The Bronski House (10 page)

In late February Aunt Ziuta asked Helena and her mother to a gala performance of
Swan Lake
at the Mariinsky Theatre. The evening was sharp and frosty. Ranges of snow rose at each corner. Everyone seemed to be converging on the theatre entrance. Kozlinski, a favourite of the Tsar, was dancing the lead.

Helena remembered nothing of the ballet itself – only a semicircle of grand dukes, in white guards uniforms, standing on a red carpet in the foyer. That Tsar Nicholas himself stood in the middle of them. Helena hardly noticed. The grand dukes towered over him. They were like immortals, a medalled pantheon, creatures of another world. But it was the sight of Prince Yusupov among them (who later killed Rasputin) that stayed with her. ‘Never have I seen such a beautiful man,’ she wrote later. ‘God broke the mould when he’d made Yusupov.’

On Saturdays there were dances at the Pawłowskis’. One of these, shortly before Lent, Aunt Ziuta elevated to a ball. It was Pan Pawłowski’s birthday. To open the evening, Waldemar was persuaded to sing some arias of Mozart to please his mother, and then, to please his father, Polish folk songs to a balalaika.

Afterwards, with perspiration gleaming on his forehead, he came up to Helena.

‘Bravo!’ she said. ‘Your father was delighted.’

‘I care nothing for him. I sang for you only, Helenka.’

‘Oh Waldemar, what idiocy!’

Later she danced with him – a polka – the first time she had ever danced at a ball. After it she sought out her mother. She found her in Aunt Ziuta’s day-room, fanning herself among a group of Polish women.

‘Mama! You missed the dance. I danced with Waldemar – you missed it!’

‘Did you enjoy it, dear?’

‘Oh, yes!’

‘Well, you’re not to dance with him again.’

The evening continued. Aunt Ziuta sat in front of the musicians, flanked by a pair of young hussars. A smile creased her cold face. Before her, the men of the Corps des Pages whirled around the floor. With their chiffoned partners, they danced polkas and quadrilles, an écossaise and a pas de chale. The head of Waldemar could be seen bobbing over the top of the Russians. Once or twice Pan Pawłowski crossed the ballroom, oblivious to all around him, hands clasped behind his back, deep in discussion with some minister or other.

For Helena, the high spot of the evening was returning home. Moonlit St Petersburg lay before her; the roofs white with hoarfrost, the river Neva nudging its cargo of ice-floes into the Finnish Straits. Beneath the furs, still dizzy from dancing, Helena listened to the swish of the skis and thought, ‘How good to be alone again!’

One evening shortly afterwards, Aunt Ziuta took her aside. ‘Hela, I don’t know what the matter is. Half Petersburg is in love with you and you don’t take a blind bit of notice! Look at your clothes. Are you ashamed of your looks?’

‘No.’ But she knew she was.

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you afraid of me?’

‘No, not you,’ she said.

‘Your mother?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And that wretched Church of yours, no doubt! Look, Helenka, you must learn to be reckless.’

‘Reckless?’

‘Learn to wear your beauty like a joke. The more you treat it with levity, the more men will adore you. Always remember that men are like dogs.’

Suddenly Helena knew that she was wrong. ‘But, Aunt Ziuta, I love dogs! More than anything!’

‘Exactly,’ she said, and a slow smile spread across her face.

I
N THE SPRING OF
1916, news of the war reached St Petersburg like sudden changes in the weather, sometimes good, sometimes bad, always a surprise. The German advance had slowed through the winter, but they were now well established in Wilno. Helena’s father, Count O’Breifne, had had no leave. His regiment was based in Smolensk, and his letters spoke of mud and epidemics, and the wolves digging bodies from shallow graves.

One morning, early in the summer of 1916, Helena’s mother let out a small shriek. She dropped her newspaper. ‘Dear Lord! Stanislaw Pawłowski has died!’

She went to telephone Aunt Ziuta. Helena picked up the paper; there was no announcement of his death. And when her mother returned, she looked puzzled. ‘Stanisław himself answered the telephone…’

Three days later Pan Pawłowski suffered a massive heart attack; he died instantly. His funeral took place in St Catherine’s church on Nevsky Prospekt. The coffin was made of polished ebony and wrapped with gold galloons. Aunt Ziuta stood beside it in a thick mantilla and a long black coat. Not once during the whole service did she move. When for the prayers the vast congregation rustled to its knees, she remained standing. She stared ahead as if carved from marble: the statue, thought Helena, of some mythical apiarist.

In the weeks that followed Helena spent even more time with the Pawłowskis. To begin with, death paralysed the household. The young daughter, Maria, hardly ate and would faint frequently on the dozens of chintz sofas around the house. Florian paced the ballroom, holding his head. Aunt Ziuta received no one. Sitting straight-backed at the piano, she filled the house with the bom-bom-bom of Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’.

Meanwhile Waldemar renounced his socialism. Summoning his father’s factory managers he told them, one by one, that he was taking over. Florian adopted his role as Helena’s chief suitor and, when he was not filling notebooks with mathematical jottings, followed her every move with his big bovine eyes.

One afternoon in mid May she arrived at the Pawłowski home to find Aunt Ziuta playing Schubert’s ‘Impromptus’. Her widow’s weeds were gone and she wore a yellow dress. The sun was bright through the open windows; coils of wisteria hung down the walls.

Aunt Ziuta stood and smiled. ‘This evening Waldemar has agreed to sing, and a marvellous friend of his, a violinist, has just arrived from Moscow.’

Helena never heard Pan Pawłowski mentioned again.

The violinist turned out to be Helena’s cousin, Andrzej Mostowski. She hadn’t seen him since Wilno, where he used to chaperone her at dance classes. He wore a thin, meshy little moustache and was waiting to go into the army. She was overjoyed to see him.

To Andrzej, Helena was changed. ‘All that running through the forest has made a woman of you!’ he teased.

‘Nonsense, Andrzej!’

‘No, it’s true.’

And she knew he was right. During the warm months that followed, she sensed a strange ease within her. She moved through those great rooms on the Moika canal, making light of the dragoons and their gangish attentions, of the leering landowners and the covetous industrialists; she danced and debated, heard extraordinary things about peasant Russia, about the war, about people with names from history books. She learned a little recklessness.

And she knew Andrzej was right when, turning over these evenings on slow drives home along the Neva, with a daylight blue filling the night sky, she could pick out all the prejudices and deceits of Aunt Ziuta’s circle.

Yet when it came to herself, by her own admission, she was still as green as a spring beech.

One Sunday afternoon, she recalled, she sat in the Pawłowski drawing room with a young Estonian baron – a Lutheran named Lex Gintze. Lex was playing the piano. Helena was thinking about distant things.

Suddenly Lex let his fingers fall from the keys and turned to her. ‘Panna Helena!’

‘Yes.’

‘You have beautiful legs!’

‘What…’

‘Beautiful legs, Hela!’

‘Lex, what madness! How can legs be beautiful?’

But within a month Lutheran Lex, promising to become a Catholic, let it be known that he wanted to marry her. Helena was horrified. Her mother told him politely to wait, and taking Helena aside, chastised her for encouraging him.

Meanwhile there was good news from the war. On the Polish front, Brusilov had managed to push through the German lines; and for a few weeks the grumbling subsided.

Helena saw her cousin Andrzej frequently. They met at the Pawłowskis’, at the musical evenings which continued throughout the summer.

Florian was now more intense than ever, and would take Helena away from the music, into the library to draw diagrams of the planets, or explain how a tree fed itself. Having completed his singing, Waldemar would then come in from the ballroom and rebuke his brother: ‘Ach, Florian! Stop bothering poor Helena! She’s just not interested in all your wretched science!’

Sitting on her other side, Waldemar would then tell her about the danger of unions, about new shifts he had devised at his cabinet workshops, at an armaments factory, and the savings he’d made.

Andrzej was the only relief. He would come in, put down his violin and give a perfect imitation of the guests, the generals, the statesmen, all the men who had edged closer to Aunt Ziuta since the death of Pan Pawłowski. He was particularly good on a certain Italian count with his stock of badly sung arias. ‘Now, look! He is crawling to her on his knees, like this: “Your eyes like jewels, darrleeng! Oh my ’eart, he is a furnace…”’

Helena became close to Andrzej; he was the first man she could talk to. He was the first man she liked being with, whose attentions did not make her feel ill. Perhaps, she wrote, she even loved him.

During July and August the O’Breifnes went to the Pawłowskis’ dacha. The dacha was in a village near Terioki in Finland. Set amidst interminable forests, the village was little more than a long row of wooden cottages and smoky-grey birch trees. A group of larger houses had been built at the far end and one of these was the Pawłowskis’.

The paths of the village were spongy with moss. Long-limbed Finns wandered among them. They were pale-faced and taciturn. They clutched axes. But nothing ever happened in that village; it was a place of idyllic calm and it made Helena strangely uneasy.

Each morning, she walked to the Lutheran church, a tiny wooden building which smelt of dust and camphor. Helena, who always wore a dark velvet jacket, sat to one side. The services were conducted by a white-bearded priest and his pious son, Peter. Staring over the rim of the chalice, beneath a straw-blond fringe, Peter would raise his straw-blond eyebrows to Helena and urge her to take the sacrament. She became used to dipping her gaze.

But one afternoon there was a knock on her door and she found Peter standing on the step. He held a bunch of forget-me-nots. He had put on a grey suit and a bright blue tie. Asking God to forgive him, he said in English, ‘Miss Helena, you are the most woman I have seen. Please come walking on me!’

She thought it only fair to stop going to church.

Helena was working for exams. In October, she was due to sit for a diploma in English, and a Miss Gardner came up from St Petersburg to give her lessons.

Miss Gardner was a lonely, peripatetic young Londoner whom Uncle the Priest had just received into the Catholic Church. She was only twenty-two; she had long fair hair plaited like bandages around her head, and wore green blouses and amber beads. Helena found her lessons very tedious. She reminded her of her mother, and this always put her off.

‘Now, repeat after me,’ said Miss Gardner, ‘“From her unhasty mule she did descend, and on the grass her dainty limbs did lay…”’

Helena repeated the verses, but in truth her attentions were elsewhere – back in St Petersburg, back in the linden avenues of Wilno, back with Andrzej. The jagged forest skyline beyond the window became more familiar to her than anything by Wordsworth or Spenser or Chaucer.

Helena fell into a mid-summer torpor. For company of her own age she had only Maria Pawłowski. Florian was there too but behaving very strangely, even for him. He rose long before anyone else and would stumble in through the front door at breakfast, his eyes restless, his coat studded with thorns.

He wouldn’t eat, and Aunt Ziuta gave up with him.

One evening Helena was picking flowers some way into the forest. The shadows were heavy across the path. In the top fringes of the pines, clouds of midges spiralled against a blue sky; finches sang in the treetops. Resinous smells thickened in the summer air.

Helena was idly murmuring to herself in English, ‘…And on the grass her dainty limbs did lay… and on the grass her dinty dibs did lay… and on the path the stupid
anglais pays…
and on the grass…’

Bending to pick an orchid, she saw a figure wandering through the trees. It was Florian. He saw her and came over. He said nothing. His temples were sweaty and his eyes wide. He stood there panting like a dog, then reached out for Helena. She dropped her flowers and ran back to the village.

A few days later, in the second week of August, Waldemar came up to the dacha with Andrzej, and Helena’s days brightened up. Andrzej had just joined the Corps des Pages, and made everyone laugh with his imitation of the Russian officers.

At about noon each day, they would pack a pony with food and walk through the forest to the sea. There was a place there with a short jetty where you could swim.

Helena, Waldemar and Florian sat above the shore, perched on the lip of soil that overhung the rocks. Andrzej was swimming, and a cool wind blew in off the water.

‘St Petersburg is changing,’ said Waldemar.

Helena looked across at him. ‘What has been happening?’

‘Meetings, these meetings. No one is happy with the war. Constant talk against the empress and Rasputin. Last week I had to dismiss three of my managers for organizing a union.’

Florian scoffed at his brother. ‘A year ago, you were organizing the unions yourself!’

‘You understand nothing, Florian.’

‘Hypocrite!’

‘What do you know of real life? Eh? You just fill your head with the planets and your pointless sums…’

Florian’s doe eyes narrowed; he stood up clumsily. He glared at Waldemar, at Helena, then disappeared into the forest. No one saw him again that day.

The next morning was bright and cool. The dew lay thickly around the house. Helena went out after breakfast, sticking to the road to keep her shoes dry. In the meadows the grass was hung with gossamer threads; the early sun made them shine like water.

A little way beyond the houses, she came across Florian. He smiled and greeted her with a faint bow. ‘Panna Helena.’