A Family Madness (35 page)

I add her letter to this account.

Paris,

Jan. 27, 1984

Dearest Radek,

If I had half a brain, I would have understood but of course you would want to translate Father's journals. You are a good son and a curious one, and I suppose that to translate a document is the next most intimate connection with it other than actually writing the damn thing.

Needless to say, I remember that winter vividly. It was at a screening of
Beau Geste
in the recreation hall that Sergeant Pointeaux approached my father between reels and asked him would he permit me to sit beside him, with all the other French guards, in the second row. Albert, as you know, was not acting out of propriety, but on a dare from the other soldiers. Father told him to clear out.

They knew each other already though. Albert did all the paperwork on UNRRA—quite self-educated, a man of natural talent. He had a senile commandant and a lazy and venal lieutenant called Pucheu, who let him do whatever he wanted as long as Pucheu himself got a cut. That's why Albert will still say—though sensitive to my grief over Mother—that for him Michelstadt was as good as a university education.

I thought Albert was wonderful from the start. You could all tell that I thought he was wonderful. Despite the loutish angle of his cap, the greased hair, the minute strand of black mustache. Despite all his legerdemain with cigarettes. I know now—I knew then but could not express it—that he could tell that we were a family marred by history, that it was compassion as well as honest lust which drew him to me.

That winter some of the elder Belorussians, the ones who were too old for politics but had not wanted to live under the Soviets either, went to the commandant, Colonel Nouges, and complained that there were inequities in the distribution of rations and that some people were going hungry. The elderly wife of a professor of philology from Lwow died in early December of malnutrition, and ordinary camp inhabitants believed it was due to racketeering, not by Father but by Redich. A postmortem which showed that the old woman had a tumor of the stomach did not defuse the rumor. Colonel Nouges, the sort of old fool who only wants reassurance, called Redich and Father in to tell them it wasn't true. Of course Father kept solidarity with Redich but was, I believe, secretly outraged.

Father then approached Albert and discovered that Redich had been raiding the UNRRA warehouse, taking truckloads of goods for what Father would have called factional rather than national interests. Albert had covered up with the bookwork. He says my father raged at him. “Why didn't you tell me right away! Redich has no authority. Etc. Etc.” But Albert says he did not want to buy into the conflict he could sense between the two wedges of Belorussians. He knew enough from his childhood in Montparnasse to understand that Redich and some of his heftier sergeants were the type of people who could arrange for disappearances. His instinct would soon be borne out by what happened to you. Albert didn't want to die for Belorussian politics. I think his attitude supremely sensible!

Father, the idealist, went to Redich and had a screaming row. In your dream world, halfway between John Wayne and Galina, you may not have noticed. But it was the talk of the camp, and among ordinary people it did Father great credit. He asked what in hell the Abramtchik faction, the papal gang, needed extra black market revenue for if they had such good friends in the French government, in General Anders's Polish contingent, and in the Vatican? Some Ostrowsky people had also been beaten up in interfactional fights. Our father told Redich this sort of divisive nonsense was to stop. Otherwise papal gang people in camps dominated by the Ostrowsky faction would find life uncongenial.

Meanwhile Albert, circling the camp on his old Czech 500cc motorcycle, continued to court me. What I was attracted to was that he was not a tragic and dedicated figure. He did not believe in tragedy, he did not pick his wounds like the Belorussians. He was an unheeding and generous lout—exactly what I wanted. He already foresaw a future—and he was more accurate in crystal gazing than any of the Belorussian dreamers in Michelstadt—in which we lived well and had no politics. In me, he was the liberation. He did not propose endless returns and exiles, coalitions, changed names, midnight flights. He promised a good time, and unlike most other men in the world, he delivered it.

You must forgive the inevitable tone of censure, or of mockery of my parents' views, in what I tell you. It is not intended, I am merely trying to prove to my brother, who would at the time have absorbed my parents' view of the romance with Albert, that I wasn't acting out of pure willfulness.

By the end of the winter I was pregnant, but with Albert's access to black market goods it was easy for us to find in Stuttgart a highly qualified obstetrician to help us out. Neither of us liked the idea, but Albert knew that if things were not arranged this way it was likely that some of Father's huskier Staroviche cops would fall on him one night and at best leave him neutered. Pressure was perhaps increased by the fact that he called me Heloise, and even though he was no Abelard, he remembered what Heloise's uncle, the Dean of Paris, had done to the body of that great philosopher out of jealousy and vengeance.

Our parents as it turned out knew nothing of my pregnancy. Security on the matter was absolute. As you were to find on your grief, you poor little fellow, security on other matters was dubious.

This has got to be a rather long-winded letter. It has been very cold in Paris this February and I am getting to an age where despite central heating the ice at the core begins to be felt. I shall continue this letter in the morning.

51

It was as Golder promised. The young Queenslander became briefly famous by dazzling his way past two disoriented defenses in the first games of the new season. “You watch,” Eric Samuels told Delaney. “The opposition's going to wake up to him. Sure, he's got a few nice tricks. But he's brittle and his sidestep's too easy to read. You watch, you watch. The first good lock he plays against is going to kill him.”

To Delaney the success of Golder's Queenslander was only a token annoyance and stood for the deeper derangement of the world. He had therefore played two tough and vengeful games in reserves, and through this accident found himself much praised in the clubhouse, as if his new ferocity was a deliberate tactical choice he had made based only on considerations to do with the game.

In the third encounter of the season, the Queenslander met the good lock Eric Samuels had predicted and was choked off all day and left the field limping. According to Golder's promise, he would now have only half a game left to recover form. Delaney however did not quite believe Golder's promise, or anyone's.

In the fourth game, before a rabid crowd at Saint George, a tendon snapped in the Queenslander's calf. Delaney came on five minutes after halftime and helped halt a tide of Saint George tries. It was announced on the evening news that the Queenslander would be on crutches for six weeks. The following Tuesday night a
Herald
photographer came to training and took a photograph of Delaney running with the ball. It appeared with the announcement that Golder would be using him at five-eighth for some time, perhaps forever.

There was always a ferocity in the air at Redfern. They called this team the Rabbitohs, after the Depression days when the unemployed of South Sydney used to hunt rabbits in that low country of sand dunes and sell them door-to-door. Half the crowd seemed to have the toughness of Depression survivors, old men with the shadows of a hard life on their faces, old women who knew their football backwards and wore green and red beanies on their heads. And then, lots of dangerous kids, the kind you saw rioting on English football fields in the evening news. It was exactly the sort of fierce crowd Delaney welcomed that Sunday—an away game, and the world against you. And a new ferocity inside.

Once when he was young he had met a great Saint George forward and asked the man what he did on the morning of a test match against the poms—what time he woke, what he ate, what he told himself? The forward replied that he got up about nine, ate a steak half an hour later, and when he ran onto the Cricket Ground he repeated the proposition, “I'm the toughest bastard here.”

The young Delaney had been a little shocked. Five-eighths got by on craft, by niftiness. A five-eighth could not credibly promise himself that he was the toughest bastard there. The young Delaney himself was not in it for the aggression, had been sure he never would be. These days though he understood the veteran. As he ran onto Redfern Oval, down the wire-caged walk placed to prevent the crones of South Sydney from attacking players or referees, his jaw was retracted, his teeth slightly apart, his mouthguard tight in his fist.

Gorrie, the Gilgandra boy, was playing second row that day, in tandem with Tancred. The selectors still stuck with Tancred. On a heavier winter day like today, he had time to pull his Yorkshire tricks.

And he was certainly good weight in the scrums. Penrith won the first two but were cramped—the Rabbitoh back line standing at least a meter offside, forcing Delaney to run too wide, and the referee too intimidated by the partisans in the grandstand to chastise the local team. Delaney found himself cut down brutally from the flank by the South Sydney center, the young one named Lynch, another whiz kid. Lynch had all the tricks, all the savageries. Before getting up, he gouged and scored Delaney's eyeball with his blindside thumb. A home crowd would have seen it and protested. This crowd cheered.

Delaney had not regained clear vision when Lynch took the ball in midfield and ran forty meters with it, leaving the forwards standing. Except for Gorrie, who, being young and from the country, did not know when he was up against a champion, and so ran the man down ten meters out from the goal line.

Now came a passage of frantic defense, the ecstasy of the crowd breaking like a surf behind the goal line. Delaney
himself
was in an ecstasy, tackling low, letting the ones who didn't know how to go in higher on the bodies of the Rabbitohs. Lynch wore all the time a cat's smile on his face, and if possible, when tackled, always levered himself upright with a hand placed across Delaney's face. When the Rabbitoh try came, it was the result of a movement between Lynch and their young second-rower, their fast Queensland winger. Even Gorrie was left shamed and standing. Tancred blinked, flat-footed and bemused, like a parent whose children were beyond him. By halftime it was 12 to nothing, the crowd were singing a taunting chant: “Look at the scoreboard!” Delaney knew the commentators would be saying that the Penrith lads were lucky it wasn't 24 to nothing. Golder's halftime exhortation was full of obscenities, and Delaney found himself, for the first time since his childhood, very nearly denouncing another player to his coach, very nearly accusing Tancred of stupidity, cowardice, malice.

Delaney ran back on head-hunting for Lynch. As Golder had said, the bastard was opening up the defense as if it was a can of bloody dog food.

The Rabbitohs, it seemed to Delaney, were winning all the scrums now. Running on a diagonal, gathering an intimidating speed, Lynch was coming through, yelling to his five-eighth for the ball. Delaney felt a lightness, a certainty. Sometimes, when you're out of oxygen and elated and fierce, you got those certainties, the pattern became apparent. He was sure he could stop Lynch and no one else could. It was one of those rare times when you did not worry about position, and you ran any distance to achieve the ordained result. He had Lynch's measure. He knew which way he would turn with the ball before the ball was even in his hands. For a time he was certain he would go in low, but three or at most four paces from Lynch he realized it must be high, in case Lynch had a colleague further out moving at that same pace, and got the ball to him. Exultantly, Delaney straightened, brought his arm up to collect Lynch's shoulder. He felt nothing but raw delight when the arm took Lynch's face and something parted there and Lynch's clever eyes glazed.

Lynch lay flat and unmoving on the paddock. Delaney heard with a strange surprise the ranting of the crowd, saw the referee waving someone off the field. In a few gasps, with a little more oxygen to the brain, he understood it was him. He looked at the referee's hands, fixing on the fingers, which would tell him whether he was gone for five or ten minutes. But the referee did not use his fingers, used merely a backhanded gesture of total banishment. Leaving the field, Delaney would not have survived the hatred of the harsh natives of South Sydney had it not been for the wire cage.

52

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

The second part of the letter from my sister, reflecting on the events of 1945–46, follows.

Paris,

Jan. 28, 1984

Dear Radek,

A fierce wind today and I saw from my window three Gypsy children move in on a woman and steal her purse with enormous skill, so deftly she was left in the middle of the pavement with her hands extended, weeping. But that piece of news does nothing to soothe your confusion about Michelstadt, so I shall take that business up where I left off yesterday.

At the end of the winter of 1946, two of Redich's men—both former police lieutenants from Rogachev, and one, Gersich, a delegate from Rogachev to that famous meeting in the Minsk Opera House where Ostrowsky outfoxed Abramtchik—were called to Colonel Nouges's office to find three armed officers of French counterintelligence and two American officers of 12th Army Counter Intelligence, similarly armed, waiting to arrest them. My unofficial fiancé of the time, Sergeant Pointeaux, filled me in on the tragedy of that arrest. Gersich and his friends were tumbled straight into the back of a truck, driven to the border of the Russian zone north of Bayreuth, and handed over to officers of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. The camp doctor back in Michelstadt had to sedate Mrs. Gersich that night. She knew her husband had disappeared into the void.