The Bronski House (20 page)

Helena’s relationship with the land characterizes her papers of this time more than anything else. When she spoke of the land it was always with passion, even ecstasy. Yet in 1933 she could write this:

Several years later, she offered a more measured appraisal:

And that is the impression that remains. Despite the ‘boiling kettle’, the frustrations and hardships, the murmurings in the villages, Mantuski was Helena’s life. The years before were a prelude. The land, the house, her new family, the new Poland were all linked in a dense coincidence of renewal and growth that swelled through the years of the 1920s. And only towards the end and in her darker moments did she admit that they were, all of them, living on borrowed time.

Zofia herself has several very clear memories of the first years at Mantuski.

In the first a governess is putting her to bed. The governess is telling her she must always sleep with her hands above the blanket. Above the blanket! Like that! This puzzled Zofia and she asked why. To prevent unclean to-does! But it merely meant her hands became cold. She put them under the blanket as soon as the governess had gone. It all made very little sense.

The second image is of the arrival of her first pony. Zofia is having her hair washed. She sees the pony through the window and runs outside with her hair streaming and dripping behind her. She jumps on and canters round and round the lawn beneath the larch. The pony is very small; it is named Karmelek, which means ‘toffee’.

The third memory is the earliest. She is lying in a pram beneath some sort of arbour. It is autumn and the leaves are falling all around her; they fall on to the pram, into the hood, all about her head – papery chestnut leaves swinging down from the sky.

‘You know,’ she told me, ‘whenever I think of Mantuski it always has this underwater feeling to it. Those leaves like flat stones sinking in a river… Everything submerged in greenery, those enormous limes, everything in slow motion…’

One more scene came back to Zofia from those early years. She was standing near the larch in front of the house. She was about nine or ten. The gardener’s son came across the lawn. He hit the trunk of the larch with a stick, then said, ‘You know where babies come from?’

‘Yes,’ said Zofia.

‘Where?’

‘Storks,’ she answered. ‘Storks bring them in their beaks from Africa.’

The gardener’s son laughed. ‘You think so?’

She nodded weakly.

‘It’s nonsense!’

‘Well, where then?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

He leaned over to whisper in her ear. She could feel his cupped hand against her cheek, his breath warm on her skin.

‘Oj-oj!’ she exclaimed.

‘It’s true! I’ve seen it myself!’

Zofia frowned. ‘How much does it cost?’

‘A hundred zlotys for a maid. Three hundred for a boy.’

She found it hard to imagine. What an extraordinary picture! But, she reasoned, it was no less plausible than storks. She cursed the governess who’d fed her that fable and for years afterwards believed there really was an old woman who sold babies in Iwje market.

I
N JULY OF
1925, Adam was offered the post of judge in Iwje. It meant spending most of the week away from Mantuski but, as he said in a letter to Helena, ‘By judging I can earn enough to put Mantuski back on its feet. Five hundred zlotys a month is a good salary!’

And from then on, Adam always lived away from Mantuski, returning at weekends and only occasionally for periods of a few weeks.

Zofia has a photograph of her father at about this time. He is reclining in some long grass, in shirt-sleeves and tie. Zofia is leaning against his knee. He has small eyes and a large head and the scale of him and his wide-open expression give him a look of outsize benevolence.

His letters confirm the impression. They are full of an apparent delight at all things. In 1924 he had written to Helena during one of her trips to Wilno:

Adam always kept a close eye on what was happening in Warsaw, and was keen on discussing affairs of state. Where Helena was a pragmatist, he was an optimist; where she railed against the corruption of the Sejm, he remained convinced it would all work out. ‘Time, Hela dear. You can’t break in a horse overnight. Poland is no more than a skittish young colt!’

Yet since the election in 1921, he had watched the Polish parliament fragment, year by year, into a mosaic of squabbling factions. Minister replaced minister, cabinet replaced cabinet; and each one proved more impotent than the last.

Adam followed the comings and goings, the coalitions, the broken coalitions, the flaccid promises, with a growing sense of disappointment. Perhaps Helena was right. This was not the Poland he had fought for. Around him, in the villages, he sensed a gathering resentment among the Belorussians; in court his own authority was sometimes shaky. Mutterings of nationalism, from all sides, grew louder.

In May 1926 Marshal Piłsudski became weary of the bickering. Deciding to rein in the skittish young colt, he emerged from retirement, marched on the Sejm in Warsaw, and sacked it. One thousand people died in the fighting. Though the Marshal declined the presidency, the centre managed, by his intervention, to reassert its authority. A policy of
sanacja –
‘regenerative purge’ – was set against the
partyjnictwo
– ‘party corruption and chaos’.

In Kresy, the summer of 1926 came early. News of Piłsudski’s coup reached Mantuski with the first dust-clouds, kicked up by timber carts in the village street. In the still air, the lilac hung limply on its panicled stalks; the sand-martins flew to and fro above the Niemen.

It was hot; still and hot and airless. Dogs lay all day in the shade, loping from shadow to shadow as the sun passed overhead. Jewels of resin swelled from the cabins’ weather boards; the nights were close and heavy.

Shortly after St Antony’s day, on yet another hot June morning, Bartek appeared shiny-faced and hatless in the doorway of Adam’s office in Iwje.

‘Trouble, Pan Adam.’

‘What trouble, Bartek?’

‘The villagers, Pan Adam. They’ve blocked the timber carts. They say the trees we’re felling’s theirs. Say it was you that gave them, sir.’

‘Which trees are they?’

‘Up behind the crossways. ’Tween there and the church.’

‘But I gave them the woodland above that!’

Adam cursed. He stared for a moment at Bartek. Then he looked away, at the oblong of light that pierced his office, at the town square beyond. He picked up his hat and led Bartek back to the street.

On the edge of Mantuski village, the issue had already been decided. The timber workers, their path blocked, had backed away from the militant villagers, taking fright at the armoury of forks and flails waved at them. They’d returned to the
dwór
steadings. The villagers now sat in a triumphant group. One or two lay on the bank, hats pulled down over their eyes. A group of young men sat in the shade talking heatedly about their victory to the
wójt,
the elected village head.

The
wójt
stood up at the approach of Adam’s
bryczka.
He was an elderly, quiet-spoken man. Adam had always found him fair-minded and believed the two of them shared the same deep love of the land.

The
wójt
put his hand on the wheel-rim and leaned forward towards Adam.

‘This is not of my choosing, Pan Adam. It’s of politics.’

‘What can we do?’

‘I have spoken all I can and they will not move. It’s the younger ones with their ideas.’

Adam climbed down from the
bryczka
and approached the group. The core of young men elbowed themselves up and looked at him blankly.

Adam stood before them. ‘I have given you the woodland beyond the church and the meadows. This wood here belongs to the
dwór.’

The row of stubbly chins remained motionless. Flies buzzed around their faces. There was silence.

Adam paused, looking at each of them in turn. ‘Tomorrow morning, I will bring the carts back to this wood and I expect to be allowed through. If again you resist, I will be obliged to summon the authorities from Nowogródek.’

In the morning they were still there. Adam spoke briefly to the
wójt
, then went with him to the exchange to telephone Nowogrudek.

The district commissioner was a retired major from the Polish cavalry. The Belorussian cause held little weight with him; he had applauded Piłsudski’s coup. He growled at Adam down the telephone: ‘I will be in Mantuski by noon.’

Adam met him by the ferry. Four constables rode beside him. Each of them had a rifle in a pouch behind his saddle.

It was not the first such show of strength the district commissioner had dealt with. He was very clinical. He read a statement, demanding the villagers to move.

They stayed put.

He warned them that if they did not move, he would order his constables to fire over their heads.

They did not move.

He ordered his men to dismount. They loaded their weapons and knelt in a short line. ‘Fire!’

The shots rang out around the forest. A group of rooks rose croaking from the lime trees. The villagers bunched together a little, but none broke ranks.

The
wójt
stepped out in front of the commissioner, and approached the militants. He started arguing with them; the group loosened its bonds. The
wójt
came over and announced they would let the carts through.

Adam asked, ‘What did you say,
wójt?’

‘I spoke plain, Pan Adam. I said if you want to die for the sake of a few trees, that’s well and good, but think of your kin.’

For several weeks after this, wrote Helena, Adam brooded. She had never seen him so withdrawn, so
piano.
His spirits returned but his unbridled optimism did not. And in the coming years, she heard more and more talk from him of land reform.

In court, Helena said, Adam could be quite stern. After 1926, he became particularly hard on what he called crimes of
nienawiść,
of bitterness, either between
szlachta
and peasants, or between Belorussian and Pole. His summing-ups, all the more striking for coming from a gentle man, left quite a mark on the convicted. But somehow his sentencing never impressed the Polish authorities.

In the summer of 1927 a woman of about nineteen was brought before him by the sheriff. She wore a pale calico dress. Her thin arms hung loosely from it, trailing like withies at her hips. Coffee-drop freckles were scattered over her nose, and she had very large eyes, like a rabbit’s. She was called Tessa Stanicka, and was accused of attempted murder.

‘Was my baby, sir.’

‘Your baby? You tried to kill your baby?’

‘Yes, sir. Yes, your honour.’

Adam was unused to such speedy confessions. ‘Why did you try to kill your baby, Tessa Stanicka?’

‘I never asked for the baby, sir. I never wanted ’ee.’

‘And what did you do to him?’

‘I put him on the tip, sir, at night. Under cabbage leaves. But the priest, Father Jerzy, he came to see my mother on ’count of ’er terrible illness in the morning, sir, and his ’orse was nibbling the cabbage leaves and there was the little baby still warm and ’live, sir, when His Reverence came in the morning…’

The clerk had difficulty keeping up with her admission, and raised a hand for her to pause.

‘So you don’t deny it?’

‘Oh no, sir!’

‘Even though it is a serious crime, and carries a stiff sentence.’

‘Well, sir, the way I see it is that if you commits a crime, it’s what happens.’

Adam nodded. ‘And where is the child now?’

‘An orphanage, your honour sir.’

‘And you realize you cannot see the child?’

‘Like I said, I never asked for ’ee.’

Adam looked across the courtroom at her. Her rabbit eyes blinked in his gaze. He could see nothing in them: neither fear nor remorse nor evil.

‘Tessa Stanicka, you have committed not only a grave crime against the state, but a sin against God. You were given the gift of a child and you squandered it like a runt piglet. Would you do it again?’