The Bronski House (19 page)

On the first cart was a pile of mattresses, trunks, jars of pickle and farm tools; Helena’s bees lay among them in a sealed-up skep; a pair of Friesian cows was attached to the side of the cart. The reins of the
bryczka
were in Adam’s hands; stretched out at his feet was the retriever, Elta, with her litter of four-week-old puppies.

The second cart, drawn by Siwka and Gniadka – the two who had drawn their wedding carriage – was laid out inside with cushions and carpets. In here were Tekla and the children – Zofia wrapped in a weasel-fur hood and her brother sitting in the lap of his wet-nurse.

And beside them all, on the new mare, rode Helena: ‘…twenty-four years old, serious, excited, committed… I was trotting up and down along the carts as they drew away, talking to Adam, urging the maids to keep the children out of the wind…’

They drove all morning through the forest. In the mid afternoon the trees thinned and the bright strip of the Niemen appeared between them. They crossed the river and drove up towards the house.

Helena went on ahead. The new house had a row of five windows on each side of the porch, and a three-storey tower at one end. She dismounted and stepped inside. The air was cool and damp; it smelt of chalk and new paint. Everything was as clean and white as a hospital. The rooms were empty and the low sun stretched unbroken across the bare boards. ‘We will have to find its soul,’ she remembered thinking, ‘we will have to find the soul of this house and fill it with voices…’

Outside, a small group of villagers had gathered to watch the Brońskis’ arrival. With stony expressions, they ran their eyes over the contents of each cart.

Jumping down from his
bryczka,
Adam greeted them.

‘Now, Panoczku,’ one of them laughed, ‘there’ll be something to loot again!’

Helena wrote of the chill she felt on hearing this, and ended her account with this reflection:

That winter they colonized two or three rooms at the river end of the house. Adam and Bartek made some birch-wood cots, a table and a birch-wood washstand. Helena wrote, ‘we lived a Cossack’s life the first winter but there seemed little to worry us…’

One particular evening Helena recorded in her green notebook. It was mid December, and she and Adam were sitting in their makeshift dining room. A wolf-skin hung on one wall. The table was scattered with the tail-end of supper – some apples, cheese, a bowl of salted herrings, a brick of rye-bread.

Adam was talking about his day, about clearing the snow from the new barn roof, about plans to fence off the orchard in the spring, and about the shooting he had had in the Moryn wood.

‘And the new sledge,’ asked Helena, ‘have you waxed the blades?’

‘
All done, kochana!’

The samovar purred in the corner; the wood crackled in the stove; Haust stretched out before it.

Helena stood and crossed to the window. She pulled back the curtains. The moon was nearly full. She placed one hand against the glass, and said, ‘Adam, why don’t we see how this new sledge works?’

Taking two large stirrup drinks, they left the house. They crossed the drive to the new, half-built stable block. The night air stung their cheeks, but there was no wind. Stretched out across the southern sky was a long cartouche of cloud, its top edge silvery in the moonlight.

On the river the snow was a sparkling white. It looked like a long tablecloth scattered with sugar; and it was there, just inches above the Niemen, that they put the new sledge through its paces.

Helena drove. She drove upstream, heading east, towards the Russian border. The moon was a few points south of their course, but as the river arced round, the light swung across their path and came off the snow to shine in their eyes.

Adam laughed, shouting above the rush of air, ‘Faster, Helutka!’

She flicked the reins, and the horses found another notch of speed. The blades sliced through the snow; the horses, their manes flapping, strained at the traces. Their hooves drummed the snow in unison and each of their movements seemed mirrored by the other.

‘Aj-aj!’ shouted Adam. ‘These two work together like electricity!’

The river ran beside snow-covered meadows. Lips of ice hung over the bank, making cavernous spaces beneath them. The sledge dashed on, beneath the stars, between darkened fields, between stands of pine which serrated the sky, between ghost-grey birches, between the white of the river and the black of the forest.

There was an opening in the trees. The frozen Niemen ran through it and entered a wide-open plain. The sky drew back, receding to a slim horizon. Somewhere far to the north was the tiny orange glow of a fire, a jewel of colour in the colourless night.

Helena drew breath. She tugged at the reins. The horses slowed, trotting on for a while. Then the plain narrowed and the forest pressed in at the banks. She pulled at the reins again and the sledge came to a halt.

Silence. Two clouds of breath hung above the sledge. Siwka pitched her head and bellowed, and the trees and snow boxed in the sound.

Adam said, ‘If we carried on we’d be in Russia by morning!’

‘I know.’

Adam pulled the rug up around Helena’s shoulders. For a long time they lay like that, breathing in shallow breaths, not speaking, until the cold came up between them, and they turned the horses and headed for home.

D
URING ONE
of the first winters – it is not clear which one – Helena recorded the return to Mantuski of Uncle Alek. She and Adam were alone in the new sitting room, at night, when a series of bumps sounded from the end of the house.

‘Who’s that, dear?’ asked Helena, not looking up from the book she was reading.

Adam raised his hand, frowning. They both heard the doors in the kitchen corridor, one by one, being opened and closed. Then he smiled. ‘Uncle Alek… It’s Uncle Alek! He is back!’

Aleksander Broński was a very distant relation. He had been born in the first part of the nineteenth century, a few years after Napoleon had been chased back across the Niemen. Named after the victorious Tsar, he went on to have a distinguished military career in the Caucasus, to lead daring patrols up and down the Military Highway and during the Crimean War to hold an impossible redoubt in which he and a Greek powder-boy were the only survivors. In 1856 he retired, decorated and pensioned, and bought Mantuski.

It was Aleksander who’d built the old house. He’d knocked down a modest
dwórek,
rebuilt it, then expanded its lands and forests. He followed the usual rounds of cards and hunting and feasts, and made flying visits to St Petersburg where he drank vodka in the regimental mess and ‘visited the gypsies’. Then his eye fell on a certain Russian girl, a minor heiress, from just north of the Pripet Marshes.

All one autumn he rode down there from Mantuski, twice a month, to try and persuade her to marry him.

‘General Broński,’ her mother told him, ‘you are a man of great stature. But you are not suitable for my daughter. You are a Pole and a Catholic and have had too many mares in your stable.’

But he persisted. In January he burst into the house in a flurry of snow. He was wearing an ankle-length wolf-skin coat. The girl was alone. He threw off his coat and knelt down in front of her. Underneath the coat, he wore nothing.

‘In all my nakedness,’ he cried, ‘I beg you to marry me!’

Having seen him like that, the poor girl felt morally bound to accept. She went to live in Mantuski. She bore Broński five children and ran his household. But it wasn’t long before the old general began to rove again. He spent weeks at a time in St Petersburg and in later years brought to Mantuski, as ‘governess’, one of his lovers. In order that the servants would not talk, his wife was obliged to sleep in the same room, behind a Japanese screen.

It was Uncle Alek’s profligate life that destined him, in the eyes of most, to haunt Mantuski. But there was another theory. In order to marry his Russian bride, Aleksander Broński had had to renounce his Catholic faith. He was buried in the Orthodox cemetery. From such a heathen place, stressed the more devout members of the family, a Broński would find it impossible to enter Heaven.

According to Zofia, Aleksander Broński was a sad ghost. He wandered the corridors of the new Mantuski, twisting door handles, shuffling across the hall, creaking on the stairs. In the hall the grandfather clock always slowed during his visits – the only time during those years that it ever faltered.

Zofia remembers seeing him sitting on the end of her bed, candle in hand, wearing his wolf-skin coat. ‘He looked so miserable!’ She came to dread his visits.

‘We must get rid of him,’ Helena had told Adam.

‘Helena!’

‘No, Adam. He must go. It is fair to him and fair to the children. I will write to Uncle the Bishop.’

So Uncle the Bishop came down from his see. He heaved his portly frame from room to room, with a prayer book and an aspergill; in each room he made a sign of the cross, muttered a prayer and flicked holy water onto the floor.

All through that winter, there was no sign of the ghost. Nor the following winter. Zofia slept easily. The nights were silent. And it was assumed that despite his worldly sins, his naked proposal, the adultery, the renouncing of Rome, a corner of Heaven had at last been found for poor old Uncle Alek and his wolf-skin coat.

But one morning, several years later, Helena noticed the clock had lost thirty-five minutes. That night she saw a light outside, moving among the snow-covered shrubs. She heard the creaking of the boards, and then a cry from Zofia’s room. She opened the bedroom door.

‘He was there, Mama, by my bed… Why can’t he go? Why, Mama? If he’s dead, why can’t he go to Heaven?’

In Mantuski, Zofia and I met a lady called Pani Cichoń who lived in a new house opposite the ruins of the
dwór.
She had very red cheeks and an expression of perpetual anxiety.

‘Oh yes, the ghost. They said about the ghost when we came. And you know, Pani Zofia,’ her voice became a whisper, ‘in the winter sometimes, there’s a light there in the trees, a swinging light over there…’ And she nodded towards the copse that had sprung out of the ruins of Mantuski.

Zofia sighed as we walked away. ‘He used to carry a hurricane lamp when I saw him…’

So in spite of everything, the war, the burning of the house, the years of communism, it seemed as if poor old Uncle Alek had still not found a way out of his earthly wanderings.

In Zofia’s sitting room at Braganza there is a painting of Mantuski. It was copied from a photograph and commissioned after the war. It shows the long low front, the mansard-roofed tower, the wooden porch wrapped in honeysuckle and roses. A faint chocolate-box prettiness pervades the picture. No one knew, when it was painted in 1946, that the house was already destroyed. Now it’s all that’s left.

One afternoon at Braganza, sitting beneath this picture, Zofia said she had found a series of notes her mother had written about the day-to-day life of Mantuski. She crossed the room and retrieved from a cupboard a file of old type-written sheets. The sheets were yellow with age and on the front of the file was written ‘The Running of Mantuski’: