The Bronski House (23 page)

Reluctantly Helena called a priest to bless the extended byre and the various objects and amulets that were now secreted beneath it.

But the following spring, a strange disease spread through the herd and four cows, with their unborn calves, died in quick succession. The
parobcy
began to mutter darkly about a ‘bad bull’. They would not go near Goliath. Unable to sell him, Helena was forced to have him butchered.

A
T THE END OF
M
AY
1937, the priest of Mantuski – Orthodox and Belorussian – was found with a home-made bomb. His plan, he confessed, had been to blow up the
dwór.
He was removed by the Polish authorities.

That summer Helena became more and more aware of what she called ‘the menacing atmosphere’. On a hot July morning, she was walking the dogs across the lawn when Gregory the ferryman came running up the drive. He stopped in front of her and took off his cap.

‘What is it, Gregory?’

‘
Prosz
ę Pani…’ He was still breathless. ‘Two Russians… they’re by the river…’

‘Russians? Soldiers?’

‘Looks like town types… with their coats and that.’

‘Well, what do they want, Gregory?’

‘Want?’ Gregory blinked. ‘They don’t want nothing.’

‘I’ll come and talk to them.’

‘You can’t!’

‘Why not?’

‘They’re all tangled in the water and the reeds, and shot with holes in the body.’

‘Dead?’

He nodded, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

Everyone had heard the rumours, the Russian rumours, the Bolshevik rumours. The border loomed in the east like the barbed-wire fringes of a forbidden world. Yet for some it was all just Polish propaganda, and they longed for the day when the barbed-wire would roll forward, crush Poland, and release them all from their frightful feudal yoke.

It was hard for these people to understand why so many tried to escape; why the few Russians who made it across the border told of famine, purges and the terrible silence that hung over the plains; and why those who hadn’t made it floated down the Niemen with staring eyes and bullet holes puncturing their broadcloth coats.

‘Somewhere about here,’ Zofia was standing at the end of the Mantuski drive, ‘I used to get this strange feeling. Like something approaching. Always here, by the cross.’

We looked carefully, but there was no sign of any cross.

In 1928 Adam and Bartek had selected this site to erect a wayside cross. Such things were a regular feature of village life and this place had always been a meeting-place, a place to idle, for wayfarers and ragpickers to rest and exchange news with the villagers. During the first war three partisans were hanged there, including one of Mantuski’s gardeners, Michał.

The cross became known as Michał’s Cross. Adam and Bartek had fashioned it from two beams of heavy oak. The beams were cut from an old tree which had to be felled to make way for Mantuski’s byres.

‘It was about six or seven feet high,’ explained Zofia, raising one arm above her head. ‘Dark, stained wood with dead flowers usually at the base. Goodness knows what became of it!’

We asked an old man wheeling a bicycle along the road. He appeared confused at first.

‘
Krzyż… krzyż…
’ He chewed on his gums and frowned. ‘
Krzyż…
Oh yes! The
kolkhoz
committee took him down, took down the timber and the nails!’

He gazed at Zofia as if she were some exotic beast; he toyed with his
czapka.
Then he leaned forward and tapped her forearm: ‘But I tell you them timbers were never right. They made a threshing machine from them and it broke a man’s arm. No, it was never right, that machine…’

She asked him what happened to it.

‘Burned!’ The old man let out a high chuckle, threw up his arms and rode off in the direction of the river.

For the last few summers at Mantuski, Helena arranged for various young Englishmen to come and teach the children English.

Tony was the first, a quiet, methodical student-teacher whom they all took to at once. He led them through the tricky basics of English pronunciation, the long a’s, the lisping th’s. He made them read
Little Lord Fauntleroy,
whom Zofia thought a ‘lovely little man’.

Zofia teased Tony mercilessly. He spoke not a word of Polish. Once, in a hotel bar in Lida, she had seen him raise his empty beer glass to the waitress, and say, ‘Same again, please, Miss!’

After that Zofia chanted at every opportunity, ‘Semagen plees mees!’

Tony spent a few hours with them each day, talking in his measured way, patiently correcting their mistakes and making a particular point of explaining the rules of grammar. He was a great one for rules.

The following year, 1938, he returned to Mantuski with a friend.

Eric appeared from the car ahead of Tony. He wore a cream linen jacket and baggy white flannels. He ran his eyes along the front of Mantuski, up to the trees, then let out a strange squeal of delight. Zofia watched him from her window; here, she thought, is a very different type of Englishman.

‘He had a kind of magic about him. He was about nineteen at the time, always running about madly. Poland made him very wild. He said it took all the Englishness out of him. He would play constant tricks, lie in wait for the ghost, swim in the Niemen at night and write long poems. We used to sit at Philosophers’ Corner discussing things for hours. Useless things! I remember a long debate about where exactly a branch ends and where the no-branch begins. That fascinated him… Dear Eric!’

But there was a clash of attitudes between Eric and Helena, and one incident that nearly saw him despatched back to England.

Within a few days of arriving, he was found fighting on the landing with Zofia and two of her cousins. They were all in their pyjamas; Eric was still dressed. Helena took him aside the following day. ‘I will not tolerate this sort of behaviour. It is scandalous! You are not in England now, and these are not English girls!’

After that, Helena always considered Eric rather Godless. But he and Zofia shared precisely the same spirit, the same mischief and exuberance. After that first summer, they began to write to each other – he in a slightly simplified English; she in her own curious, half-tutored version:

Helena was now ill much of the time. Since Adam’s death she had become diabetic, had constant colds, an up-and-down temperature and increasing trouble with her joints. In March 1939, on the advice of her various doctors, she travelled across Europe to take the waters at Montecatini.

She spent five weeks away. She was alone and, by her own account, very happy. She was very happy after a week at the spa, happy reading Charles Morgan’s
Sparkenbroke,
happy in Lucca among the narrow ochre streets and the cool stone churches, happy in the leafy little squares, in Pisa, in the hotels and trains, and happiest of all by the sea at Livorno. There she spent a whole day watching the surf, before writing:

She listed twelve ‘admirers’ during those weeks, twelve men drawn in by her solitude, twelve men left high and dry at her door. Professors, Frenchmen, a Swiss painter, came and went. Then there was the Italian count in Rome who had urged her to ‘take life as it comes’. She had felt suddenly young and impulsive in his presence, drugged by his words.

‘Look!’ he had said, gesturing down on the rooftops of Rome from his villa. ‘Look how beautiful the world is! How can you waste it all, Helena? How can you shut yourself away?’

But she had remembered that other Satanic hand offering the world, that other mountain, and she had woken from her trance and fled the Italian count.

The high blue of the Alps revived her, Munich was quiet, Berlin was horrifying. She could not believe the change in a few years. The city was ‘hypnotized by Hitler’, a picture of him in every window, brown shirts on every corner. At the border she was bustled and jostled by slim young giants with swastika arm-bands. They made all the Poles wait for hours. Arriving back at Mantuski, she recorded, was like coming out of a bad dream.

The following morning, early, she wandered through the forest. She walked out past Michał’s Cross to the river and sat on the bank. She watched the first swallows weave through the still air. She was transported by the familiar ecstasy, the old ecstasy of the forest. The horrors of the new Europe fell from her.

‘What human assembly,’ she wrote, ‘can bring such peace? I adore watching the cool green river below. I love seeing the dear house through the trees, seeing the dogs at my feet. I love the absorbing work of this place; I love it all. I would rather perish here than leave.’

But she knew as soon as she had written it that it was not going to be so simple.

There was something strange about the spring of 1939. The thaw came late, and suddenly. One day the Niemen was frozen and the next it was bubbling out of Russia with a barbarous fury. In a matter of hours, acres of river-bank had been lost to the flood, peeled away from the bank like turfy icebergs.

Then in May the water dropped and remained pitifully low all summer.

The Mantuski stork, which every year had nested in a dead oak beyond the lawn, failed to return. And it was nearly June before the first nightingale was heard.

Helena sat by the window, listening to the news on the wireless. She kept her darker thoughts to herself. She gave the children leather belts and gold roubles to sew into them. She had been collecting the roubles over the years. They bore the head of Tsar Nicholas II; she knew that if the chaos came again, they would be the only currency of any use.

Zofia remembers sewing the rouble-belts that summer, but little of the sense of threat. To her the summer of 1939 seemed much like all the others – except that it was hotter, and that Eric was back.

He and Zofia renewed their enthusiasm for long and useless debates at Philosophers’ Corner. Eric had brought a copy of
The Wasteland.
He read out long passages while Zofia sat watching the river.

‘I hardly understood a word!’ she told me. ‘The English went way over my head. All I remember was “the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter / And on her daughter / They wash their feet in soda water”!’

(Many years later, Zofia met T. S. Eliot. She had translated his
Murder in the Cathedral
into Polish. In his preface to the edition, Eliot said he gathered it was a fine translation, though he himself did not have the Polish to judge. Zofia considered it a kind of revenge.)

Neither she nor Eric thought there would be war. They talked about it at length, but Eric was a pacifist and convinced Zofia that France and Britain would, if it came to that, step in and scare Hitler away. But in late August, the threat suddenly closed in. Eric was rushed to catch the last plane out of Lithuania.

From then on, wrote Helena, a sort of unreal quality fell upon events.

O
N 1
S
EPTEMBER
, at about eight a.m., Helena drew open the curtains of her room and counted twenty-four planes passing overhead. In the west, the Panzers rolled over the border into Poland. Within days the first refugees had arrived at Mantuski. They came with nothing but bundles of bedding and clothes, and fantastic stories of villages burnt, women taken, cattle crushed beneath the wheels of tanks, babies eaten.

It all happened so suddenly, no one had time to worry. Helena spent her time clearing the rooms and the farm buildings for the refugees. She relayed from the wireless reports of the Polish cavalry inflicting heavy losses on the Germans. But to her diaries she admitted the one question which haunted her: to stay at Mantuski, or to take her children to Wilno.

One afternoon, she went to see the Russian Woman. The two of them sat outside her cabin; three scraggy hens pecked in the dust around their feet.

‘It’s a bad time that’s come again,’ the Russian Woman said.

Helena nodded. There were occasions when even the Russian Woman’s wisdom sounded trite.

‘I’m thankful not to have children, Pani Helena. I have only my hens.’ She scattered a handful of corn towards them. ‘If anything happens I can eat them.’

There was silence for a moment. ‘I have decided to leave,’ Helena said.

The Russian Woman looked at her gravely. ‘Give up your land now, Pani Helena, and you will always be lost, trying to rediscover it.’

‘But,
ciocia
, how can I stay? Landowners will be murdered if they stay.’

The Russian Woman nodded sagely. A light wind rose from the south. It brushed through the birch leaves above their heads. ‘It is like a curse to be born in this country, Pani Helena, a wretched curse…’