The Bronski House (21 page)

‘No, sir.’

‘How can we be sure?’

‘I don’t ’ave another baby, sir. I don’t want one.’

‘No –’ Adam was thrown for a moment by her logic. He carried on. ‘However, I do not detect in you any malice and feel that with the right circumstances, you will be able to live a virtuous life. Do you think that is possible, Tessa?’

‘Oh yes, sir!’

‘And you are sorry for what you did?’

‘Oh yes, sir!’

Adam summoned the sheriff and asked him, in hushed tones, about her family.

‘Her mother has disowned her,’ whispered the sheriff. ‘If she goes back to her village they will starve her to death.’

Adam tapped his fingers on the oak table. Then he leaned towards the girl and said, ‘Tell me, Tessa, have you ever worked in service?’

When, several days later, Adam returned to Mantuski with Tessa, and announced she was to be a maid, Helena was incredulous. ‘Among our own children, Adam? How could you employ this murderess!’

But Tessa took quickly to her new role. In time she proved the best of all Helena’s maids. Others came and went, lured to the altar or to the city, but Tessa showed no interest in anything but keeping birds – hawfinches, chaffinches, goldfinches which flocked to her window like disciples. She remained at Mantuski, perpetually naive, perpetually loyal, loved with an unquestioning love by the children and surrounded by an ever-growing choir of passerine song.

Helena loved that birdsong. It took her back to St Petersburg, to Liki the Chinese songbird and Aunt Ziuta and the smell of herring on snowy street corners, to the astrakhan hats in Gostinny Dvor; and to the sight of her father, frail and smiling by the Moika Canal, leaning on an ivory-topped cane and reciting a couplet from Mickiewicz.

By the end of the 1920s, wrote Helena, Mantuski was ‘back on its feet’. Yields had grown steadily and cheeses were now being sent for sale to Wilno, to Warsaw and Cracow. The house no longer looked new and spartan but was alive – alive with the three children, alive with dogs; the larch in front of the house had grown level with the eaves.

Yet it was still a harsh life and there was frequent illness. One autumn, when she was about eight or nine, Zofia’s brother developed a sudden temperature and when it dropped back, he started to cough up blood. The doctor came after three days and told Helena that the child stood little chance of seeing out the winter – unless she could be taken south, to France or Italy.

There being no money for such a trip at Mantuski, Adam spoke to his father. Stanislaw Broński had little truck with rest-cures.

‘Children,’ he told Adam, ‘they’re like glasses! If one breaks, you simply get another.’

Helena’s Uncle Nicholas was more accommodating. He put up the money and Helena took Tessa and the children to a small villa in Juan-les-Pins. With the help of a very kind Belgian doctor, Zofia’s brother recovered and in early March the party journeyed back across Europe, each of the children parcelled up in a set of brand-new linen clothes, with a spray of freckles on their teak-brown noses.

The illness had shaken Helena. She had seen the French hospitals, the new drugs and the surgery. Eastern Poland seemed medieval by comparison. Dogged as she was by her own ill health, she told Adam she would set up a clinic for the village.

‘But Hela, you know nothing of such things!’

She explained that she had once studied nursing in Wilno. He looked sceptical.

But for the most part it proved enough. The ailments that the villagers brought to Helena were simple ones. Anything serious they left to prayer, or the magic of roaming quacks.

Twice a week, she opened the side door of the house and villagers would come into a small back room that she had labelled: MANTUSKI KLINIKA. At the beginning they came mainly out of curiosity, peering at the jars in the glass-fronted cupboards, at the kidney-shaped basins and steel scissors, at Helena in her white coat. The women of the village remained wary of her powers, but the men soon became fond of the swish of Helena’s lye-starched coat, and the touch of her scrubbed hands on their skin.

She had a small repertoire of remedies, to match the small repertoire of ailments. She devised a barley poultice for lumbago, a lime and honey balsam for colds and sore throats. She dabbed iodine on burns. For flesh wounds she raided the dairy for fresh unsalted butter and, with a few herbs, made a dressing with lint obtained from ravelled linen. As a sudorific, she used extract of dried raspberries. For the ‘three-day ague’, a common Mantuski complaint, she gave a course of quinine. She refused, outright, requests for ‘them leeches’ to flush out the ‘dark blood’ and kept a store of placebos – herb and cream ointments and infusions. She was quite fierce with time wasters, and particularly short with a Pani Kasia who once a month brought her cat to be cured of ‘his fearful downcast spirit’.

F
ROM THE BEGINNING
of the year 1933, Helena’s day-to-day diaries have survived. They continue intermittently until the outbreak of the war.

1933 it seems was a trying year, a yo-yo type of a year, with wild swings of mood and fortune. The spring was late. Planting fell behind. May and June were very wet. Then came July, clear and warm and perfect for mowing. Open canoes crossed the Niemen laden with hay. The barn doors were thrown open; lines of rack wagons creaked through the village towards them. It was a record cut.

On 11 July Helena recorded:

On Sundays Adam and Helena would have lunch at a large table by the river. They grilled bream or a Niemen jackfish and sometimes as many as fourteen would gather around that table – the three children, visiting cousins, Uncle Nicholas, Helena’s ageing mother, Panna Konstancja from Wilno, the new governess from Grodno.

For a while everything fell into place: milk yields were up, the cheeses recovered their distinctive pre-war flavour, and the buckwheat and rye, free of witch grass, blew like silk in the July breeze.

Then a number of things happened. First the governess from Grodno was found swimming at night with one of the married
parobcy.
Helena asked her to leave and she locked herself in her room. For nearly two days she refused to come out. Bartek had to prise off her door and the last they saw of the Grodno governess she was lying on her bed, being driven to the station on the back of a farm cart.

In August Smok, Helena’s favourite prize bull, became ill. She sat up all night with him, dabbing his sweating flanks with a solution of soap and whey.

Then in September, she watched four unfamiliar carts pull up in the yard. A young Jewish merchant from Iwje jumped down: he said he had come for the Mantuski hay. Adam had offered it as surety on a loan to someone he hardly knew.

Helena was furious. She sent a letter to Adam with the merchants. She told him she’d give them only two carts of hay; the rest he was to make up with his own cash; if her cows went hungry that winter, she added, she would divorce him.

By the end of the summer, Helena made the following entry:

By Christmas of 1933, with the winter weaving its slow web across the land, the running of Mantuski had calmed. It was clear there would be enough hay; the cows would not starve; Helena forgot all about divorce:

On Christmas Day both Adam and Zofia became ill. Zofia was much the worse. Within two days, her temperature had risen to 103° and she was delirious. The doctor said it was scarlet fever.

‘But she’s had scarlet fever!’ protested Helena.

‘She has it again,’ he said. ‘It can happen.’

For two days, Helena sat with Zofia while she writhed around and talked nonsense and sweated. On day three her temperature fell back a little and the whole family moved up to Wilno. Adam’s illness, no more than a cold, passed quickly.

At this time, the children were all at school in Wilno. Adam had been appointed director of a bank in the town and the family, during term-time, rented a flat that overlooked the Wilja river.

The Wilja was frozen throughout January and there was skating in the fields below Three Crosses Hill. One Sunday in early February, they were all returning from Mass. Bright sun bounced off the snow in the park and lit up their faces. Zofia and her brothers were walking behind their parents. Suddenly Adam shuffled to a stop. He sat down on a bench and looked wordlessly at Helena. After a minute or two, he said he could continue, but the following day Helena urged him to see a doctor.

He returned to the flat at four in the afternoon. He sat down heavily in a chair in Helena’s dressing room. He too, it seemed, had had scarlet fever and it had ‘reached his heart’. The doctor told him he must have a complete rest.

Helena was horrified. She imagined him being unable to shoot, unable to play tennis. She begged him to go to bed. ‘Please, please, please,’ she sobbed, invoking every saint she could think of for him to take care, to go south to the Krynica spa.

Adam took her hands. ‘Only now,
kochana,
do I understand that you really love me!’

‘You know I adore you! But please, please look after your health! Go to Krynica!’

The next day they went to order him a new suit for the south. She made him promise to write every day, and to do what the doctors said. They called on the specialist. He had seen the latest x-rays and he shook his head: Adam could make no journey. The x-rays showed his heart horribly enlarged.

He went to bed in the flat. The room looked over the river. Helena read to him, from
The Story of San Michele
and
Edouard VII et son temps.
They played halma and chess. Slowly he improved and by March they were able to go out, taking a droshky to the forest wrapped in furs. But Helena said there was now a strange blankness in his eyes. She went back to talk to the specialist, alone.

‘What is happening, doctor?’

The doctor shifted awkwardly in his chair. She repeated the question.

He picked up a pencil and said, ‘If death is Warsaw, Madame Bronska, then the train is just leaving Wilno.’

Back at the flat, the afternoon sun filled the rooms with its orange light. Helena said nothing to Adam. She herself refused to understand what the doctor had said, what they all knew. Adam sat listlessly in a chair. They talked of Mantuski. They trod every corner of the land, inspected every building and wood; they stalked the capercaillie, swam in the Niemen, and she refused his tacit admission that he would see none of it again.

‘I will leave you Mantuski,’ he said.

‘Nonsense!’ Helena took his hand. ‘You will weep at my funeral and then go out and marry that Zboromirska!’

Pani Zboromirska was a young widow who always became animated when she saw Adam. Helena ordered flowers to be sent to him and signed them ‘Zboromirska’. She dabbed water on the card to make it look like tears. Adam believed it; bashfully he pretended they had come from an aunt.

That was Holy Week. His room was full of flowers. The children came to see him twice a day; their Palm Sunday osiers were pinned to the wall. A ruff of newspapers lay below the bed. Helena had come in late on Easter night to check his pulse and he had opened his eyes.

‘Helena, my dear.’

She lay with him that time, the last time, terrified in case he should be hurt. But afterwards he fell asleep and slept while she listened for his breaths, waiting for each one as it fell from his lips, collecting them. His face was placid like an icon.

She rose slowly to prevent him waking and in the darkness crossed to the window. Far below, the river shone silver-grey in the moonlight.

‘Pantarei,’ she muttered. ‘All things pass.’

‘Pantarei,’ she repeated, weeks later, watching the Niemen through the window at Mantuski, while the teardrops fell into her coffee. ‘Pantarei…’

Zofia was alone in the Wilno house. She was twelve, sitting on her bed, doing her homework. There was a sudden noise through the partition. She rushed into her father’s room.

‘He was struggling for breath. I held his hand and spoke to him but he could not hear. There was just this noise from his throat. I picked up the phone and rang the doctor but he didn’t answer. He lived only two stops on the bus so I ran out of the house and ran for the bus which was pulling away. I remember the conductor saying: “Careful, little one! You’ll give yourself a heart attack with all that running!” I found the doctor and we hurried home but of course, Papa was already dead.

‘In his room were dozens and dozens of hyacinths; to this day I cannot see hyacinths without thinking of his death.’

Adam was buried several days later, at the family chapel near Nowogródek. It was a grey, breezy morning. Uncle the Bishop stood over the grave. The wind came through the pines and scuffed the pages of his Bible. Before the coffin was closed, Helena placed on Adam’s chest the pocket-knife he had given her in 1915, and a letter. She copied the letter: