The Bronski House (2 page)

Then came a call announcing a six-month trip to Australia: would I come and see her off?

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘I leave on Sunday week. At noon.’

‘From Heathrow?’

‘No! From Tilbury.’

She had taken a berth on a Polish cargo ship. I carried her two suitcases up the gangplank. In one were her clothes (jerseys for the Bay of Biscay, cotton dresses for the tropics), in the other, books. She pushed open her cabin door and sat down on the bunk. Down the companionway came the shouts of the crew, Polish shouts, and Zofia looked at me sadly and smiled: it reminded her of home.

I left her on board. I watched the grey hull slide off down the Thames. I pictured her unpacking her books in the cabin and thought, for the first time, of what her exile really meant – that perpetual rootlessness, the ceaseless sense of un-belonging, the warding
off
of bitter thoughts. Over the coming months a series of fat envelopes fell through my door – postmarked Genoa, Alexandria, Dubai, and filled with Zofia’s ‘Poems of the Sea’. These confirmed it, helping to convince me that exile, long sea voyages, all that gradual dissipation of place, held in them some secret capacity for revelation.

The following year I wrote to Zofia saying I was leaving London. I was coming to live in Cornwall.

A letter came back by return. ‘So,’ she wrote, ‘I’m afraid the Furies have finally got to you!’ But she was delighted.

I arrived back in the village at dusk on a slow January day. It was blowing a gale. The seas were rising in sudden bomb-bursts above the quay wall, to flop down over the road and douse the boarded-up buildings. I unlocked the cottage, dumped my things, then went up the hill to see Zofia.

Braganza was unchanged – the photographs, the bearskins, the samovars. The monkey-puzzle stood unmoving in the gale. But a certain calm had settled on the house. The rooms echoed with absence. Where were the pasty-skinned men and their old-world suits, the Finnish cook, the summer hordes of French children? The old Polish cavalry officer and the painter from Cracow, the mysterious poet from Poznan?

Zofia was alone. She sat reading in a high-backed chair. She put down her book as I entered, and slipped off her glasses. ‘Philip, how lovely to see you.’

She was now widowed. Her daughter was living in France, her son had been killed in a car crash.
Memory
had been sold to a judge. Several generations of dogs had come and gone. The ring of elm trees outside had gone too, gnawed to death by arboreal beetles. On her mantelpiece was a plywood banner reading: ‘SOLIDARNOSC’; it was the time of martial law in Poland.

Yet none of these things had dented Zofia’s spirit. She seemed unembittered, perennial, robust. Her speech retained those honeyed tones, her presence remained magnetic. Over the coming months, I found her still mischievous, still writing, still surrounded by that Slavic aura – and by her dogs, three of them, which slept like angels at her feet. If anything she seemed happier.

‘Oh goodness, yes! It’s much better to be seventy than your age.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

She leaned towards me. ‘None of that confusion of sex!’

One afternoon I went up to Braganza and discovered Zofia kneeling on the floor, flanked by notebooks and files. ‘My mother’s papers,’ she sighed, then started for the first time to tell me about her. She became animated; her Polish accent thickened. Her arms were raised at the dredging up of old grievances, dropped to her sides at the thought of what had been lost. She railed against the impossible demands her mother had made on occasions. ‘Yet she was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known.’

‘In what way?’

Zofia paused. ‘Almost every way. She could charm a hawk off a tree. Her conversation was brilliant. In her presence everything became uplifted, gayer. She was almost like a saint in some ways. But, my God, such things happened all around her!’

‘What sort of things?’

Zofia turned towards me. She paused; the question was too big to answer. ‘Wars… calamities… always fleeing…’ Then she pushed the papers across the carpet. ‘But it’s all here! It’s all in here. Why not read them?’

I took the papers to my cottage, the notebooks and letters and diaries, even some short stories. Many were in English; others Zofia had translated. For four days, a week, I read and re-read those papers. The shadowy world of Zofia’s pre-war past came to life. The scenes she had conjured up for me years earlier were re-shaped, fleshed out, in hundreds of pages of her mother’s pale blue script.

A damp, woody smell rose from the notebooks as I read them; passions and betrayals rose with them. Old Europe had been caught like a fly and squashed between those yellowing pages. Zofia’s mother took hold of me.

She was born on 17 July 1898, at a house called Platków in the northern regions of Russian Poland. On the night of her birth a great storm swept through the forests, scattering the pines like matchsticks. For years afterwards, the trees lay where they had fallen and Zofia’s mother assumed that devastation was the natural state of things.

They christened her Helena. On her mother’s side she came from a traditional Polish land-owning family, with a traditional land-owning aversion to alien things. This was the world to which Helena was entitled, for which she was born, the one into which she should have settled quite comfortably but for two things. That world, as she always sensed, was coming to an end. And she had inherited a foreign name.

Her father was called O’Breifne. He was the direct descendant of Lochlainn, last king of East Breifne. Lochlainn had ruled lands just to the south of Ulster in the fifteenth century. But two hundred years later, with the kingdom gone, his heirs were forced to flee the English after the Battle of the Boyne and head for France.

From France the O’Breifnes went to Russia, three brothers invited by the Empress Elizabeth to train the Tartar wildness from her army officers. One of the brothers, Cornelius, the only one to have issue, settled there. Though his family remained in Russia, they were never naturalized. Cornelius’s son became a famous general (his portrait hangs in St Petersburg’s Gallery of Heroes). Tsar Alexander I was godfather to his children, but he could not bring himself to forfeit the one thing he retained from the old country: his faith.

‘Never forget,’ his father had told him, ‘that you are a Catholic and an Irishman.’

Obliged to become Orthodox if he married a Russian, his only option was to marry a Pole. Three generations followed suit. The Irish blood was diluted. Yet in the stifling climate of Eastern Poland’s landed families, Helena and the O’Breifnes were always outsiders. They read books, for one thing. Some of them had liberal Tolstoyan ideas. They discussed dangerous things like land reform. And there was always that name.

The O’Breifnes, as Helena was reminded, constantly, by the stage whispers of dusty dowagers, were ‘not really true Poles’.

Zofia too remembered the whispers. ‘All these grand Polish women used to pretend they couldn’t pronounce it. “Orbrefna? Orbrefska? What sort of a name is that? There’s dozens of them in Ireland… Living in hovels all over the place…”’

On one visit to Braganza Zofia handed me an envelope. Out of the envelope fell two photographs. They were the only ones to have survived the war.

The first picture was taken on the edge of a forest in 1936. Helena was bending down, with one hand on the back of a dog. She was looking up at the camera and her mouth was set in a half smile. There was a kind of sprung vitality about her.

‘That was taken near the house at Mantuski, with Barraj, one of the Great Danes.’

The other picture was a studio portrait, taken in Warsaw in 1919. Helena was almost twenty. I looked at her white high-collared dress, the cocked head, the smile and her narrow eyes, the strange polished complexion of her face.

Zofia pointed a finger at it. ‘You see here the way she is toying with the necklace, below the neck? She used to say that that was the way to make a man fall in love with you.’ Zofia hushed her voice. ‘You know, I believe it works! I have even tried it a few times…’

I looked closely at the two pictures. I tried to tell myself it was something else. It was the diaries, the letters, her extraordinary story; it was the way that this woman, Helena O’Breifne, had crossed the steepest contours of our age; that for me, living in flatter decades, in a quieter corner of Europe, her world represented everything that had been lost, a place of slow villages, muddy livestock and unfenced fields, of time passing with only the backdrop of the seasons, of lives exaggerated – exaggerated in wealth, in poverty, in suffering – lives buffeted by a history no one seemed to control: Helena’s was a bigger world, a crueller world, a world of half-mad nobles living on borrowed time, of noble peasants living outside time, another Europe, an older Europe.

But of course Zofia was right. My interest was also much more commonplace. It had just as much to do with the way Helena toyed with her necklace.

I
WENT AWAY
for six months and returned to Cornwall the following spring. At Braganza, Zofia was combing the hair of her dachshund. Out of the window, I could see daffodils at the foot of the monkey-puzzle. The bay beyond was grey-blue and ruffled. The SOLIDARNOSC banner had gone from the mantelpiece.

Zofia greeted me with her sad, open, blue-eyed smile.

‘Philip, how good you’re back!’

We sat and talked for a while, then her eyes lit up and she said, ‘Look, I’ve got something to show you. Something extra-ordinary!’

She stood, and from the next room fetched a large marquetry jewel-box. Among the strings of pearls, the amber brooches, the diamanté ear-rings, was a wedge of concrete. ‘It came last week in the post. Can you guess what it is?’

I shook my head.

‘From Berlin! My cousin sent it.’ She picked out the small relic and held it. ‘The wall. It’s a piece of the wall.’

She paused. Decades of loss crossed her face. I knew that expression well; her whole being seemed about to burst with the force of what was behind it: the half century of separation, her two lives torn apart, Europe torn in two.

It was fifty-two years since she had fled that morning, on a farm cart, in the early autumn of 1939. And since then, nothing. Not a word of news had reached her – of the village, or the house, or the people she had known. After Yalta the Poland she knew was no longer Poland. It was Stalin’s Belorussia, and a part of it too close to the border to let foreigners visit. Not even rumours slipped out – only wild speculation: that the village had been destroyed in the war, turned into a military camp by the Soviet army, contaminated by fall-out from Chernobyl.

Zofia replaced the concrete fragment and closed the box. ‘I am going back, Philip. I don’t think I could die not knowing what happened. You will come with me?’

‘Of course.’

‘Maybe we will find the silver!’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

For a year or so I heard nothing and wondered whether, on reflection, Zofia had decided against lifting the lid on all those monsters from her old world. I went to the Middle East, to Egypt and Israel. One evening in the old town of Jaffa, a letter caught up with me:

Back in London, someone gave me the name of a Polish art dealer in Jermyn Street. He put me onto a professor in Minsk, who in turn issued an invitation. After a couple of mornings standing on the pavement outside the Soviet consulate, I had the visas. I took them down to Cornwall at the end of April. Zofia was working in her flowerbed.

‘Oh, how marvellous, Philip! Look!’ She slipped off her gloves, took the visas and thumbed through them. ‘So, we are really going!’

Only the sight of her own name written in Cyrillic muted her enthusiasm.

We spent several days in preparation. I re-read Helena’s papers; Zofia bought some crepe-soled shoes. ‘Travelling shoes,’ she whispered. ‘Ghost-hunting shoes!’

The day before our departure we walked to a creek above Ruan Lanihorne. It was the first week of May. The woods were covered in a tentative, filmy green; toadflax tumbled from an old stone bridge. The river bubbled beneath it, before sliding into the creek, losing itself in the tide.

‘Duty,’ mused Zofia. ‘Perhaps more than anything else my mother drummed into me the notion of duty.’

‘Is it your duty to go back?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s something else. I am going back for myself, not for my mother. No, it was more a code she had, a fiercely rigid code of duty that ordered her whole life.’

‘And yet she was always trying to escape.’

‘Yes, or being forced to.’

When Helena wasn’t fleeing marauding armies, she seemed to be struggling perpetually against the strictures of her own position – her mother, her family, her suitors.

The earliest story in her diaries concerns a brief spell at a convent in Cracow. She was fourteen; the year was 1913. On arriving at the convent, she had looked at the other girls, at the nuns, at the shiny brown corridors; and for two weeks plotted her escape. One night she took a loaf of bread and a flask of water and climbed the convent wall.

It was a still, cold night and the frost was thick. Helena crouched on the wall, ready to jump.

‘Helena O’Breifne! Stay where you are!’

She froze. It was the headmistress, standing beneath the wall.

‘Helena!’

‘Yes, Mother Immaculate.’

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

She said nothing.

‘You’ll never get anywhere without your passport. Here, I have it with me. If we hurry we can reach the station for the Warsaw train. What do you think?’