The curls of her grey hair had been tousled by our travels; her eyes, sad and hooded as always, were calm. ‘Now it all comes back.’ She smiled. ‘I remember in the winter the noises the ice on the river made – cracking like gunshots. And here, I used to come riding. There was one day in particular. I was about fourteen and had a pony called Delilah. I tied her up over there. There was no one about, so I took off all my clothes and went swimming. That was forbidden, of course! But my mother was away and I remember thinking then, here on the river, that suddenly anything was possible.’
She paused. ‘How strange it is, that day seems to me now like the beginning of the world.’
We returned to Minsk. On our last evening, the last evening in Belorussia, we were invited to a ‘Poets’ Evening’ at the Dom Literatury.
‘What do you think that means, Philip, a “Poets’ Evening?”’
‘I’ve no idea, Zosia.’
We gathered in an upper room with about twenty or thirty others. After a series of readings, a song, more readings, more songs, there were the speeches. Everyone made a speech – speeches to poets, speeches by poets, speeches to wine-making, to poetry, to the new era of independence, to Belorussia. I was asked to make a speech and spoke about nationalism and its dangers, about the risks as I saw them of new fault-lines emerging in Europe – until I realized no one understood a word of English. Zofia had a little more luck with her Polish.
‘I am a Pole,’ she announced, ‘who fled my country when the Russians invaded in 1939 and now I have come back to see what happened. My mother lived in Minsk for a while in 1918 and she fled too. She was in love in Minsk but the Bolsheviks came and drove her away. And now they have gone, I can come back. Perhaps we should drink to that!’ She picked up her glass and everyone followed suit, nodding in agreement.
‘But I would also like to say something else.’ Zofia placed her glass back on the table. ‘I too am a poet. I have written verse now for more than fifty years. Yet in my writing I am a traitor. I have betrayed the greatest thing a poet is given – her own language. I had to abandon my beloved Polish and now I write poems in English and I feel like a bigamist… The only Belorussian I know is a rhyme I learnt as a child.’ (She recited the comic circular rhyme which she had told me, years earlier, concerning a priest and his dead dog. No one knew it. There was much applause.) ‘So I would like to drink a toast to the end of communism, to a new era, to poetry, to friendship, and to the Slavic soul which we all share and which seems to me to gravitate so beautifully between vodka and tears. Na zdrowie!’
Na zdrowie!
Everyone clapped and drank. There were more speeches. A woman made a speech about Mickiewicz. A professor made a speech about politics. (They were all wearing tiny red-and-white badges on their lapels, the colours of their brand-new country for which they – the poets, the writers, the intellectuals – were trying to mould something distinctive from the heavy brown clay of Soviet culture.)
The professor was still speaking when the meal began. Spontaneously the poets leaned forward and colonized the plates of food. The professor gave up on his point about public spending and grabbed a sausage, two pieces of bread and a gherkin.
Zofia had recovered her good spirits; she was giggling. Opposite her a man in a black shirt, with a gold-toothed flashing smile, slopped vodka into her glass. ‘Drink! Drink, my jewelled Polish princess!’
She turned to me and whispered, ‘He thinks I am a princess. He has translated Verlaine and says he is in love with me! What do I do?’
‘I think you’d better marry him, Zosia.’
At the other end of the table a Romanian folk singer raised herself from her chair. She shrieked a song in Belorussian. When it was over, a tiny old woman stood up beside her. This old woman, with egg-yolk hair and an emerald-green cardigan, had apparently been a famous opera singer. She trotted out an unknown aria in a cracked soprano, and then said, ‘I am ninety-two. All my life has been dedicated to beauty.’
Another couple stood, fair-skinned and fair-haired. She was wearing a headscarf, he a buttoned-up mud-brown suit.
‘For twenty year,’ she explained, ‘he is in prison. I think him dead, in camp. Then he came to my door the week ago, and knock and say, Marta, I need some water. I am thirsty. Where have you been? I ask. And he is weeping like a child…’
Beside her, this man, spruce-straight and a foot taller than her, flicked the tears from his cheek as if they were pebbles.
A woman with an accordion started the dancing; people stood and soon the whole room was a mass of reeling, bobbing poets. The wild-faced lexicographer and the nervous teacher, the expert on Bernard Shaw, the toothless archaeologist dancing alone, a famous actress, a leaping linguist, a balding translator of Dante, an earnest young guitarist with sad songs, and Zofia with her Belorussian ‘husband’, her ‘Don Juan’.
The evening subsided into a haze of vodka and żubrówka and tearful speeches and stories. It was after midnight when people began to slip away. The lexicographer was asleep in a chair. The archaeologist was standing on one leg. The nonagenarian opera singer was carried out by her daughter the accordion player. The actress was weeping. Zofia was having her palm read by Don Juan.
‘Don’t throw your love to the dogs!’ he pleaded – adding, in a whisper, ‘My wife, she has the tongue of a viper…’ Then he cried, ‘Our meeting it was written in the stars! Such joy I have not known like this evening…’
‘But you,’ said Zofia, tapping his chest with her finger, ‘you are a Slav like me – and tomorrow you’ll be sad.’
Three days later, we crossed the border and arrived back in Warsaw. It was five in the morning and we were both exhausted. At the railway station we bickered, pointlessly – about where to get a taxi, about whether Warsaw was dirty or not, about the exact date of the Yalta conference – until Zofia threw back her head and laughed, ‘Look how foolish we are, Philip. We’re just tired!’ And soon we were in a taxi, winding through empty streets to the Dom Literatury: another town, another Dom Literatury.
We took rooms there and stayed several days, resting, reading, writing notes, seeing friends and having earnest debates with various writers. Our rooms looked over the cobbled square in front of the palace, over the Vistula, over the roofs of the suburbs to the forest beyond. The city that May seemed full of light.
On the plane home, Zofia said she felt she had ‘closed the circle’. That was why she had come all this way – to close the circle.
London was thundery and humid. We left the airport and took a bus into town. Our journey was over. At Paddington we stood together on the platform while heavy rain drummed the station roof. Zofia was going home to Cornwall; I was staying in London.
‘I will miss you,’ she said. ‘These last weeks have been incredible to me.’
‘For me too.’
She reached up and traced a cross on my forehead. ‘I leave you with an angel. May everything go well for you, dear Philip!’
It was November before I moved back to Cornwall for the winter. In the evenings, I went up to Braganza and sat with Zofia and we drank home-made żubrówka, distilled by a Polish cook in one of the local villages. Zofia remained poised in her high-backed chair, her face its usual medley of expressions, while we talked about pre-war Poland, about her mother’s reminiscences, about our own journey. At Christmas, we put together parcels of chocolates and clothes for Pani Wala and Pani Jadzia and the watchmaker – which never reached them.
In the meantime, Braganza’s bookshelves proved a jig-saw of Polish history: memoirs, poetry and novels, each volume adding a piece to the context of Zofia’s first life. Poland appeared in all its various guises – Poland as history’s plaything, Poland both conquering and conquered, Poland as the perennial survivor; Poland where personal lives seemed no more than a light diversion between wars, like a game played while waiting for a train.
‘Polot,’ said Zofia. ‘It all comes down to polot.’
‘Polot?’
�
��It doesn’t translate. “Lot” means flight, of course, like the Polish airline, and there is a sense of weightlessness about it. But it’s also a certain charm, a panache – something to do with being dashing and brave – appearing to fly through hardship!’
‘And your mother had polot?’
‘Oh yes. She had polot.’
In her Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman cites two instances of polot. The first was in 1939, when the German Panzer divisions rolled into Poland, and the Poles, refusing to surrender, rode at the tanks with their cavalry. Then during the Warsaw rising of 1944, while the Nazis were flushing out the last pockets of resistance, the Poles erected speakers in the streets and played Chopin.
Other incidents from Polish history stayed with me. There was the victory message that King Jan Sobieski sent to the Pope after the Siege of Vienna: ‘Venimus, Vidimus, Deus Vicit.’ And the observation of an Allied observer sent to Warsaw in 1945: the place he said was full of flower stalls – not a building intact, rubble everywhere, bread beyond the means of most, but flowers, stalls and stalls of fresh flowers from the fields.
And the old Polish joke (the favourite, it is said, of Paderewski, Prime Minister of newly liberated Poland in 1919): a professor at an international college sets his students a long dissertation on the general theme of ‘The Elephant’. The titles come back as follows:
The Englishman: The Elephant, and how to hunt him.
The Frenchman: The Love-life of the Elephant.
The German (after much research): An Introduction to the Preliminary Study of the Gastronomic Possibilities of the Elephant.
The Russian (after anguished smoking of cigarettes): The Elephant – does he exist?
The Pole: The Elephant and the Polish Question.
But the story that remained sharpest concerned the unveiling of a statue of Adam Mickiewicz in Warsaw. Like Pushkin, Mickiewicz is a national poet and his statue was to be a national monument. The time of the unveiling was shortly after the Polish Uprising of 1863, and the Russian governor was nervous. He wheeled up his artillery, knocking down several rows of buildings as he did so. Tens of thousands of Poles had gathered in the square. Henryk Sienkiewicz stepped up to the podium. From his pocket he took the pages of a speech he had been forbidden to make. He waved the pages in the wind. There was silence. He unveiled the statue. Still silence. The Russians stared at the Poles and the Poles stared at the Russians. Not a sound.
Then from the midst of the crowd was heard the noise of a woman sobbing. Then another, and another until all that could be heard in the centre of Warsaw, on the occasion of the unveiling of Mickiewicz’s statue, was a low collective wailing.
Mickiewicz was born in Nowogródek. Just off the town’s main square is the Dom Mickiewicza, a museum to his memory. Zofia said her mother used to go there in 1915 each Sunday after Mass, and found in her papers this description:
The Mickiewicz house was lived in and run by two women. On Sunday they gave great feasts for anyone who wanted to come. The women never had a rouble between them but every time they wanted money they just went to Uncle Nicholas. One of the women had a squint and was known for her good works and frequent bouts of praying. The other had little brown curls and lay on the sofa eating chocolates and reading romances. She eventually swelled to twenty stone and tyrannized her companion…
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:
My Own Life – volume I
When I look back at my life it is chiefly a strange loneliness that is its mark. I was a lonely child – without friends or companions – a child who somehow had no personal life, was hardly aware of existing so engrossed was she in the lives of her animals and her friends who were all grown-ups – aunts, Panna Konstancja, all the people of Platków, and Mother Immaculate.
I grew up very late, was happy and adored in St Petersburg, chased from one place to the next by war, lonely in marriage, and finally happy alone at Mantuski…
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.
PART II
HELENA
8
EACH 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 u
nderstand 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.’
The Bronski House Page 5