The Bronski House (22 page)

1992. Nowogródek. Zofia wanted to find her father’s grave. She was very tired. I suggested she wait, but she said no, she must get it over with.

We drove through dripping forests. The unmetalled road was deserted. A darkness hung over everything.

‘I remember the chapel,’ she said. ‘The family chapel on a kind of low hill…’

We pulled out of the trees and the road passed between a pair of rye fields. It was still raining. Beyond the fields, perhaps half a mile beyond, the dark green of the forest closed in again. To the left was a small knoll. ‘Yes, look.’

It was a larch, like the larch that marked the ruins of Mantuski – another larch rising above the hazel bushes. Beside it was the chapel.

It was still standing, though in a poor state. We left the car and walked up towards it. One of four columns had collapsed and the roof had buckled and fallen in.

Adam’s grave was outside. An iron railing ran around the plot. Inside the railing was an empty hole. The grave had been ransacked.

A small group of villagers had gathered to watch us. The rain dripped from their hats. It was during the war, they said, during the war – bandits… partisans… the treasure, for the rings and the gold teeth…

Zofia stood there for several minutes; she was unable to speak. She stared into the darkness of her father’s grave. ‘It’s all upside down, Philip, this whole terrible world is upside down. When we come here to the grave, it’s come back up to earth, and when we go to our house it’s buried itself under the ground. It’s all upside down…’

F
OR ALL OF THAT SUMMER,
the summer of 1934, Helena remained at Mantuski. A stream of visitors flowed through the house. They all had their advice, and imparted it: Uncle the Bishop with his whispered devotions, Helena’s mother (‘Your dog’s duty is to the children’), Panna Konstancja (‘that Dame Cross-bones!’), Uncle Nicholas (‘It is us who are now the next row for felling’).

Helena carried on. She carried on mechanically. She rose each morning, dressed, spent time with the children, checked the stables, checked the cows, checked the cheese-making. She trod Mantuski’s dusty summer soil like a ghost. She passed from the smells of the stables, to the clanging pails at milking, to the cool of the house at midday. But, by her own account, she felt nothing, heard nothing, smelt nothing.

July was impossibly hot. The cattle wallowed in the shallows, up to their knees in mud. In the yellow desert of the afternoon, too bright to work, Helena walked and swam, clutching hopelessly at the fringes of her old life.

On one day in August, skirting the fallows, she looked back over the dry tangle of witch grass. She looked over the fur of rye; she felt herself merge with the heat-haze, rising up like the mist, spinning like a dust-devil. She closed her eyes and tilted her head up and it was orange again, like the Wilja river, like the room in which Adam had died, in which they were engaged – orange like the day in 1914 when she’d lain beneath the birch boughs at Klepawicze, the day the war had begun and the walls of her first world had fallen.

With the first cool of autumn, Helena returned to earth. There was a small fire that damaged one of the barns. She took delivery of a new bull. Plough-shares peeled away the stubble and the top layer of soil, and the winter rye was drilled in. A new governess arrived from Warsaw.

Helena knew that her mother was right; her ‘dog’s duty’ was to her children. She wrote out a list of resolutions:

1. Pray against negative thoughts (worse than evil thoughts).
   
2. Be outwardly gay and serene.
   
3. Pray for Adam, pray for the children.
   
4. Talk to every member of the household, visit the village.
   
5. Do not complain.
   
6. Stay busy! Walk, ride, swim whenever possible.
   

One day in early October, she rode out along the banks of the Niemen. Brushing aside a clutch of birch branches, she entered the forest. There was still a little birdsong and for a moment she was transported by it. She felt the familiar fusion of the senses, the feeling the forest always brought her, and knew that here at least, here among the trees, she could be assured of solace. Then she heard the tok-tok of an axe. It was Sunday: there should be no felling.

She rode towards the noise and in a clearing came across three men beside a freshly felled birch.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘This is
dwór
timber.’

One of the men looked up at her briefly before resuming his work. ‘The
dwór
has no master now.’

‘I am in charge of the
dwór!’

The man swung his axe and it lodged in the bole of another birch. He worked it free. ‘Mantuski’s no place for a woman alone.’

‘Nothing’s changed!’

The man let his axe fall to his side. He looked up at Helena again but said nothing.

‘If you need wood for fuel,’ she said, ‘come to the
dwór.
We have plenty now. But I will not have this cowardly stealing!’

The man smiled faintly. There was a trace of pity in his face. He called away his men, and there was no more stealing.

Isolation crept up on Helena like a mute stranger. Winter was tolerable, but in the summer, that second summer after Adam’s death, she felt the first whispers of madness.

‘Work,’ she told herself. ‘I must bury myself in work.’ And she smiled to herself: Adam had always called such remedies ‘the refuge of Calvinists’.

She spent her time working on an elaborate plan for replanting the forests. In Wilno she discovered a certain variety of Russian plum and planted a new orchard. She bought two new beehives, swam in the mornings, walked in the evenings, went to Mass; and there were evenings when for a whole hour she managed to forget.

But in early September she met a doctor in Lida who examined the dark smudges beneath her eyes and said, ‘Madame Brońska, you are suffering from nervous exhaustion.’

He recommended a spa. Karlsbad, he said, a very civilized spa. She travelled there by train and took a room in a hotel with high ceilings and clanging pipes. Karlsbad survived in her imagination – from a visit years before with her mother – in two random scenes: the matchbox town viewed from a dangling funicular cabin, and a goat she’d watched near the hotel, chewing its way through the pages of a Bible.

The dining room at her hotel was full of guests at pink-clothed tables, eating alone. There were aspidistras by the door and cascades of rococo plasterwork. In the evenings an ice swan perched on the buffet table.

During the day, she sat on the terrace. She sipped spa water and watched Europe’s leisured hordes drift past her table: the spruce Germans, the Czechs, the Austrians, the Swedes and, a little apart from them all, the Jews and the English with their look of private detachment.

Helena loved being alone in a place where everyone else was alone. She felt somehow better at it than those around her. She received steam baths in the morning and, after a week, a proposal of marriage from a moustachioed Parisian lawyer. She said no, she had children, and a house in Poland – but for days afterwards she felt a tight knot in her chest like a stone.

One afternoon she walked up into the mountains. She passed the last station of the funicular and she pressed on into the forest. It was nearing dusk; there was no one about. The evening was full of the first dusty smells of autumn. A hare bolted across her path and she paused to look down a narrow ravine, to where the ‘V’ of the slopes opened out into a vast, dark expanse of tree-tops. How she missed Mantuski! She thought of the children, the byres and the cheese factory, and the dampness on the banks of the river and the last autumn two years ago with Adam.

Looking up, she saw her path double back up the slope. A rock bounced down through the undergrowth. She noticed the figure of a man in a long, bottle-green coat walking quickly down the path towards her. They met on the corner. She could see his head, bald and globular in the semi-darkness. She prepared to greet him, then saw as he turned that he was wearing a black velvet mask; only his eyes and his lips appeared through it.

Helena was too shocked to move. The man stood before her. She watched him slip both hands inside his coat. Opening it, he suddenly revealed the pale folds of his flesh. He panted something in a bestial German – then lunged at her. He pushed her back against the trunk of a pine, fumbled with her clothes, pressed hard against her with his hips. And all the time, inches from her face, the mask leered at her without moving.

She tried to wriggle away. The material of his green coat was rough against her cheek. He took one hand from her shoulder and she ducked violently; the man stumbled, and she was free.

She ran. She ran back down the hill, past the funicular station. In the hotel she went to her room and drew a bath; she felt as if her very skin were a thick layer of dirt and spent a long time in the water, scrubbing and scrubbing.

Two days later she saw the bottle-green coat again, crossing one of the cobbled squares. On its arm was a Czech woman whom Helena had been talking to in the hotel. Her husband had also died recently.

‘Widowhood,’ she had confided to Helena, ‘is not something one wants to endure for too long.’

Helena was in the forest, not far from Mantuski village, on a day in spring that had broken free of its early frost to bring the first real warmth of the year. She was walking with a local woman and talking about dogs, books and the ceaseless trials of life.

The Russian Woman, as she was known, was said to be the illegitimate child of a White Russian general. She had arrived in Mantuski after the war and married a taciturn woodman. The villagers were vaguely suspicious of her sudden appearance and never called her anything but the Russian Woman. But she had a passionate, sage-like presence and many – including Helena – learnt to rely on her words in times of crisis. Beneath her scarf was a crown of sand-blonde hair and eyes of a remarkable pale brown.

In the same month as Adam had died in Wilno, the Russian Woman’s taciturn woodman had been found frozen upright in a ditch near the Niemen. He had been there for two days. His arm rose out of a deep snowdrift, stretching for the birch root that would have freed him.

‘No,’ said the Russian Woman quietly. ‘I’ll never be married again.’

‘How can you say never?’

She shrugged.

‘But we were not meant to live alone!’

‘I do not believe that, Pani Helena. I see my own suffering and joy as too great now to share with anyone but God.’

‘And what does God do with those things?’

The Russian Woman glanced at Helena. ‘Don’t lose your faith. Never lose faith.’

How such advice infuriated her! She had heard it from a dozen priests; she had heard it from her Uncle the Bishop. She knew they were right, and this infuriated her still more.

In the autumn of 1936, Helena’s mother came to stay. Poor Mama! Helena now always thought of her mother as ‘Poor Mama’, this frail woman who spoke about nothing but Poland’s great families – Radziwiłłs, Potockis, Zamoyskis – and read only early mystics – Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, Thomas à Kempis. At Mantuski she spent her days in a leather chair by the window. She squinted at the river, pressing Helena to get married again.

Helena’s mother lived in constant fear of the Russians coming. In Wilno, where she kept a large flat, she sought out the reassuring company of priests and colonels. Her friends and family had proved a disappointment. She had finally fallen out with Aunt Anna, who had left Poland for South America and a Jewish composer.

Helena tried all she could to cheer up her mother. She arranged bridge parties and lunches and staged a series of Gospel sketches performed by the children. But it all washed over her.

Only when she started to involve her in the workings of the farm did she show any interest at all. Helena ran through the books, the milk yields, the cheese-making, the timber felling, discussed the planting rotas, the feeds, wages, new machinery.

One afternoon with the sky low and steely grey, Helena wrapped her mother in furs and took her to see the herd. The cows were stalled for the winter. One end of the byre had just been extended, with plans to add another twenty or so heifers from the spring calves. The new stalls were empty – except for the last one, a larger one, in which stood the dozing form of Goliath.

Goliath had replaced Smok as Mantuski’s bull. He had come as a frisky red-and-white calf and had swelled, under an experimental diet of beet and vitamins, to an enormous size. His markings were a deep copper and he had fluffy white hair around his eyes and a whirlpool of it that spun around his forehead. He stood in his stall like some great ship in dry dock.

The old woman leaned on the rail, patted his haunch, and smiled for the first time in weeks. Helena felt a glow of filial pride.

From somewhere far up the shed came a slow bovine groan, and Goliath snorted.

‘Careful, Mama!’ cried Helena. Goliath threw up his head and turned, backing his rump against the rail. There was a rattling of metal and a straining of wood. Helena’s mother stepped backwards. Her foot caught in the drain and she fell, twisting, to the stone floor. Her head flopped harmlessly into some straw. But her leg was locked at a strange angle.

‘Jesus, Mary!’ she hissed. ‘I cannot move.’

With the help of Bartek and a cow hand, they transported her to the Klinika in a barrow. ‘Them new stalls,’ said the cow hand. ‘I knew they was bad, Pani Brońska – they’d been neither blessed nor tallowed!’

Helena’s mother had broken her leg. They set it in a splint. She was sent to the station on a bed of straw. In Wilno, she had the leg set and in three months’ time she was walking. But she never went to Mantuski again.

In the village, the news spread quickly. Such an accident was clearly not chance, and the consensus was that something was amiss.

The cow-hand was partly right: the correct procedure had not been followed before the beast was installed. No prayer had been said at the new threshold, no broom or hatchet buried in the foundations. It was either the building that was at fault, or the bull.