30

RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

The luncheon conversation with Onkel Willi had—through my host’s efforts to settle his young guest down—reached safe ground. I could talk films with great ease, and Onkel Willi had the grace to pretend he had not seen Stagecoach, which I had been taken to at the Paris Cinema in Warsaw the month before the war began. As a result I was able to begin a ramified account of the story line, subplots included, even snatches of dialogue.

My narration was interrupted by the sound of some outer door in the apartment slamming twice. I heard Fraulein Hradek exclaiming with unexpected passion and then a torrent of sound from the stairway and front hall. I saw Onkel Willi’s face turn bloodless and the corners of his mouth hang anciently as he stood. The door between the dining room and the kitchen opened, and through it fell the pale young private with the white gloves. Nothing could be heard except the furious sound of what I knew yet could not believe were guns, though indistinct yells and screams lay behind the noise. I saw Onkel Willi’s lips frame the words “Jesus Christ!”

When the row stopped for a second, I heard boots entering from the kitchen and the living room. Onkel Willi pushed me under the table. Kneeling aghast in the under-table dimness, I saw two separate triangles of reality—furniture legs, the base of a sideboard, drapes, the bottoms of Oberführer Ganz’s knife-sharp trousers—segmented from each other by the triangular-cornered hang of the tablecloth. I felt as if buried alive, and chewed for comfort on the back of my hand. The boots ceased to move—a pair of them entered the leftmost of those three lightning-sharp triangles of mine. Onkel Willi spoke in Russian as if he were talking to a plumber or a housepainter.

“Well then,” he said.

A young voice said, “Fascist sowfucker!” Then the tower of intolerable sound fell on me once more.

Then for the first time in my existence I was delivered from the awful geometry of that kind of event which lay at the limits of earthly peril in which I found myself. It was as if there had been a gravity in my blood, pulling me down to boot level, dragging me against the cutting edges of the triangles. And then the gravity was released. In all the racket, the universe produced a voice which made the earth habitable. I say a voice, and I would always claim it was a Belorussian voice. But it was more as well, it was a firm hand in the small of the back. It enunciated this to me: Keep still. This isn’t the only place you’re going to see in a long life.

To speak of an unspeakable experience is impossible to do without debasing it. Nonetheless I can say that no other voice has ever made me so welcome to the wide world. For some reason I responded to it by uttering one word. “Uncle.” I was aware of laughter. And the sentence After the Wave breaks, you’ll still be in place. I knew at once what the Wave was. It was what would cancel the benighted politics which were killing Onkel Willi.

An instant later, I suffered the experience of being lifted on a fountain of light high into the corner of the dining room. I could see the ruined meal, the tubercular private, and Onkel Willi staggering. The grief I felt for him was that he probably did not possess any elevated view of the act, such as I enjoyed from this vantage point. He likely felt in his last seconds as I had when I first perceived the triangles beneath the table, and my grief for him was not for his death so much as for his terror.

The stupefying sound ceased. Now that it lifted like a curtain between Onkel Willi and his assassins, I saw them for who they were. One looked like a peasant, another like an intellectual. These two were perhaps in their early twenties. They wore caps and overcoats, both sets worn, but the provenance of one of the overcoats was better than that of the other. The intellectual had extremely childlike puckered lips, as unsuitable for terrorism as Mrs. Kuzich’s hips had been for martyrdom. Their leader was a man my father’s age. There were no embarrassing immaturities in his face and I had the impression that he was an Army officer in mufti, since he looked as strange in his street clothes as Bienecke did in a suit. There was a second of awe as they considered what they had done—even the leader had to give in to it. Onkel Willi’s broad brow faced the ceiling and—tidiest of men—his good white shirt had been torn loose from his trousers and hung bloodied over them as if he’d been caught before he had tucked the tail in. From the throat to the waist he was not recognizably a human being. The tubercular private’s body had suffered more lightly. Through a corner of the kitchen door I could see Fräulein Hradek’s horizontal and homely ankle and thought what a terrible world it was when the making of hare in sour cream carried with it the fatal penalty.

I saw the senior assassin, the one who was already in my mental vocabulary “The Soldier,” lift the corner of the tablecloth and peer under the table at the child beneath, that child who lay galvanized beneath the tyranny of the triangular view. This child felt he should explain that Onkel Willi was not a target, was not Bienecke, was not even Chief of Police Kabbelski, was only of relevance to children and to women widowed by their husband’s career. Was an extra in a Western, as it turned out: with his broad nearly Mongolian face a certainty for the role of firm young adviser to the elderly Sioux chief who has seen the buffalo hunting grounds shrink. “The Officer” looked in under the table at the child panting animal-like on its four limbs, and the child could not manage a word.

“The Officer” said, like an echo of the “unclesome” voice, “Keep still!” Then he turned to the baby peasant, the baby intellectual. “It’s the Kabbelski kid.” The word he used was in fact halfway between the English “kid” and “brat.” There was no animus in the way he used it. The wonder was that in all the carnage he had time to know my tag, whose kid I was at all. “Stay still there,” I saw him tell the child beneath the table. They left by the kitchen, all three of them, making for the courtyard where Yakov had once saved Onkel Willi’s Mercedes. I maintained my high point of view in the corner of the kitchen door. I heard it all with great dispassion—“The Officer,” “The Peasant,” and “The Intellectual” perishing in a surge of noise on the back stairs as Police Chief Kabbelski arrived from the direction of the front lobby, roared when he saw Onkel Willi, but then with open mouth and a prodigious frown such as I had never seen him wear, stepped over the Rubicon of gore from the Kommissar’s body, lifted the tablecloth, and saw the child. The grunt of delight he uttered was quite as animal as every sound he had made since entering the apartment. He grasped up the child, forced its head into the crook of his shoulder as if he would willingly prevent it from seeing anything more of the butt end of politics, and galloped out through the living room, the lobby, hurdling the bodies of two middle-aged Wehrmacht privates on the stairs and reaching the pavement. He sat the child on the pavement, stood back from it gasping with delight, bending with his hands on his knees. “Thank Christ,” he intoned. “Thank Christ!”

Still stuck in my high corner of the room, I yelled, “Me! Me!” Though he thought he had found me, he hadn’t. Disappointment—that’s what I believed then anyhow—caused me to faint and fall. It was a brief business. When I found my head again I was on the pavement. A dozen or so Belorussian police stood around, a dozen or so SS men. I could see Obersturmführer Harner frowning at my father’s celebration of his son’s survival. Past him, at the corner of Marka and Bryanska streets, I saw an elderly peasant looking at all of us with fierce concentration. When he saw my eyes were on his, he spread his hands and grinned. “Uncle!” I murmured, but he turned his back and walked away down Bryanska.