The Bronski House (4 page)

Zofia put a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh my goodness! The poor house has crawled away!’

She stepped onto the ruins. She took a small plastic bag from her pocket and filled it with soil. ‘To sprinkle on my coffin,’ she explained and suddenly she was grinning at herself, at the trees, at the absurdity of it all, at the baffling distance between her two lives.

W
E STAYED IN
the small town of Iwje that night. The next morning was bright and warm. We went back to Mantuski early. As we walked down the street, Zofia looked at the bright yellow-painted cabins, and said, ‘Oh, thank God I came! What marvellous days these are!’

Behind us there was the click of a gate. ‘Proszę Pani! Pani Zośka!’

The old man from the day before hobbled up to us. ‘Proszę Pani, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for yesterday.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Honestly.’

‘Only I was drunk. I meant to give you this, you see. I’ve been keeping it.’ He held out an old silver knife. It was broken. ‘From the
dwór,
Pani Zośka. I found it at the
dwór.
And I kept it for you.’

She smiled. ‘Please, keep it.’

He pointed down the road. ‘There’s Pani Wala wanting to see you down there beyond the school.’

‘Pani Wala – the seamstress?’

The old man nodded. ‘Beyond the school!’

We carried on.

‘Yes, I remember Wala,’ said Zofia. She had been descended from a foundling. Her grandmother had been abandoned and taken in by Zofia’s grandmother.

We found her house. Bantam chicks scurried out of her yard. I knocked on the door. An old woman appeared in a sunflower housecoat. She saw Zofia, and burst into tears.

Zofia took her hand and they sat on a bench in the sun.

Pani Wala could not believe it. ‘Pani Zofia… this is a vision, I am seeing a vision…’

Zofia talked with her for a minute or two, then asked about the house.

“…Yes, they burnt the house, they took
off its
clothes and burnt it.’

‘Who?’ asked Zofia.

She shook her head. She was overcome. She looked at Zofia and rolled her head from side to side. ‘Oj-oj-oj Pani Zofia, it is like a dream your coming… so many things have happened so many deaths so many births… mountain cannot meet mountain but man will meet man again…’

Zofia repeated her question about the house.

‘Partisans, it was the partisans…’

Partisans. Every story here led back to the partisans. It was a generic term, an explanation in itself, like ‘Chernobyl’ or the ‘Mafia’. From the day Helena fled with her family, the day of the Russian invasion in 1939, bands of villagers began to take to the forest. The forests here were wilderness, as impenetrable and wild as mountains. Only years after the end of the war did the last partisans finally re-emerge from them.

‘Partisans,’ repeated Pani Wala, ‘the Red partisans burned it when the ground was hard, burned it and it was smoking for days…’

When the Germans invaded in 1941, the numbers of partisans increased. There were Polish partisans, Belorussian partisans, Jewish partisans, partisans with Bolshevik leanings, nationalist partisans. They fought as much amongst themselves as against Germans or Russians. During the German occupation, amongst the most effective were the Red partisans, backed by Russians. That put a date on it: after the Blitzkrieg of summer 1941. So the house was burnt that winter of 1941/42. Burn the nests, Lenin had said, and the birds will not come back.

Pani Wala stared ahead. The tears ran down her cheeks. The decades piled up behind her lips; she was unable to hold them back and all at once she was talking, in a trance-like monologue that was two parts poetry and one part song:

‘
Boże, mój Boże,
what life there was then, picking raspberries and redcurrants and the pears you brought pears in your hat… on the tennis court the girls were singing and you with your books in the shade, you with your books and me darker than a beer-bottle and the dresses I made from Wilno cloth… But oh my God what happened what happened when the Russians came… you took the horses and fled, and the Germans came with their machines and the Russians were in the river… then the Russians came again and the Germans were in the river with their machines, drowning drowning like beasts in the river spread like leaves in the river…’

She paused. Zofia and I were silent.

‘…Then the partisans at the window and the houses burning and who were they all who went into Russia… my Kazik bootless in the snow… God, my God and just last week the girl dead in the forest her breasts cut…’

Pani Wala turned and looked up at Zofia. Her eyes were red with tears. She took Zofia’s hand in both of hers and gripped it fiercely. ‘Pani Zofia, I will weep all night remembering you! You, Pani Zośka, with your little plaits and your bright face and the red dress I made with flamenco pleats…’

Pani Wala told us about an old woman living alone in the forest. Pani Jadzia, as she was known, had a wooden hut on the edge of a field of rye. Behind the hut was the forest. It was all very remote.

She was standing by her well when we arrived. Zofia explained who she was and Pani Jadzia nodded without smiling. She unhooked the bucket and started to carry it to the hut.

Yes, she remembered the Brońskis. She remembered her sheep straying onto their land and Pan Adam finding them; she remembered him riding over, and her expecting his anger but instead he had asked about that year’s lambs and sat and drank
kwas
with her father.

Pani Jadzia took her water inside and came out again into the sun. We sat on a bench against the wall and she looked at us both in turn.

She must have been well over eighty. Her head rose not upwards but forwards from the small mound of her shoulders. Her face was unmoving, set firm against the world. When she relaxed, as she did after her scrutinizing, you could tell she was smiling not because she smiled, but because there was a faint softening in her stony expression.

She told her story without sentiment. Many had told us how good the old life was, the life before the war. Pani Jadzia had no such illusions: it was all just as bad.

During the German occupation, she had been in the church one morning, the Gawja church a mile or so away. Walking home, she heard shooting. When she reached her home, the soldiers had already left. Her father, her mother, three brothers and two sisters were lying dead beside the beech trees.

Pani Jadzia paused, but her face remained expressionless.

Shortly after her family was killed, Pani Jadzia married. Her husband came to live with her in the forest. He helped her to take over the running of the sheep and the crops and the bees. Each week he rode into Nowogródek for supplies. One day he didn’t come back; he’d been run over by a German tank. Then the Red partisans came out of the forest and burned everything.

Pani Jadzia married her second husband soon after the war. One evening someone leaned in through the window and shot him; there were rumours of some mistress or other. Her third husband was a drunk and she left him. Several years ago a herd of bison broke down her fence and trampled her plants and toppled her hives. Now she had only her bees and her dogs and a cow, and at hay-time her son came to help her. Yes, she said, God had blessed her with a fine son, a fine, strong and sturdy son who helped her at hay-time.

As we left she gave us a small jar of honey; I have never tasted such honey as Pani Jadzia’s.

Back towards Mantuski, the pine forest closed in again. There was a group of villagers retrieving potatoes from an underground store.

‘The dogs’ grave,’ whispered Zofia.

‘What?’

‘If they ask what we are doing, we say to them: “We are looking for the dogs’ grave.” There will be a hundred eyes watching us, ready to attack us!’

By this time, the silver had become almost an irrelevance to me. But it seemed churlish not to make some sort of effort.

‘Now,’ explained Zofia, ‘on that morning, we heard the Russians had invaded at about five. Everyone was in a panic, running around like madmen. Mama and I went into the forest. We had the silver in mushroom baskets. We walked for about fifteen minutes and found a young plantation.’

We reached the ruins of the house again and stepped into the forest.

‘Yes, it was in this direction. There were trees and then an open place, and then the plantation.’

The trees gave out sooner than Zofia was expecting. ‘Ah… they must have cleared some of the forest here… That way! To the left.’

We skirted the edge of the field until we reached the trees on the far side. They were tall pine, laid out in ranks.

‘This must be it!’ said Zofia. ‘The plantation! Now, seventeen for my age, forty-one for Mama’s. The seventeenth row and the forty-first tree!’

I started to count. At seventeen, I cut across into the trees and was surrounded at once by that peculiar expectancy of the forest. The ridges were covered in a thick cushion of pine needles. Cobwebs hung in the still air. One or two trees had fallen, and their slender trunks lay slumped in the undergrowth. Where there were gaps the sun fell through the canopy, onto the forest floor like light into a cathedral.

Twenty-nine, thirty… At thirty-one, I reached a narrow track. Was it here fifty years ago?

I heard Zofia shouting from the edge of the plantation. ‘There are people coming. Hurry!’

Beyond the track, the trees continued. Thirty-five, thirty-six–a gap at thirty-seven, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one.

‘Hurry, Philip!’

A thick branch lay across the trench and this I broke. I dug down about two feet. The soil was soft and crumbly. There was nothing. I dug some more. Still nothing.

‘Philip!’

Each stage of our walk here had diminished my faith in Zofia’s navigation. That this was the right direction from the house, that it was the right plantation, that the rows had been left intact, that I had estimated the right number of trees, that fifty-three years had passed with the hoard not being found; all these things I doubted so much that, had it been there – had the silver candlesticks and salt cellars appeared gleaming among those roots – I honestly think the sheer improbability would have driven me mad.

I walked empty-handed back to Zofia. A group of three peasant men stood around her. She looked nervous.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

She turned to the men. ‘The dogs’ grave, you see. The… dogs’… grave.’ But they weren’t Polish and didn’t understand. They leaned on their scythes. They scratched their heads. One of them said something and the others laughed. We walked back through the trees.

It was a hot morning; flies hovered in the shafts of sunlight. Everything was brown and dusty. A cuckoo sounded from deep among the trees. We followed a sandy path that meandered through the pines, through the semi-darkness, and came out onto the banks of the river. The water stretched before us, brilliant and steely blue.

We walked a little way upstream. The forest fell away; the banks widened to a spongy sward. Zofia said, ‘Oh isn’t it beautiful, just as I remember it…’

Helena’s papers were full of descriptions of this place; her love for it at times seemed almost to exceed that for her family. She used the forest like a palliative, the river like an oracle. She revived her spirits with the powerful tonic of the landscape. She escaped to it. Here, seeing it in the flesh, I could understand why.

On the opposite bank they were taking in the hay. A man was standing on the top of a cart spreading the grass. Others swayed through the fields with their scythes.

‘Somewhere here,’ said Zofia, ‘we had a place… we always came to it at this time. Yes, there, in the trees!’ A small burst of birch trees stood on the river’s edge. Beyond it the river took a sharp turn to the left. ‘We called it the Philosophers’ Corner. We used to come here and talk – great big talks!’

‘About what?’

‘Oh, you know – life!’ She pronounced it voluptuously – ‘lye-ffe’ – as though it were a favourite dish.

We sat on the bank by the trees. The sand martins twittered from across the water; others flew back and forth, dipping and diving over the river’s languid stream.

‘So,’ she said, ‘no house and no silver!’ She did not sound disappointed.

‘But these people that remember you?’

‘Oh yes, that is worth much more.’

‘Zosia,’ I asked, ‘do you know now why you had to come?’

She watched the river for a moment, then nodded.

‘Why?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just curiosity?’

She paused. ‘You know, if we’d found the silver and been killed by those peasants for it, it would have been because of my curiosity – I’m sorry! Women are more curious than men.’

‘Really?’

‘Listen, we used to play a game here.’ She cupped her hands and shouted across the river: ‘Kto zjadł jabłko z drzewa?’ The echo came back from the far bank: ‘eva, eva…’ ‘You see?’

‘No.’

She smiled teasingly and shouted, louder this time: ‘KTO ZJADL JABLKO? DRZEWA… EVA… eva… va…’

‘No!’

‘“Who has eaten the apple of the tree?” And the echo comes “Eve”! You see, curiosity. She ate the apple out of curiosity.’

‘And then look what happened!’

‘Yes. Banished from the Garden. Just as we were.’

I asked if she really saw it as a vanished Eden.

‘In a way, I do.’

‘But it’s a savage place.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that as well. A savage, damaged paradise.’

L
ATER THAT WEEK
, Zofia and I went down to Lida to try and find the house of her grandparents. We found a
sovkhoz,
a vast collective farm. A sign marked the entrance with a name that had echoed through Zofia’s childhood: KLEPAWICZE. The sign was a fine piece of Soviet kitsch, painted in a silvery, zinc-like paint and decorated, in bas relief, with a blooming flower, a wheat sheaf, a milk churn, a fat cow and a sickle.

Concrete buildings marked the core of the
sovkhoz
and on top of the largest was a digital read-out. The read-out changed every half minute or so – the time changed to the temperature, and the temperature changed to an enigmatic ‘10’.