The Bronski House (26 page)
Authors: Philip Marsden
She continued to see Eric. They referred frequently to those two summers at Mantuski. So much was changing; that alone seemed constant. Zofia wrote to him in May 1940:
Enfield.
…streets streets and houses and chimneys and a sun so uncomfortable in all this town town town… I sit in the window and try to imagine. It is Mantuski – I walk in the marshes and the water makes a funny little noise at my feet and the song of the forest is all around. You are there too, Eryk, because I am not happy here now seeing the Enfield station and the old dirty houses and a brown train speeding past with a noise. And you are not happy either and you are going to the army and you can’t be free any more – so let’s imagine… Oh, it’s all too real and annoying a life!
To begin with, during the phoney war, Eric had stuck to his pacifism. But when the fighting began in earnest, he joined up with the sudden zeal of a neophyte. At the end of 1941 he was sent to the Far East. He wrote to Zofia from the ship:
…It is evening and everyone is leaning over the rails and dreamily watching the waves. We have been to two ports since I last wrote and there is so much to tell you I don’t know where to start. You know, always moving, and stopping for a few days at these fairy-tale towns is marvellous and as you go on a kind of excited madness mounts and you feel the whole world is at your feet and that all the marvellous places you have ever heard of lie open to you… It was you who had much more imagination than I did. You always wanted to travel to the ends of the earth and I loved the forests of Poland and the Swiss mountains and was content to stay near them. Dear Zosia, how you would love this now…
By early 1942, Eric was stationed in Singapore with an anti-tank unit. The Japanese had begun their offensive.
Since the very beginning, strangely enough, I seem to have been involved in all the big engagements and lots of minor ones as well. Somehow I do not get frightened, because I have too much to do, but I don’t feel a bit like Rupert Brooke. I don’t believe in fate at all, but only in the blind Goddess of Chance.
You know, Zosia, lately when I have been in action and often since, I keep on having sudden lovely glimpses of Mantuski. It is strange. Just for a moment I see the branches of the fir trees on the edge of the forest near the house, waving in the sunlight, but most of all the river, the sandbank and the sweep of the river opposite the village, and the river beside the meadows and the swirling of the surface and the noises of the water.
Just then, there was a specially big burst of shell fire a few miles away and I wanted to weep as I wrote. I think it was the contrast. I must stop now. Goodbye, darling Zosia. I think you will find me more natural when I get back.
With love. Eryk.
That was his last letter. At the time, Zofia was working in the Polish section of the BBC in London. Eric’s sister telephoned her there. She told her what she knew: that Eric had been captured during the Japanese advance, that he had been imprisoned, that he had escaped with an American, that he was betrayed by some villagers, made to dig his own grave by the Japanese, and bayoneted into it.
I asked Zofia once if she would have married Eric.
‘Philip, I really don’t know. We talked of the future, of course, but we never made plans. Everything was happening so fast in those days. If I’d been sure about Eric, perhaps I would not have been able to marry so soon afterwards.’
A year after Eric’s death, Zofia married a Spitfire pilot, a Pole. The wedding took place in the Catholic church in the Fulham Road. Helena was unable to come; she was ill with angina. The honeymoon was spent in Wales, in a lakeside hotel which granted free board to Polish airmen. Zofia remembers a series of fine autumn days and damp bracken. It was a brief spell of happiness stolen from the brown horror of the war. And it was a beginning.
After ten days, her husband had to go back to his squadron in Northolt; Zofia returned to London. They talked by telephone on the evenings he wasn’t flying. A week after the honeymoon, he ran a mission into France. His Spitfire was returning home when it was shot down. They had been married less than three weeks. At the age of twenty-three, Zofia was a widow.
After the war she married an American diplomat. They settled in Cornwall and became hotel-keepers. They bought Braganza. Zofia ran the hotel cellars, wrote poems and sailed, badly, in
Memory.
She planted roses and escallonia hedges and camellia, and they had two children. But the pattern of loss continued. Their son was killed at twenty-one in a car crash. They went bankrupt and lost the hotels. Zofia’s second husband died, quite naturally, at the age of eighty.
At Braganza there is a picture of her son, a pastel drawing. He is wearing a moustache. He had tried to brush his hair for the portrait, but you can see it made no difference: it was too wild and bushy to be properly controlled. He has Zofia’s hooded eyes.
I saw that same face again, in St Petersburg. It was framed in a small portrait in the Heroes Gallery of the Hermitage. Here, individually painted, are all the generals who helped push Napoleon back across the Niemen in 1812. Tsar Alexander I dominates the whole of one wall. His generals line the walls on either side. Half-way down on the left is one who, alone, is not looking at the portraitist. There is the same moustache, the same untameable hair.
Beneath the painting is written, in Cyrillic: General Graf I. O. O’Breifne.
One evening in 1992, several months after returning from Belorussia, Zofia and I were in her sitting room in Braganza. The picture of Mantuski hung above her head. It was dusk and the wind was rattling at the doors; a summer gale was on its way. Through the window, one of the trawlers was coming back into the bay. To one side of the window, the monkey-puzzle stood in the semi-darkness.
‘Just here, about fifteen years ago,’ said Zofia, ‘I remember sitting with Mama. On the lawn the grandchildren – her greatgrandchildren – were playing some noisy game. Not one of them spoke a word of Polish. English, French – but no Polish. None of her descendants had married a Pole. Mama was almost blind by then. She turned to me and said, quite matter-of-factly, “Sometimes I wonder whether I was right to bring you all out of Poland. Perhaps it would have been best just to have waited for the Russians.”’
In exile, Helena settled in a corner of Surrey. There she shared a large mock-Tudor house with a female companion and various cats. It was an unremarkable house, in an unremarkable place. Except for one thing. In the pictures of it that Zofia showed me, it was surrounded by exactly the pine and birch woods which had surrounded Mantuski.
‘As she got older, her eyesight failed. She became very demanding. Her own mother had died in Dublin just after the war. Being an O’Breifne – one of the Wild Geese, or at least the widow of one – made her a curiosity there. For Mama it was different. She lived here for more than forty years but never really settled. She was always trying to get me to go and live in Surrey, but how could I? I had my own family here. In the end she came here, in January 1981.
‘She arrived wearing dark glasses and had a cat under her arm. I imagined she’d be here for years. But you know after only three weeks she had died. Dear Mama…’
Zofia looked out of the window. It was now almost dark. The trees were just a shadow against the bay beyond. Mist was spreading in from the west. From the lighthouse came the moan of the fog-horn.
Back in Mantuski, the larch was still standing. Pani Cichoń’s house stood next to it. Twice, she had stepped in to stop the authorities cutting it down.
‘Look,’ she had pointed at the trunk, ‘you can see the axe marks.’
Pani Cichoń had asked about the family, about Zofia’s aunts and her brothers, and her mother and what had happened to them all. Suddenly she leaned forward, interrupting Zofia’s reply. ‘Yes, ten years ago the children were playing there and there was a thunderbolt. It came out of the sky and hit the tree! Hairs of the tree came spinning down’ – Pani Cichoń made a spiralling motion in the air – ‘it must have been then – it must have been the time Pani Helena died!’
Zofia plucked three of the green seed-cones from the tree. Back at Braganza, we tried to nurture them. We planted them in pots in the greenhouse, but nothing appeared in the pots except a couple of weeds. Only the following spring, with the pots half-forgotten on the floor of the greenhouse, did it become clear that the weeds were tiny larch shoots.
Z
OFIA WENT BACK
once more to Belorussia. It was June, a high blue Kresy June. The skies were cloudless, the air a matted buzz of insects. The chatter of finches filled the forests. In the hay-fields, teams of reapers swung their scythes with the eagerness of those who know that good days – like everything else – were in short supply.
It was two years since our first journey. Belorussia had dropped further into its particular well of post-Soviet torpor. Fistfuls of banknotes were needed for the tiniest purchase; the whole fabric of the towns was rotting. Disparities had grown, hostilities sharpened. A sense of stasis pervaded everything; only the forest seemed truly alive.
In Cornwall, in the meantime, Zofia had been raising money. She had opened an account, at the National Westminster Bank in Truro, and named it simply: ‘Chapel’. Into this account went funds for the one thing she felt would bridge her two worlds, that would pay the debt of duty she felt towards her abandoned past: the restoration of the family chapel and the looted graves of her ancestors. House guests, friends and family had all chipped in; even her dentist had waived his fees for the cause when he heard that bodies had been dug up solely to recover gold teeth.
That April, down a crackling phone line, the Nowogródek priest had announced that work on the chapel was now almost complete. The opening ceremony would be on 30 June.
‘Philip,’ mused Zofia as we crossed the Belorussian border, ‘supposing we get there and it is not finished. Supposing there is no roof. What do we do then?’
‘It’ll be ready,’ I reassured her – though felt less than reassured myself. I poured two large measures from the bottle of expedition vodka. ‘For crossing the border,’ I said. ‘Remember?’
Father Antoni Dziemianko, Polish Catholic priest of Nowogródek, was a man practised in dispelling doubt. I remembered him well from the last time. I remembered his didactic liturgies. I remembered his teak complexion, his large
face,
his large horizons. He had in the bad years spent several years as an underground priest, but now had come into his own. He alone in that dazed town had had energy; he alone managed to get things done.
That evening, with the final instalment of the Chapel Fund lodged in smuggled dollars in my pocket, we knocked on his door. He was writing up a sermon on an old Soviet typewriter. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. ‘Pani Zofia! Pan Philip!
Proszę!’
We sat down.
‘Now, everything is ready for Thursday. A bus is leaving here at two o’clock. The village are killing a calf, and the bishop is coming from Grodno.’
‘Oh, my goodness!’ exclaimed Zofia. ‘A bishop!’
Father Antoni rose and closed both doors. Sitting down at his desk, he unlocked a drawer and produced a small wooden box. Inside the box was a gold wedding ring and an oval locket. Behind the maculated glass of the locket, rested a tiny wisp of dark hair.
‘The builders found them near the graves.’
I took the ring and squinted at the inscription on the inside: HB 4 VII 1842. ‘Who would that be, Zosia?’
‘I’m not sure. Some Broński or other…’
We handed over the dollars and took the small wooden box and its contents. Father Antoni saw us to the door. As we were leaving, Zofia turned. ‘Oh, one more thing, Father. I wonder, could you ask the village to spare that poor calf?’
Outside it was dusk. The ruined castle of Nowogródek stood on the opposite hill like a shipwreck.
‘What I can’t understand,’ said Zofia, ‘is how the looters missed it. A wedding ring – I mean, wouldn’t that be the first thing they would look for?’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t found by the builders at all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Perhaps someone in the village had a guilty conscience.’
The day of the ceremony had been chosen as a day of obligation, the Feast of St Peter and St Paul. By midday, it was very hot. A faint-hearted breeze did no more than tousle the fringe of the forest. Zofia and I arrived at the chapel early: she was to greet the bishop when he arrived, and present him with the keys. As we stepped up the path, a nun was laying a trail of blue lupins around the chapel door.
But the door was padlocked. A man went off to the village for the keys and returned, breathless. He shook his head. ‘No key!’ He began to force the lock with a crowbar.
‘So,’ I whispered to Zofia, ‘that is what you must give to the bishop – a crowbar!’
The restoration, though, was magnificent. Outside, four robust columns supported a timber pediment; a simple black cross topped the pediment. One of the outer walls had been completely rebuilt – but so neatly that it was hard to tell which one. White-wash covered the columns and the walls and was so bright that Zofia had to dip into her handbag for a pair of sunglasses.
Inside the chapel, it smelt of new paint. Accustomed as we were in Belorussia to seeing ruins, it seemed odd to be looking at the fruits of fresh building. The interior was neat and modest. It was no more than forty feet long. A parquet floor stretched to a simple altar. All around the altar and the chapel were jars of lilies and peonies. The ceiling was made of stained larch, cut from the tree that had stood beside the ruins, and which two years earlier had guided us to the site.
Into one wall was set a granite tablet, and on it had been chiselled the inscription: Adam Broński 1890–1934. Zofia placed her bag on a chair and stood before the tablet. She stood there for several minutes.
Sixty years. Sixty years since her father’s coffin had been carried into that chapel. Sixty years since the horse-drawn cortège had travelled through the forest from Mantuski. Sixty years. Sixty years in which all she’d thought was solid, all the people she’d loved, had vanished one by one. Here was where the parade of loss had begun.
We went outside. The heat rose from the stripped earth around the chapel. Zofia sat in the shade of one of the columns. Parties of villagers climbed the hill. They bore sheaves of flowers. They chattered in small groups, peering at the new elegance of the building, at the old elegance of Zofia. Slowly, they shuffled towards her, eyeing her clothes, her shoes, her sunglasses.
Proszę
Pani, tell us, where is your home? Is this your son? Please tell us, where is the rest of the family? What has become of them all?
Canada, Anglia, Francja, Australia…
When will they come back? Proszę Pani, why are they not here?
It’s far. Far, and many are poor. (How could she explain how difficult it was to return, how difficult it was to face what had happened?)
But they will come,
Proszę
Pani, won’t they? Please tell them to come…
The Bishop of Grodno arrived at a few minutes before three. His German car slid to a halt. The crowd parted to let him through, and he smiled an episcopal smile and handed out plastic rosaries to the children. He entered the chapel, bowed, took his seat beside the altar, and placed a biretta on his head. There was no presentation of keys.
Six priests followed the bishop. Their suitcases of props – the mitre and crozier, the various liturgical soutanes, all the starched and glittering paraphernalia of the host, took up a sizeable part of the chapel. The people crammed in, packed the doorway; and those who could not fit – the majority – stood outside.
The service itself was a conventional Mass, with the addition of a reconsecration ceremony. This involved a series of prayers, and the bishop parading around the chapel with an aspergill, scattering holy water.
After Mass, Zofia stood to make a speech. She cleared her throat and looked at the faces before her.
‘This chapel,’ she began, ‘holds memorials to my family, the Brońskis. Once they all lived here and used this chapel for Mass, for their baptisms and weddings, and for their burials. I remember my father’s funeral here sixty years ago – some of you told me you were here then too. That means an enormous amount to me. Thank you for coming.’
The crowd outside pressed in closer to hear; there was some jostling in the packed aisle.
She raised her head before continuing. ‘Like you, my father lived all his life on this land. He loved the land more than anything else. He spent his life working it and when he wasn’t working it, in the first war, he was fighting for it. He loved the people here and the forests and it is in his memory that this chapel has been restored.
But there is one thing you must understand. For more than half a century now, no Broński has lived here. Once this was our home, but not any more. The family is scattered around the world and the life we knew here is gone. The restoration of the chapel is not for us; it is not for my family, but for you, for all of you – Belorussian and Pole, Orthodox and Catholic. You must look after it as your own home. You must use it. Come here and pray whenever you want, whenever you can – even if there is no priest to officiate; you must say the rosary and in the spring cut back the forest around the building.
‘And be warned,’ she smiled, ‘that if the chapel again falls into disrepair, it will be
my
ghost that comes back to haunt you!’
The next morning, Zofia rose late. We were staying with a Polish family, on the fourth floor of a crumbling block of flats in Nowogródek – six of us in three rooms.
‘
Dzień dobry,
Philip. I feel rested,’ she said.
‘
Dzień dobry,
Zosia.’ I kissed her cheek.
She sat down at the small table in the kitchen. ‘Oh, I can’t tell you what a tremendous relief I feel today!’
She had given me no idea how much she’d been dreading the whole thing – dreading the ceremony, dreading the speech, afraid that her Polish would fail her, or her legs, or that no one would come, or that those who did would be hostile.
‘Yet you know, Philip,’ she said, ‘I honestly think that it was one of the best days of my life. Does that sound ridiculous?’
‘No, Zosia, it does not.’
Before leaving Belorussia, there was one more thing we had to do. We drove to Mantuski.
Pani Wala Dobrałowicz, Zofia and Helena’s one-time dressmaker, was feeding her bantams when we arrived, scattering seed on a patch of bare earth before her cabin. The bantams squawked at her feet. A single birch tree stood beyond her vegetable patch, its silvery leaves quivering in the wind. Beyond the birch was the Niemen.
When she saw us, Pani Wala let her pan of seed clatter to the ground. ‘God, my God!’ she cried, and came over, hugging us both as if we might fall apart.
Of all the people I met in the old region of Kresy, all the Poles and Belorussians, the Lithuanians and Russians, the priests and nuns, none left quite such a mark on me as Pani Wala. She had eyes of the deepest cornflower blue and a pure and powerful presence. But it was her speech that I remember best.
As she talked, you could sense a reservoir of feeling behind her face; and sometimes the reservoir would spill over, filling her eyes with tears, setting the corners of her mouth twitching. The words would tumble out with the fluency of music. Then pausing, she would laugh. The switch was miraculous; she was the only person I have ever met who seemed utterly oblivious to her own mood.
We followed her into her cabin, and sat while she bustled around, shaking her head and muttering, before sitting down with us.
‘Only a little longer,’ she sighed, looking up at the wedding portrait on her wall. ‘Just a little more of this and God will let me join my Kazik.’
Her Kazik had died two years earlier. In the years before the war, he had been the head gardener at Mantuski. He it was who had tended the roses, trained the honeysuckle, and with Helena each spring made the plans for planting.
We had lunch. Pani Wala laid out a clean white table-cloth; she laid it with plates of potato and
kiełbasa
and herring. Zofia presented her with a pair of shoes and two jerseys from Marks & Spencer.
A bottle of vodka appeared. Normally, Pani Wala explained, she never drank. ‘But, Pani Zofia, I shall drink your coming! I shall drink until I fall. I shall drink, drink, drink – three times until I am completely out of knowledge! I shall drink for you, Pani Zofia; I shall drink for you, Pan Philip. I shall drink like an Englishwoman!’
And we did drink, and talked and ate and drank again, and slept it off in the close heat of the afternoon – the two widows on beds behind a screen, me on an old sofa next to the stove. It was nearly four when I rose and tiptoed out of the cabin.
I walked out along the river. Its eddies twisted and slid past my feet. The wind pulled at the high grass on the bank. Down near the
dwór
were the ruins of the brick factory. The chimney still stood, the same chimney that had been there in Zofia’s day, the same chimney that rose above the ruins when Helena arrived in 1920. Some hardboard huts had been erected beneath it, and inside them were signs of the new age, the age of ‘beesnees’ and kiosks: village girls were filling bottles marked Tutti Frutti Shampoo and Fleur Raspberry Bath Essence.
I carried on. Nearer the site of the old house, one of the limes of the avenue had fallen in the last year. The larch still dominated the skyline, though one or two of its boughs were bare with age. On the mound – all that remained of the old house – shards of red brick were still visible in the soil.
We spent the night in Pani Wala’s cabin. Zofia wore a pair of white satin pyjamas. I could hear the two women talking behind their screen long into the night.
In the morning, shortly after dawn, I left the cabin. I went outside and sat beneath Pani Wala’s birch tree. Zofia came out shortly afterwards, tying up the cord of her red silk dressing-gown. She walked into the vegetable plot. She stood there watching the Niemen, watching the mist rise from the water. All around her were calf-high potato plants, cabbages, sprigs of parsley and onions.
For several minutes nothing moved. Then from the pines there came a cackle of rooks. Zofia raised her head to listen. It was the same sound that started her days in Cornwall, that spilled out of the high chestnuts at Braganza.
She placed one hand casually against her throat. She remained there for some time, quite still, while her dressing-gown trailed like a bridal train through Pani Wala’s sprouting onions.