The Bronski House (25 page)

They made steady progress. But the horses grew slower. They dragged their feet through the mud, nodding feebly as they struggled to pull the carts across the uneven ground. It was late afternoon when they reached a stream. The water was high from the rain. The beasts bowed their heads and drank and Helena bent to wash the sweat from their flanks.

When she looked up again, a group of four soldiers was standing in front of her on the track. Their rifles were raised. More men spilled out of the trees and an officer stepped out in front of them. They wore Polish uniforms.

Helena put a hand to her chest. ‘Oh, thank God! I thought you were Russians!’

‘You must give us your horses,’ said the officer. ‘The army needs your horses.’

‘Take our horses, Major, and you will be leaving us for dead.’

She could see the man was afraid. ‘Leave us the horses,’ she said.

He stood aside and let them pass.

It was dark by the time they reached Antoków. There were many refugees, a good deal of them landowners. Everyone was asleep. Helena went to the kitchen to prepare food. Zofia found some coffee beans in their supplies. She poured water on the beans and heated up the mixture in the kitchen. She could not understand why it did not work. Nor could her mother. Neither of them had any idea how to make coffee.

‘See how we’d starve if we had to live under the Bolsheviks, without servants!’ laughed Helena.

The upstairs rooms of the house were scattered with sleeping refugees. The Brońskis found a corner in one and spread out their blankets. The room had no curtains and the moon fell on the sleeping forms as if on a line of hills. Helena stayed awake a long time. She tried to picture the Lithuanian frontier, the barrier lifting in front of her and the guards letting them all in. She couldn’t. She gazed at the stars and prayed.

Soon after dawn, word reached the
dwór
that the Russians were closing in. Those who had cars set off for Wilno, which had still not fallen. The Mantuski carts were too slow for the convoy; Helena knew she must carry on for the border alone.

But there were one or two families who would not leave, who would not trust the open road, who felt a dignified surrender to the Russians was their best chance. Father Jarosław stayed with them. They stood awkwardly on the terrace as the Brońskis left, while Father Jarosław conducted prayers. They formed tight little family groups around him, hands clasped in front of them, straight and elegant in their breeches and ties, in their woollen skirts and lace collars, in all their condemned formality.

On the roads that morning there was more traffic, a bustle of carts and leaderless troops. The fighting was closer, the sound of shelling continuous. In one place some soldiers had gathered in a huddle on the side of the road, four of them, with one rifle between them.

Helena slowed as she passed. ‘What is it?’

The soldiers turned to look up at her. They said nothing but drew back to let her see. The body of an officer lay twisted on the verge; he still clutched his service revolver where it pointed at his cheek, but his cheek was missing. Helena was frozen with shock: it was the major who, only the day before, had asked her for the horses.

She flicked her reins and rode on before the others had a chance to see.

They reached the frontier town of Orany soon afterwards. It was little more than a stretched-out main street. A row of young linden trees had been planted along it. The town was in chaos. Soldiers and police ran backwards and forwards. From one of the few side-streets came the sound of rifle shots; scarves of smoke rose from its buildings; the still air shook with distant explosions. The Russians had not yet reached the town, but the fighting had begun.

They rode on. Beyond the town, the noise receded and they slowed to a walk. They were all exhausted. One of the horses on Zofia’s cart had developed a sore on its shoulder where the shaft had rubbed; each step now the animal faltered.

The road dropped down steeply into a ravine. The Mareczanka river, which marked the frontier, ran along the bottom. They could see the bridge and the border post beyond it. A group of Lithuanian guards stood above the parapet. There was no one on the Polish side.

Helena stopped the carts. She took a couple of her Tsarist gold coins. In measured capitals she wrote a note:

She left the carts and the children and crossed the bridge alone. She came out of the shade of the ravine and into the sun. As she walked, she could see beyond the guards to a small, busy settlement. Two or three oxen stood beneath a large oak tree, and villagers and soldiers milled around them.

Helena smiled to the guards as she approached. One of them flicked his gun at her, urging her back. She stood her ground. Out of the guardhouse came a bearded officer. A wedge of hair stuck up to one side of his head which he scratched noisily. He yawned.

‘Please, Major, I have an urgent wire. Please send it.’

The officer looked at her, then smiled slowly. ‘No.’

But she only half heard him. Over his shoulder, a man from the settlement had stopped on the edge of the bridge and was watching the scene – a young priest. Without thinking, Helena pushed past the guards. She could hear the soldiers shouting, the sound of their boots on the gravel. She reached the priest, pressed the note and the coins into his hand, and whispered: ‘In the name of God, Father, send this wire!’

She felt the guards take her arms. She shrugged them off and turned, walking swiftly back ahead of them. ‘Thank you, Major,’ she said as she passed the officer.

She reached the others. No one said anything about the gunfire and shelling, which was getting closer all the time. They rode up out of the valley and back along the main road to a group of two or three wooden cottages. The place was choked with refugees. Three old men sat in the shade; one of them was picking at his boots, the others were staring at the trees. On the cottage benches, arranged outside, women sat peeling cabbages and plucking chickens.

Helena jumped down from her cart and spoke to one of the elderly men, a Pole.

‘Can we wait here?’ she asked.

‘You have salt?’

She took down a large block of salt and said they had coffee too and brandy and some money…

‘Money!’ he scoffed. ‘What use is money now?’

But he gestured to one of the buildings and there they found space to sleep. They went back outside to prepare food.

‘What will happen now, Mama?’ asked Zofia.

‘Your grandmother will go to President Smetona.’

‘And why should he do anything to help us?’

Helena smiled. ‘When he was young the president had been a shepherd boy on her estate. She paid for his education and now he would do anything for her.’

But Helena herself was full of doubts.

That night, the shelling subsided. Word reached the refugees that a battle had been going on all day, near the railway line to the east, and now the Russians had won control of it. In the morning, everyone knew, they would be continuing the advance.

There was nothing they could do. Helena slept little. Around midnight, she left the cottage and went out to walk up and down the main road. A steady wind chased the clouds across the moon. There was a smell of apples in the air and also the dust of mushroom spores. Autumn had overcome the indolence of summer and Helena thought of Mantuski. She had always loved September’s calm, the longer nights, the permitted sadness. Now she felt oddly robust. An inevitability had set in during the day. She had done all she could.

The morning began soon after six. Helena was asleep on the cottage floor when she heard the first shells falling on Orany. Tanks were approaching through the trees.

Helena rose quickly. ‘One cart, Zosia, harness the two chestnuts. I will wake the others.’

On the road, the sound of fighting drew closer. The horses had about half a mile to go before the road dropped down towards the frontier. They could hear rifles now, and the voices of men in the trees. A group of Polish soldiers ran out suddenly in front of the cart, crossed the road, and dropped down into the ravine. Helena urged the horses into a canter.

Out of the trees came a unit of Russian troops. For a moment they appeared confused; they looked up and down the road. They saw the cart and opened fire. The bullets whined like hornets around it; one thudded into the side, splintering it. Then the road slewed down to the left and Helena did not look back. She saw the bridge, and the guardhouse beyond it and an armoured car. She drove for the bridge; if they shot at them, she thought, so be it. It was better than the Russians.

The officer waved frantically.

Beside him, his troops raised their rifles. Away up the ravine the Polish soldiers had regrouped on the edge of the river. A shell dropped into the water near them, and they hurried away downstream, around a bluff, out of sight.

‘Madame Brońska!’ The officer stepped in front of his troops.

She drove on towards the troops, but they did not fire. The officer waved to her and she drew level with him. ‘Your cable,’ he said. ‘Your cable came through last night, from the President.’

The troops closed in behind the cart, and the Brońskis crossed into Lithuania.

‘She was as brave as a lion! Goodness, when I think of it now, Mama’s courage seems in-ceredible!’

In Belorussia, shortly after we had been to Mantuski, Zofia told me what she remembered of the escape. It was a much less detailed account than her mother’s. She said that at the time she was ‘too young and foolish’ to be frightened. There was only one moment which really alarmed her.

They were driving through a village. It was late at night. They had no idea whether it was a friendly village or not, so they were cantering. Zofia was on her own in the last cart. She felt something tug at her reins and the horse slowed. She saw two or three men close in around her.

‘I had a rifle and waved it at them. I shouted at the horses and shook the reins. Somehow we broke free.’ She paused. ‘But if there was one thing that really saved us, it was that Lipniszki priest. I wonder what happened to him.’

The next morning we went to Lipniszki. The church was set back a little from the main square. It had a high tower, and a compound with the leafy look of under-use. A cabin stood outside it, and on the verandah dozed an old man.

He woke as we approached and the white spade of his beard rose from his chest. ‘Father Jarosław?’ The old man nodded and led us back into the compound. Father Jarosław! He pointed to a neat well-kept grave near the fence.

The priest, it turned out, had also reached Lithuania. He had spent several years there. In 1944, during the German occupation, he returned to Lipniszki with the church’s monstrance. He resumed his ministry. There was a typhus epidemic in the village and he had tirelessly visited the sick.

The old man’s voice dropped to a whisper and he leaned towards us. ‘But Father Jarosław got the typhus himself and the Lord took him.’

Zofia stood for a moment before his grave and crossed herself. Then she said, ‘All these years I had wondered whether that priest wasn’t some sort of angel, sent to guide us to safety.’

T
HE BROŃSKIS
spent the rest of September in Lithuania, then October, and half of November. They stayed with Helena’s mother at Platków.

After the dash to the border, the relief with which they crossed it, the reality of their position began to sink in. Helena wrote:

Zofia took long walks in the forest. Of that time she remembers the trees and an overwhelming sadness. She wrote to Eric:

Three generations waited at Platków: Helena’s mother, frail and timid in her old age; Helena herself, widowed, thirty-nine years old, hobbling with a stick on account of her knee; and Zofia in loose cotton dresses, long gypsy hair and pale blue eyes.

The Russians stopped at the Lithuanian border. They signed a pact with Smetona and the pressure eased for a while. But in November Helena made the decision to leave. Her mother urged her to stay, saying it would all be over soon and they could return to Mantuski. But Helena had been chased out once too often.

In late November, Zofia wrote to Eric; she told him they were trying to get to Britain:

They reached Britain in December 1939, by way of Estonia, Stockholm and Oslo. In Bergen, there was a small coal ship bound for Newcastle. Eric met them at the docks. Zofia was struck by how formal he seemed. ‘I learned then that an Englishman in England is very different from one in a Slavic country.’

The Broński family was dispersed, billeted on various families around the country. Zofia ended up at the Convent of the Holy Family of Nazareth in Enfield. She learnt to type, to take shorthand, perfected her English and was accepted to read English literature at Reading university.