The Bronski House (17 page)

‘Help her, please,’ whispered the recumbent woman. ‘I am nearly through.’

Helena did what she could. She sent them food when there was any. The Tartar woman lived on. Always she was the same when Helena went there, pale and listless on her heated stretcher, but alive.

At dusk on a foggy day in March, she was returning from the old woman’s cabin. A soldier in a ragged uniform stepped out of the mist and fell into step beside her.

The soldier was Polish. He had been living in the forest since his unit had been routed in the last Russian advance. He’d heard there was peace, but he didn’t believe it.

‘God has left this country,’ he said.

‘God is still here if you know where to look.’

‘Among the trees I see only ghosts. The men that have fallen. Those are the ones I know. Ghosts.’ He looked down at his bast shoes and shook his head. ‘I have no one. No one but ghosts. Stop here with me.’

She said nothing.

‘Stop here,’ he repeated, and stood in front of her. She was forced to halt. He raised one blackened hand and reached for her shoulder.

The wind sighed in the trees overhead; it was getting dark. Helena looked him in the eye. ‘I too am a ghost. And if you meddle with a ghost, you can never return to the land of the living.’

His hand fell back to his side.

Days later the story reached Helena of a deserter running out of the forest, wide-eyed and chattery with some story about a ghost, a strange and amorous ghost, who had tried to accost him.

Around this time Stefan arrived from Platków. He was leading two mares, Siwka and Gniadka, the same two horses that had driven Helena and Adam from their wedding. She hardly recognized them; they stood in the yard, and the cage-bars of their ribs poked out through tettered flanks. Stefan said they were due for the wolves, but he knew she’d find a use for them.

‘Oj-oj-oj!’ She clapped a hand to her chin. ‘What skeletons!’

Sick though they were, Siwka and Gniadka were the only two horses at all in that dead country. Helena cleared the old straw and cobwebs from the Druków stables. Three times a day she scrubbed the horses with a tobacco solution; she dabbed the sores with boric acid. Her friend the Tartar woman produced some flax oil and this she rubbed on; someone else brought salt, so they were given salt. She changed their bedding, groomed them, fed them, talked with them, prayed for them – and slowly, very slowly, a little life re-entered their tired eyes.

In mid March the wind went round to the south; the patches of snow in the park disappeared; one or two mild days slipped in between the frosts. The fields, ungrazed and unploughed, appeared oblivious to the change in the seasons.

Meanwhile Kresy began to twitch with life. A weekly train now ran to Wilno and every now and then someone would return from Nowogródek with a letter. Helena received one from her mother. It was dated 20 March, and had come from Wilno:

Helena declined.

One Saturday in late April, Adam arrived after his week at Mantuski, striding out of the avenue with a newspaper, six days out of date. He called the household together – Pan Rymszewicz and his wife, and the families of some of Helena’s pupils. Standing on the steps, in the low afternoon sun, Adam pushed up his cap.

‘From the Sejm in Warsaw! “In the name of Almighty God!”’ he read. ‘“We, the people of Poland, thanking Providence for freeing us from one and a half centuries of servitude, remembering with gratitude the bravery, endurance, and selfless struggles of past generations… we hereby proclaim and vote this Constitutional Statute in the Legislative Assembly of the Republic of Poland.”’

A faltering cheer rose from that small group and the women bent to kiss one another. Pan Rymszewicz hurried into the house. He came out with vodka and a tray of rattling glasses.

‘A toast,’ cried Adam. ‘To Piłsudski! To Poland!’

‘Poland! The republic!’

But there were one or two there who were not Poles, who did not share his enthusiasm, and slipped away, muttering, to their bare-shelved homes in the village.

After that winter, Helena and Adam had the feeling, unstated though it was, that things could never be quite so bad again. In their private conversations, they spoke only of the future. The past was a shadowy place and neither of them wanted to revisit it.

In April Helena walked over to Mantuski with Adam. It was the week before Easter. The Niemen was high from the flood, and Gregory the ferryman had quite a battle getting them across the river.

At the site, there was little sign of progress. It had been cleared; there was a stack of charred timber by the trees; the old walls had been knocked down, and the
parobcy
had started to sort the stone. But they were short of everything – materials, tools and time. Helena was dismayed to think how long it would all take. She returned to Druków full of plans, and one of these was to establish an apiary.

A week or so later, Rymszewicz found a swarm in the bole of an old oak. They hacked out the section at night. They set it on wooden supports in the orchard and in the morning made a skep and three frames. Helena, waving a faggot of smoking reeds, stepped up to transfer the swarm to the skep. She cut out the wax with the eggs in it, carried it to the hive and placed it inside. Then she dropped the reeds and fled.

But the bees got in under her veil; she was badly stung. For three days afterwards, she could hardly see. Her temperature soared to 104°. After a week a doctor came from Nowogródek. Pani Rymszewicza showed him into the library where Helena lay on the sofa. He examined her, washed his hands, and said she would start to recover soon. He also announced that she was three months pregnant.

‘Lord!’ Pani Rymszewicza sat down hurriedly. ‘And after all them bee stings! What manner of creature will you produce?’

‘One used to suffering,’ joked Helena.

But in truth she was terrified. She sent a message to Mantuski, and two mornings later Adam burst into her room having walked through the night. His hair was lank and, when he took off his
czapka
, tufts of it stuck out at strange angles. ‘I want a dozen children!’ he cried.

‘No, Adam Broński! I am not a machine.’ But she too was smiling.

Adam threw open his arms and yelped with joy.

To begin with, Helena was frequently sick. She lost weight, and her cheekbones tented out the pale skin of her face; she became very bad tempered.

In May the potatoes were dug at Druków; their muddy white bodies signalled the first real sign of life from the dead land. The lilacs came out beside the lake and Helena grew a little stronger; she walked whenever she could and trailed her hands through the high grass.

At the same time, life at Druków moved towards its old pre-war normality. Uncle Nicholas returned from Warsaw. Helenka the maid and the Angora cats Kiki and Risetka came by train from Wilno; the brother of Pan Rymszewicz, who had lost an arm in 1916 in the Russian trenches, returned. Rymszewicz himself travelled west to Poznan and returned after six weeks with twenty cows and three horses. Uncle Nicholas gave Adam one of the horses, and three cows for Mantuski. For the rest of the summer at Druków there was milk and butter and the first cheeses, and Helena’s cheeks swelled again; she became breathless and clumsy.

Then, in September, Panna Konstancja, despatched by Helena’s mother, arrived in a battered old
tachanka
with two ten-pound hams on the seat beside her.

It was agreed that the baby should be delivered in Wilno and in early October, with Adam and Haust, Helena travelled up there. They stayed in the house on Mała Pohulanka. With the first frost came Helena’s contractions and Adam took her to the Doctor Rymsza hospital. All evening her labour continued. Adam was horrified by her pain. He could not bear to watch, so at dusk slipped off to the Church of Sw Yakub to pray. He prayed and prayed and prayed. Then he fell asleep. He woke to find himself locked in. All night he was stuck in that church and when at last he was released, at eight in the morning, he hurried to the hospital, fully expecting Helena to be dead.

But she was sitting up. She had had a ten-and-a-half-pound baby, a daughter. Adam knelt beside the bed and wept.

Adam’s father and Helena’s mother, their two remaining parents, were her godparents. She was christened in Wilno: Zofia Aleksandra.

At Druków when they returned, there was a carriage waiting for them in the yard. A face leaned out through the window, chewing on a carrot. It was the bearded face of a goat. The coachman handed Helena a letter, headed with the Broński crest:

‘A goat for the birth of your daughter, Zofia Aleksandra. Stanislaw Broński.’

I
N EARLY
J
ANUARY
1993, Zofia received a letter from a cousin of hers in Poland. Would she come and join her for a couple of weeks that summer, at a spa in Lithuania?

She telephoned me to ask what I thought. ‘You know, Philip, what I’d really like to do? I’d like to see Wilno, where I was born. According to me, this spa is only about a hundred miles to the west. If I could get a bus or something…’

I had to be in Russia that summer. I told her I could come down and collect her and we could go together.

So on the eve of the longest day, a battered Soviet bus left me in the small Lithuanian spa town of Birstonas. I crossed the square and headed towards the river. The poplars were shaking their leaves in the wind; a rainstorm had just passed over the town and black puddles lay across the road.

Beyond the town was a complex of concrete hotels. I found the right one, took the lift to the fifth floor, walked down a darkened corridor and knocked on the door of Room 511.

‘Philip! I thought you’d never make it!’

I kissed Zofia on both cheeks and followed her into the room. She was wearing a pale blue skirt and a navy sweater and a string of plastic beads. She turned and sat down. Her face, with its network of lines, the etched-out legacy of a lifetime of charm and suffering, was tanned and glowing. I said she looked well.

‘Yes, I am. But I tell you, two weeks here and it is enough! It is stultifying here. If it wasn’t for my books and the Niemen, I think I would have gone mad.’

On the table in front of her were two or three stacks of books. I could see the poems of Zbigniew Herbert, a new book by Kapuscinski and a biography of Daphne du Maurier: Polish and English; Poland and Cornwall, her two worlds. I asked if she had been writing.

‘Yes, a few verses. But only in Polish.’

That evening we spent with her cousin and a couple of other Polish widows. We sat in one of their rooms and drank a bottle of Dubonnet. We ate chocolate. The late sun came through the window and fell on the widows’ grey hair and on their old-fashioned dresses; and the bottle went round the group and they told their stories, the fifty-year-old stories, the same stories that sooner or later every conversation turned to here – the stories of deportations and exile and death – until it seemed there was nothing more to say. Silence flooded between us. From the outside came the sound of a truck changing gear and Zofia smiled, saying: ‘Come on, enough gloom! A song!’

She sang her Belorussian song, and then one of the women started the ‘Red Belt’ and gradually the others joined in. Their voices stretched across the evening, spilling out of the open window and down towards the river. They made a strange medley, those Polish widows, the one with a mannered soprano, another with a plaintive mumbling voice, another spirited and sharp. I thought of their stories as they sang and looked at their faces – at the one whose husband had died a month before, and the one whose mother-in-law had been crushed beneath a German tank, the one whose family had all died in Auschwitz, the one who’d been deported to Kazakhstan and saw a woman in the cattle truck slash her own throat.

The singing finished and I noticed in Zofia’s eyes a familiar mist of tears. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘just think how lucky we’ve all been! What a charmed life we’ve led!’

‘Lucky?’ I blurted. ‘How can you say that, Zosia!’

She shook her head. ‘No, Philip. Just consider. Why was it that we were spared while all those others perished?’

The next morning we left Birstonas and the Polish widows and took a bus up into a region of lakes and
kolkhoz
fields and forested horizons. Zofia was curious to see Vilnius. She called it by its Polish name, Wilno.

‘It just shows you how stupid and unthinking I was as a girl. I never imagined Wilno was anything but Poland. We were never told in school how Piłsudski had just come and annexed it from Lithuania – and only the year before I was born!’

We topped a hill, and Vilnius was spread out before us – an archipelago of old church towers in a bay of new grey tower blocks.

We looked for the hospital where Zofia had been born but had no luck. Crossing the square in front of the old KGB headquarters, we reached the church of Sw Jakub. It was being restored. Inside, a network of wooden scaffolding rose up into the vaults like some elaborate stairway. A team of women was sweeping building-dust from the stone floor.

Zofia went up to them. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘that seventy-two years ago, on the night I was born, my father came here – to this very church – and he prayed so hard that he was locked in all night! Imagine that!’

The women smiled at her, and looked at her clothes. They didn’t understand a word of Polish.

‘I wonder,’ said Zofia, as we came out of the church. ‘Mickiewicz street was somewhere here. We had a flat there – number sixty-two.’

I asked an ice-cream vendor what the street was called.

‘Gedimino.’

‘And before?’

‘Before?’ he scoffed. ‘Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, you name it…’

‘What about before the war? In Polish times.’

‘Oh then! Then it was Mickiewicz.’