The Bronski House (9 page)

‘Helena.’

Aunt Minia gazed at her critically; the dog-sized beast munched away in her lap. ‘What do you like doing?’

‘Walking… riding. I read a lot.’

‘Well, you’re too pretty to be clever. Don’t trust books and don’t trust men with blue eyes or women who laugh. Stick to animals.’ And the old woman slotted another leaf into the rabbit’s mouth.

The land agent had a very frail wife who was also a distant cousin of Helena’s mother. It was perfectly all right therefore for Helena to make friends with his daughters. Or one of them at least: the other, following an ill-starred liaison with a Russian officer, had attempted suicide and Helena was forbidden to talk to her.

The respectable daughter was called Zofia. She knew the forests well and the two of them spent much of their days riding, and swimming in the lakes.

After All Saints’ Day came a spell of heavy rain and winds which filled the park with dancing leaves. Jews coming to buy calves whispered that the Germans had reached the Niemen. Other reports confirmed what they all feared: the advance was continuing.

Helena’s mother summoned everyone, family and staff, to the hall. She said, ‘The carts from Druków and Klepawicze must continue east. Whoever wishes to go with them may. But for the moment I am staying here.’

She then recited the ‘
Kto się w Opiekę’,
‘Prayers to God’s Providence’, from Psalm 92:

The next day a very worried Dominiecki rapped on the door of her room with word that a retreating Russian cavalry regiment had crossed the estate’s marches.

‘The officers are on their way here, Hrabina – to the house. What should I do?’

She opened the door. ‘Welcome them, Dominiecki. They will give us news.’

‘But they are not gentlefolk!’

‘They are officers.’

‘Yes, Pani Hrabina – but Russians!’

Late in the afternoon, a group of six hussars crossed the hall in shiny black boots. Helena’s mother stood stiffly on the bottom stair. The colonel, an elderly Muscovite prince with drooping cheeks, kissed her hand. He greeted her in Parisian French and introduced his officers.

They spent the evening in the Piesków drawing room. When Helena crept in, hoping not to be noticed, the hussars sprang to their feet. They called her to the piano, ‘Venez, Mademoiselle. On chante les chansons Russes!’

Helena’s mother relaxed for the first time in weeks. She asked Dominiecki to bring some vodka from the cellar. Dominiecki looked grave: Russians in the house was one thing, but giving them vodka, that seemed to him very unwise.

At the end of the evening, the colonel took Helena’s mother aside. ‘I would urge you strongly to leave this house. Another offensive is underway.’

‘An offensive?’

‘The front is very close, Comtesse. It is a matter of days. It would be safer for you in Minsk, or better still, in St Petersburg.’

The next morning Helena’s mother took her charges off again. The land agent sent his daughters with them.

Pulling out of the tracks of the estate, they joined the Minsk road. The mud was appalling. Helena described the scene: Russian soldiers and their carts and guns; many wounded; others with no more than bast sandals on their feet. She remembered a group of them leaning against the back of a clogged
tachanka.
They were trying to free it and, as she passed, she saw inside the
tachanka
a man lodged against a machine-gun. He looked at her blankly. He had lost both his legs.

After that the next few days blurred together. Helena wrote:

H
ELENA SPENT
the greater part of two years in St Petersburg. Of this time she wrote later: ‘these were in many ways the happiest years of my life. I came of age in St Petersburg, just as the city itself collapsed into chaos. I had never seen such splendour nor have I since…’

She was seventeen when she arrived, naive, private, used to the Kresy forests and the provincial life of Wilno. No photographs survive of her at this age, but in her notebooks of St Petersburg, written later, she drew an ink portrait of how she remembered herself, a neat and straight-backed girl dressed in fur, with a fur muff and a fur hat.

In St Petersburg too she had her hair cut short – so that it touched the bottom of her neck – and kept it like that throughout her adult life. She wrote that she learnt to ‘wear clothes properly’, choosing subdued colours and the ‘classical lines’ her father had wanted. It is clear that she was already beautiful, clear too that she was usually oblivious to the impression she was making – until it was too late. Things still happened
to
her. But St Petersburg opened her eyes.

Uncle Augustus – Uncle the Priest – found them a flat in a tenement off Ulitsa Pestelya. The panelled walls were varnished a deep burgundy red, the paintwork was white and the flat was very small – four rooms for Helena, her mother, her sister, the land agent’s daughters, Panna Konstancja, and Tekla who slept in a broom cupboard off the kitchen.

Helena shared a room with her sister. It looked out over a dirty courtyard. At night the courtyard filled with cats that fought and screamed in the darkness. By day a second-hand light seeped down its high, chimney-like shaft. For the first months Helena was ill; she hardly left her room. From her bed she watched the snow-flakes corkscrew out of a grey sky. The days sped past and shrank. The doctor came with tonics of almond juice. Much of the time she slept.

On Christmas Day, 1915, Uncle Augustus stepped into the flat with a small Chinese song-bird in a cage. The bird had white feathers and a red bill. He hung him up in Helena’s room and she christened him Liki. For a year and a half Liki trilled in his brass cage by the window. He hopped between his perches; he pecked at the sunflower seeds Helena fed him. Then came the revolution and Liki vanished. Never again did she hear the sound of passerine song without thinking of three things: the cardboard glamour of St Petersburg, the cry of fighting cats, and the sight of her father, leaning on an ivory-topped stick, on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt.

In the new year of 1916, Helena grew stronger. She was able to eat boiled vegetables and an occasional herring. The doctor moved her off almond juice and on to a special butter supplied to him direct from central Russia.

Late January brought frosty skies and a string of Polish émigrée women to the flat. They wore sable furs and big jewels to compensate for the loss of their estates. Their husbands were either fighting, or already dead. They failed to conceal their discomfort at the size of the O’Breifne rooms. They asked prying questions about food, laundry, and servants, and leaned around Helena’s door to inspect her.

One of these women was Pani Józefina Pawłowska, ‘a famous beauty’, according to Helena. She arrived one day in an ankle-length zibeline coat. Standing for a moment by Helena’s bed, she stretched out her hands and half closed her eyes.

‘Blue – I see a blue aura around you!’

She sat down, crossed her legs, and tugged at the fingers of her black gloves. ‘I have heard something of you from your mother. But she said nothing of your beauty. Wretched woman! A bit of flesh back on you, and you will be exceptionally pretty. Helenka, I believe I love you already! When you’re better, promise to write and I will send my driver.’

By the beginning of February, Helena was almost fully recovered. Whenever the doctor brought his muslin bag of butter, she begged him to let her go out. On one day in February he turned to her mother and said, ‘Ça va! La jeune fille va bien.’

A week later, a sled pulled up in the courtyard and took Helena off to the Pawłowski house on the Moika canal. She climbed down and looked at the building. It was more a small palace than a house. The walls were a pale green, with a colonnade of fluted pilasters between the windows. A large cupola, patinaed and guano-stained, stood on top.

Pani Józefina was sewing in her emerald-green boudoir.

‘Hela,’ she stood and kissed her, ‘you look a hundred times better.’

‘Thank you, Pani Józefina –’

‘No! I am Aunt Ziuta to you.’

‘Yes, Aunt Ziuta.’ Helena perched on a cane chair.

‘Do you feel better?’

Helena nodded.

Aunt Ziuta smiled her frightening half smile. She wore a white silk shirt and a grey pleated skirt. Everything about her was crisp and elegant; she spoke in the best Warsaw Polish. She was unused to being interrupted.

‘Now, I want to know all about you. I imagine you understand nothing of life at all. That mother of yours! I suppose she taught you a few good prayers and told you to beware of men. Am I right?’

Helena nodded.

‘Well, seeing that you are here in St Petersburg, you will be my charge. You will be part of my family. With me you will come to know life.’ This last word she gave a peculiar, ambiguous emphasis. Then she smiled. ‘And in exchange, I need your help.’

‘Help, Aunt Ziuta?’

She smiled, running a hand down her swan-like neck. ‘You will come to know, Hela, that for me there is only one thing worth living for, and that is music. My eldest son has a voice like an angel, a bass voice that can break your heart. He is six foot six and quite maddening. He thinks he is a socialist. He goes round all his father’s factories preaching to the workers. They all think he’s mad. He never sings now. Our musical evenings were famous but now he has no time for them. That is where you come in – do you see?’

Helena shook her head.

‘Of course – you know nothing of men. But I guarantee that if you start to visit us, he will stay at home and stare at you and sing until he is quite hoarse.

‘As for the rest of my household they are of little interest. With my husband it is all business, business, business. You will no doubt find Florian my younger son quite handsome with his great calf eyes. But he wastes his time with books of science. He is completely tone deaf.’

‘Hela,
kochana!’
Aunt Ziuta greeted Helena on her second visit to the house. She led Helena through a series of rooms full of cut flowers, to a library and a long ballroom. At the far end of these cavernous rooms was a study. There, hunched over an oak desk, was the great Pan Pawłowski.

When Aunt Ziuta had married this man, in Warsaw, it was widely considered a
mésalliance.
He had, Helena recalled, brusque manners and was stout and rather animal in his ways. It was said his grandfather had been a Poznan peasant. But he proved a brilliant financier and built up a string of Russian factories. He amassed a fortune. In St Petersburg his baser quirks were accommodated: ‘Ce cher Pawłowski est tellement original. C’est un original – enfin!’ And in his deep armchairs and sofas, ambassadors and whiskered grand dukes came to exchange confidences.

When Helena entered his study, Pan Pawłowski stood and took both of her hands in his. He stared at her and said, ‘You have great beauty, my girl. What will you do with it?’

‘I want to study at university.’

He shook his head and laughed. ‘No, no. I think not! Girls like you don’t go to university!’

Helena said nothing.

Later she met his two sons. They made an odd pair. The one, Waldemar, tall, with dark hair, bowed as he took her hand; the other, Florian, a good foot shorter with huge grey eyes, stared at her in a disconcerting way.

That spring, Helena found her life dominated by the commanding figure of Aunt Ziuta. She spent a great deal of time at the Pawłowski house. She was invited to all the musical evenings and, sure enough, Waldemar began to have less time for politics and more time for singing.

Sometimes, on crepuscular afternoons, Aunt Ziuta would come to collect Helena and take her driving around the city, in a sleigh to begin with and then, in March, in an old and over-decorated carriage. The sun crouched on the skyline; St Petersburg rested on its swamp. It floated like a ship, and its orange façades, its lemon-yellow façades, its lime-green façades, its icing-sugar domes, seemed to Helena no more than players in some bizarre costume drama.

This was life, she thought. This was what Aunt Ziuta meant. She had only ever seen Wilno and Cracow and Warsaw, but St Petersburg and its people seemed altogether on a different scale. The town and the Pawłowskis became associated in her mind: St Petersburg was as appealing, and as heartless, as Aunt Ziuta herself.

They watched the guards goose-step at the Winter Palace; they saw Peter the Great rearing on his bronze horse. Aunt Ziuta had some colourful views on Russian history, and told Helena all the best anecdotes and scandals. She led her through the lit-up shops of Moskovsky Prospekt; they bought chocolates, tried on hats and furs and shoes. On the pavements of Nevsky Prospekt, Aunt Ziuta pointed out the ambassadors’ wives, the generals, the Duma socialists. Once they saw Rasputin, reeling out of a carriage.