The Bronski House (8 page)

‘When the Mass was over the general rose from his knees and turned to face the congregation. “Please, there is no need to fear. I am not Russian. My name is O’Breifne and I am a Catholic. I come from a very old Catholic country – a country far to the west called Ireland.”’

O’Breifne meant nothing to them, nor Ireland, and they were not at all convinced by this foreigner and his strange name.

‘Only when he returned with a Polish wife,’ said Uncle Nicholas, ‘did the people begin to believe him.’

Klepawicze was no more than a few hours’ ride away from Druków and Adam Broński was a frequent visitor. He was closely involved with the Polish underground movement and, wrote Helena, had the unquestioning respect of the peasants.

Though he completely ignored her, one thing about Adam made a particular impression on Helena at that time: he seemed utterly oblivious to rank. Her mother found this very strange. He appeared to come to Druków more to be with the land agent than with the O’Breifnes.

‘Wartime, dear. Farmers are very important in wartime. Adam must do his duty.’ And because he had such good manners, was the heir to Klepawicze, and was the son of Pan Stanisław Broński, she forgave him.

One morning, Adam rode over to help the agent clean the carp pond. Helena sat on the bank and watched. The two men opened the sluices and Adam stripped to the waist. He bent to pick the wriggling fish from the mud.

‘Breeding!’ he cried, or, ‘Cooking!’ and threw the fish into one or other of two galvanized bowls.

After lunch Helena stood before the high mirror in her bedroom. How could she get Adam to talk to her? Panna Konstancja had said if she made herself smart for once, she might be surprised.

She picked up her hairbrush. She pulled it down through her long auburn hair. It would not fall straight; she wanted it straight! But with each stroke of the brush its stubborn curl sent it springing back. She threw the brush down.

In the wardrobe were the Petersburg clothes her father had given her. She pinned her hopes on a dress of sky-blue cotton and a straw hat. Chewing a cherry to colour her lips, she went out into the park.

Beyond the drive was a small birch copse. Helena said she heard Adam’s voice echoing through the trees. She stood on the edge of the copse and pulled back the leaves to see in. He was alone. Now he would talk to her!

He was standing there beneath the trees, singing. He did not see her. He broke into a strange Indian dance. He threw open his arms and spun. He tried a one-legged pirouette but fell to the ground.

Helena could not help smiling. But she remained where she was. She watched him get up. She watched him run backwards and forwards through the trees. He did not once look in her direction. Soon he had run off into the distance. She waited for him to come back, but he did not. She returned to the house in silence. She threw her hat on the bed. What a waste of time it all was! Animals, as she always suspected, were much less bothersome.

I
N THE DINING ROOM
at Druków one wall was painted with a scene of Diana hunting in the Arician grove. Each morning, at breakfast, a samovar was placed against this scene. It filled the room with strange bubbling noises and Panna Konstancja would come in, wink at Helena, and cock an ear to the samovar: ‘
German idyot… German idyot
… Do you hear, Hela? The Germans are coming!’

And the German forces pressed on. From Klepawicze, the Brońskis – all except Adam – had already been sent to St Petersburg. Long lines of carts and livestock were filing every day through Nowogródek. News, rumours, counter rumours were all anyone mentioned. Adam Broński was about to empty the great vats of the Klepawicze still; the
spiritus
and the grain would be given to the peasants. Adam himself would wait and join the retreating Russian army.

Uncle Nicholas was unequivocal. He was sending all his valuables east. He told Helena’s mother to take her children with them. He himself could not leave his land.

So one morning in early September Helena and her mother, and her brother and sister, and Panna Konstancja and Tekla rose at dawn and gathered on the drive in front of the house. Uncle Nicholas stood on the steps. He was wearing a long overcoat and a pair of Berber slippers. He traced the sign of the cross over each child.

A train of wagons already stretched away into the avenue. All Druków’s valuables, all the furs and goldplate, the Persian silk carpets, the Saxony china and Kiev ware, and the trunks and trunks of Moroccan leather books, joined the bedding and fodder for the journey east. The horses were fidgety. Uncle Nicholas’s foresters ran up and down the line shouting to each other, checking the harnesses, finding space for the last few boxes.

In charge of this strange caravan, and its team of
parobcy
drivers, was Pan Rymszewicz, Uncle Nicholas’s gamekeeper. He put his lips to a hunting-horn and gave two blasts: the first carts lurched forward.

They drove out of the avenue. To the right a mist clung to the river but the water-meadows were empty. The cattle had already left. Passing the church, they joined the main road and turned into the sun. A small hill rose above the road and the track to Klepawicze led up over it. Waiting on the crest of the hill, beneath a clutch of larches was Adam Broński, seated on a bay mare. He galloped down to meet the wagons.

Reining in his horse he slowed to a walk and touched his hat to Helena’s mother. ‘
Dzień dobry
, Comtesse.’

Some of his own carts, he explained, with the silver, had also left that morning. Could they join theirs? They would be waiting at the Niemen. He rode alongside for a few minutes, then trotted up to Helena: ‘Good morning, Hela.’

‘Good morning.’

There was silence between them.

‘Panna Hela, you mustn’t worry.’

‘I am not afraid.’

‘Are you sure?’

Helena nodded, looking across at him. He wore a peasant
czapka
with the peak pulled down to his forehead. She thought: what tiny kind eyes he has.

‘Dobrze!’ he cried suddenly and, reaching into his coat, pulled out a pocket-knife which he pressed into her hand. He was galloping back up the hill before she had a chance to thank him.

At noon they reached the Niemen. A narrow wooden bridge stretched across it and, while they waited for the Broński carts, Helena climbed down the mossy bank.

It was, she remembered, a hot and windless day. She stared into the water; the ink-blots of scattered clouds lay on the surface. Helena broke them with her fingers. She rolled up her sleeves and pushed her arms into the water. The water was cool and oily, and she splashed it on her face. No, she was not afraid. Quite the reverse. She was excited. She was overwhelmed by the familiar sense of something approaching.

She took out the pocket-knife and rinsed it; the haft was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and set into it, in silver, was a worn Broński crest. That a Broński should be capable of kindness, any kindness, was quite a shock to her.

Pan Rymszewicz’s hunting-horn sounded and they carried on. They left the banks of the Niemen and plunged into dark forests where the sun slanted through the trees and the air was filled with the smell of pine resin. The noise of the convoy was louder among the trees, a noise of creaking axles, cracking reins and low voices.

At dusk they arrived in front of a small
dwór.
An elderly couple stood on the steps. Two ridgebacks jumped forward a few paces and then, seeing the size of the convoy, stood still and barked.

That night Helena ate in a vaulted dining room full of family portraits. She was given a room in the top of the house where the moon streamed over the boards and she slept deeply. At dawn Pan Rymszewicz’s hunting-horn sounded out across the park and the whole convoy set off down a pale road that skirted the forest. They climbed and came out of the trees. Topping a low ridge, Helena saw the chalky ribbon of the road for miles ahead, meandering across the plain, splitting in two the brown smudges of small villages, dipping into hidden valleys, following the perimeter of a distant forest before burrowing into it.

The days fused one into the next. They travelled for one week, two weeks, a month. Sometimes they stopped for a few days before continuing their eastward trek. The forest banished all thought of war. Helena felt happy, exhilarated. Each day was different. Her mother withdrew the barbed constraints that normally surrounded her. She relaxed; the progress of the convoy imposed its own loose authority and, in years to come, Helena looked back on those weeks in the forest, seeing the horses’ twitching ears, the arc of the wooden hames, hearing the creak of carts, and knew that this was the closest she ever came to any sort of freedom.

One night they stayed in a cabin on the summit of a small hill. All around them were camped the carts. Helena watched the fires stretch towards the trees. She left the cabin and walked through the camp. The smoke weaved up towards the great starry sweep of the Bird’s Way. She felt like Queen Jadwiga wandering among her troops.

On another occasion, in late September, they passed through a village. An ox-cart blocked the road and, while waiting for it to be cleared, the Belorussian villagers gathered round the wagons. Their children were barefooted and the men had dirt in the lines of their faces. Pan Rymszewicz ordered them to clear the way but they pressed in closer.

He pulled his team off the road and led the convoy round towards the back of the village. He cracked a whip at two men who lunged for his reins. Others surged out of the crowd; one curled his stubby fingers around the calash hood of Helena’s
bryczka.
He thrust his face in and for an instant she was staring into his eyes. She felt his breath on her face. He shouted something in a strange tongue and gripped her ankle. Then the horses leapt forward and he fell from the wagon, and they were bumping over the stony verge and into the fields.

After that Pan Rymszewicz avoided the villages. The convoy relied on the forest, and the hospitality of remote
dwóry.

Some of the landowners were oblivious to the approaching Germans. The convoy arrived one afternoon at Wojopodorsk. The entire household was taking tea on the terrace, sitting at round tables, or on the steps, or standing importantly behind the chairs: old men in silk dressing gowns conferring, a boy with a pet rabbit, a widow with a dog in her lap, a young girl with her arm in a sling playing chess with a woman in a tiara of white lilac. The war, wrote Helena, was not mentioned at all by this family.

Others waited alone. They stayed once at a place called Barbarin, the home of a Graf Ignacy. A giant of a man, Graf Ignacy lived with his wife half a day’s ride from the nearest town. In his dining room, dozens of elkheads stared down on a table with a worn, gold-threaded military saddle in the middle of it.

Helena watched him fill and re-fill his pewter plate with slabs of half-cooked roe deer; at his feet two red-toothed borzois pitted their jaws against its globular hip-joints.

‘The Germans?’ he spluttered. “What do they know of the forest… We never budged for Bonaparte, why should we budge now?’

In the morning Helena heard gunfire; she opened the curtains and saw the cupola of Graf Ignacy’s head thrust from a first-floor window; he was shooting rabbits on the lawn.

Many landowners had already left; sometimes Helena and the others spent the night on the bare boards of an abandoned house, and she would wake to sun in the curtainless windows and pick up her clothes and leave beneath huge chandeliers cocooned in dust-sheets.

In the first days of October, they arrived at Piesków, to the north-east of Minsk, home of Helena’s uncle and a pair of very odd great-aunts.

The approach to Piesków, Helena recalled, was from below, over a little stone bridge with a wrought-iron fence on either side. Lilies lay on the lake below the bridge. The drive was made up of loose stones and gravel which crunched beneath the convoy’s wheels. The carts pulled to a stop in a long line. On the steps stood a liveried butler and a fat man with a plum-red face. The butler was called Dominiecki; the red face was that of the land agent.

‘Hrabina, Pani Hrabina!’ Dominiecki stepped up to Helena’s mother. He had a flustered manner. ‘We heard of your coming, Hrabina. The Hrabia is fighting and the others have gone to Moscow only two days now. But we have instructions, Pani Hrabina, instructions. Please…’ He bowed, clenching and unclenching his palms. Then he led them all into a hall with a vast, chess-board parquet floor.

After weeks in the forest Helena was shown up the wide stairs to a crisp-sheeted bed and a deep hip-bath. Lying back on the bed, she tugged off her boots; a shower of pine needles fell on the counterpane. She stepped barefoot to the window and watched the horses, bucking and kicking after harness, running around the paddock.

They spent a whole month at Piesków. The German offensive had slowed, and they had dug in to the west of Minsk. There would no more fighting, it was thought, until the mud had frozen and the roads were passable again.

Piesków was a strange household, and nothing was stranger than the two great-aunts who lived in the attic. Their presence hovered over the house like a taboo. The only approach to their rooms was a steep staircase and a door which was always closed. Sometimes they wouldn’t come down for days and at these times their food was left on the stairs.

Helena remembered the older of the two – Aunt Minia – as an angry old woman with no time for anyone; what affection remained to her was directed towards two dozen rabbits which she kept in a fenced-off patch near the kitchen garden. If she talked at all, it was usually about rabbit manure.

Her sister was six foot six, deaf and famously holy. God had made her tall, people said, in order for her to be closer to Heaven. She spent her days, if not in the attic, in the Piesków chapel, her shoulders and long neck rising from the back pews like a steeple. Being deaf she rarely spoke; if she suspected someone of addressing her, she simply smiled and closed her eyes.

Helena sometimes glimpsed her in chapel, but never managed a word from her. Aunt Minia she talked to only once. Sitting in the corner of her rabbit hutch, the elderly woman was feeding lettuce leaves to an enormous jack rabbit. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.