A Family Madness (33 page)

My father and I fitted in the front with the ordnance maps. My mother, Genia, and Miss Tokina took the rear seat. There was room for Frau Zusters, but she was so firmly identified with the house that none of us expected her to join us. Nor did she, though she wept and speculated on destiny.

I mentioned Yuri's genius earlier. He worked us south past the wreckage of houses and automobiles, toward the point where the Kurfürstendamm turns south on the edge of the Grunewald, the woods where Bernhardt Kuzich would tonight, as he had been doing all day, send flak into the sky. From there Yuri found a way by country lanes toward Wittenberg and Erfurt, avoiding the main roads choked with convoys and refugees. It was a normal story of flight therefore, except for Yuri and his back roads. All Europe seemed to be on the sunset trail that spring, looking for the Americans, whom they still considered innocent and fair people. Sometimes, in the three days of our search, my father would bribe our way into a military convoy traveling toward a front which had by and large become illusory. I slept enormously throughout this journey, but I remember the deserters hanging from the newly leafing trees, and sometimes SS men and police also hanging where the fleeing proletariat of the Wehrmacht had overpowered them. Even Miss Tokina got sick of exclaiming at such sights. I remember my father holding me, semiconscious, upright, while I relieved myself at dusk at the edge of a plowed field near Bamberg.

On the evening of the third day we stopped with a horde of other people, many of them soldiers, in the town square of the Bavarian hill city of Forchheim. A mass instinct had halted people here, as it halted us. Even though the noise from the front was not as extreme as what we had heard coming from the east in Charlottenburg, there was a sense a resolution was at hand, something more precious than deliverance. No one need walk or drive further. Yuri's ordnance maps were now finished with.

Yuri, with some of the merchandise from the back of the car, bought Tokina, my mother, Genia, and myself a space to sleep in a cellar beneath a Renaissance schoolhouse near the Town Hall. Yuri and my father stood guarding the car all night and, at a given hour near dawn, strapped a Belorussian standard—the double-barred cross of white on a red background—across the side of the car. By seven o'clock in the morning, when they came to the cellar to collect us, they had been found by the Americans and had even had a conversation with an American political officer named Major Knowles. My father seemed radiant, now that he knew that the future was negotiable.

I do not have my father's journal as a guide to this period. But I was aware of some of the factors influencing our lives in the Regensburg Displaced Persons Camp in which we found ourselves. Perhaps from the conversations of my elders, perhaps from continuing even on the edge of puberty my childish habit of eavesdropping, I was aware that there were some Americans—Major Knowles in particular—who respected the Belorussians because they were anti-Soviet, and another darker faction of Americans, represented by the Counter Intelligence Corps, who were more interested in the fact that for the sake of their independence they had worked with the SS. It was taken for granted in the huts of Regensburg (the place had originally been a Polish forced labor camp under the Germans, but the Americans had made it more habitable) that the forces of light represented by Knowles, a beefy avuncular Southerner who attracted droves of displaced children wherever he moved, would triumph over the others. In case they did not, one of Ostrowsky's junior ministers, a friend of my father's from Minsk, set to work to provide us all with forged identification papers. Hence we became the Kowolsky family, and our grandparents—those devout Belorussian patriots—became, for the sake of protective coloring, Poles.

My father and sundry other Belorussians interred in Regensburg became, through Major Knowles's benign influence, officials of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. There was Franz Kushel, who, according to camp mythology, had told his men at Eisensteinstadt to fight their way through an SS division and link up with the Americans at Zwissel. There was Redich, who had also acquired Polish grandparents and whose name had become Radic. And then there was my father. They seemed to me to run the camp, and I am sure they did. The easygoing Major Knowles and the officers of the U.S. supervision battalion, who were meant to control Regensburg, managed only the perimeter and were pleased with the arrangement. For they could not believe their luck. Children endowed with cigarettes and gum and stockings, they found themselves triumphant in a corner of Bavaria which had been little marred by war, in which the Gothic parishes and baroque town halls still stood.

Because of all his veterans who filled the camp, Kushel was elected camp chief. Under his supervision were the canned foods; the medicine balls; baseball bats; parallel bars; blackboards; gym shoes; Bibles in all languages; garish-colored comic books detailing the adventures of Moses, Tom Sawyer, Superman; the pianos and piano accordions; the antibiotics and contraceptives; the bicycles and chocolate bars—all of it the bounty of UNRRA. We lived at the apex of that heap of plenty. There was a special mess for camp leaders and UNRRA appointees and their families.

I had no awareness that anywhere in the pyramid anyone went wanting. Regensburg was to me a happy kingdom, an Aristotelian model of a state. It worked better and more benignly than Staroviche had, nor were children restricted to their own gardens.

This rational kingdom had its army. Not the American Army, not the supervision battalion which had borne its virgin arms across France and into Bavaria, not Major Knowles with his big oiled and unused Mauser on his hip, so different from the firearms of Staroviche, so much an ornament. Kushel had the army. Wisely, he called it the Boy Scouts. All youths from thirteen to twenty years belonged, and marched and wheeled on the three playing fields. Above us hung the limestone cliffs of the Danube valley, and the river itself was merely a short walk away, that river which connected us to the East, to our beginnings, to those unassuaged longings which had burdened all our lives. By that strand of water one day soon we would—as by a rope up a hillside—pull ourselves home.

The Americans, we knew in the meantime, had cornered the riches of the earth, were an unfathomable trench of abundance. So too, through the Americans' touch, was UNRRA. To provident Slavs like us it was reasonable that some of this excess of cigarettes and razor blades, of clothing and medicines should be sold to provide with what political parties call a “fighting fund.” Major Knowles agreed with this concept.

Every few weeks therefore I would travel with my father, Yuri, and Major Knowles, socketed between their respective male musks, on the wide front seat of a two-ton truck as it made for the city of Regensburg. We would make stops at warehouses on the north bank of the Danube. Goods would be unloaded from the truck while Major Knowles and my father and Yuri stood about smoking. Then we would cross the Danube toward the old part of the city. Major Knowles loved this crossing. There would still be warehouses to visit, but the sight of the spire of the Dominican church would set him off.

“You've got no idea, gentlemen,” he would say, “how distinct all this here is when set beside the city of Goldsboro.” That was the name of his town in North Carolina. By his description it was low country, beset by coastal swamps. He seemed to have no idea that we too came from low-lying earth, from the most ancient fen-lands of Europe. Regensburg he knew by all its names. By the Roman name of Castra Regina, by the old name of Ratisbona. He used all the terms—Saint Emmeram's and the Schottenkirche were Romanesque, though Saint Emmeram's had been done over in baroque. He used the term “done over” as if sometime in the eighteenth century wallpaperers had come in. The Dominican church and Saint Peter's cathedral by the old stone bridge were pure Gothic. In Goldsboro, he told us, there wasn't any Gothic—though there was a taste of it in the Presbyterian church and the Odd Fellows Orphans' Home. Goldsboro though, he said, and all of Wayne County (which I had no doubt was named in honor of the hero of
Stagecoach
), was innocent of baroque and rococo.

On some of our Regensburg excursions he would take us to old sausage restaurants by the bank of the river. These would be full of American officers. I was delighted to see that they resembled Major Knowles in temperament. They were generous and sentimental men. I believe that my father and other Belorussians thought whenever they saw such collections of smooth, open-faced, splendidly uniformed Americans that they had found the right ally at last, men who were persuadable and whose hearts and minds were in the right place. Knowles was the sort of ally Hauptsturmführer Bienecke had never been.

I knew, again not by what I was told but by what I overheard, that the ancient enemy intended to mar the Regensburg idyll. There was the rumor that a Russian mission would be permitted into the camp to look for Belorussians who had worked with the Germans. Right-thinking Major Knowles received requests from his superiors, who had received them from a Soviet MVD general named Sedlow, to look in Regensburg and other places for people named Ostrowsky and Abramtchik, Stankievich and Sobolewsky, even for Redich and Kabbelski. He was pleased to tell them there was no one with those names in Regensburg; his right-thinking superiors were pleased to pass on to the Soviets the same news.

Polish intelligence officers from General Anders's Polish Army, which had campaigned with the Allies, began to turn up in Regensburg, eat in the mess with the camp leaders. They carried a warning that agents of the Soviets who had influence in the Western press were leaking and printing stories about how lax General Patton and his American officers had been in pursuit of the so-called war criminals of Belorussia and other places. These old enemies, the Poles, were suddenly our brothers too. They too were waiting for the Allies to turn east.

One afternoon in early autumn Knowles turned up in a fast jeep and called a meeting of camp officials in the mess. My mother, Genia, Miss Tokina, and myself waited dressed in our best clothes in our suite at one end of a hut the Americans themselves had had built for camp officials. Ordinary internees—even those who had families with them—lived in men's and women's quarters, but someone as eminent as my father enjoyed a space of ten meters by four, of which separate rooms could be made through the use of shoulder-high partitions. It was an arrangement which had for me the solidity which the house in Staroviche had never enjoyed.

That night the young, highly polished Americans of the supervision battalion withdrew to their barracks and did no duty on the camp perimeter. Our family and others traveled in a truck with Major Knowles westward toward the French zone. The French, it seemed, were not under the same pressures to betray us as General Patton. The womenfolk and I spent a day uncertainly at a large confusing transit camp. Ostrowsky was there—he had come from the British zone to talk to everyone. He was full of enthusiastic news, it seemed, some of which seeped down to me. The British were right-thinking also! My father had an hour's conference with him.

I believe it is as a result of that conference that we ended up in the DP camp in Michelstadt, which I think of now as the European terminus for us all, Michelstadt being a flame which consumed and transmuted our politics, our loyalties, our childhoods. Such decisive events were to overtake the Kabbelskis there that I see Michelstadt not so much as a European location as a stop on the Parramatta—Penrith line.

Michelstadt—not the camp but the valley in which it and two other DP camps stood a little to the east of Stuttgart—was by no means physically squalid. It stood among splendid woods. On excursions from the camp you always met young Germans on their way to hike in the hills between the Rems and the Kosher. The camp was run by the French Army, and from my mother there was a small flutter of excitement at being able to exercise her grasp of that language which above all—like so many Slavs—she loved and respected.

There were by now age and harassment lines on either side of her mouth, and her upper lip seemed puckered into a question. The question was of course the perennial one: whether the quick flights would ever end, whether she would find an address. She could no longer risk too great an enthusiasm. Even though my father was immediately appointed refugee rations officer by the French commandant, my mother never ate well. She saw UNRRA's bread for what it was, the bread of exile. We were all therefore ecstatic, even frail old Tokina, when during a morning walk around the compound my mother encountered Galina.

Mother had begun school with Galina at the age of five, before the first exile. Galina's father had been a Russian timber merchant, her mother Belorussian. In that first loneliness at the start of their schooling, under the eyes of a sober young Polish nun, they had held each other upright on a bench in Baronovichi.

The day we met Galina we were promenading in our usual way—Genia and Tokina walking ahead, the old woman's ear bent toward Genia, my mother and myself a few meters behind, my mother already wearing (though it was only mid-August) the coat with the fox collar she had brought with her in the limousine from Charlottenburg, and I, proud of my prepubescent tallness, an adequate escort for her. Galina was more than twenty paces away, across a circular patch of grass where young Belorussian policemen were playing loud soccer. Mother recognized Galina, my mother said, by that open face and the way she carried her head. In that mass of people the recognition was a little like reading a foreign newspaper, my mother said, and finding the single word you understood, the word—among the masses of meaningless digits—which was radiant with significance.

The feat of recognition was even greater in view of the fact that Galina, my mother's childhood sweetheart, was not dressed like a camp eminent, but nondescriptly, in the remains of a black suit. It went well with her black hair. I have to confess that I recognized her too through the melee of footballers. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, but also, as I admitted with a shock, tougher and so, visibly younger than my mother.