The Bronski House (3 page)

Helena’s plan crumbled before her. It seemed suddenly childish and naive. She climbed back into the convent grounds.

Mother Immaculate took her inside and sat her in her office. ‘Now, Hela, I know how unhappy you feel. But it would be a terrible waste if you didn’t study. Don’t you agree?’

Helena nodded.

‘I want us to be friends. You must come and see me whenever you want.’

How can one be friends with a nun? thought Helena. But over the coming weeks, she found herself spending more and more time with Mother Immaculate. They sat in her office and talked after Mass. The other girls chastised Helena for it, but she didn’t mind. For the first time she felt affection for someone who was not one of her family – nor one of her animals. No one else, before or since, encouraged her in quite the same way.

The following summer, during the holidays, Mother Immaculate wrote to say she was passing through Wilno. Could she come and see the O’Breifnes? Helena was delighted. ‘Look, Mama, you will meet Mother Immaculate!’

Her mother read the letter. She shook her head. ‘Your friendship with this nun is not natural. I forbid you to see her.’

That autumn Mother Immaculate was posted to China. She was sent to teach in an Ursuline mission. Though Helena wrote to her frequently, and received long letters in reply, and though in these letters she gained constant reminders of the duty she had to her own talents, and though the phrases in those letters stayed with her for the rest of her life, she never saw Mother Immaculate again.

In 1916 this elderly nun was attacked on the steps of her own chapel by the lackeys of a Chinese warlord. Helena received news of her death early in 1917.

The tide had crept up the creek. A cold wind was blowing from the north. Zofia pulled up her collar and said, ‘Yes, I remember that story. She had those letters at Mantuski. She kept them in a Chinese ivory box. Goodness knows what became of them. Looted I suppose, like everything else…’

She looked up into the trees. The boughs of the scrub-oak were twisted into strange, serpentine forms. ‘What are we going to find, Philip? What will we find there?’

O
N A DAMP MAY NIGHT
, we crossed the border into Belorussia. The train pulled into a siding to be raised on vast hydraulic jacks – Polish bogies rolled out, Soviet bogies rolled in. Border guards climbed on board to inspect papers; the ‘jer-jink’ of their stamps rang out along the corridor.

Inside the old Soviet Union, I opened a bottle of vodka. We toasted the crossing and Zofia tapped the bottle and said, ‘Philip, I think we might need this again. Will you keep it to hand?’

We reached Minsk at about two a.m. The train pitched us out onto a dark platform, then sped on into the night, on towards Moscow. Zofia shivered. She looked at the dim ranks of Soviet buildings, the alien shapes of Cyrillic script and said, ‘Ach! What a grim place!’

Her fear of Russia was something elemental, instinctive. It had been bred into her with the unassailable prejudices of frontier peoples. She had been brought up in the shadow of the new Soviet border, less than sixty miles to the east of Mantuski. In those days, only stories permeated its barbed-wire coils, stories and bodies floating face-down in the waters of the Niemen. She learnt two things intuitively: that upstream in Russia, they killed girls like her, nice land-owning girls; and that peril, when it came, came always from the east.

‘Do you know that the first Russians I ever saw were the soldiers in the trees as we fled into Lithuania.’

And here she was, at two in the morning, fifty years later, east of her old home, on Soviet soil for the first time.

A war-like darkness hung over the city. I found a taxi which crept through the lampless streets in search of a hotel. At the first one, they said, ‘Nyet!’ At the second the receptionist didn’t even bother saying ‘Nyet!’ but simply shook her head. At the third they said, ‘Nyet!’ and the taxi driver came to argue. They still said, ‘Nyet.’

He and I stepped out again onto the street. In our absence, a man had got into the car. I could see Zofia cowering in the back. I ran across just as he jumped out, slipped around the other side, beat the car’s roof, then started to flap his arms like a bird. Before we could stop him, he was off, shouting bestially.

I opened the car door. Zofia was laughing, but in the darkness I could see her hands clasped tight over her handbag. They were shaking.

‘Oh, Philip, thank God you came back! Was he mad, do you think, or just drunk?’

Either way, it confirmed her worst prejudices.

We returned to the first hotel and, in the end, managed to bully a couple of rooms from them. The hotel in fact was virtually empty. In a room on the eighth floor, I reopened the vodka and poured two glasses.

‘Well, Zosia,’ I said. ‘To success!’

‘Success,’ she said, unconvincingly.

‘Are you afraid?’

She looked up at me and nodded.

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know, Philip. I just feel a deep apprehension. Perhaps this is all madness. I mean, how can we go back? How can we ever go back?’

I tried to see it through her eyes. How could I? Reading Helena’s diaries had only made me realize how distant it all was, how completely 1939 had divided their lives into two.

She looked down, fingering her watch-strap. ‘I don’t know, I just don’t know…’

When she looked up again, she said, ‘You remember what Konrad Lorenz said about those rats, how if one is killed they mark the place with their urine? Then the others know not to go back… and here am I – going back! It is madness!’ She raised her glass. ‘More vodka, Philip! Then I am going to bed.’

I stumbled back down the ill-lit corridor. I could not sleep. I propped the bottle on the window-sill of my room and looked out. The city of Minsk winked lamely in the night. This trampled, luckless city! Twice destroyed – once in the first war, again in the second. Eighty per cent of Belorussia’s towns and villages had been destroyed in the second war; one in four of its people had died. Zofia was seventeen that time; Helena was seventeen the first time.

I kept thinking of the patterns their two lives made across this dark century. Helena came of age with it, lost her innocence with it, was there – in St Petersburg, in 1917 – at the outset of its great and glorious experiment, the same experiment which forced her, several times, to flee for her life. Zofia and the new-bordered Poland were born in the same year, Polish twins, and both were seventeen when the borders collapsed: seventeen, 1917, 17 September, 17 on
Memory’s
distant, flapping mainsail.

Czesław Miłosz was born ten years before Zofia, in the same town, Wilno. ‘1914,’ he once wrote, ‘was the manifestation of all of Europe’s defects and of her end… the longed-for war of nations had brought Poland to life as a posthumous creation.’

Looking over the dark, lifeless pathways of modern Minsk, thinking of Helena when young, Zofia when young, the Russia of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the Poland of Mickiewicz and Reymont, I found the idea a compelling one: of living in a posthumous Europe, a Europe repeating in death precisely the mistakes it had made in life.

The next morning was bright; from my window, I could see the early mist lingering over the municipal lakes. In the hotel café Zofia was already up, already surrounded by coffee and books and bread, and already talking to a man called Vladimir.

Vladimir was an enormous man. He had thick black hair and hairy bear hands. His story as he told it began in 1940 when a Polish girl, a frail Polish village girl, first held in her arms the little bundle that was to become Vladimir. His father, she told him, had been a Russian officer. The war had brought him to the village, and the war had taken him away. For years Vladimir wondered about this man, this ghost of a man who was his father. When doing his national service he began his search: it went on for fifteen years. ‘Fifteen yerrs lukeing!’

In Moscow he had some success. He tracked down another of this man’s children. It seemed that Vladimir had twelve half-brothers scattered across the Union. Through a series of letters they all agreed to meet in Moscow.

‘Well, when I see them,’ explained Vladimir, ‘when I see them on railway station I hug, hug, hug. Twelve times hug! An the teers they come up, they roll like peas down the cheek. Like grreat beeg peas!’

Afterwards, when Vladimir had taken his briefcase off into the new uncertainties of the morning, Zofia tutted, ‘My goodness, how they weep, these poor people!’

Later I found her bending over a book in her room; she too had been weeping.

‘The dogs… You know, we abandoned them when we escaped, we left them behind…’

She was reading the account of a wounded partisan in a cave in 1940. A skeletal creature appeared at the cave mouth, licked the partisan’s face, then curled up at his side, dead.

‘Perhaps that was one of ours…’

And the tears rolled down her cheeks like peas.

We left Minsk a couple of days later, on a road lined with wooden cabins painted blue and green and yellow. Our contacts had found a Lada and a Russian driver named Andrei.

We drove west, beyond the fringes of the city, into the forest. A muddy sky hung over the morning, swollen with rain. Beneath it the land had flattened itself, and cowered in the shadows. We drove in silence. The forest thickened, the villages became fewer, then gave way altogether to the Puszcza Nalibocka, an expanse of bison-filled, tree-covered territory the size of a small county. The rain began to fall in large droplets which shattered on the windscreen. Andrei stopped the car, jumped out, clenched his lapels together and with his other hand attached the wiper-blades.

The cloud dropped. It wrapped itself around the pine-tops. In places there were clearings, but beyond them more trees, more forest. It gave the impression of some grim eternity.

Zofia sighed. She was looking out of the window, watching the trees slip past. I could sense her turmoil, could see in her eyes a shadow of the old catastrophe. We did not speak.

The
puszcza
ended and the trees gave way to fields. Cattle dotted the damp green spaces and then suddenly the clouds were broken and the sun was shining. It shone on the meadows and farm tracks, on the steaming thatched roofs of hay barns. The Niemen was now quite close. Mantuski was less than an hour away.

Zofia turned to me and smiled, whispering, ‘Philip, do you know I can hardly believe it! Before the sun sets I will be in Mantuski, after fifty-three years – and I am being driven there by a Russian who seems in no way intent on killing me!’

Leaving the main road, we drove down a barely metalled track towards Mantuski village. There was one long street and two rows of wooden cabins. Flashing between the buildings was the pale fish-back blue of the river Niemen.

We pulled up beside the village well. An old man was sauntering up the road, in and out of the shade of the chestnuts. The sun was low behind the trees.

The old man reached us. He looked up at us each in turn, his head askew. Zofia shook his hand and said to him, ‘I am Panna Brońska. Zofia Brońska.’

The old man blinked. ‘What?’

‘I am Zofia Brońska.’

‘Zofia Brońska?’

‘Yes.’

He took off his cap, blinked again. He looked up at her and frowned. ‘Little Zośka?’

She nodded.

‘
Nie… nie prawda… nie prawda,
little Zośka on a pony! In a red dress with your hair in plaits by the river… Panna Zośka, Panna Zośka,
nie prawda, nie prawda…’

Then the tears overtook him and he could not speak.

Zofia bent and kissed the old man and she too was weeping. ‘…my pony, yes, you remember, and the red dress…’

The old man pulled away from her again. He looked up at her with flooded eyes. ‘But why,’ he spluttered, ‘why you are so old?’

I asked him about the house.

‘The house? The
dwór?’
the old man was struggling to light a cigarette. ‘Nie ma!’ he inhaled sharply. ‘Nie ma domu.’

So that was it:
nie ma domu.
No house. I looked at Zofia; she seemed too dazed to register it.

‘Let’s go and look anyway,’ I said.

We drove on, through the village, beyond the last houses. Zofia was watching carefully.

‘It was some way beyond the village… these cabins are new… there was a cross, Michał’s Cross we called it, I don’t remember where exactly… and then the avenue. But none of this I recognize…’

We re-entered the forest. The Niemen was off to the left, through the trees. We carried on, slowly, and the forest gave way to a wide field of potatoes.

‘No, this must be too far.’

We cut down through the trees to the river, and back along the bank.

‘Oh, the Niemen… look at it…’ Zofia watched its spinning, turbulent flow. ‘Perhaps there is just nothing left of the house, nothing at all…’

I felt angry at her nonchalance, the old villager’s nonchalance. ‘There must be something!’ I said. Are you sure that none of this you recognize?’

‘Vaguely… the river…’

‘What about those buildings?’ Ahead were some low farm buildings.

‘Vaguely…’

But I saw they were new. Maybe she was right. And maybe it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was simply literal-mindedness on my part to feel the need, if not for the walls and roof, at least for some ruins, for a corpse.

‘Wait.’ Zofia sat forward. ‘There, that must have been the brick factory. So the house was in there somewhere.’

We drove through a
kolkhoz
yard. Two poplars rose above a well.

‘No, no, this isn’t right.’ Zofia sat back. ‘It’s all changed.’

Beyond the
kolkhoz,
the horizon was broken by a tall and scruffy tree. In Helena’s diaries, there’d been a larch on the lawn in front of the house.

‘That larch, Zosia. What do you think?’

She leaned forward again. ‘I think you may be right – yes… yes, that’s it!’

We got out of the car and walked, down a grassy path and through an orchard. The larch stood on a low mound.

‘That’s the larch!’

‘So where’s the house?’

‘There!’

I followed her gaze: a few bushes, some hazel trees, and beneath them, the stunted, grassed-over remains of some walls. That was all.