29

RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

My father found it hard to find an appropriate substitute for Herr Hirschmann, since the whole population seemed to be swept up into war efforts of one kind or another. He located at last a seventy-year-old woman, living in retirement in a house in Pushkina Street, who had graduated in law and letters in Cracow in the days of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, whose empire then controlled that city. She must have been a prodigy in her day, even to the progressive Austrians, and she had taught most of her life in Warsaw and Vienna. Staroviche was the town of her ancestors to which she had retired. My father would sometimes say of her after a drink, “Never retire anywhere near the Warsaw–Minsk–Smolensk highway. There are always Goths and Vandals marching up or down it.” But the advice came too late. Her name anyway was Miss Tokina; she had a serene face and an instinct for controlling Genia as if the age difference between them were only a few years instead of over half a century. She got Genia reading the German classics—turning my sister’s inchoate adolescent energies onto Heine and Goethe.

Miss Tokina however did not come until just before the final scene in Onkel Willi’s life. Because of the events of Kommissar Ganz’s fall, I would for most of the period of Miss Tokina’s tuition in the house therefore be in a privileged position, like that of a recuperating survivor of a shipwreck or of an African hunter who has emerged wraithlike from the tyranny of a swamp fever caught on safari. My Belorussian education would by then be virtually at an end. I could pretend nausea or a headache and my mother would exempt me from Miss Tokina’s sessions. I believe that my frequent absence from her classes bound Tokina and Genia closer and that her ultimate death of malnutrition and pneumonia in the Michelstadt Displaced Persons Camp in 1946 would help drive Genia away from the family and into the arms of Sergeant Pointeaux. But to mention Miss Tokina’s death and Sergeant Pointeaux’s venality is to take the family history ahead by years and not by days. I return therefore to May 1943, when the great news had just been telephoned to my father in the middle of the night by my godfather Ostrowsky himself that a Belorussian Republican Congress would hold preliminary meetings before Christmas in the Minsk Opera House.

This information transfigured the household. I would hear my mother sing in the mornings, and there were a few days when she began to sketch with charcoals even though it was that point of time when the year seemed darkest, between the last of the rain and the first of the snow. My father’s vision of the world improved, and I remember a suppertime when he uttered the peculiarly rosy view favored by most of the visitors to our house—the Germans and their allies would hold indefinitely their shortened line from the Leningrad front through Vitebsk and along the lower swamplands of the Pripet. Give or take a mile or two, the Russians had stalled along the borders of godly Bela Rus, and this seemed to my mother like an answer to prayer. The Russians spoke grandly of their First, Second, and Third White Russian fronts, but Bela Rus remained intact. It was said at our table by many a Belorussian official and even by the colonel of our garrison, Oberst Lustbader, who understood military affairs, that “the antiquated bludgeon of the Red Army has now outrun its logistical possibilities.” It was a formula that seemed to bring great satisfaction to everyone at the Christmas party my father held early that year, since he had to leave for Minsk to confer with the great Ostrowsky and with General von Gottberg.

So there would be a stalemate in the East, a negotiated peace in the West, one of the codicils of that peace being America’s, Great Britain’s, everyone’s recognition of the independence of a Belorussian Republic under the presidency of my Lincoln-like godfather Ostrowsky. Finally there would be a devotion of all the world’s resources to the destruction of Russia, and then a thousand years of peace and sanity.

This hope seemed to flame around me particularly in the days immediately following the terrible events in Onkel Willi’s apartment, and the freezing air was full of a brightness which hurt my eyes and which seemed a reflection of the voice I would encounter the promises I would receive, in Onkel Willi’s apartment.

Three days after his demented behavior Oberführer Ganz turned up again at our place and my mother took him into the living room. It was the late morning. There was a point on the stairwell which was one of my spying places—once a ventilator had been located there giving straight into the living room. It had been taken out when the staircase was replaced and the workmen had simply covered it with a thin plate of painted deal. When I sat on the appropriate stair this plate was at knee level, and conversations other than the most cautious would rise from it to my ear. Onkel Willi had come to beg my mother’s pardon for his uncontrolled behavior. My mother denied there was any cause for him to apologize. “I was beyond control, my dearest Danielle,” Oberführer Ganz insisted. In this terrible phase of history, he said—it was, I have indicated, common for people to invoke history in our household; there was more credibility in their doing so in Staroviche in 1943 than there is here in Penrith now—in this terrible phase of history he had only two polestars of sanity. She understood perfectly, he said, that one of these polestars had been extinguished through the chicanery of Bienecke, who had achieved his goal in the cruelest manner anyone could devise. (Here Willi Ganz made a short reference to dynamite and a groan escaped my mother.) She had never judged him, he said, for his friendship with Yakov, her mind rose above the comic opera narrowness of those who had devised race laws. What he would not be able to live through now was her rejection, if because of his demented behavior he lost the pure affection which had till now prevailed between himself and the Kabbelski family, especially the unsullied understanding which existed between my mother and himself.

I remember what he said then not because it was different from all the oblique adult references I had been hearing lately, but because for the first time the words seemed to me to carry an adult freight of meaning. It was as if I had cracked the code at last.

“Believe me, Danielle,” said Herr Kommissar Ganz, “your husband has nothing to be ashamed of. He has acted from motives of the highest nationalism. He has done what he can to moderate the savagery of the Kappelers and the Bieneckes. As time passes, his view of things, like mine, might come to prevail. I look forward to a time when we can work together not simply to administer a region and maintain the anti-terrorist struggle but to restore the honor some of our colleagues have forfeited in the past two years.”

My mother assured the Oberführer that there was no way in which her friendship for him had been diminished. “We are all unworthy,” she said. (I could not quite understand how.) “And we all have secrets.” I could hear tears in her voice as if she were the one seeking pardon. “I think we ought to pledge that we will always be friends, no matter what, in war and after war and whatever we reveal of ourselves.”

“I pledge that now,” said Ganz, his voice breaking.

A week before I would have taken an august conversation like that very seriously, whether I could have understood it or not. With the memory of Ganz’s furious mouth on mine, the words were transformed, the way the seaside around Puck had been transformed one day in 1939 after I placed my finger in the maw of a hungry sea anemone and felt its alien ravenous grasp and understood that the sea was not just passive but was a hungry element.

And my knowledge of Ganz’s strange hunger made the conversation between him and my mother sound a little overdone, like a conversation in one of the romantic radio serials about a typical yet noble German family whose sons, sad and wise, were always coming home on leave from the Eastern Front and talking about honor and history, endless forgiveness, and a phoenix future rising from the ashes.

“Let me take Radek to lunch,” said Onkel Willi without warning. “I am well escorted—SS and your good Belorussian outriders and Wehrmacht guards. I am afraid I rather disgraced myself in front of Radek the other day and I would like to regain lost ground. Also, Danielle, you must find being trapped in the house with such an active boy exhausting.”

I tried the novelty of thinking of myself for the first time as an active boy. I had not accustomed myself to the idea before I heard my mother calling for me. I disappeared upstairs as fast as I could and reappeared more loudly a little later, thumping on the steps as if I had come sprinting from my room. My mother was waiting by the parlor door at the bottom of the steps, smiling at me. “Herr Kommissar Ganz has invited you to lunch,” she told me. You could not have said her smile was radiant, but it had no ambiguity, she was not smiling at me in that preventive way she had when some visitor offered me overrich confectionary too close to bedtime: the smile that said, “Refuse politely.” I was both appalled and delighted that she had heard nothing from my father about Oberführer Ganz’s weird, grieving kiss.

Onkel Willi’s broad face appeared behind her shoulder. “Will you join me, Radek. A gentleman’s lunch. Cigars and cognac afterwards.”

My mother’s laughter committed me. I got an overcoat and we creaked down the drive in the back of the Oberführer’s car, preceded by four SS men in a limousine, flanked by two sidecar motorcyles manned by my father’s men, and followed by a blitz wagon carrying an Army corporal and a private. Even in this dangerous winter, it occurred to me, we have so many men to stand guard over Onkel Willi’s visits to the Kabbelskis’. I sat still on the seat, very taut. There was the unthinkable risk that Onkel Willi might beg my pardon too, that the kiss might become an open subject between us.

Herr Kommissar Ganz employed a cook-housekeeper, a heavy Czech spinster named Fräulein Hradek. As Onkel Willi and I sat at the dining-room table, Fräulein Hradek recommended the menu to us, listing dishes like a waitress in a restaurant. “Gentlemen, a full-bodied bean soup, followed by carp in a sweet and sour jelly and then hare in sour cream.” As she recited all this Onkel Willi groaned and rolled his eyes comically at me. It was a richer lunch than anything the Kabbelskis were eating that lean December, but then Oberführer Ganz was the Kommissar of Staroviche. In any case the plenty of his table partly reassured me. Since it was the sort of fare appropriate to an official guest, it elevated me to that status. And a provincial Kommissar could not weep in front of an official guest or kiss him full on the lips.

A pale young SS private wearing white gloves appeared and served us our soup and then vanished. Woodenly I spooned the food in. It tasted of my embarrassment, and Onkel Willi could tell. He reached for my free hand and enclosed it in his. An immense hand, it could have been a stevedore’s or a boxer’s if Onkel Willi had come from the appropriate background.

“This is lunch between friends, Radek,” he told me. “Your Onkel Willi lost a good friend in the most cruel manner. Therefore I behaved like a wounded beast. But I must assure you that no one in the Kabbelski family will ever be knowingly misused by me. And I’ve changed my tack now to a determination that those who were responsible for the cruelty will suffer. You agree the cruel should suffer? Now, eat your soup, unless you don’t like it.” He withdrew his hand and clapped, struck by an extravagant idea, the way the old Willi Ganz so often was. “Why don’t we make a compact to dislike it together, exercise our freedom of taste? Take on the soup dragon together. A Hanseatic knight and the White Russian champion. In league.”

“No,” I said with something like a natural smile. “I like the soup and I don’t think we need to go to war with anyone.” I thought there was gratitude in his barking laughter, as if we were really going back to hide and seek in lightly guarded woods. The dining room possessed in fact the same solitude which had existed in Brudezh forest. The SS waiter was not to be seen, Fräulein Hradek—without Hanseatic knights to battle—sat silent in the kitchen. The apartment building was largely empty—the ground floor a sandbagged storeroom, and two civilian officials from Oberführer Ganz’s Kommissariat office occupying the next level. On the top floor both apartments belonged to the Kommissar himself, so that what had once been the hallway between two separate dwellings was Onkel Willi’s lobby.

In a busy world, surrounded by busy causes, we sat at the core of genteel silence. That was my impression anyhow. He began to ask me when-you-grow-up sorts of questions. These were similar to when-the-war-is-over questions. Would I ever consider emigrating to America? Marrying an American? I raised the problem that I was their enemy and so they were mine.

“Won’t always be like that,” said Onkel Willi, bread in his mouth. “What if we made peace with the Americans? What if within a year there were British and Americans here in the streets of Staroviche?”

Because of American films I had seen, because of the glamour of the name, I felt an obscure excitement at the idea. I imagined smiling loose-limbed boys in Bryanska Street, lolling on tanks adorned with America’s white and Christian star.

“I predict it,” he said. “By next midsummer. And … it will make some people at the Natural History Museum behave better than they have up to the moment.”

I concluded he must have meant Hauptsturmführer Bienecke, a man I agreed with Onkel Willi in disliking.

“We might all end up in California,” murmured Onkel Willi with a misty and conspiratorial grin. “Learn a little English and make our living as extras in cowboy films.”

I tried to envisage Oberführer Ganz without his uniform and realized that he would have made a very good sad heroic Indian chief.