A Family Madness (26 page)

“Oh yes. Maybe they need a new heart surgeon at Saint Vincent's.”

“Rudi's a man of his word, in his own way.”

“But he's out of it, you know, off the air, and I wondered why. Out of the office all the time except when he turns up with heavies from other companies. Bloke from TNT there the other night.” Stanton ground his forehead into the pad of his hand. “And bloody stupid Stanton still doesn't twig, just happy to be working twenty hours overtime a week!”

“Rudi's buying land. He's selling Uncle so that he can afford a pastoral bloody kingdom.”

Stanton shivered—the beer and the cold were adequate but not likely explanations. “I don't think I'm on his mind much,” he said. “I'm not much on any of their bloody minds. Warwick runs the rosters now, but he's no company. You know, I said the other night they'd have to find two new men—Scott hasn't come back from the bush—and the bugger looked right through me. Danielle's okay, from some flu she caught, but she's not too lively at the moment. They really choked that off, didn't they. You and Danielle. Strangled that one at birth. Never bloody mind.” He dropped his voice. “You know I got so desperate the other night that I fell back on poor old Bernadette—Danielle was still in bed sick. Took Bernadette out to the old shed that used to be the control room when bloody Rudi started the business. Poor bitch kept saying, ‘Brian, what if there's an alarm while we're in here?' Promised her I wouldn't be that long, and she said, ‘But I might be.' The old Bernadette! Must have it off among the filing cabinets at work.”

Delaney was somehow shocked by the idea of Stanton making what hay he could in the shadow of Danielle's illness. All sexual pride suddenly drained, however, from Stanton's face. “Lot of good all that's going to do me.”

“Danielle better now?”

“She's all right. Compared to the others. Jesus, Rudi had a fit just after you left.”

Delaney laughed. “Upset, was he?”

“No, a fit. A fair dinkum … you know … fit. What do you call it?
Paroxysm.
” Stanton explained how, at the start of a shift, Rudi Kabbel had appeared from the hallway whimpering and biting his lips, and a stream of urine falling crookedly down the legs of his deep blue pants. His hands were raised in front of his face and were trembling very fast, which made Stanton think of epilepsy. He whimpered like a child. Danielle ran from the arms cabinet and dragged him roughly from the room by the hand. Later she came back and told an amazed Stanton that it was Rudi's childhood. He'd suffered awfully, she said.

This news aroused in Delaney a vague and painful urge to rescue Danielle from her father. But before he could ask too many questions about this incident, about Rudi's trembling and his unleashed bladder, Stanton reverted to the sale of Uncle. “You can't tell me that if one of those big companies want to buy without any encumbrances that Rudi will hold out for poor bloody Stanton.”

Delaney couldn't tell him that.

“This time I'm going to apply for my own gun license. I'll rob banks.”

Delaney smiled and patted Stanton's arm. His friend had said that before, but apart from his innocent intrusion into Dyson, society remained safe from him.

37

R
ADISLAW
K
ABBEL'S
H
ISTORY OF THE
K
ABBELSKI
F
AMILY

The last Staroviche winter was sweet and by no means seemed to me to be the last. The house was full of Miss Tokina's instructive voice and of Belorussian police billeted in servants' quarters upstairs and at the back of the house. They were very happy to be here instead of thrust forward into some frozen village among partisan-ridden forests. My mother treated them with an absent-minded generosity. They flirted with Genia. They spoiled me—it delighted me to see they knew I was the kid the partisans had nearly finished, it enabled me to adopt a certain style. Even at night I was not afraid of bullets, yet I needed to sleep with my mother, given that I dreamed so often of that awful sense of a large mistake, of myself transfixed in the high corner of Onkel Willi's dining room and my father rescuing from beneath the table the wrong child, the shell of Radislaw, the stranger. As I said earlier, I was safe from tutors. It seemed to me that because of the shock both of Onkel Willi's kiss and of Onkel Willi's murder no one would ever have the right to try to make me learn algebra again.

My father was back and forth to Minsk almost continuously that January. He attended meetings of the Belorussian Central Council and talked to the various regional chiefs of the Defense Force. He was the foreshadowed Minister for Relocation. The
Minsker Zeitung
and the local Belorussian papers both said so. I have to confess I was pleased he was away so often. I felt I could no longer pose as his little boy. Events had made me a brat, as Miss Tokina had converted Genia into an occasionally charming, less hormonally stormy adolescent. The feeling that my father knew too much about me, had seen me in too many extremities, had not abated. That he was locked up in the Europa Hotel in Minsk and was planning the Belorussian Republic and all its works and all its pomps seemed entirely suitable to me. I was at ease. I did not foresee the spring, as my intelligent mother did.

There had been winter Russian offenses in the south, but the Smolensk front on which we depended remained steady. The combination of oil and railways down south made assaults inevitable. Up here in the north we were innocent of oil, and the Germans still held all the railway junctions. So it looked like a situation that could last forever: the Germans encompassing Leningrad and holding far Novgorod and Staraya Russa, a Belorussian garrison in the house, my father away on most important Belorussian business, Genia neutralized by Miss Tokina, my mother anxious in the tradition of mothers but never with a blade to her throat, and no threat of a blade developing.

We went to Minsk for Easter, traveling by troop train. It was slow—a small locomotive traveled ahead at a crawling pace, looking for tampered-with rails and hauling a tender carrying a German railway repair unit. Once we were parked for two hours while track was replaced. Toward dusk, as we edged along, shots were heard from the front of the train and an officer came through to our compartment and asked us to lie on the floor. Genia and my mother obeyed him so thoroughly that I was able, in the spirit of the guarantees I had received under Onkel Willi's dining-room table, to look out through the shuttered window. I saw, edging through long grass and cornflowers, a strong detachment of German infantrymen from our train. I saw them all pause and pour fire into the woods. These fellow travelers of ours were on their way ultimately to take up a line along the Beresina south of Minsk, should that be necessary. It was yet another of those lines which the more knowledgeable of our house garrison said could last an age.

We reached Minsk toward midnight, and my father was there to meet us. We heard klaxons on the way to the Hotel Europa. My father smiled at my mother. “It's never quiet at night,” he said. That Easter morning we heard Mass in Latin at the church of the Bernardine monastery. It was a sharp, clear Resurrection Day. For two such nationalists my parents had an unself-conscious preference for the Latin Mass over the Belorussian-Byzantine style, for a French Christ resurgent over a Russian or Greek one. For my parents were among that 20 percent who used Belorussian only to communicate with their fellow nationals but who believed that a knowledge of the Latin responses made one an heir to Western culture and was as good as a visit to Paris.

In the car on the way to breakfast at the Europa, my father told my mother, “You should stay in Minsk. General Busch intends to make Minsk into an irreducible stronghold. Besides, I'm only nominally police chief of Staroviche now.”

We drove past a strongpoint on a corner guarded by young Belorussian conscripts in new but shabby uniforms which echoed those of the SS.

“I don't want to give up the house in Staroviche,” I was delighted to hear my mother tell him. “And Genia must have Miss Tokina or she'll go mad.”

“Don't misunderstand me,” said my father, smiling and indulgent. “We won't relinquish the lease on the Staroviche house.”

We haven't relinquished it to this day.

38

Old Greg Delaney had been able to come in off the road at the age of forty-five when he achieved the post of dispatch clerk at Pioneer Frozen Foods in Parramatta. Here his days began hectically—if he dropped dead on the job, he always said, it would be between seven and nine in the morning—but the rest of the shift was calmer. He had time to read two newspapers and be opinionated as drivers and supervisors from the factory drifted through his office. What gave him piquant joy was that he knew management were relaxed about him, that he kept the bookwork and the drivers straight. That freed them from suspicion and him from supervision. The managing director had come down to his booth by the loading docks the week before Christmas 1982 to hand him his bonus check, to sip a scotch with him, and to assure him that an independent consultant had discovered that Greg had saved the company $98,000 in pilferage during the previous tax year.

That visit from the management intrigued Delaney—the fact the man had uttered a specific sum and that it was large enough simply to be equated with riches in Greg's mind, but that Greg considered his $1,500 bonus abundant reward. And that the managing director knew that—knew the figure he reeled off would not appear to Greg an achievable or possessable sum, meant to Greg no more or less than say the number of light-years between Earth and Alpha Centauri. And this was not because Greg Delaney was stupid. It was because he was a happy man and therefore incorruptible.

His son made him professionally uneasy by asking him for a job. “It isn't what your mother had in mind for you. Driving a truckload of frozen peas around Sydney.”

“Tell her it's only temporary,” said Delaney.

It was possible old Greg didn't want his son crowding him in at Pioneer, invading his glass booth, making special claims on him.

“Mrs. Terracetti called your mother with a pretty garbled story about some brawl between Gina and yourself. That's what this is all about, isn't it?”

Delaney admitted it.

“You know she's a bloody wonderful girl, Gina.”

Delaney nodded. “Do you think I'm going to say the opposite?”

“Don't come into Pioneer. Start something of your own. I should have made you go to university.”

“My grades weren't high enough.”

“Then to one of those advanced education places.”

Delaney said he needed a breathing space. “After that I'll go and found my own multinational.”

Whatever his reasons, Greg Delaney continued to fight the idea. “Look, Pioneer's minting money. There'll be a generation of kids who believe vegetables grow in little plastic packets with a bloody pioneer wagon on it. But I ought to give any job that comes up to a married man.”

“Shit,
I'm
a married man.”

“A married man with kids. Listen, a word of advice. Not the word you're expecting. Don't take your problems to that idiot Doig.”

“Well,” asked Delaney, “is there a job?”

“Will be in two weeks. A Greek driver's going back to Salonika. Reckons the standard of living's better there. What have they done to our beautiful country!” This was a constant exclamation of Mrs. Delaney's. “I'll get you an application form.”

“Will you put a word in for me?”

Old Delaney—a man who had saved his company $98,000 and was willing to save them from his son as well—snorted and said nothing.

He had seen it in films.

Films had in fact provided the bulk of his education, outside marriage and his affair with Danielle, on these matters, and he wondered if people now made love, mimicking the erotic gestures of Julie Christie or Burt Reynolds, in a different way than their grandparents.

Or even than their parents. For the Delaneys senior tolerated pictures only from the fifties in which June Allyson and Cary Grant shared twin beds and displayed toward each other lots of amiability and not an amp of passion. Questions of potency and orgasm did not arise. But in a Goldie Hawn movie a husband dies of a heart attack at climax. And in others there was a modern standard scene where an unsure hero gets a spectacular woman to bed, there is a cut to her wistful and him ashamed, and she sighs, “It could happen to anyone.…” It was always a comic scene and the audience laughed, delighted to find confirmed that which their homely wisdom and honest women had already taught them: Too much desirability can freeze a man's engine.

In the fornication palace at North Parramatta, on a Tuesday evening after training, Delaney found that this scene from comedy, this take from that other effete and sated world parallel to the real world and never touching it, had interposed itself between himself and Danielle, and that Danielle was saying, with less flagrant disappointment than the movie vamps, “But it's nothing to be worried about.”

That afternoon she had bravely appeared in time to meet him, asserting herself, her own woman. But it seemed to Delaney that the withdrawal of Rudi's approval reduced everything, made the whole business meaner. Despite himself he began to hear noises from other rooms, a jovial voice, a murmurous discussion of erotic preferences, a sound of furniture bumping harshly, a post-coital shower turning on. It had been necessary to Danielle Kabbel and Delaney both, one of the basic terms of their infatuation, to believe that everyone else in the place was a lover of a different and lower order than themselves.
They
were fated, but the people next door were just in it for the fun. The illusion lifted now, the whole arrogance of the affair vanished. The walls grew thin. Delaney could see a sort of stain of weariness on Danielle's forehead, and his own limp seed failed to move.