The Bronski House (11 page)

He seemed calm and Helena felt strangely sorry for him. She wanted to help. ‘What is the matter, Florian?’

He shook his head.

‘Something is the matter. Tell me.’

He broke a dead branch from a larch. She watched him snap it in two; then he snapped the two pieces into four, and continued to snap them until they were all too small to snap any more. He threw them away.

‘What is it, Florian?’ she repeated.

‘It’s you, Hela.’

She said nothing.

‘I love you.’

‘No, please!’

‘I want to marry you.’

‘No!’

‘Why not?’ He stared at her fiercely.

‘Just no.’

‘Is it Andrzej? Would you marry Andrzej?’

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t asked me.’

‘But if he asked you?’

Helena shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

Florian stopped suddenly on the road. He clenched and unclenched his fists, then stood staring at his palms.

Helena turned on her heels and left him. It was time for Miss Gardner.

Later that morning one of the Finns found Florian in a patch of fern beyond the village. There were mushrooms in the grass beside him. Andrzej’s service revolver was in his right hand; the barrel was in his mouth.

Above his body the bracken was just beginning to turn autumnal brown.

In her account, Helena says nothing about her reaction to Florian’s suicide. She simply said that the first thing Aunt Ziuta – his mother – did was to embrace her, saying, ‘It was not your fault, my darling, and anyone who says it is will have to deal with me.’

She looked to Andrzej for solace, but they both realized it had changed. Even back in St Petersburg it was different. The silences between them were shadowy and taut. Florian was always there, just as he had been in life.

I
N THE AUTUMN OF
1916 there were many strikes. The gates of the Petersburg foundries and wool mills were often locked. Groups of workers gathered outside them, their hands stretched over braziers. Near the docks certain men stood on upturned fish-crates and talked of things that few in their audience seemed to understand. The days grew shorter; the speeches grew longer.

Sometimes there were bands of mounted policemen posted around the city. They held long pikes and wore greatcoats which flared out over their saddles. The horses stamped impatiently and breath steamed from their nostrils. In her account, Helena confessed that she was oblivious to the mounting tension. But she always noticed the horses.

She had passed her exams with distinction. The directors of the English school – an odd pair known as Miss Sanders and Mr Pike – said that during the war it was not possible to get teachers from England, as was their policy, but could she take a class?

‘Helping to spread the lovely language of Shakespeare,’ sighed Miss Sanders. ‘Surely one of the noblest things a young person can do.’ And Helena was flattered enough to agree.

So at 5 p.m. the following Monday, in a grey cardigan, she pushed open a frosted glass door marked ‘FORM IV – Berkshire (Only English spoken)’. A row of staring Russian eyes greeted her. She had been given a class of twenty-three civil servants.

She introduced herself in English. The eyes stared.

She stood in front of the blackboard and placed her hands on the back of her chair. ‘What is this?’

The eyes blinked.

‘
This is: a chair.’

‘
A sheer… a cheer… a jair…’

The first lesson was a sticky affair. None of the class had a word of English and Helena was shy. She had never been alone in a room with so many men before.

But in the following weeks they made more progress. The clerks proved keen and good-humoured. Helena became fond of them and sometimes the hour-long evening lessons would stretch to two, even three hours. Soon they were reading Aesop’s
Fables
and conducting faltering debates about goats and lions and birds. The snow built up in arcs across the windows, muffling the sounds from the street.

Perhaps, thought Helena, Miss Sanders was right. She made plans to become a teacher, to help ‘spread the lovely language of Shakespeare’.

In St Petersburg, the O’Breifnes had very little money. Their life was frugal and plain and Helena resented it. On receiving her first pay she said to her mother, ‘Enough of these economies!’ and went to Gostinny Dvor and bought her a new watch. It was a barbed gift. Relations between mother and daughter deteriorated step by step. One Sunday afternoon Helena’s mother found her complaining to Andrzej on the telephone. Snatching the receiver from her hand, she cried, ‘Telephoning men is the habit of seamstresses!’

Helena turned in anger. ‘Mama, he said something… Andrzej said he saw Papa. Why didn’t I know? Why isn’t he here, staying with us?’

‘It is not your business. He is ill.’

‘He is my father! I want to see him.’

‘I will not allow it.’

But from Aunt Ziuta, Helena found out that he had taken a small flat on Nevsky Prospekt. She went there at once. Uncleared snow lay in the courtyard. She climbed the stairs and when he opened the door had to make an effort to greet him normally. He looked very ill. His face was drawn and sallow-skinned; his uniform sagged on his shoulders and on his hips. He had black smudges under his eyes, yet oddly he seemed younger. He pointed Helena to a desk chair, and sat down opposite her.

‘Hela, my dear Hela!’ He leaned forward and took her hand. ‘You are grown up, Helenka. You must see that your mother and I do not get on.’

‘But why, Papa?’

‘She made me promise never to see the woman you call Aunt Janienka. I could not promise such a thing, so she does not want me. She has no use for me any more.’

‘How can I see you? I must see you!’

He held up his hands and smiled. ‘All right, Hela, here’s what we’ll do. I will come for you each evening at the English school, and we will walk here and have supper in my room and afterwards I will take you home. Tell your mother you eat at the school and no one will ask questions.’

So every evening he was there sitting on a wooden bench in the hall of the English school, waiting for Helena’s class to finish. And the rumour began, among the grinning Russian clerks and the thinly scattered staff, that this man, this dashing man of forty-eight, was really her fiancé.

She did nothing to deny it. She called him ‘Józef’ in their presence. He in turn took to arriving with gifts of chocolates and flowers; sometimes he donned his uniform and Miss Sanders whispered to Helena, ‘Such a handsome man. 1917 will be your year, Miss O’Breifne, I know it! A lovely spring wedding!’

Mr Pike put an avuncular arm around her shoulder and warned her about men who were ‘philanderers and blackguards’.

But all the while Helena’s father was getting weaker. At Christmas there was a party in the flat and he came and sat in a corner. Twenty people filled that flat. They picked at a pair of geese that Tekla had found from somewhere. There were noisy toasts and noisy Polish singing.

During the height of the party, Helena looked around and saw that her father was missing. She went into the back of the flat and found him in her own room. He was sitting on her bed, leaning over a bucket and vomiting. He tried to laugh it off: ‘The doctors, Hela, they say my stomach is narrowing. The solution is simple – all I must do is eat less!’

‘History,’ Aunt Ziuta had said once, on one of those summer evenings on the Moika canal, ‘is like a hare waiting in the bushes.’

Now it was winter. The Moika canal was frozen. St Petersburg was ploughing through the icy wastes of the new year. The sun shone yellow on the underside of the clouds. Sometimes there was a wind and it blew fiercely across the empty squares, searching the streets for loose snow. Sleighs slid to and fro, reluctant to stop; no one went out to shop as there was nothing to buy. The Neva, where only a month or so before Rasputin had been jammed through the ice, stretched like a white no man’s land through the city. Mounted police barred the bridges across it; distant shouting echoed off the river. The hare waited in the bushes.

In February Helena’s English classes grew smaller. They were reading Kingsley’s
The Water Babies,
and the twenty-three grinning clerks became twenty, then fifteen, then ten. There was shooting on Nevsky Prospekt and then only five appeared; and one day after a heavy snowfall, with the streets full of troop carriers, only Ivankienko, an earnest Russian from the Urals, managed to get through. He pulled from his coat a pot of raspberry jam, and gave it to Helena. ‘Oh Miss! For you the jam! You must not go to hunger…’

At that moment, the main door opened. Helena’s father stood breathless on the threshold. ‘Quick, Hela… Fighting has broken out…’

Outside, there was the sound of gunfire. Groups of men were running through the streets; some were clutching shards of ice from the canal.

The three of them hurried out of the school. They crossed open squares, passed boarded shops and iced-up trams; they made progress street by street, doorway by doorway. Helena’s long skirt became stiff with snow and swung like a bell against her felt boots. The cold tore at the back of her throat.

‘Quick!’ coaxed her father. But he too was in pain. He gripped his side. Ivankienko ran ahead, checking at each corner for barricades, the pot of raspberry jam clutched tight against his chest.

On a bridge over the Griboyedov canal, three men were standing on a dray cart. They were addressing a small crowd of workers and soldiers with rifles. Some were firing into the air. Ivankienko put an arm in front of Helena and halted her. They retraced their steps.

Around the back of Gostinny Dvor, they stumbled across a group holding red banners. Someone was signing the ‘Marseillaise’. Ivankienko pressed Helena into a doorway. The men were standing in a semi-circle. They were shouting at a police officer; the officer was on horseback. He was trying to spur himself away, but they closed in around him. One of the group had the reins and the others were tugging him from the saddle. The officer fell. He tried to run away, but they pushed him to the ground. One of the crowd took a lump of ice, about the size of his fist, and started beating it against the man’s head. His head flopped forward. Someone held it back by the hair. They carried on beating him until he was dead.

Helena never forgot that scene; she never forgot the look in his eyes, nor his blood in the snow. It was the moment, for her, when the world finally lost its innocence.

For some time the city was in chaos. Helena didn’t go out, not even to see her father. Tekla would come in after hours of foraging with only a loaf or a few pickled vegetables to show for it. She fed them the latest rumours – that the Volhyn Regiment had mutinied, that Khabalov was mounting a counter-attack, that the Corps des Pages were defending the Winter Palace, that the Tsar was far away; that the Tsar had abdicated.

And then a kind of order returned. The trams and buses ran again and a little food found its way into the shops. Helena resumed her classes and her clerks came back, one by one, looking thinner, with tighter grins, until the class was twenty-three again. They finished
The Water Babies,
and moved on to Kipling.

One afternoon – it was a Saturday and the lime trees were a hazy green – Helena walked home across the Mars Fields. She remembered the dark clouds overhead and the rubbery squeak of the snow beneath her feet. She thrust her hands deep inside her coat. Across the expanse of the park, she could see a crowd gathered in the corner. A man was standing at the front on a wooden box. He was hatless and nonchalant in the cold. She drew closer and could make out his words:

‘Every man is master of his destiny… He must shape his own destiny and help shape that of his country… Your time has come, people…’

Back at home she found Uncle Augustus standing in front of the Dutch stove.

‘Uncle.’ She stretched to kiss him, then started to take off her gloves. ‘Such a curious man was speaking today in the Mars Fields. But what a beautiful voice he had! Such intelligence!’

‘Who was he?’

‘They said his name was Lenin.’

And the situation had not really improved. There were still men with brooding eyes everywhere, still shooting in the streets. Running to her father’s flat with a flask of Tekla’s vegetable bouillon, Helena frequently saw the bodies discarded like rubbish in the doorways.

Her father also remained in a state of uncomfortable limbo. Helena spent Sunday afternoons with him. When in pain, he would hold a towelling-wrapped samovar to his stomach. As the pain eased he slept. She watched him sleep. She listened to the French ormolu clock chiming away the hours. There was always a point when his hands dropped away from the samovar, his head slipped to one side, and the skin around his cheeks softened; then for a while he seemed at peace.

In April, Aunt Ziuta took Helena to a ballet at the Mariinsky. Even though the city was in flux, the auditorium was full, the performance flawless. To Helena it was much less of a spectacle without the silks and jewellery, without the archdukes, without Yusupov.

Afterwards, in the square, a
babushka
stepped out in front of them. She had blue eyes and grub-like fingers. One of these she thrust at Helena. ‘I have a hat for you, my girl, a crepe mourning hat!’ She put a piece of paper into Helena’s hand.

Aunt Ziuta led Helena away. ‘C’est rien. La femme est folle!’

Later Helena unravelled the bit of paper. There was an address on it, somewhere behind the theatre. She traced it, several days later, to the fourth floor of a soot-blackened house. A pipe was leaking in the hallway, and a stream of water dripped down the stairwell. The rooms were full of people on straw mattresses. She was about to leave when her
babushka
came hopping across a row of sleeping bodies, holding a hat.

‘Your hat, Miss. I made it for you.’

‘But I don’t need a hat.’

‘You will,’ she laughed, and taking a clutch of coupons from Helena’s hand left her with the hat.

Meanwhile her father grew worse. He could not hold down even Tekla’s broth. The doctors decided to operate and on the 10 May – 27 April in the old calendar – he was taken to a large army hospital. Helena, her mother, Uncle Augustus and Panna Konstancja waited outside.