A Family Madness (24 page)

“Don't stand around laughing,” she told him. “Don't do that. Denise Stanton tells me Kabbel's got a daughter, a nice little blonde. Is that the problem?”

Delaney said, “Yes.”

Gina had made it easy. She stumbled against one of the outdoor benches and sat sideways on it. Her face contorted and she began to wail. His mother had never made a sound like that. It was a foreign sound—Delaney thought of it as subterranean somehow—it had run underground great distances and for eternities before emerging from Gina's mouth in Bringelly and startling the party. “Oh God,” she cried, slowly pounding the bench. “What can I do?”

Susie put her hands on Gina's shoulders. She looked paltry beside Gina, her flesh speckled with the wrong expensive makeup.

Delaney stood muttering. Everything he uttered sounded like a provocation. Her tears became less controlled. There was no limit to how terrifying they could become, and Delaney had an urge to run downstairs and out to the car parked beyond the farmhouse gate. Three women brought their Sicilian faces to the living-room door—Gina's mother, the skeletal aunt, a Terracetti cousin from Gymea. They seemed like a chorus in an opera and their faces looked beautiful in ways which had not been obvious to him early this dismal morning and which increased his impulse to flee. Downstairs even old Aldo appeared on the concrete apron outside his poolroom, looked at his grieving daughter for some seconds, and disappeared again. “Gina darling,” her mother called, “why don't you forget it for today? Put your arm around her, Terry, and bring her in here.”

Gina threw up her hands. “I don't want the arm of that whoremonger around me. He … he has had foreign whores in Hawaii. Everyone knows that, everyone in Penrith!”

Delaney was aware of his stupid blood blazing in his face.

Gina was fearsome and went on screaming. “Everyone knows it! Adulterer! Whoremonger!”

His gorge heaving with shame, Delaney forced himself to the door and told Mrs. Terracetti he was going home. “I don't want to be impolite—” he said.

“Impolite don't matter when my daughter is bleeding.”

He made for the steps.

Mrs. Terracetti's accent thickened, as if falling back on some terrible Sicilian sense of honor. “Would you want your worst-a enemy to cry like that?”

Downstairs he made more quick apologies to the men, backing as he went. He hoped they had not heard much of the Hawaiian news. Joe Terracetti urged him fraternally to come and stew himself on grappa. By lunchtime Delaney would love every bastard on earth, said Joe. By four o'clock he would be sick and by seven too tired to fight with his wife. Delaney continued to back. From upstairs Mrs. Terracetti called, “You need children. None of this waiting until you got all those things—dishwasher, video? Whatsa your video doing for you today?”

At last he was out on the Northern Road in his freezing Holden, making for the Blue Mountains, where the mists would be heavier and he would be protected from such gazes he had just suffered at the Terracettis'. He switched on the radio and filled the car to the limits of its steel and glass with the manic warmth of the Match of the Day commentators at Belmore Oval. He worried away at the propositions that he was the happiest man in Australia and that he would not treat an enemy as he was treating Gina. Somewhere beyond Lawson, where the mist and the narrow highway made self-aware driving a matter of necessity, he decided to resign from Uncle Security. He was not sure what this would do for himself or Gina or Danielle. But because it was a direction in which he could move without causing harm, the idea filled him with serenity.

34

“Let me tell you in confidence, Terry,” said Kabbel, serenely chewing. “I am pleased you have chosen to go back to your wife.” Beyond the windscreen it was drizzling coldly. Even Kabbel couldn't sit by the bandstand in this weather, playing windproof and waterproof Belorussian, exposing his Belorussian certainty to the weather.

Delaney, sitting in the passenger seat, a cup of the usual Kabbel peculiarly fragrant coffee in his hand, said nothing. He still had no idea what in the hell leaving Uncle Security meant—the first move in separating Danielle from the family or a move back to Gina. He didn't want to strengthen Kabbel by arguing with himself about that point aloud.

Anyhow it had made Gina something like happy, it had produced in Delaney's white and papally blessed house in Forth Street an atmosphere of dull misery in which Delaney was able to sleep beside his wife, to regret occasionally sending his hand down the line of her back as if he were settling a Labrador. He knew it was all criminal but believed it gave him time to think. Thinking wasn't possible. Everywhere—it seemed to Delaney—the air discouraged it.

“You would have had to go back in the end,” Kabbel went on, crowing. “Danielle sees herself as so inseparable from the lads and myself … She did tell you, my friend, she was more or less married before, didn't she?”

“She told me about some séance in Melbourne.”

Kabbel started to laugh. “Jesus Christ!” It was a rare expletive with Kabbel, and Delaney knew why he came out with it, to get Delaney on his side in laughing at the way women exaggerated. “I wish she wouldn't use that term.”

“What should she have called it?” Delaney asked, refusing to join in any “Oh, women!” stunt.

“That's the trouble,” said Kabbel. “It was the sort of burning family experience you could never understand, Terry, even if I tried to explain it. I don't mean you aren't intelligent and I don't mean you aren't ‘a good bloke.' I mean it would be like a foreign language to you.”

Delaney felt his face redden before Kabbel's glistening confidence. “Why don't you give up this mystifying bullshit, Rudi?” he yelled. “Why don't you let Warwick and Scott find Australian girls with big tits and sunny bloody temperaments? Why did you have to force Danielle to go to Melbourne to see bloody ghosts? They're zombies, those poor little buggers, you're like a bloody pillow over their faces. Get rid of the bloody explosives manuals, Rudi, and let in some bloody fresh air!”

Kabbel leaned over in his seat and looked frowning into Delaney's face. “Is this a declaration of hostilities, Terry?”

“I don't know what in the bloody hell it is. Listen, Danielle has not once mentioned my wife.”

He understood straightaway that it was a mistake to mention that, even a betrayal. What he meant it to be was an accusation against Kabbel, because he kept them so locked up that they didn't see anyone out there beyond the edge of the Kabbel clan campfire.

“So you wish Danielle
would
nag you about Mrs. Delaney?” asked Kabbel, with that shrewdness again which made Delaney want to hit him. “Adultery occurs everywhere and in every age and in spite of women's sisterly concern for each other. You are actually complaining, Terry, that Danielle does not weep hypocritically for your wife?”

“I'm complaining that you stunted the poor little bitch!”

Rudi Kabbel sighed, laying his head back against the rest, the extension of the seat which was designed to prevent whiplash injuries. Returning from setting booby traps, the Kabbels would be safe from spinal damage.

“Sometimes, Mr. Delaney, history
does
make its claim on people. In places like Los Angeles and Sydney people try to live in an eternal and very base
now
, without any memory of the dead. The barbecue and the sun are
all
. Games are
all
—a game is
all
to you. But you have to face it: Sometimes—I restate it so that you will know—sometimes even here history can't be avoided, history comes up and grabs people. Outside coffee bars in Auburn where Armenians wait with knives for the Turks to come out—there it can kill people. What I say is Don't try to marry Danielle. It will never work. She belongs to forces you can't negotiate with, Terry. I tell you that as a friend. I too wish it were otherwise. But there can't be any Aussie coziness in life for her.”

Mouth open, Delaney was considering making the challenge, yelling, We'll bloody see, and all the other worn terms of a struggle between a lover and a father, when Kabbel changed direction.

“I was going to tell you, anyhow. I'm selling out, Terry. The business and the house. I want to buy property—forests, escarpments, meadows. The line can no longer be held, Terry. The line against barbarity.”

“And poor damn Brian Stanton?” asked Delaney.

“He'll work for the new owners. I have to get out, Terry. There is a valley beyond Newnes—two and a half hours away from here if you drive sedately like me.”

“Farming? Or a bloody munitions factory?”

“The bottomland can be farmed and carry livestock. There are great sandstone gorges, made by glaciers when God was young.”

The mention of glaciers signaled Delaney. “This is all for the sake of that Wave you crowd talk about!”

“Everyone knows it's on its way, Delaney. Every cretin restocking the shelves in supermarkets from Tasmania to Finland. Everyone knows it's on its way.”

“So you don't live
now
, like sane people. You live for
afterwards
, you stupid prick, Rudi.”

“Said like a good Catholic, who doesn't enjoy fucking now, if you will excuse the term, so that he can fuck without worry in heaven.”

“God,” said Doig over the heads of mystified parishioners one Sunday, “is glorified by the love with which you treat your own body. This includes drinking wine at the right time and putting the cork back in the bottle at the right time. This includes feasting in season and dieting in time to prevent a coronary.” (“Man thinks he's bloody Pritikin,” said old Greg Delaney outside.)

“So you cork up the gorges to stop the rest of us getting in,” Delaney observed. “You put up a gate and anyone who touches it gets the Stevo treatment. The gates of bloody heaven, eh? And the unworthy get their mitts blown off. You know what shits me about you, Rudi? You look at me, a professional player but that means sweet damn-all—a poor stupid bugger who's worked well and taken deep bruising at the bloody chicken house for you—and you think, Pity about poor Delaney, he's done for, might as well write him off. I've been inside your daughter, you old sod, and it doesn't mean a thing, I'm just another one of the damned. And what will you do out there with Danielle, in bloody Newnes, in Kabbelburg? A woman, Rudi, a really lovely and healthy woman? Will you give her to Warwick so they can bang out a few cross-eyed kids while you're waiting for the bloody surf to break over the Blue Mountains?” He noticed Kabbel was regarding him in a strange deliberate way and understood with delight that the man had lost his temper. But it was not the hot loss Delaney had hoped for. There was no chance of punches or screaming. The Kabbels never gave you that.

“Give me your gun, Delaney, and I'll sign it off. Call for your pay and bring your uniform in tomorrow night. Though you do not think so, I give Danielle her freedom, so it is her matter whether you meet in the future. I don't think we should meet again.”

There was nothing Delaney could say without losing ground. He put his beeper and his .38 on the seat beside Kabbel. Still struggling for a fit last word, he opened the door. As he stood up outside the car astringent rain struck the back of his neck. It brought him something like a satisfactory answer.

“You're a bloody fool, Rudi,” he called, “and you'll die unhappy.”

Kabbel shrugged, nodded, and drove away.

35

F
ROM THE
J
OURNALS OF
S
TANISLAW
K
ABBELSKI
, C
HIEF OF
P
OLICE
, S
TAROVICHE
.
Dec. 21, 1943

Fourteen of us gathered in the board room of Minsk Opera House. We constitute the Belorussian Central Council—Ostrowsky to take our names to General von Gottberg for ratification by Christmas. Easy to be fanciful at such a time. Not impossible though that on this day in the future Belorussian children will honor our snow-clad graves.

Minor humiliations. We have to confer in German for the sake of the two German observers, Dr. Kappeler and Oberführer Riese, von Gottberg's deputy. Ostrowsky is occasionally summoned to go and talk to von Gottberg. It is like being called away to the headmaster's study.

We strike our blows for independence, though. Earthy old Stanek Stankievich came back from morning coffee to make a speech. “German military disasters are one thing, the Belorussian Council is an entirely separate entity. Its continued existence depends on German victory but its destiny is its own. It ought to be understood Germany could be destroyed, but the Belorussian cause would still exist.”

Ostrowsky rushed in to assure Kappeler and Riese Stanek's German is imperfect, that he really meant to emphasize our only immediate hope was the policy of alliance with Germany. Both sides knew nonetheless that a message had been passed. Ostrowsky came back from one of his sessions in von Gottberg's office across the square at dusk. Planes of his face impressively lit by chandelier as he detailed final terms of our independence. There is to be universal conscription of Belorussian males over the age of eighteen into a Belorussian Defense Force. This force to wear both the double-barred cross and the SS insignia. Basis of this force will be the 20,000 members of our police forces, to be run from Minsk by our old friend Franz Kushel. Ostrowky says he told von Gottberg he did not want to have to negotiate with the civilians who had worked for Kube, the Generalkommissar of Belorussia preceding von Gottberg (Kube a friend of Willi Ganz apparently, and like Ganz in philosophy; was blown up in his bed by the partisans). “I've been used to working with the Greens,” said Ostrowsky—by which he meant Wehrmacht authorities for whom he had administered Smolensk. Von Gottberg pointed to his own green SD uniform and said, “You're working for the Greens again, Radislaw!”