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RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

The last Staroviche winter was sweet and by no means seemed to me to be the last. The house was full of Miss Tokina’s instructive voice and of Belorussian police billeted in servants’ quarters upstairs and at the back of the house. They were very happy to be here instead of thrust forward into some frozen village among partisan-ridden forests. My mother treated them with an absent-minded generosity. They flirted with Genia. They spoiled me—it delighted me to see they knew I was the kid the partisans had nearly finished, it enabled me to adopt a certain style. Even at night I was not afraid of bullets, yet I needed to sleep with my mother, given that I dreamed so often of that awful sense of a large mistake, of myself transfixed in the high corner of Onkel Willi’s dining room and my father rescuing from beneath the table the wrong child, the shell of Radislaw, the stranger. As I said earlier, I was safe from tutors. It seemed to me that because of the shock both of Onkel Willi’s kiss and of Onkel Willi’s murder no one would ever have the right to try to make me learn algebra again.

My father was back and forth to Minsk almost continuously that January. He attended meetings of the Belorussian Central Council and talked to the various regional chiefs of the Defense Force. He was the foreshadowed Minister for Relocation. The Minsker Zeitung and the local Belorussian papers both said so. I have to confess I was pleased he was away so often. I felt I could no longer pose as his little boy. Events had made me a brat, as Miss Tokina had converted Genia into an occasionally charming, less hormonally stormy adolescent. The feeling that my father knew too much about me, had seen me in too many extremities, had not abated. That he was locked up in the Europa Hotel in Minsk and was planning the Belorussian Republic and all its works and all its pomps seemed entirely suitable to me. I was at ease. I did not foresee the spring, as my intelligent mother did.

There had been winter Russian offenses in the south, but the Smolensk front on which we depended remained steady. The combination of oil and railways down south made assaults inevitable. Up here in the north we were innocent of oil, and the Germans still held all the railway junctions. So it looked like a situation that could last forever: the Germans encompassing Leningrad and holding far Novgorod and Staraya Russa, a Belorussian garrison in the house, my father away on most important Belorussian business, Genia neutralized by Miss Tokina, my mother anxious in the tradition of mothers but never with a blade to her throat, and no threat of a blade developing.

We went to Minsk for Easter, traveling by troop train. It was slow—a small locomotive traveled ahead at a crawling pace, looking for tampered-with rails and hauling a tender carrying a German railway repair unit. Once we were parked for two hours while track was replaced. Toward dusk, as we edged along, shots were heard from the front of the train and an officer came through to our compartment and asked us to lie on the floor. Genia and my mother obeyed him so thoroughly that I was able, in the spirit of the guarantees I had received under Onkel Willi’s dining-room table, to look out through the shuttered window. I saw, edging through long grass and cornflowers, a strong detachment of German infantrymen from our train. I saw them all pause and pour fire into the woods. These fellow travelers of ours were on their way ultimately to take up a line along the Beresina south of Minsk, should that be necessary. It was yet another of those lines which the more knowledgeable of our house garrison said could last an age.

We reached Minsk toward midnight, and my father was there to meet us. We heard klaxons on the way to the Hotel Europa. My father smiled at my mother. “It’s never quiet at night,” he said. That Easter morning we heard Mass in Latin at the church of the Bernardine monastery. It was a sharp, clear Resurrection Day. For two such nationalists my parents had an unself-conscious preference for the Latin Mass over the Belorussian-Byzantine style, for a French Christ resurgent over a Russian or Greek one. For my parents were among that 20 percent who used Belorussian only to communicate with their fellow nationals but who believed that a knowledge of the Latin responses made one an heir to Western culture and was as good as a visit to Paris.

In the car on the way to breakfast at the Europa, my father told my mother, “You should stay in Minsk. General Busch intends to make Minsk into an irreducible stronghold. Besides, I’m only nominally police chief of Staroviche now.”

We drove past a strongpoint on a corner guarded by young Belorussian conscripts in new but shabby uniforms which echoed those of the SS.

“I don’t want to give up the house in Staroviche,” I was delighted to hear my mother tell him. “And Genia must have Miss Tokina or she’ll go mad.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” said my father, smiling and indulgent. “We won’t relinquish the lease on the Staroviche house.”

We haven’t relinquished it to this day.