A Family Madness (36 page)

There was a great deal of anxiety in Michelstadt that other arrests might take place, and that Belorussian patriots—as some of those coarse clowns called themselves—might be seized and sent prematurely east. (Remember that term from our childhood in Staroviche? Sent east?)

Our father suffered from this fear, of course. But there was the additional problem that the papal gang suspected that he or someone else in the Ostrowsky setup had betrayed Gersich and his colleague to the Soviets. As you know, most of us were masquerading as Poles, or as humbler refugees from Belorussia than in fact we were. Subtle misspellings of our names, forged papers, the general good will of the French and the Americans, gave us protection. For Gersich and his friend to have been arrested, someone—and Redich was certain it was someone in Michelstadt—must have betrayed Gersich's and the other man's identities, must have sent information and photographs to General Sedlov. Someone in Michelstadt must therefore be a Soviet agent. Redich wanted that agent uncovered and punished. That is why Redich kidnapped you and put you in the pit.

R
ADISLAW
K
ABBEL

Because Sergeant Pointeaux was courting my sister, I was treated as something of a favorite by the guards. I would sit with them in the guardhouse, read their comic books, both French and American, and shamelessly extract chocolate from them. My father might have abominated Sergeant Pointeaux, but my connection with both men gave me more stature than probably any other brat in Michelstadt. It did not occur to my father, to Albert, or to me that I might be used for leverage between the factions, and so my liberty to wander in the camp and beyond it was virtually unrestricted.

I was returning from the guardhouse to my parents' suite in Hut 11-C one early dusk. It is very likely that I was singing or talking to myself. In both Regensburg and Michelstadt I had returned to being what my mother called a “normal child.” There had been cessation of the mild seizures which had occurred fairly regularly in the last days of Staroviche and in Frau Zusters's house in Charlottenburg. So, a normal child, I sang my way home toward a plentiful supper.

In this particular late February dusk the camp had already begun to recover from Gersich's capture by the Russians. The mess halls, where I would sometimes eat with other children, telling by instinct that they liked me better if I avoided the mess where the camp leaders and their families ate, were full of talk of immigration. The first officials from Canada, the United States, Australia were just beginning to appear in places like Michelstadt, touting their version of the new world, looking for faces that would fit it. New York, New Jersey, Boston, Montreal were invoked. Of Australia, people knew little other than kangaroos and genial Aboriginals. The vacancy of what was known made the place seem highly desirable to many people in the mess, people who never again wanted to be at the storm's eye.

That evening, I was equally at peace both with the idea of a future of prairies, exotic wildernesses, deliciously serrated city skylines, as with the present benefits of Michelstadt.

Four huts from home I was intercepted by a beefy young Belorussian, probably in his late twenties. He told me he had served with my father in Staroviche. My father didn't want me to go home—instead he had sent this man to tell me to meet him in the recreation hut for some exciting news. “A surprise, a surprise,” said the young former policeman. “Though I suppose you're nearly too grown up for surprises now.”

I walked ahead of him but was aware, as if he had bifurcated, that there were now two of him. I looked around to see a second young man, thinner but equally tall. The second young man was smiling too. I smiled back. They were full of a sort of peasant good will. They seemed to be following me precisely so that they could witness that first flush of amazement on my face when my father announced the unexpected.

They told me, in the vicinity of the crudely built Catholic church, that my father wasn't really in the recreation hut—that he was in the old part of the camp. To get me to him, they intended to put me in a garbage bin and pass me off as refuse when they came to the French sentry by the soccer field. It was of course essential for this escapade that I remain quiet and still. With all my soul I pledged quietness and stillness.

So they found me a garbage bin and I sat in its yellow reek of early putrefaction as they toted me past the sentry. I heard them nominate a destination beyond the old huts, the huts which would have been primitive accommodation even in the days of the German forced labor.

Beyond these ancient huts were a covered row of old latrines. That was where they took me. They set me down and dragged the lid of one of the pits away. I was tumbled forth from the bin. There was no father. Only the dirty snow and the burningly cold earth. The genial-looking policeman who had first approached me said, lifting me by the armpits and lowering me into the dark, “You're going down, sonny.”

I told him no. Nonetheless I fell into the dark earth, landing at last with a fierce jolt on a deck of planks someone had placed halfway down the pit. I could barely see the monitory faces of the two Belorussians high above me in the lesser dark of the February dusk. “If you get thirsty,” said the one who had done all the speaking, “you'll find lumps of ice on the walls.” Saying that, they threw in two blankets, and I wondered whether these would be adequate.

Then they dragged the lid across the pit. The darkness was absolute. Without being dramatic one could say that I was buried alive.

The earth could not accommodate my terror, but man is such an efficient machine that in the end I felt for moisture on the foul walls. Even in a miasma of terror I pursued the mechanics of being human or, at least, animal. Given time on my wooden platform deep in the pit I would have become a hunter, scrabbling for worms and bugs in Europe's subsoil, delving for the insects which had maintained their wise politics through all Europe's surface changes, the changes which only
we
believed to have penetrated to the center of the earth. I was astonished that it had happened again in my life so soon: I believed the guarantees I had been given beneath Oberführer Ganz's dining-room table had exempted me from all future anguish of this scale. It was all very well for that Belorussian voice named “Uncle” to have promised me a Wave. In the pit, the Wave was no consolation.

I did not begin to feel cold until sleep, normal functional sleep, began to overtake me. I fought it, since I believed this sort of unconsciousness would not give me any height from which I could look down on the child in the hole.

I was blessedly wrong. Asleep, I wavered atop a light pole above the ancient latrines. A dead light bulb, one which had probably shone in the days of the Polish slave laborers, sat in the mantle by my right shoulder. I was aware of the radiant anxiety of the child in the latrine, that child affrighted to sleep. I could see the lit camp and hear voices and jazz music. They were not alarmed voices, they were not voices asking where Radek Kabbelski was. They were voices full of the expectation of America and Canada. They were voices more stimulated now, since the Allies had failed to sweep on over the Russians, by the prospect of New South Wales or Winnipeg or Massachusetts than by memories of the forests and the Belorussian buffalo.

There were very few people in the open, for it was a dismal evening. The drizzle which descended from low, soggy clouds would later turn to sleet. I saw my father walking quickly past the playing fields, around the perimeter. Stopping to talk to a French sentry, he was—on account of his stature—permitted out the gate and into this old section of the camp. The ground in this area was, I was aware, littered with the debris of condemned huts, timber, and iron roofing stacked for some further use but never taken away. My father advanced halfway across this wasteland. My sister Genia, I saw, appeared behind him on the playing fields, striding straight across the middle of the soccer pitch. As my father looked behind one pile of stacked lumber and then another, Genia began to speak animatedly to the young sentry who had permitted him into the open. My father turned, saw her, and strode back to the gate. He began gesturing to Genia, shouting, though I could not catch what he said. I could see though that the sentry was embarrassed. I was astounded, aggrieved enough to curse him, as I saw him gesture Genia back toward the huts from which the music and the voices rose. My father had been distracted from finding me by the easy delights of chastising Genia, of calling her a slut.

I believe that later in the night he returned with two of his police officers, one of them being Yuri, and searched the open land—there were reasons why he could not come back with battalions and flashlights. I would not be aware of this later search however, just as I was not aware of what a busy night in general it would become for him.

The last event I saw from my vantage point, as the camp was becoming quieter, was Galina and my mother rushing along the fence, my mother stopping to look under the older huts by the playing fields. They spoke for a while to the sentry, but he seemed to have become bored with the Kabbelskis and their friends by now and answered only briefly, ultimately turning his back to them.

Halfway back across the playing fields, in the shadow of the clinic, Galina and my mother began to argue. I was absolutely diverted by the strangeness of this. Galina became increasingly angry, took my mother by the upper arm, pushed her this way and that. It might have been a re-enactment of a schoolyard scene, I naively thought. Then Mother, pulling away from Galina, landed on her haunches in the mud. Galina jumped behind her, dragged her half upright with a crooked arm, and began choking her. While I cried out to the treacherous Galina, my mother arched her back and tried to find purchase on the miry earth with her feet. At last she managed it, wriggled out of that vise, the elbow of her old school friend, and staggered away calling my father's name. Galina responded neither to my cry nor to my mother's escape, and collapsed against the hut wall and stared at her bare knees.

It seemed to be soon after that I awoke in the pit with the consoling knowledge that the pit could not hold me. Through the wooden lid high above me I could see the glimmer of an ice-gray morning. I was prodigiously cold and thought in semidelirium that searchers might be attracted to me by the noise of my organs, above all my heart and brain, creaking under the weight of icy air. I called for help as much to warm myself as in hope. The earthen walls absorbed any cry. My little lumber platform, wedged above the cess, began to shake. I suffered a natural concern as to whether the waste of Frenchmen and Poles and Russian soldiers employed here in the war years would be a foul sea still or would have solidified and become one with the earth itself.

Considering these questions, I grew comatose. Once I awoke and knew that either it was dusk or the steely day had grown unnaturally dim. It was at some stage of that night that I saw the lid removed above me to show stars of savage clarity. A hand reached down to me and I reached up. It was a hand so callused I did not need to see the face to know who was the rescuer. I concluded, intuitively and at once, that it was the old man I had seen on the corner of Marka and Bryanska streets on the day Onkel Willi was shot by the partisans. “Come on, come on,” said a voice in Belorussian. “We don't die in holes. Not people like us.”

It was all I would hear from him. Gratefully yet shrieking with cold I was lifted out and carried a little distance in a needling north wind and set down in the lee of a pile of lumber.

53

They played the tape in fast motion, then in slow. The images of Delaney's outrage against the integrity of Lynch's jawline appeared on an enormous screen of the type generally found only in clubhouses, in vast areas, among bar tables. In the small boardroom, the infamy of that tackle seemed gigantic.

The members of the judiciary board were reduced to stillness by the electronic evidence, the collision between Delaney and Lynch. Even old Bernie Bell's asthma could not be heard.

Now the board had seen the impact at the speed of the human eye, the official in charge of the video machine let the tape rewind in slow motion. Delaney loped ridiculously backward into the state of taut innocence which had preceded the tackle. Lynch himself took similarly grotesque backward strides. Yelling, “Coming through, Baz!” backward, he got rid of the ball to Austin and disappeared around his flanks. His energy, run backward, resembled fear rather than a hard offensive intention. Behind Delaney one of the journalists tittered.

Run forward as slowly however, the event did not look quite so comic. Even to himself, Delaney-on-the-screen looked like someone who wanted to punish. His face was set in an aggressive rictus. He seemed to push the slow-footed Yorkshireman Tancred out of the way in his rush to launch himself against the developing movement. He looked as though he would come in low, a fine five-eighth tackle. Then he unwisely straightened and drove his forearm against Lynch's jawline.

Behind Delaney someone whispered, “Jesus!” Nausea overcame him. If I get sick in here, will it do me any good? He remembered the berserk elation he felt as the structures of Lynch's face yielded. Run at normal speed, the tape might support a defense based on reflex action, impulse, lack of malice. Run slow, it looked like bloody murder.

Golder had insisted the club provide him with counsel. The counsel was, in this case, a young barrister named Vickers, who now asked for an adjournment and led Delaney out of the boardroom and down the corridor into a toilet, where hissing urinals provided some cover for private conversation.

“All right,” said Vickers. “I think now you should be frank with them about Lynch's provocations offered earlier in the game.”

Delaney said he didn't want to do that.

“Come on. Provocation's important! It's all very nice, Terry, to be brave and take your medicine, but we're not schoolboys here. We're talking about a loss of thousands of dollars to you.”