The Bronski House (27 page)
Authors: Philip Marsden
We left Belorussia as we’d come in, on a beaten-up old bus. The whole chassis of the bus was skewed; a sunburst fracture filled the windscreen. The driver shrugged. ‘Perestroika,’ he said.
The bus had been chartered to take a party of schoolchildren on holiday to Poland. Their parents followed them on board, bringing with them bags and bags of old clothes and household goods to sell in Warsaw for ‘ice cream money’. The bags made us feel like refugees.
We sat at the back, among the refugee bags. Zofia leaned against them, and said, ‘Philip, what do you think? Will I ever come back here?’
‘No.’
She looked out of the window, watching the buildings of Nowogródek give way to the fields and the forest. The sun was low on the horizon. ‘No, I think you’re right.’
Then she raised her chin and smiled her reckless half-smile. ‘But maybe when I’m very old I’ll come here in a car and stay in a little cabin in Mantuski and die there all alone!’
We reached the border at dusk. Queues of stationary buses stretched back down the road, like the vertebrae of some fossilized reptile.
There was an incident at the border, a small everyday incident. After seven hours of waiting, seven hours edging down the line, filling in forms, passing checkpoints, we cleared the Belorussian side. By then it was well after midnight. On the other side of no man’s land, a Polish guard came on board. He was very different from his Belorussian counterparts. With high uhlan boots, a hay-maker’s tan and a hero’s blue eyes, he had all the swagger of the re-emerging Poland. He stepped down the aisle. He counted the children’s sleeping heads, asked for the driver’s papers, tapped them with a pencil and said no, you must go back into Belorussia, back to your own town.
Zofia told me later that she saw red; she felt her blood boil – it was the look he gave ‘that poor Belorussian driver’. She came hobbling down the aisle. She’d started shouting at the guard before she reached him: ‘How dare you! Can’t you see these are just children? Really, you make me ashamed. You make me ashamed to be Polish!’
I told her to keep quiet. Pragmatism had taught me two things at borders: ‘no’ does not always mean ‘no’, and never lose your temper, never argue principles.
But who was I to know? What use had pragmatism proved at that other border, fifty-five years earlier, with Russian bullets hissing around her head, with the world gone mad, with Poland dying at her feet?
The Polish guard left the bus. He took the papers with him. In the end he did let us through. Perhaps we were both right.
Beyond the frontier was another queue of cars. They were lit up briefly in our headlights. We passed the queue’s end and carried on into the night. Everyone on the bus settled down to sleep. The driver lit a cigarette; soon the only sound was the growl of the engine. In the darkness, the ranks of birch trees slid past the window.
At the back of the bus, resting against the refugee bags, her legs stretched out over the broken seats, lay Zofia. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing evenly; her arms were wrapped tight around herself for warmth. Above her, one of the windows was open and the night breeze was coming through it, flicking at the curtain, and tugging at the tuft of grey hair that hung down over her face.
B
ACK IN
L
ONDON
, we went our separate ways. Zofia had her paying guests to look after, I had a book to finish. All that summer when I telephoned or we wrote, she seemed to be ill, beset by a series of minor complaints. In November when I returned to Cornwall she looked tired and said she was going to hospital for tests. Two days later they operated, and found her abdomen riddled with cancer.
She outlived the couple of months the doctors gave her to live. She recovered well from the operation and had treatment in the spring. She also kept an imaginary black knife, she told me, and in the still hours after dawn would steer it down towards the cancer and cut it away, cell by cell. One morning she rang, laughing with the laugh I knew hid some elemental fear. She said she had had a terrible nightmare – the Red Army had come to Braganza and thrown her on the rubbish heap; for some time after she woke, she lay there convinced she was back in Mantuski, back beside the Niemen – until she heard the sea breaking against the rocks below.
The summer was as normal – Braganza full of family and paying guests and dogs and everyone was amazed what a recovery she had made. But when I saw her again in September, there were moments on our own when the mask dropped and she seemed suddenly far away. And it was odd at that time that I did not feel any of the mad urgency I had been expecting, the sense that our time was running out. It was as though we both knew that we could never do anything more together than those long Cornish winters, the Belorussian journeys, the chapel, this book. And when I saw her for the last time, and she was in her high-backed chair with the sea beyond her full of sun, it is not what was said that I remember but the time after we’d talked and we sat in silence and did not need to say anything more.
In late October, on a grey afternoon, the season finished. Zofia waved goodbye to her last guest, closed the door of Braganza and went to bed. Four days later, she died.
Bryczka
(Pol.)
– A small carriage
Czapka
(Pol.)
– A peasant cap
Chata
(Pol.) –
A hut or cabin
Dvornik
(
Russ.)
– Yard-keeper
Dwór
(Pol.) –
A manor house
Dwórek
(Pol.)
– A small manor house
Graf
(Russ.)
– Count
Grafini
(Russ.)
– Countess
Hrabia
(Pol.)
– Count
Hrabina
(Pol.)
– Countess
Kresy
(Pol.) –
The lands of Eastern Poland
Kolkhoz
(Russ.)
– A collective farm
Kwas
(Pol.)
– Rye-beer
Pan
(Pol.)
– Mister
Pani
(Pol.)
– Mrs
Panna
(Pol.) –
Miss
Parobcy
(Pol.) –
Estate workers
Puszcza
(Pol.) –
Large natural forest
Sovkhoz
(Russ.) –
Large collective farm
Spiritus
(Russ.) –
Raw spirit, the base for vodka
Szlachta
(Pol.) –
Polish gentry
Tachanka
(Russ.) –
Springless cart
Wójt
(Pol.) –
Elected village head
Żubrówka
(Pol.) –
A flavoured vodka
Philip Marsden is the author of several works of non-fiction, including
The Crossing Place,
which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and
The Spirit-Wrestlers,
which won the Thomas Cook/
Daily Telegraph
Travel Book Award. He has also written a highly acclaimed novel,
The Main Cages.
He lives in Cornwall.
The Bronski House:
‘A long poem in prose in which individual lives serve to evoke the fate of millions upon millions of men, women and children in our time… Philip Marsden enhances his reputation as a fine travel writer with an acute sense of history and an empathy with alien cultures… His eye for an unusual incident or an arresting detail endows the book with real distinction’
Spectator
‘A most romantic, exciting story… a reflection on an age from which Europe has still not escaped, and an evocation of ghosts who will haunt us for years to come. Excellently crafted, it is written with love but without sentimentality. Few readers will take this journey into the little-known borderlands and return unmoved’
Observer
An intensely detailed portrait of life that has now gone for ever, and a fast-moving, eyewitness account of the conflicts that killed it off
BEN ROGERS,
Independent on Sunday
‘A beautiful book, a labour of love executed with a skill and delicacy which entrap the reader’
The Tablet
‘Philip Marsden is much more than the travel writer who has justly had great praise heaped on him. He not only brings to life an unfamiliar and enduring landscape, but peoples it with a fascinating and varied cast. Indeed the two characters, mother and daughter, with their stimulating panache, alternating with the deepest sorrow, tell the reader more than many a worthy history book… a wonderful book, of great originality and distinction’
JOHN JOLLIFFE,
COUNTRY LIFE
‘A tragic, uplifting elegy to a remarkable family’
RORY MACLEAN
By the same author
The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians
The Spirit-Wrestlers: And Other Survivors of the Russian Century
The Main Cages
The Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance
The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians
The Spirit-Wrestlers: And Other Survivors of the Russian Century
The Main Cages
The Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance
The names of the main families, as well as the names of the various estates, have been changed for the purpose of telling this story.
In Polish, first names have a series of diminutives and affectionate elaborations. ‘Zofia’ becomes ‘Zosia’ in familiar speech; likewise ‘Helena’ may become ‘Hela’ or ‘Helutka’ or ‘Helenka’. In the interest of simplicity, I have avoided using the vocative for reported speech; all names appear in the nominative.
Nie byto nas
Byt las.
Nie bedzie nas
Bedzie las.
(We were not here/ But the forest was./ We will not be here/ But the forest will be.)
Popular verse from Kresy, the borderlands of Eastern Poland
Mother Tongue wearing a robe of mystical gold – liturgical – hieratic (I see her always in gold, the Mother of Words) Her pensive face, the gesture of hand absolving this Prodigal Daughter who squandered, scattered her heritage of words in foreign lands.
Zofia Ilińska
Zofia Ilińska’s two volumes of poetry,
Horoscope of the Moon
and
Address of Paradise,
are published by Tabb House, 7 Church Street, Padstow, Cornwall.
The Smell of Old Notebooks
By Philip Marsden
I never imagined it would become a book. And when it did begin to grow into one, I never imagined this would be its final shape.
When Zofia first showed me her mother’s papers, I was amazed by them. I remember afternoons walking the cliffs completely absorbed in their conjured-up other-world of snowy forests and constant flight. I remember the powerful presence of the young Helena herself, the wide-eyed 17-year-old in revolutionary Russia, the 24-year-old riding through the forest to her rebuilt home, the 30-year-old struggling to manage her land. I remember the strange sensation of being a little in love with her.
But the papers were sketchy. What left Poland with Helena was next to nothing – a few notebooks, some letters. To these she added reminiscences later on, such as her time in St Petersburg, but it didn’t amount to very much.
A year or two passed. Zofia and I travelled to Belarus; the ex-Soviet Union fell deeper into chaos. Rather than fade, Helena’s story grew stronger. But how to tell it? Research failed to fill in enough gaps for it to be a biography. I began to picture some Zhivago-like epic, the central character a woman coming of age against the backdrop of the Russian revolution and the turbulent years that followed. Its deep resonance with current events was one spur to its progress. Another was the new pleasure of writing fiction. Six months later I had a baggy and very incomplete version of the book. I put it to one side. I spent that summer in Belarus and Lithuania and St Petersburg and the Caucasus. When I returned to the manuscript in September it looked flat. I tinkered with it, dropped some sections, wrote some more, grafted in the scenes that I’d sketched on location that summer. But still something was missing.
What it lacked, I realized, was the immediacy of reading Helena’s papers for the first time – the intimate thrill of the handwriting, the smell of the old notebooks. Fiction can do many things, but it cannot recreate that. Having identified the problem, I was still unsure how to solve it. I tried various fictional tacks without success. Then a friend said simply: ‘Why not tell the truth?’
I started on a new beginning: about my own discovery of the story. I wrote of the papers and that week first reading them and the journey that Zofia and I had taken. As I did so, so the real story re-emerged. It took me back to the growth of my friendship and fascination with Zofia as a child, the hints of some huge and tragic past. I told the truth, and all the pieces of the story fell into place. It was one of the most exhilarating periods of work I’ve ever had.
The result is a hybrid, a mongrel of a book. I have seen it in bookshops under ‘Biogràphy’, ‘Travel’ and ‘Fiction’. It contains elements of all three. Although in the final version I peeled away a large part of the fictional elaborations, some remain. Corners have been rounded, gaps filled, the narrative made clearer, the cast reduced. It was much easier than I thought to choose which bits of the novel should stay. Once I’d decided it should be ‘non-fiction’, it became obvious where my own imagination had strayed from the essence of the story.
The process taught me a valuable lesson: that there
is
a definite line, however narrow, between fiction and non-fiction. There may be facts in fiction, and there may be imaginative passages in non-fiction. Fiction sacrifices literal truth for essential truth; the story is invented for the purpose of conveying some wider truth. The most interesting non-fiction to my mind does something similar, but it is just more grounded. You select material, pick out revealing details, convey character, weave narrative. While there is no space to make things up, it is not as constraining as it might appear. It’s actually much closer to the way we interpret the reality of the world than pure imagination. The key thing I believe is to remain true to your intentions, true to your material and not to some artificial form or category of book. And if that baffles booksellers, then so be it. ■