The Bronski House (13 page)

There wasn’t very much on the road – no carts (the war had taken all the horses) and no cattle. The crops looked very thin and burdock and thistle grew among them.

After St Petersburg, Helena imagined she was used to destitution. She had seen the poor there and she had seen the dead. But it had not prepared her for that camp. Hundreds and hundreds of people were squatting in the mud. Their children lay bare-legged beside them. Babies were bundled to the women’s breasts. Stooped figures shuffled about, collecting water from puddles. Illness hung over that place like the thunder-clouds. Everyone was ill – ill from dysentery, ill from typhus, ill and widowed from other people’s war, other people’s ideas, other people’s revolution.

Helena said she felt a powerful urge to leave. She wanted to scrub her hands and sit in the window where the sun came in and read her books. But the impulse to stay was stronger. She could not take her eyes from that scene. She rode around the camp until a group of women surrounded her and tugged at her skirts and begged her for clothes and food.

She rode back in silence with the major. She felt dazed. Then she felt angry, then decisive. She would set up a committee! She would raise funds from all the wealthy Poles! Uncle Augustus will appeal to Rome! She herself would learn to nurse, would learn about dressings and dispensing and how to give vaccinations… and then she thought of Medeksa.

‘I spent a whole day writing the letter,’ she recorded. ‘I told him of my plans; humbly, I confessed my faults; I talked of the timeless nobility of treating others: I told him I would like to grow old treating others as he did. I said that I loved him, that I didn’t care what my family thought. I wrote the letter again and again, toning it down, toning it up, before sealing up the envelope and despatching it to his hospital.’

That evening she ate nothing. She knew that in effect she had committed herself to marrying Medeksa – if he was still interested. She looked around the table, at her mother and the bishop, at the long table and the silver and the portraits, and thought: this could be the last evening.

And so it was. At seven o’clock the next morning, there was a knock at the door. It was the German major. ‘We have reports of a Bolshevik uprising. You must leave at once!’

Helena thought of staying, but seeing the speed with which her mother packed, she knew she must follow – just as she always had.

From the train she watched Minsk slide past the window; she watched the church towers and villas, the tramways and cobbles; she watched the town give way to low hills and the roads which wound into the distance. Then the train entered the forest and the trees blocked her vision. Helena never saw Minsk nor Medeksa again.

I
T WAS EARLY SUMMER 1918
when Helena and the O’Breifnes arrived in Wilno. Minsk, Medeksa, St Petersburg, Helena’s father – countless towns and one-night stops – were behind them. They brought nothing. They were refugees like everyone else. They had been refugees since the day in 1915 when Helena had watched her grandmother’s prize horses trotting up Mała Pohulanka, fleeing the Germans. That had been in Wilno. They had now come full circle.

But still nothing was settled. The Bolsheviks were on the move and the Germans were weakening. A swathe of unoccupied and semi-occupied territory had opened up between them. Wilno was in this territory.

They had been in Wilno only a few days when Helena’s mother announced they were leaving: for the
dwór
of some great-aunt – a house with pompous, wine-red rooms and a garden as bleak as snow. Then, after a week, they returned to Wilno; there was talk of Warsaw, of Cracow, but in the end they returned to the aunt’s
dwór
where, wrote Helena, her mother ‘sat smoking all day in that tomb of a drawing room’.

A few weeks later, Helena began to hear mentioned the name of Platków, home of her grandparents, the house where she had been brought up, and with the name came the thought of all her vanished pre-war certainties.

They left for Platków the following week. The journey, by cart, took five hours. The house itself was very run-down. Helena’s grandparents had left it in 1915. Paint peeled from the walls and in dozens of places the brickwork was exposed. Szymon, who had been Platków’s land-agent for as long as anyone could remember, was dead. So was his dog Zółtaik. The stables were empty. The pedigree horses were lost in Russia. Only Ewa stood on the step to greet them – Ewa the housekeeper, who had remained there throughout the war and was now widowed like everyone else. She stood waving with both hands. Beside her stood three German officers.

Platków had been requisitioned by the Wirtschafts Offiziese, responsible for collecting milk and eggs and grain from the villages for their troops. They were not pleased to see the carts.

Helena brushed past them and went inside, wandering from room to room. The valuables had gone – into Russia for safety in 1915 and now in Bolshevik hands. The rooms, many of them shuttered, looked like barrack rooms and smelt of unwashed men. She stepped out into the garden. The wind hissed among the birches and she wondered if there was anything anywhere that remained untouched by the war.

That evening, a man rode up the avenue on a bay stallion. Dismounting, he handed the reins to one of his officers and bowed. He introduced himself to Helena’s mother as Freiherr von Sanden, District Commandant.

‘Of course, Hrabina. You must reclaim your house. I will see my men are re-billeted.’

And with a click of the heels, Freiherr von Sanden was gone. He trotted off beneath the chestnut trees with his officers obediently following behind him.

At Platków, the days soon found their own rhythm. Helena, her mother and sister, Panna Konstancja and Tekla – the same five who had remained together throughout those three years – now felt in some way that they had returned.

But they were very isolated. They lived in a country that was not a country at all. No one was responsible for anything. The Germans ran what trains and post they needed, but no more.

‘Like fishes,’ Helena’s mother said. ‘We are like blind fishes swimming in a net.’

She allotted them all daily tasks. Each morning Helena had to fetch milk from the cottages, then boil up lye in old kettles to make soap; she made wheat starch with Tekla. Her mother, having found some strips of rubber in the stables, set about resoling everyone’s shoes. She sat surrounded by jars of resin and cups of coffee and snake-like rubber peelings, and very soon everyone was hobbling round the house, forever tripping over their brand-new rubber soles.

Helena had a room on the ground floor – a dark, panelled room that looked out on to the park. There, she said, she spent her afternoons studying, elbows propped up on one of several volumes of European History in Polish, or Macaulay’s
History of England,
or Bongand’s
Le Christianisme et les Temps Presents.
She read steadily and well; and the books, the room and those uncertain months remained with her always, knotted together as a perpetual reminder of European turbulence.

Helena’s mother had rediscovered an old friend from Wilno – Aunt Anna. Once, Aunt Anna had been very beautiful. Her emerald-green eyes and her long neck had always fascinated Helena and, as a girl, she had wished to be like her.

But now that Aunt Anna was nearly fifty, her face was bitter and her hair set in a wiry crown of marcel waves. When her husband had died, a few years earlier in St Petersburg, she had married a man ten years younger. Now she hated being seen with her children who reminded everyone how old she was. They were all in Wilno, her new husband was at the war and she and Helena’s mother sat talking and smoking, playing cards and drinking endless cups of Turkish coffee.

In mid June Helena came in one lunchtime from the stable. A faint smell of apple blossom hung in the hall. Her mother was on the terrace with Aunt Anna, holding a letter.

‘Your Dr Medeksa is in Wilno.’

‘Let me see, Mama.’

The letter was written on thick, poor-quality paper and the ink had seeped a little into its fibres, fuzzing the letters. At the top were some lines in English from Keats. The letter ended:

Aunt Anna waved her cigarette dismissively. ‘Let her marry him! You have had enough trouble with her. Let her settle in some sordid flat in town while he treats Jews for venereal diseases!’

Helena took the letter away. She crossed the garden. She reached the shrubs and the wooden bridge beyond. She leaned against the parapet. She read the letter again and it left her cold. She could not marry him, not now. Everything was happening too fast; he was behind her.

Most of the time Aunt Anna wore evening frocks at Platków. She had no summer dresses. Her task was to restore the roses, and she wandered among them, smoking like a boatman, in a blue, puff-shouldered ball dress. Panna Konstancja, who had no time for Aunt Anna, said she looked like a redundant courtesan.

But no one had any clothes. All Helena’s clothes had been lost. She had fled Minsk with nothing but her charcoal-grey mourning dress.

One day Freiherr von Sanden, the district commander, rode up to the house and presented her with a bale of sand-coloured linen – used for wrapping bread and cheeses. Panna Konstancja cut and pleated it into a skirt. She made a long loose blouse with a sailor’s collar. In the village a shoemaker stitched a pair of linen boots, laced through a dozen eyes with hay-cord. The German officers when they saw her, nicknamed her the ‘
Madel im Haafersack’
; Aunt Anna muttered about ‘costumes for Warsaw bar-girls’.

Freiherr von Sanden came regularly to Platków that summer. He stood head and shoulders above any man Helena had ever seen; he must have been more than two metres tall. On his bay stallion, equally large, his Teutonic head brushed the chestnut boughs as he rode out of the avenue. When he arrived and greeted the women, his deep bow only brought his gaze down level with theirs.

In July, Freiherr von Sanden presented Helena with a fox cub named Lisek. He slept curled up in a rust-coloured ball on her bed. He behaved to her like a devoted dog. No one but Helena could get close to him. If anyone approached her room, he would leap out of the window.

But by October, Lisek had started to roam. He bullied the cats and chased the geese. At night he padded round the homesteads. When he began to kill hens and kittens Helena’s mother said he must go.

Helena took him on a cart with Panna Konstancja and set him down deep in the forest; they shooed him away and he slunk off. Helena wept for him that night.

The next morning she opened her curtains, and there he was, panting at the window. She tried shutting him in the stables (he barked all night). She tied him on a long chain (he barked again). She made him a wire enclosure (he dug himself out).

For two days he hid beneath the verandah, in one of the ducts that ventilated the cellar. Helena let it be known that he had gone back to the wild, and smuggled him carrots and buckwheat from the kitchens. Then one of Ewa’s geese was found dead.

‘For goodness sake,’ said Aunt Anna. ‘Shoot the wretched animal!’

But Helena’s mother took her side. They drove off again into the trees, into the
puszcza.
They drove for several hours and stopped by a small lake. The water was blue-grey and all around it was the green band of the forest. Her mother sat in the cart, while Helena took Lisek and set him down by the water. He lapped at it, looked up, then ran off into the trees without a backward glance.

Rumours of cruelty filtered up from the village. During the first year of occupation, the Germans had shot four men in the square for pilfering stores. Eva said the thieves had been Wehrmacht soldiers and that the villagers were innocent. Others, unable to bear the ignominy of occupation, had gone to live in the forest and sometimes they launched attacks on supply convoys. A number of houses had been burnt in retribution.

Then there was the story of Maria. Helena remembered Maria as a bright, rosy-cheeked girl with dark gypsy hair, always eating apples. She had been a kitchen maid at Platków. In the summer of 1916, she took to going down to the Wodalka lake where German soldiers met in the long evenings. Ewa had her beaten once; she warned her not to go. Maria continued to go, and then one day her body was found in some reeds. She had been strangled with her own hair-tie.

But for Helena, all this was hard to reconcile with the figure of Freiherr von Sanden. With him the war seemed far away. Sometimes he arrived, late on a summer afternoon, leading another saddle horse and they went out riding, over the low hills beyond the lake, across the fields and into the
puszcza.
He sang in a bass voice which boomed out among the trees. He sang for his schloss in the Rhineland and the black birds which spun around its towers.

All through August and September, once a week, Freiherr von Sanden took Helena riding. One evening, she remembers, they were coming back along the river. They dismounted, watered the horses and sat on the bank. He said, ‘Winter is coming, Helena. Soon we must leave.’ Then he turned to her and whispered, ‘Come back to my castle on the Rhine with the black birds and the mist. Marry me, Helena.’

She was too surprised to answer.

‘What do you say, Helena?’

She said no, she could not marry him. She did not love him. She was fond of him but she did not love him. She knew what love was now, real love, as for several weeks she had been in love with a man named Józef.

At that time, Józef was a man of about thirty-five. Part Lithuanian and part Tartar, he had a shallow v-shaped brow and dark skin. He had two estates, either side of Platków, and spent his time travelling between them in a green-painted
bryczka.
Whenever he passed Platków, he called in.

All that remained of a long line of hybrid nobility was Józef, and his mother who lived in Wilno. According to Helena, she was known as ‘the best-dressed woman of Kresy’ – despite having not risen from her bed since the day her husband died, fifteen years earlier.