The Bronski House (12 page)

It was mid afternoon when the surgeon came out. He was smiling; the operation had been a success. Helena’s father was wheeled out on a trolley, and they waited for him to wake.

Half an hour later, he opened his eyes. He tilted his head towards Helena and her mother, and smiled. Then he went back to sleep. Soon afterwards his eyes opened suddenly. This time he looked surprised. The professor rushed to his side. He took his wrist, leaned on his chest. He shouted for a nurse and they both pummelled his chest. Then the professor pursed his lips and pulled the sheet up over his patient’s face.

Helena’s mother stared at the trolley. She had seen it before in her dreams. She had seen it after his ‘visits’ in the early years of their marriage. These fleeting encounters used to fill her with such horror that she would become blind afterwards and the only thing that ever broke the darkness was this: the vision of her husband, harmless, lying on a table wrapped in a white shroud.

In Poland the custom was to take the dead home and make a ‘
Chapelle Ardente’
where family and friends could come and pray before the body was buried.

Helena wanted a
Chapelle Ardente
but her mother refused. ‘These are dangerous times, dear. It’s best to leave it.’

All the following day Helena stayed in the flat. She sat unpicking the stitches of a cushion; Liki chirruped over her head. By the evening, Panna Konstancja could take it no more. She took her aside and told her where her father was lying.

The
dvornik
swung open the oak door. It was 10 p.m. and very cold. She pulled a woollen scarf up around her mouth and hurried along the canal. There was no one else on the street.

What Helena remembered of this journey was hazy and disjointed. She followed the route mechanically. She crossed the Neva with the moon broken to pieces in the rippled water. There was then a white-bearded night-watchman who muttered amiably as he admitted her to a room of low vaults and simple altars hidden in the niches.

The room was full of corpses. They lay on stone plinths and tables; they lay between the tables, on planks and loose duckboards. Some were wrapped in sheets and sackcloth, but others were still in their clothes.

‘Counter-revolutionaries!’ whispered the old man.

Her father was on his own in a corner. He was wrapped in the same hospital sheet. She took a candle and sat with him and laid a hand on the sheet. She felt the calico warm and sticky against her skin. Her fingertips were covered in fresh blood. She jumped up. ‘He bleeds! Look, he is alive!’

The watchman came over and shook his head. He left Helena with a clutch of candles, and she sat there all night. She slipped in and out of sleep. Then she slept properly and when she awoke the candles had burnt down and the shadows had receded. Dawn had entered that dank ward and her father’s face was grey.

The attendants came down the stairs. They crossed to the basin; they chatted while scrubbing their forearms. They hauled the bodies off the plinths and on to stone slabs.

In a daze, Helena watched these corpses being washed. In a daze, she watched Tekla arrive and Panna Konstancja and Uncle Augustus who said Mass in one of those cave-like niches. She remained motionless on her stool, unable to focus on anything but the pale and beautiful face of Aunt Janienka bowed before the altar, the slow leonine way in which she moved: this woman who had taken her father away. It was the only time she ever saw her.

And then, wrote Helena, there was another great blank in her memory and there was nothing of the burial nor the last days in St Petersburg nor the goods train which hurried them away. There was only the image of herself, a listless figure back at Piesków, in black, too tired to take in a word of Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
which lay unread in her lap.

H
ELENA SPENT
most of the summer of 1917 at Piesków, just to the north of Minsk. Of these days she recalled:

The arrival at Piesków marked the beginning of Helena’s most turbulent years. Germans and Russians came and went; borders shifted like the tide, washing everyone up in different towns, in different countries. There were farm carts and forest drives and nights in Jewish inns. But something had changed. The journeys were different from the flight of 1915. That had been an adventure. Now the world was a darker place. Everyone Helena knew or loved was either scattered by the war, or dead.

Her mother, widowed, became harder. She took to drinking black coffee and smoking Turkish cigarettes. She was keen for Helena to marry, yet couldn’t bear seeing her with men. Helena frequently promised herself to be rid of them all and live alone, without her family, without admirers, in some cabin in the forest, surrounded by dogs and horses and wild bees.

But Medeksa’s words of ecstasy and love were very pleasant – so pleasant that after several weeks of them, Helena became convinced she had committed some sin.

Medeksa was ‘old’ – more than twenty-eight. He had been serving in the Red Cross
Otryads
in the Bukovina and was now stationed in a field hospital near Piesków. He was widely read in English and French and when it came to talking of poetry – as it always did – he would quote great tracts from Baudelaire’s
Fleurs du Mal,
or Rimbaud’s
Une Saison en Enfer.
He knew that words alone were the key to Helena’s heart.

In time, her mother found out. She was very angry.

Helena reassured her. ‘It’s all right, Mama…’

‘What do you mean, “It’s all right”? The man is untrustworthy!’

‘I am going to marry him.’

‘What?’ She drew sharply on her cigarette. ‘One does not marry doctors!’

Her mother’s vehemence pushed Helena closer to Medeksa. He took to writing her long letters from his hospital, always headed with a couplet of French or English verse, and always scented with apple blossom.

Then in September her mother said they were moving to Minsk. It would be safer in Minsk, she said. Safer with Uncle Augustus.

He too had fled the increasing chaos of St Petersburg. He was now a bishop and had been given a large house near the cathedral in Minsk. It was a beautiful house, its outside walls feathered with creeper, its high rooms decked out in episcopal splendour. But in those dark days it felt oddly deserted. Helena had the sense that there was always someone missing, that they had pushed open the door and simply stepped inside.

They were constantly hungry. Everyone was hungry. That winter was even worse than the last. They would gather in the dining room knowing, as Uncle the Bishop said Grace, that all they were thanking God for, at best, was a few cubes of horseflesh.

Helena’s grandmother was also with them. She was oblivious to most things and, humming quietly, spent her time sitting in the parlour stitching brown flannel shirts for the poor.

At the other end of the house lived a young curate, tall and thin like a poplar. He painted scenes from the life of Christ: great blocks of colour with twisted, scarecrow figures. Helena used to watch him work. She marvelled at the care that went into something which turned out so dull. He took her interest for admiration, and when he left, on a special mission to Rome, presented her with a picture of the disciples crossing a cornfield.

‘How lovely,’ she exclaimed. ‘Boats, on a lovely yellow lake!’

Helena carried on her teaching. She gave classes in English to two ‘dim-witted’ Russian princesses. She discovered her lifelong intolerance of mediocrity. One evening in October, her princesses came to her in tears.

‘Oh Helena! We have to leave, this evening!’

‘Where to?’

‘Away!’ they said.

‘Where away?’

‘We don’t know!’

‘Well, why must you leave?’

‘Oh Helena, we don’t know!’

Typical of their answers, she thought.

But the reason was soon clear. Later that week, with the trees bare and all but the crows flown south, the Bolsheviks took control of Minsk.

Overnight the city changed. Men wearing red armbands filled the streets, spitting sunflower seeds into the gutters. The Bolshevik governor came to Uncle the Bishop and told him to leave. He refused, and one night they machine-gunned the cathedral windows. The following day every Pole in Minsk rallied round the building and the Bolsheviks, still unsure of their support, left them alone.

Uncle the Bishop mulled over the problem. He decided to give a reception. He invited the Poles, and he invited the Bolshevik governor. No one expected him to come but he did, a youngish man with round glasses, attended by two commissars. They tried not to stare at the red silks of the women and their jewels, at the twelve-foot aspidistra in one corner, at the dusty authority shining from the room’s portraits. They left early.

The party carried on long into the night. The toasts rambled, the singing grew louder, the dancing quicker. The curate fell behind a sofa. Helena was dancing with a distant cousin when she spotted Medeksa in the doorway. But before she managed to reach him, Uncle the Bishop had told him to leave.

The next day, at breakfast, a letter arrived and the dining room filled with the scent of apple blossom. Helena’s mother took the letter, tore it up and scattered its pieces in the fire. ‘That man is no good for you, Hela.’

All through that winter Helena laid plans to meet him; each of them came to nothing. The only time she ever saw him was at evening Mass, when he sat in a pew behind her, his eyes on her neck. But her mother was always with her and she could not talk. Anyway, she wrote, she was much too busy praying to take any notice.

Outside church, she became increasingly distracted. She stared at her books as if they were in Urdu. She met a kindly priest, Father Rostowski, who listened to her closely and then said, ‘Love is like ivy, Panna Helena; it can grow through even the thickest wall.’

Father Rostowski took the case to heart. He saw Medeksa, and promised to help. He went with his dilemma to Uncle Augustus. But Uncle Augustus was his bishop and told him not to meddle; he accused him of behaving like a Bolshevik, a Trotsky of family affairs.

As for Helena, she remained more determined than ever. One afternoon, after a complicated series of letters sent through Panna Konstancja, she left the house and met Medeksa by the river.

It was a bright winter’s day. She wore a summer dress under a thick coat; he wore an orchid in his button-hole. They sat together on a bench. All around the park the grass was showing through ribbons of ice; tiny buds were visible on the trees. They talked of everything, of food and music, of St Petersburg and God, of the Bolsheviks and Verlaine. They laughed easily and Helena felt buoyant and happy. Then he ran his arm along the top of the bench and kissed her.

Helena leapt up. ‘Medeksa!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Do you take me for a housemaid?’

‘My poor, poor Helena…’

‘Don’t “poor Helena”! I am not one of your nurses.’

‘Oh, you and your snobberies! You’re really no different from your mother!’

Helena turned and left, alarmed to discover that he was right.

The weeks passed and the Bolsheviks gained in strength. The streets became choked with soldiers in grey uniforms, the gutters with their sunflower seeds. They went about in pairs, gesticulating madly, peering through the windows of abandoned villas. Several times they pushed past Uncle the Bishop’s butler and wandered in and out of the rooms. At night, friends disappeared. Uncle the Bishop’s life was threatened. He placed a permanent guard on the churches and Helena’s mother offered up her Prayers of Providence.

Providence knocked again. On the very day that the Red Guard was despatched to arrest the O’Breifnes, the Germans re-took Minsk. Prisoners were freed and for a time there was food.

German officers began to come to tea with Uncle Augustus; he had been to a Jesuit seminary near Innsbruck, and spoke a good, high German.

One day they reported that there was a camp on the edge of Minsk, a refugee camp full of displaced Poles. Helena asked to see it.

‘It is not something for young ladies,’ said a major.

‘That means it must be worth seeing, Herr Major.’

The following afternoon, flanked by the major and his aide-de-camp, Helena rode through the Minsk streets. There were parties clearing the streets of its war debris; there were sentries on the city fringes; Helena realized she hadn’t been outside Minsk for nine months.

But then the skies blackened. A sudden breeze scooped up the dust from the empty road and the horses shied; thunder rolled in from the plain. When it started to rain, the ADC said above the noise of the wind, ‘Miss Helena, we must turn back!’

Panna Konstancja came in the following day with a letter for Helena. The letter had no couplet, and no apple blossom:

Helena threw the letter aside. She did not answer it. She wrote instead to the German major and repeated her intention to go to the camp at the first opportunity.

He came after two days. ‘Fraulein,’ he said, bowing slightly from the waist.

They rode out of Minsk on the Smolensk road. It had rained in the night. A thundery heat pressed down on the land and the horses were jumpy. They splashed through the puddles; the reins left sweaty streaks on their necks. The major sat straight in his saddle, one hand on the pommel.