The Bronski House (7 page)

One morning in Nowogródek, Zofia and I had tried to visit the Dom Mickiewicza. It had recently been restored but that morning it was closed, surrounded by fallen trees. A storm in the night had left the whole town choked with fallen trees. (Fallen trees: Helena had been born on the night of the great storm in 1898, and it had taken years to clear the trees.)

From Braganza, I retrieved Helena’s papers, the notebooks, the loose typed sheets, the newspaper cuttings. They came to me in a box marked ‘GEEST BANANAS’. One morning in January – a morning of high winds prodding at the eaves of my cottage, of restless waves tearing at the beach below – I dipped into the box and took out the first of these notebooks. The corners were scuffed slightly, and one had been chewed by something, a mouse or a dog. The book was a burgundy red and on its front cover Zofia had stuck a label: ‘recycled paper – THIS LABEL SAVES TREES’. Beneath it she had written: ‘Mama’s Life vol I’.

Inside, the title was echoed in her mother’s own hand:

Re-reading Helena’s papers that winter, two things, two patterns, seemed to emerge. One was the strange symmetry between her own circumstances and the wider turbulence around her (the parade of her suitors, for instance, during the years after the first war appeared to mirror the comings and goings of armies). The other was a sense of constant change, the work of unseen forces: precisely the feeling that comes from seeing trees scattered by the wind.

For sixteen years, Helena led a life of relative calm. But one lunch-time in the summer of 1914, at Klepawicze, all that came to an end.

E
ACH DAY AT KLEPAWICZE,
in that summer of 1914, a table was set on the verandah for lunch. Jugs of lemonade and
kwas
stood next to a ham or a side of cold beef. There were plates of cheese and chives and always a vase of peonies. Helena and the Broński sisters gathered there first, then the brothers and at precisely 12.45 p.m., Pan Stanisław would appear from his study, say Grace and the meal would begin.

One day during the second week of Helena’s stay Pan Stanisław was late. It was after one o’clock before he stepped out through the French windows, poured himself a glass of
kwas
and announced that the Kaiser had declared war.

There was silence. Helena looked at the Broński sisters and at the brothers, at the various aunts and retainers. What did war mean? Their faces gave no clue.

After lunch she walked down to the river. She sat beneath a stand of birches. Swallows gave out a continuous squeaking from across the water. She lay back on the grass and closed her eyes. The sun glowed bright orange behind her eyelids. If she moved her head, the birch branches broke the sunlight and the world was full of orange flashing. She heard the guns and saw the charging horses. She saw columns of men and rows of uniforms. That was war.

The following day she was sent back home to Wilno. Everything there was just the same as before – a few more horses perhaps, a few more troops, a few more people in church – but that was all. Then after a few weeks came the defeat at Tannenburg and people said that the war might not be over quite so soon.

One evening in October, Count O’Breifne appeared at the house in Wilno for a few days’ leave. He called Helena to his library at 9.30 the next morning. Turned away from his desk, he was looking out of the window. A bright autumn light was falling into the room, brushing the side of his face. His feet were apart and he was toying with his fingers behind his back.

‘Father?’

He turned to face her. He looked tired. His skin was loose and his lips pale; he had the appearance of someone waiting for an operation. But he smiled, and stepped in out of the light.

Instead of kissing her, he said, ‘Helenka, look at you! You’re a mess!’

Tugging down her shirt, he shook his head. He made her straighten her skirt. Then he sat down wearily behind his desk. ‘I must talk to you, Helena. You are no longer a girl. You are fifteen –’

‘Sixteen, Father.’

‘Sixteen?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s time you learnt.’ He raised his eyebrows and sighed. ‘Hela, you must understand that a woman has to dress well. It is her duty to look her best.’

It was the first time he had ever addressed her as anything other than a child.

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘the happiness and well-being of a family depends on the woman. If she makes an effort constantly, her husband will remain attached to her. A man in love with his wife will always make a good father. You have been brought up to believe it is a virtue not to think of your looks, not to care about clothes. Is that not right?’

She nodded.

‘My dear Hela, it is not a virtue – but a crime. Your poor mother was brought up by a man, a saintly man, who knew nothing of women. Her utter lack of feminine charm has brought misery to us both. She should not have married at all. She has no use for marriage. Marriage is based on physical ties and your mother cares nothing for that.’

He was holding a paper-knife and he flicked some imaginary dust from his ink-pad. Helena remained silent.

‘You must not fall into the same trap. I don’t know how long I will be here to help you, but you must promise me to try? Will you do that?’

‘Yes, Father.’

He stood and came round the desk. He took each of her hands. ‘You are beautiful, my Helenka. You are a Diane Chasseusse, a Juno…’

Helena tried to look away.

‘But please don’t waste it! Don’t wear these horrible little buttons and frills. You must dress in straight and simple lines. Don’t you think you’d feel happier in such clothes?’

‘I have nothing of that kind.’

‘I know, I know. It is wartime, and your mother says it is not the time to buy good clothes. Is that not right?’

Helena smiled. ‘Yes, Tatuś!’

He turned and went across the room and entered a door in the bookshelves. When he came back he held a pile of boxes. He placed them on the desk in front of Helena.

‘I bought these for you in St Petersburg. Go on,’ he said, ‘open them.’

She untied the uppermost box, and peeled back the folds of tissue. There was a tailored riding habit inside. In the next box was a hat wrapped in heavy white silk and fixed with a tiny bunch of violets. In the next was a long wine-red coat. In another was a whole set of thin summer frocks, and a yellow-striped pinafore, and an evening gown of pale pink silk. There were boxes of shoes and belts and gloves.

Helena looked up at her father.

‘Try them on.’

She went through the bookshelf door, into his dressing room. She set down the boxes. The room had her father’s smell. In the middle of it was a tall looking-glass, which pivoted in the middle and Helena pushed it down to see herself. He was right – she looked a mess!

She tried on all the clothes, then re-entered the library in the evening gown.

‘Now, enough of these ponytails!’ Her father slipped off her hair clasp. He gathered her hair and reassembled it on top of her head. One or two fronds twisted down her temple.

‘Look, you see?’ he said.

‘Thank you, Tatuś.’

‘Don’t worry.’ He bent to kiss her forehead. ‘I will explain it all to your mother.’

Her mother thought him mad. She said it was a sin to spend so much on clothes. Now, at this time! Ach! But seeing that his furlough in Wilno was so brief, she let the matter drop.

It was the middle of May, 1915. In Wilno the trees had burst into flower; white lilac and bird-cherry crowded the streets with their bridal blooms; the parks were spotted with camomile. Helena grew restless. She wrote of a sense of undirected excitement, a physical feeling. Something was approaching and she could not see it, she could not touch it, she did not know its name. It had nothing to do with the war. Did everyone feel like this? She had no idea. She had no one to ask.

At times the feeling of expectancy was overwhelming. On slow afternoons she took to walking alone through the town, blinking in the strange light, constantly alert, constantly surprised by familiar things. For her, spring never came again without bringing back something of May 1915.

On most days there was a wind. In the avenues it swept through the rowan trees with a sound like water; it tugged at the horse-chestnuts; it set the fat fingers of their leaves flopping to and fro. Helena took in the sweet-and-sour smells of Wilno’s markets, the shouts of the hawkers, the slinking forms of tinkers. At midday she felt fiercely alive; by late afternoon she was exhausted.

In the evening a cooler wind brought the sound of church bells. She toured the chapels, praying, indulging her earnest and precocious piety, gazing at the Miraculous Madonna of the Ostra Brama. The sacrament was exposed in all of Wilno’s churches. People spilled out of the pews, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, cramming the west doors. Men squeezed their caps in knotted fists; women knelt in the aisles. All sent their eager prayers drifting upwards – urging God to hold back the Germans.

The Russians were in retreat. From the west came reports of whole villages fleeing. All over the country, households were sending their livestock east, away from the hands of the Kaiser. Journeymen told of roads choked with guns and muddy soldiers and herds of lolloping beasts.

One afternoon Helena was standing on the balcony. A hay cart turned off the main road and into Mała Pohulanka. Behind the cart was another cart, then a larger wagon and a string of brood-mares attached to it; their clumsy-footed foals trotted beside them. Helena recognized her grandmother’s troupe of Lithuanian Zmudziaki horses; it was then she knew that they would all have to leave.

The O’Breifnes went south at first. The horses were sent on ahead. Their own party, six of them, travelled by train: Helena’s mother, Helena, her brother and sister – both much younger – Panna Konstancja and Tekla.

Over the coming years, Panna Konstancja and Tekla accompanied the family wherever they went. Panna Konstancja was a large, matronly figure with a sharp tongue and a roguish humour. She, almost alone, had brought up Helena; she was a much less distant figure than her own mother. Tekla was the family’s cook, the fatherless child of a ‘corner-woman’ taken in by Helena’s mother.

A thirty-five-kilometre drive took the party from the station at Nowojelnia to Druków. It was a drowsy evening. The heads of the horses were heavy, bullied by flies. Helena’s mother fanned herself with a book. Tekla had acute diarrhoea and there were frequent stops.

Helena felt daunted by this retreat. Would it end at Druków? What if the Germans like Napoleon could not be stopped and they were pushed on, deeper into Russia? The east! Russia! Helena baulked suddenly at the thought of the snowy steppe, the grey hills, the unkempt beards of the Orthodox priests, the rows of high-cheeked Tartars against the snow. Then she fell asleep in the familiar regions of Panna Konstancja’s chest.

When she woke they were almost there. The driver clicked his tongue and the horses turned off the road and into Druków’s twisting avenue. Tekla made a final leap from the
bryczka
and ran for a bush.

Druków was the home of Uncle Nicholas O’Breifne, a softly spoken, bookish man who had never had children and treated Helena as his own. They spent much of that summer at Druków.

It was a quiet summer; news of the war punctuated it only rarely. Helena spent much of her time – when not in her mother’s makeshift classes – walking or riding. She walked with Uncle Nicholas out beyond the avenue. She loved to hear him name the trees and flowers, identify the call of each bird.

One afternoon they returned via the Druków church. Inside it was cool and dark. In silence, the two of them stepped up to the chancel and knelt – Uncle Nicholas huge and barrel-shaped in his old camlet coat, Helena slim beside him with a blue velvet ribbon in the tangle of her hair.

Uncle Nicholas pointed out the commemorative plaques to his father, his grandfather and other O’Breifnes.

‘Uncle Nicholas,’ she asked, ‘have your family lived here for a very long time?’

The first O’Breifne at Druków, he explained, was the General; he would have been her great-grandfather. The Russians were very proud of him, even though he was not Russian. In Serbia he had once saved the Russian army from the Turks. On the night before the battle a nun named Dovergill had come and warned him that the Turks would attack the following day. He prepared his positions well and was victorious. But when the general asked in the neighbouring convents for Dovergill, he drew a blank. ‘Dovergill? Devorgil? There is no nun by that name.’

Only later did he find out who she was – an ancestor of his, an Irish queen of the twelfth century. She had been abducted by the King of Leinster and the row that followed led to the invasion of the Normans. This, said Uncle Nicholas, was the beginning of the end for the ancient Irish kings and chiefs. Four centuries later, they suffered their final defeat at the Battle of the Boyne, when the O’Briefnes themselves fled Ireland to end up in Russia.

General O’Breifne, he continued, bought Druków and its five thousand souls. The serfs were mainly Polish Catholics. One day he rode down to inspect the estate. He found a great number of them in church. A Mass was being said. The general strode in just in time to hear an anxious petition raised to protect them all from the ‘Russian general’ who had bought them. General O’Breifne walked up the aisle. His spurs clanked on the stone floor. He knelt at the front. The priest fell silent.

‘Carry on,’ the general said, and the priest stammered on through the liturgy.