The Bronski House (6 page)

Zofia looked up into the trees. She was smiling. ‘You know, I think I can hear them all laughing – all the ghosts of my ancestors looking down at us, and laughing!’

T
HOSE WEEKS
in Belorussia passed quickly. They were brightly coloured, packed with a strange intensity. Each encounter, each story seemed to contain in it a lifetime of incident. Often, looking out of the car window as we drove, Zofia would shake her head and say, ‘I can’t believe this. I can hardly believe I’m here.’

Before returning to Minsk we managed to spend one more afternoon at Mantuski. It was a hot day. We walked down to Philosophers’ Corner and sat in the shade of the birch trees. The Niemen slid idly past our feet. We opened the bottle of expedition vodka and drank and talked of various things. Then I dozed off and woke to find that Zofia had written a sonnet. I asked her to translate it.

She cleared her throat. ‘“I sit by the Niemen and look” – no, “gaze – at the boats… offspring of crows cackle behind me… same woods, same meadows… decades have gone… and now this wordless enchantment – this loss, this sadness, this surprise –”’

She glanced up from the page. ‘No…
“zdumienie”.
It’s stronger than surprise… “amazement”.’ She read on: ‘“…what became of that water, what became of the time… spell-binding – self-absorbed – full flood tickling my stars and my fish. I hurry on to the sea, as this is my fate.”’

She looked at the river. ‘It’s odd. Here I seem to be able to write only in this canon of loss. And only in Polish.’

Later in the evening, our friends the doctor and his family came over from Iwje for a picnic. We drove through the forest, coming out of the trees further upstream.
Kolkhoz
cattle were scattered in the meadows on the opposite bank. The doctor’s wife unloaded food from the car; the rest of us went into the forest to collect wood.

The doctor was in high spirits. ‘In your country, you cannot do this. You cannot come and take wood from the forest! Everything belongs to someone, am I not right? But here we have socialism! Socialism! After all, who can such a forest belong to?’

I winked at Zofia. ‘You!’

It was dusk by the time the fire was hot enough to cook the potatoes. The smoke rose in the still air and tangled in the fringes of the forest. The doctor’s wife unwrapped from newspaper a Niemen pike; the doctor bit the plastic stopper off a bottle of vodka and spat it out. The
kolkhoz
cows were driven up out of the meadows, onto drier pasture. The river pressed on to the west.

A little later, full of pike and potatoes, and full of vodka, Zofia and I left the others and walked along the river. The moon was red and bulbous above the forest. The soft croaking of a woodcock came from the trees; the only other sound was the distant chatter from around the fire.

Zofia stopped, looking up along the banks. ‘Fifty years I have struggled to keep this place alive…’

The curls of her grey hair had been tousled by our travels; her eyes, sad and hooded as always, were calm. ‘Now it all comes back.’ She smiled. ‘I remember in the winter the noises the ice on the river made – cracking like gunshots. And here, I used to come riding. There was one day in particular. I was about fourteen and had a pony called Delilah. I tied her up over there. There was no one about, so I took off all my clothes and went swimming. That was forbidden, of course! But my mother was away and I remember thinking then, here on the river, that suddenly anything was possible.’

She paused. ‘How strange it is, that day seems to me now like the beginning of the world.’

We returned to Minsk. On our last evening, the last evening in Belorussia, we were invited to a ‘Poets’ Evening’ at the Dom Literatury.

‘What do you think that means, Philip, a “Poets’ Evening?”’

‘I’ve no idea, Zosia.’

We gathered in an upper room with about twenty or thirty others. After a series of readings, a song, more readings, more songs, there were the speeches. Everyone made a speech – speeches to poets, speeches by poets, speeches to wine-making, to poetry, to the new era of independence, to Belorussia. I was asked to make a speech and spoke about nationalism and its dangers, about the risks as I saw them of new fault-lines emerging in Europe – until I realized no one understood a word of English. Zofia had a little more luck with her Polish.

‘I am a Pole,’ she announced, ‘who fled my country when the Russians invaded in 1939 and now I have come back to see what happened. My mother lived in Minsk for a while in 1918 and she fled too. She was in love in Minsk but the Bolsheviks came and drove her away. And now they have gone, I can come back. Perhaps we should drink to that!’ She picked up her glass and everyone followed suit, nodding in agreement.

‘But I would also like to say something else.’ Zofia placed her glass back on the table. ‘I too am a poet. I have written verse now for more than fifty years. Yet in my writing I am a traitor. I have betrayed the greatest thing a poet is given – her own language. I had to abandon my beloved Polish and now I write poems in English and I feel like a bigamist… The only Belorussian I know is a rhyme I learnt as a child.’ (She recited the comic circular rhyme which she had told me, years earlier, concerning a priest and his dead dog. No one knew it. There was much applause.) ‘So I would like to drink a toast to the end of communism, to a new era, to poetry, to friendship, and to the Slavic soul which we all share and which seems to me to gravitate so beautifully between vodka and tears.
Na zdrowie!’

Na zdrowie!

Everyone clapped and drank. There were more speeches. A woman made a speech about Mickiewicz. A professor made a speech about politics. (They were all wearing tiny red-and-white badges on their lapels, the colours of their brand-new country for which they – the poets, the writers, the intellectuals – were trying to mould something distinctive from the heavy brown clay of Soviet culture.)

The professor was still speaking when the meal began. Spontaneously the poets leaned forward and colonized the plates of food. The professor gave up on his point about public spending and grabbed a sausage, two pieces of bread and a gherkin.

Zofia had recovered her good spirits; she was giggling. Opposite her a man in a black shirt, with a gold-toothed flashing smile, slopped vodka into her glass. ‘Drink! Drink, my jewelled Polish princess!’

She turned to me and whispered, ‘He thinks I am a princess. He has translated Verlaine and says he is in love with me! What do I do?’

‘I think you’d better marry him, Zosia.’

At the other end of the table a Romanian folk singer raised herself from her chair. She shrieked a song in Belorussian. When it was over, a tiny old woman stood up beside her. This old woman, with egg-yolk hair and an emerald-green cardigan, had apparently been a famous opera singer. She trotted out an unknown aria in a cracked soprano, and then said, ‘I am ninety-two. All my life has been dedicated to beauty.’

Another couple stood, fair-skinned and fair-haired. She was wearing a headscarf, he a buttoned-up mud-brown suit.

‘For twenty year,’ she explained, ‘he is in prison. I think him dead, in camp. Then he came to my door the week ago, and knock and say, Marta, I need some water. I am thirsty. Where have you been? I ask. And he is weeping like a child…’

Beside her, this man, spruce-straight and a foot taller than her, flicked the tears from his cheek as if they were pebbles.

A woman with an accordion started the dancing; people stood and soon the whole room was a mass of reeling, bobbing poets. The wild-faced lexicographer and the nervous teacher, the expert on Bernard Shaw, the toothless archaeologist dancing alone, a famous actress, a leaping linguist, a balding translator of Dante, an earnest young guitarist with sad songs, and Zofia with her Belorussian ‘husband’, her ‘Don Juan’.

The evening subsided into a haze of vodka and
żubrówka
and tearful speeches and stories. It was after midnight when people began to slip away. The lexicographer was asleep in a chair. The archaeologist was standing on one leg. The nonagenarian opera singer was carried out by her daughter the accordion player. The actress was weeping. Zofia was having her palm read by Don Juan.

‘Don’t throw your love to the dogs!’ he pleaded – adding, in a whisper, ‘My wife, she has the tongue of a viper…’ Then he cried, ‘Our meeting it was written in the stars! Such joy I have not known like this evening…’

‘But you,’ said Zofia, tapping his chest with her finger, ‘you are a Slav like me – and tomorrow you’ll be sad.’

Three days later, we crossed the border and arrived back in Warsaw. It was five in the morning and we were both exhausted. At the railway station we bickered, pointlessly – about where to get a taxi, about whether Warsaw was dirty or not, about the exact date of the Yalta conference – until Zofia threw back her head and laughed, ‘Look how foolish we are, Philip. We’re just tired!’ And soon we were in a taxi, winding through empty streets to the Dom Literatury: another town, another Dom Literatury.

We took rooms there and stayed several days, resting, reading, writing notes, seeing friends and having earnest debates with various writers. Our rooms looked over the cobbled square in front of the palace, over the Vistula, over the roofs of the suburbs to the forest beyond. The city that May seemed full of light.

On the plane home, Zofia said she felt she had ‘closed the circle’. That was why she had come all this way – to close the circle.

London was thundery and humid. We left the airport and took a bus into town. Our journey was over. At Paddington we stood together on the platform while heavy rain drummed the station roof. Zofia was going home to Cornwall; I was staying in London.

‘I will miss you,’ she said. ‘These last weeks have been incredible to me.’

‘For me too.’

She reached up and traced a cross on my forehead. ‘I leave you with an angel. May everything go well for you, dear Philip!’

It was November before I moved back to Cornwall for the winter. In the evenings, I went up to Braganza and sat with Zofia and we drank home-made
żubrówka,
distilled by a Polish cook in one of the local villages. Zofia remained poised in her high-backed chair, her face its usual medley of expressions, while we talked about pre-war Poland, about her mother’s reminiscences, about our own journey. At Christmas, we put together parcels of chocolates and clothes for Pani Wala and Pani Jadzia and the watchmaker – which never reached them.

In the meantime, Braganza’s bookshelves proved a jig-saw of Polish history: memoirs, poetry and novels, each volume adding a piece to the context of Zofia’s first life. Poland appeared in all its various guises – Poland as history’s plaything, Poland both conquering and conquered, Poland as the perennial survivor; Poland where personal lives seemed no more than a light diversion between wars, like a game played while waiting for a train.

‘
Polot,’
said Zofia. ‘It all comes down to
polot.’

‘
Polot?’

‘It doesn’t translate. “Lot” means flight, of course, like the Polish airline, and there is a sense of weightlessness about it. But it’s also a certain charm, a panache – something to do with being dashing and brave – appearing to fly through hardship!’

‘And your mother had
polot?’

‘Oh yes. She had
polot.’

In her
Lost in Translation,
Eva Hoffman cites two instances of
polot.
The first was in 1939, when the German Panzer divisions rolled into Poland, and the Poles, refusing to surrender, rode at the tanks with their cavalry. Then during the Warsaw rising of 1944, while the Nazis were flushing out the last pockets of resistance, the Poles erected speakers in the streets and played Chopin.

Other incidents from Polish history stayed with me. There was the victory message that King Jan Sobieski sent to the Pope after the Siege of Vienna: ‘Venimus, Vidimus, Deus Vicit.’ And the observation of an Allied observer sent to Warsaw in 1945: the place he said was full of flower stalls – not a building intact, rubble everywhere, bread beyond the means of most, but flowers, stalls and stalls of fresh flowers from the fields.

And the old Polish joke (the favourite, it is said, of Paderewski, Prime Minister of newly liberated Poland in 1919): a professor at an international college sets his students a long dissertation on the general theme of ‘The Elephant’. The titles come back as follows:

But the story that remained sharpest concerned the unveiling of a statue of Adam Mickiewicz in Warsaw. Like Pushkin, Mickiewicz is a national poet and his statue was to be a national monument. The time of the unveiling was shortly after the Polish Uprising of 1863, and the Russian governor was nervous. He wheeled up his artillery, knocking down several rows of buildings as he did so. Tens of thousands of Poles had gathered in the square. Henryk Sienkiewicz stepped up to the podium. From his pocket he took the pages of a speech he had been forbidden to make. He waved the pages in the wind. There was silence. He unveiled the statue. Still silence. The Russians stared at the Poles and the Poles stared at the Russians. Not a sound.

Then from the midst of the crowd was heard the noise of a woman sobbing. Then another, and another until all that could be heard in the centre of Warsaw, on the occasion of the unveiling of Mickiewicz’s statue, was a low collective wailing.

Mickiewicz was born in Nowogródek. Just off the town’s main square is the Dom Mickiewicza, a museum to his memory. Zofia said her mother used to go there in 1915 each Sunday after Mass, and found in her papers this description: