Authors: Philip Marsden
*
The wedding was set for July. Helena’s mother became very excited about the plans. Aunt Anna was back at Platków and the two of them sat hunched over the card-table, playing dominoes and discussing the guests, while the cigarette smoke hung over their heads like a rain-cloud.
Aunt Anna was full of stories for Helena. ‘At eighteen, you know, boys are sent to women by their fathers. You’ll soon find out what Turkish habits they picked up.’
Panna Konstancja was gathering what she could for Helena’s trousseau, stitching cotton tea-dresses and handkerchiefs and raiding the attic for bed linen.
In June Adam came to stay for two weeks before the wedding. With him was his cousin Józef Kossak.
They brought worrying news. The Red Army was massing again in the east. Budyonny had already attacked the Polish forces to the south, in the Ukraine. But it was in Belorussia that the main thrust was expected. On 2 July, Tukhachevsky, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian forces, issued his orders:
Soldiers of the Red Army!
The time of reckoning has come.
The army of the Red Banner and the army of the predatory White Eagle face each other in mortal combat.
Over the dead body of White Poland shines the road to world-wide conflagration.
The attack on Poland was the Bolsheviks’ first foreign adventure. The plan was to link up with the burgeoning communist cells in Germany, and thence into Western Europe. Only Poland stood in the way, a country that had only existed for the last two years, and one that had, by common consent, already grown well beyond its capacity to defend itself.
On 4 July, the Red Army crossed the Berezina and took Minsk. On the 14 July, the day of Adam and Helena’s wedding, they swept into Wilno and the city fell. Not one of Adam’s family was able to reach Platków. The chapel was practically empty.
Helena wore a simple white dress and a tiara made from lilies of the valley. Sparrows sang in the chapel’s rafters; a blind fiddler accompanied the ‘Ave Maria’. Helena walked up the aisle – just as the gypsy had predicted five years before – on the arm of Józef Kossak.
Uncle the Bishop performed the ceremony. He stood before them, offering his blessing. ‘Do not expect happiness, my children!’ and his eyes filled with tears.
‘Pathetic priest,’ muttered Aunt Anna.
At the back of the chapel, sitting alone, with the face of someone who had eaten poison, was Touring Józef. A year later he was married to a war widow from Siena and went to live in Cannes. (Helena saw him only once, years later, in the late 1930s, a tired red-faced old man. She couldn’t decide whether it was exile or the war widow that had destroyed him.)
Stefan had painted the Platków carriage. With all suitable horses taken by the cavalry, he had harnessed Siwka and Gniadka, Platków’s surviving plough-horses.
At nine o’clock that night Adam and Helena stood on the Platków verandah. The dusk gave way to night and they stepped inside. Helena went up to bed in her usual room. Adam was given the room next door. Beyond him was Helena’s mother, with Uncle the Bishop on the other side. Panna Konstancja was upstairs.
Adam entered Helena’s room in a dressing-gown. He sat on her bed and kissed her. She kissed him and said politely, ‘Goodnight, Adam.’
Then they knelt for prayers. He kissed her again on the forehead, and went back to his room.
Helena was still wandering the avenues with her rosary, gazing at the high trees, humming her breezy tunes, bending in the grass to pick flowers. It took Adam some time to explain, to gain her trust. She found the whole thing faintly comic. Their real honeymoon took place that winter, on a snowy night in a Warsaw hotel; and during the months in between, to Helena’s great surprise, they forged a remarkable friendship, a friendship without secrets or conceits, whose boundaries grew with each day, and which provided the basis for the only real love she ever knew.
The day after the wedding it was hot again. Helena and Adam sat by the lake. Adam read out passages from Majewski’s
Kapital,
and sang the ‘Dubinoczka’. They talked about the future. At midday they walked back to the house.
Five Lithuanian soldiers stood on the steps; they had come to intern Adam.
There was nothing anyone could do. They took him away and Helena saw the cart sliding off into the avenue, flickering between the chestnuts like a running trout.
‘Damn those Lithuanians!’ Helena’s mother threw her cigarette to the ground.
That afternoon she and Helena went to see the district commander, a man with tiny eyes who divided his hatred evenly between Poles and landowners. Helena could see he was enjoying their misfortune.
‘Pani Hrabina,’ he said with mock respect, ‘you must understand. The old countries are gone. Six wars are being fought around your beloved Poland and when they are over, all Europe will be one. Please, be patient.’
Patience was not something Helena’s mother found easy. For three days she smoked and paced the verandah, until Adam appeared one morning from the trees. He had escaped the internment camp by pretending to be a doctor.
That same night they all left Platków, just as the year before, fleeing on farm-carts. Adam was keen to join his regiment. They travelled west, crossed the border into East Prussia and reached Gdansk on a small fishing-boat; Helena was horribly sick the whole way. Several days later they were in Warsaw, where Adam kissed Helena on the cheek, and went to find the 13th Uhlans.
Such was the first week of their married life.
The Red Army was closing on Warsaw: six armies, more than 100,000 men, were moving rapidly towards it. All attempts to slow them had failed. Poland’s brief independence was being shattered. Yet in Helena’s account there is nothing about the threat, nothing but a list of who she saw and where she stayed and the fact that Warsaw seemed ‘rather hot’.
Lord D’Abernon, head of an Allied delegation, recorded the same apparent nonchalance in his Warsaw diary of the time:
26 July. I continue to marvel at the absence of panic, at the apparent absence indeed of any anxiety… all the best troops are being sent to Lvov, leaving Warsaw unprotected.
27 July. The Prime Minister, a peasant proprietor, has gone off today to get his harvest in. Nobody thinks this extraordinary.
2 August. The insouciance of these people here is beyond belief. One would imagine the country in no danger and the Bolsheviks a thousand miles away.
3 August. The population here has seen so many invasions that it has ceased to pay any attention to them.
Examining his options two nights later, Piłsudski realized the only hope of defence was to attack. The orders were issued: a large part of the Polish troops were to disengage, hurry south along the front, and cut off the Red Army from the rear. The plan was an absurd one. Yet it worked.
The Miracle on the Vistula, as it became known, was a decisive victory. Never again was the Soviet army defeated so emphatically. There followed a bloody Russian retreat. The Red Army slid into disarray. The lands of Kresy were trampled by starving, leaderless Cossacks and retributive Poles.
By October 1920, an armistice was called and Poland found itself with an eastern border more than 500 miles long. Lord D’Abernon, who had witnessed the Polish victory, gave its importance a hyperbolic assessment:
The Battle of Tours saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran; it is probable that the Battle of Warsaw saved Central and parts of Western Europe from a more subversive danger – the fanatical tyranny of the Soviet.
In fact it proved only a respite, a twenty-year respite in which the landed families of Eastern Poland carried on living much as before.
Adam was demobbed in November. He came back to Warsaw and burst into the flat with his customary enthusiasm. He and Helena planned to leave for Mantuski. Helena had no clothes but summer clothes. One day in the street she met her Uncle Nicholas O’Breifne. He gave her some money for a winter coat, but the money went instead towards the price of a black-eyed dachshund puppy. Helena called the dachshund Haust.
The following morning, she and Adam and Haust left Warsaw on one of the first trains to the re-established territories of Eastern Poland. They spent two days sitting on sacks of grain from America, while Helena clutched her dog for warmth.
In Lida they stayed with a Jewish family. When she heard where they were going, the old woman clapped her hands in horror. ‘Alone in the forest! How can you live there now?’
In the morning they left early. They loaded their few belongings on to an old dray with low sides and a high box. They told the Jewish family their horses would be back in a few days.
Helena remembered the journey well. It was bitterly cold. An icy fog had paralysed the land. Nothing moved in that dead November; the road was no more than a series of frost-hardened ruts, the scars of a dozen armies. And yet, she said, everything seemed hopeful and new: new home, new Poland, new dachshund, new Adam.
They rode in silence. The reins rested lightly in Adam’s gloved hands. His moustache had thickened in the army. His high forehead rose steeply before shelving back beneath the peak of his peasant
czapka.
‘How he loved that
czapka!’
thought Helena. And always his grey eyes, hooded at the corners, bright with an eternal uncomplicated joy.
All morning the forests dozed beneath the fog. There was no one else on the road. Around midday the trees thinned and they entered a plain. A milky sun seeped through the cloud; the unworked fields wore thick fringes of grass. The road dipped and rose through a number of low hills.
They came to a small river; the bridge had been destroyed and the two horses placed their feet tentatively on the frozen water, which gave way. They crossed the river with the ice just above their fetlocks, breaking it with each step. Adam stood on the box to shout them on, and soon they were bounding up the far bank.
Sitting down again, he began to talk about Mantuski. He spoke of his visit there last year and the damage that he’d found. The Russians had used the house as a field headquarters and much of the furniture was destroyed. He had managed to arrange repairs and redecoration and ordered new furniture. ‘You will like what I’ve done!’
The day slid into afternoon. In the colourless twilight, they pulled off the main road and onto a soggy track which threaded its way between the trees and out again into the homesteads of Mantuski village. The houses were low and brown. Each one was penned in by a square of picket fencing. Leafless trees were scattered among the houses; narrow streams of smoke rose from the chimneys. Helena waited to see her new house.
A cold wind blew through the pines. Broken ice lay across the Niemen. The sky was black as they pulled through the village towards the house. There was no house.
Nie ma domu.
Only the chimney of the brick factory remained. Not one other building. The house had been burned to the ground.
Helena says nothing about her or Adam’s response. She says only that it was dark by the time they crossed the Niemen, and that they drove on through the night to Druków.
One or two of Uncle Nicholas’s retainers were at Druków – Rymszewicz (who had led the convoy in 1915), his wife, Janówa the cook. They greeted Adam and Helena with tears.
Adam left early the next morning. He had to return the horses to Lida. A week later he was back, stepping out of the forest, crossing the fresh snow in the park and climbing up to the house. Two hares hung from his shoulder. He had spent a night or two at Mantuski; most of the estate workers were still in hiding. The rebuilding, he told Helena, would start at once.
M
ANTUSKI TOOK
exactly three years to rebuild. In the meantime Adam and Helena lived at Druków, in the old estate office of Uncle Nicholas O’Breifne, a building known as the ‘
oficyna’.
The first winter was the worst any of them had known – worse even than those of the war. The accumulated effect of the occupations, the offensives, the invasions and retreats, the revolution, had sucked the land dry. There was nothing. No cows, no horses, no pigs, no chickens, no corn; no mail and no trains.
To begin with, Helena had some American tins, most of which were fed to Haust. After that it was just buckwheat. This was boiled into a watery porridge,
kasza,
the traditional buffer against famine. ‘
Kasza
is our hope’ went a popular saying, and Adam never tired of repeating it at table, as a joke, as he handed a bowl of it to Rymszewicz’s young daughter, Kasia.
But Adam was only rarely at Druków. Each Monday morning of that winter he walked through the snow to Mantuski. There he spent the week with a peasant family in a
chata,
and set about clearing the debris from the
dwór.
There was no consensus as to quite what had happened to Mantuski. Adam gleaned various reports from the villagers. It seemed that towards the end of September 1920, after the Battle of the Niemen, a great number of Russian troops had retreated along the river’s southern bank. Polish cavalry pursued and harried them. At Mantuski, where there was a ferry, the Russians had slowed to cross the river and some sort of battle took place. When it was over, the
dwór
was in flames. No one could tell him who was responsible – Poles or Russian or looting villagers.
For Helena, virtually alone at Druków, the weeks dragged. She missed Adam. Each Saturday evening he came back from Mantuski for a couple of nights, shaking the snow from his boots and laying his gun on the table. For her, those nights were the only times during that dark winter that she felt truly alive.
In February 1921 Helena started to give classes to the village children. She taught them reading and writing, and small gifts began to arrive for her: a lump of bacon, some gritty bread, corn someone had managed to hide, a beetroot. And on one day there was a note, written in almost incomprehensible Polish, begging her to visit a girl’s grandmother.
The grandmother was a large shapeless woman and she was very ill. She lay on the stove-bed, in a small cabin in the forest. Her family, being Tartars, had fled east during the years of war and now there was only this one girl.