The Bronski House (24 page)

‘And yet it’s beautiful…’

‘And God asks a heavy price when he bestows beauty. Dig down into this soil and you will find it bleeds – bleeds with the blood of Poles and Russians and French and Lord knows who else.’

The Russian Woman’s wise words proved of little real help to Helena. Duty was the oracle she consulted next, and duty proved more lucid. Number one duty was to her children – they would go to Wilno, and from Wilno, if necessary, to the coast, to Norway, or England, or France. Number two was to her land, her household, her animals: she herself would return to Mantuski; she would remain at Mantuski like a captain with his ship.

Zofia said she felt it was dangerous to be split up. But her mother ignored her protests. She went off to Nowogródek to get passports, and to see Uncle Nicholas.

Zofia watched her leave, watched the black hood of the Ford fade behind a screen of dust. She then crossed to the stables and saddled Delilah. She would try and reach Uncle Nicholas before her mother; he alone had the influence to persuade her.

Zofia took the back route to Druków, through the forest; she did not want to meet her mother on the road. The trees closed in around her; the war seemed far away. She rode for two, three hours. Sprigs of hazel brushed at her hair. The forest was parched and tired after the hot summer. When the trees thinned, she slowed to a walk. Ahead appeared a long kidney-shaped field cropped of its rye. Beyond the field rose a forest of young spruce, and beyond them was Druków.

She skirted the field. From the forest came a noise – a breaking of twigs, a parting of leaves – and Delilah side-stepped into the stubble. Zofia watched the trees for a deer or a wild boar. But instead two men and a woman appeared. The men were carrying rifles.

‘Who are you?’ said the woman.

‘I come from Mantuski – Zofia Brońska.’

‘Why do you take this back route – why not the road?’

Zofia paused. ‘I was lost.’

The woman looked at her closely. ‘That is not the truth!’

The men ordered her to dismount. They searched her pockets and found nothing but a little bread and an apple. ‘How do we know you are not a German paratrooper?’

‘My uncle is Nicholas O’Breifne, from the
dwór
at Druków.’

‘Take us to him.’

At Druków, Uncle Nicholas was ill. He came out of the house tying the cord of his dressing-gown. He blinked in the sunlight and barked at Zofia’s captors, ‘Of course she’s my niece!’

Uncle Nicholas then listened to her concerns. ‘Yes, Zosia. I will talk to your mother.’ He then kissed her forehead and told her to hurry back to Mantuski. ‘And take the main road this time!’

He was standing on the bottom step when she looked back, a portly figure in his silk dressing-gown waving with both hands. It was the last time she saw him.

Druków 1992. In the grounds of the O’Breifne chapel was a small mausoleum. The rain fell through the high beech trees and spilled onto the building’s roof. From across the river came the sound of thunder.

We stood in the shelter of the mausoleum’s portico – Zofia, me, and a woman from the village. On the door, which was padlocked, was a small plaque which read: ‘Count Nicholas O’Breifne 1862–1940’.

‘The Russians came that morning,’ the woman said. ‘They shot the game-keeper and took the Count away on a hay-cart. I saw him lying in the back on some straw.’

The following spring, she said, he had returned. He could barely walk. Months in a Soviet jail had broken him and before long he died.

‘So that’s what became of him,’ mused Zofia. ‘That’s what became of Uncle Nicholas.’

We stood there for a long time. The rain showed no sign of stopping; the village woman stared at it with the look of one who’d been staring at it for years.

In the end, for Helena, there was no choice to make, no trip to Wilno. Watching the progress of the Germans, listening to each news bulletin, she had pushed from her mind the other danger, the greater danger – from the east.

On 16 September, she had returned from Nowogródek quite late. The evening was still and quiet. She had walked with the dogs down by the Niemen and round by Michał’s Cross. The sky was filled with the whine of planes but she was not unduly worried. Later she had found that she could not sleep, so took a small sleeping draught.

Her sleep was broken at five o’clock the following morning.

‘Mama! Mama! The Russians!’

Helena opened her eyes and saw Zofia standing at her bed. ‘Mama, they telephoned from the village! The Russians have invaded!’

Helena rose at once, stubbing her toe on the bed and cursing. She dressed in a new thick skirt and a green jacket which she had kept aside. (Buying them in Wilno, the thought had come to her suddenly: these are clothes to die in.) She gathered the household together to pray in the hall. Like her own mother in 1915, she read the ‘
Kto się w Qpiekę’
, ‘Prayers to God’s Providence’:

Outside, the sun cleared the tree-line. Stiletto shadows stretched across the fields. Beyond the Niemen, beyond the far bank, a mist seeped out of the forest. From the village came the sound of dogs and crowing cocks, and the herd lumbered out from milking, down the avenue towards the upper meadows.

Helena had no choice. Bartek said he would hide them all. He said that to risk the open roads was madness. But she knew it would be madness to stay: they would be betrayed in no time.

‘We must go, Bartek.’

They had only a matter of hours. She went to her office. A silence had already settled there. She unhooked Adam’s picture from the wall, and his service medal. From the safe she took two thousand zlotys in brand new notes, jewellery and a pistol. All these she put in a small leather bag. She went to the Klinika, unlocked the glass cabinet and took down a small bottle of arsenic. She then crossed the hall to the dining room.

There was a glass-fronted cupboard against one wall and its shelves were stacked with samovars, candelabras, a silver wolf, mustard pots, salt cellars. Taking two large mushroom baskets from the kitchen, Helena placed the silver inside and covered it with a scarf. She then found Zofia and they left by the back door to bury it in the new plantations.

Back at the house Bartek said the Russian forces were within eight miles of Mantuski. They were moving quickly.

Bartek had harnessed the two remaining horses. They waited beneath the larch. He had put blankets and food in the carts, and a rifle. For a moment everyone stood outside the house, the carts loaded and ready to leave. Bartek took off his
czapka.
Tessa shuffled from foot to foot. The others stood motionless. No one knew what to say.

Helena turned and climbed into the front cart. She motioned to Zofia to take the reins of the other. Still nothing was said. Bartek stepped forward and checked the harness of Helena’s horse.

‘Hurry!’ he whispered.

Helena flicked the reins. She did not say goodbye. She knew it would not be long before she returned.

T
HEY CAME OUT OF
the avenue, passed Michał’s Cross and rode on through the village. Outside the church a number of people had gathered. They stood in formless groups, waiting. Some were leaning on scythes, others held their caps, folded like documents in their palms. Hearing the carts, they shuffled aside. They fell silent, and the horses trotted past them.

Helena could not bear to look; she could not bear to see their hatred – could bear even less the sight of those who did not hate her. Again she thought: I cannot leave, I will see the children are safe and then return.

They kept north of the Niemen. The roads were empty. A breathless heat lay on the land and the clouds were thick and thundery. The forests stood motionless beneath them. Out of the distance came the soft thud of shellfire.

Helena’s plan was to reach Wilno. The Poles were there in great numbers. There she could wait while it became clear what was happening. But in the first village they reached, it was obvious this would not be possible: the road to Wilno was already blocked by the Russians.

They rode on to the
dwór
of a friend. Trotting out of the long avenue they found its windows shuttered, its front door locked, its stables empty.

They returned to the road and, while the horses rested, took shelter in an empty barn. Their options, Helena realized, were narrowing. It was at this point that she toyed with the bottle of poison in her pocket for the first time.

After some twenty minutes there came the rattle of another cart and Helena peered through the crack of the barn-door. A priest, an elderly man, was driving a farm cart towards them. She stepped out of the barn to greet him. They eyed each other nervously.

‘Father,’ Helena nodded up at him.

‘
Dzień dobry,’
mumbled the priest.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Lipniszki. You?’

‘Mantuski.’

He looked at her more closely. ‘You are Pani Brońska?’

She told him she was.

The priest said he had worked with Adam during the last war. ‘A wonderful man!’

From inside his soutane, he took out a map. Dismounting, he spread it on the verge. He swept a bony hand across the routes and forests of Kresy.

Wilno was cut off to the north. The Russians were also advancing to the south. Russians lay to the east, Germans to the west. A narrow corridor, he explained, still ran north-west, between the fronts, one hundred and twenty miles to the Lithuanian frontier. How long the corridor would remain open they couldn’t tell.

The priest said quietly. ‘Either we give ourselves up, or –’ He paused.

‘Or what?’

‘Or we put our trust in God and head for Lithuania.’

Helena needed no time to decide.

Yet both of them knew that Lithuania had already closed its borders.

Father Jarosław was a man of prophetic height. His limbs stretched with a strange elongated grace from his body and he moved them slowly. Helena found his presence a profound reassurance. Beside him on the cart sat the monstrance of his church.

It was early evening when they reached the edge of the next village. Seeing the priest, a woman invited them into her house, provided them with tea, bread and salt, vodka, and feed for the horses. She clutched the priest’s hand. ‘Pray for us all, Your Reverence; the Bolsheviks took my son the last time, took him and I never saw him since.’

The candles guttered suddenly and in the doorway stood the woman’s husband. He was holding an old hunting-piece. ‘Go!’ he cried. ‘Leave us alone! You will have us all slaughtered!’

They went. They drove on, back into the forest. They drove most of that evening. Sometimes there was a plane overhead and the sound of bombing. Towards dusk the air thickened and the storm came quickly, bringing a sudden wind that spun the sand into steeples on the road. The horses coughed and flicked up their heads. Then it began to rain.

‘We must find shelter, Father!’ shouted Helena. ‘The horses cannot go on.’

Father Jarosław knew a blacksmith, a large and ruddy-faced man with a sheepskin waistcoat and a toothless smile. He lived in a forest cabin. He enveloped the priest in a great sheepskin hug and said he would do all he could to help.

‘But I have to tell you,’ he added, ‘they’ve reached Lida, Father. It is only a matter of time.’

He had no stables, this blacksmith, so they covered the horses with furs, took out their bits, and unloaded piles of clover in front of them. The steam rose from their flanks as they ate.

Inside the blacksmith’s house, two grimy-faced children sat at the hearth. One of them was jabbing a fork at a scavenging hen. Helena sat at a table with the priest who smiled in the half-light and told her he had ‘seen the seal on their foreheads’ that day: the seal that in the Book of Revelation marked the foreheads of those destined to survive when God let loose the furies upon the earth.

The rain fell heavily outside. It beat on the thatch and made a hissing sound on the bare earth beyond the door. Helena fell asleep. Her head rested on the table; the children lay on the floor. The priest and the blacksmith carried on a conversation whose muted tones lapped at the hinterland of her sleep.

It was still dark when Father Jarosław shook her shoulder. ‘Quick, Pani Helena! There are tanks on the main road!’

She rose, still half asleep, and woke the children; she heard the deep growl in the distance, a noise that appeared to come up through the earth itself. Good God, she thought, we will never get through, and in her pocket she felt again for the bottle of poison.

It was still raining. They re-harnessed the horses and set off on a forest track behind the cottage. The noise of the tanks receded. All that day they rode through the forest. They rode circuitously, sometimes north, sometimes west, avoiding main roads and villages. But on occasions it was impossible and in the early afternoon they were forced onto a short stretch of road. After some time a car approached from the south, a black Chevrolet.

Helena grew anxious as it came closer. It drew to a halt beside them and through the window she saw the face of an elderly man, pasty-skinned, flustered with fear: it was her mother’s first cousin, fleeing his estate near Lida. She urged him to take them with him.

He looked at her helplessly. His wife leaned across the bench seat. ‘Hela, look! You can see we have no room!’

Her husband threw up his hands in despair. ‘Useless! Useless! None of us will get out!’ And he grated the car back into gear and drove away.

That evening Father Jarosław led them to a presbytery in a small, predominately Polish town. The priests had fled. The caretakers said that the Russians were still some way off, and moving now more north than west.

In the morning, Father Jarosław spread the map out on a large oak table in the hall. The Lithuanian border was still sixty miles away. They could not reach it before nightfall. They decided instead to head for a
dwór
named Antoków; there, they had heard, a number of Polish refugees had gathered.