Helena turned in anger. ‘Mama, he said something… Andrzej said he saw Papa. Why didn’t I know? Why isn’t he here, staying with us?’
‘It is not your business. He is ill.’
‘He is my father! I want to see him.’
‘I will not allow it.’
But from Aunt Ziuta, Helena found out that he had taken a small flat on Nevsky Prospekt. She went there at once. Uncleared snow lay in the courtyard. She climbed the stairs and when he opened the door had to make an effort to greet him normally. He looked very ill. His face was drawn and sallow-skinned; his uniform sagged on his shoulders and on his hips. He had black smudges under his eyes, yet oddly he seemed younger. He pointed Helena to a desk chair, and sat down opposite her.
‘Hela, my dear Hela!’ He leaned forward and took her hand. ‘You are grown up, Helenka. You must see that your mother and I do not get on.’
‘But why, Papa?’
‘She made me promise never to see the woman you call Aunt Janienka. I could not promise such a thing, so she does not want me. She has no use for me any more.’
‘How can I see you? I must see you!’
He held up his hands and smiled. ‘All right, Hela, here’s what we’ll do. I will come for you each evening at the English school, and we will walk here and have supper in my room and afterwards I will take you home. Tell your mother you eat at the school and no one will ask questions.’
So every evening he was there sitting on a wooden bench in the hall of the English school, waiting for Helena’s class to finish. And the rumour began, among the grinning Russian clerks and the thinly scattered staff, that this man, this dashing man of forty-eight, was really her fiancé.
She did nothing to deny it. She called him ‘Józef’ in their presence. He in turn took to arriving with gifts of chocolates and flowers; sometimes he donned his uniform and Miss Sanders whispered to Helena, ‘Such a handsome man. 1917 will be your year, Miss O’Breifne, I know it! A lovely spring wedding!’
Mr Pike put an avuncular arm around her shoulder and warned her about men who were ‘philanderers and blackguards’.
But all the while Helena’s father was getting weaker. At Christmas there was a party in the flat and he came and sat in a corner. Twenty people filled that flat. They picked at a pair of geese that Tekla had found from somewhere. There were noisy toasts and noisy Polish singing.
During the height of the party, Helena looked around and saw that her father was missing. She went into the back of the flat and found him in her own room. He was sitting on her bed, leaning over a bucket and vomiting. He tried to laugh it off: ‘The doctors, Hela, they say my stomach is narrowing. The solution is simple – all I must do is eat less!’
‘History,’ Aunt Ziuta had said once, on one of those summer evenings on the Moika canal, ‘is like a hare waiting in the bushes.’
Now it was winter. The Moika canal was frozen. St Petersburg was ploughing through the icy wastes of the new year. The sun shone yellow on the underside of the clouds. Sometimes there was a wind and it blew fiercely across the empty squares, searching the streets for loose snow. Sleighs slid to and fro, reluctant to stop; no one went out to shop as there was nothing to buy. The Neva, where only a month or so before Rasputin had been jammed through the ice, stretched like a white no man’s land through the city. Mounted police barred the bridges across it; distant shouting echoed off the river. The hare waited in the bushes.
In February Helena’s English classes grew smaller. They were reading Kingsley’s The Water Babies, and the twenty-three grinning clerks became twenty, then fifteen, then ten. There was shooting on Nevsky Prospekt and then only five appeared; and one day after a heavy snowfall, with the streets full of troop carriers, only Ivankienko, an earnest Russian from the Urals, managed to get through. He pulled from his coat a pot of raspberry jam, and gave it to Helena. ‘Oh Miss! For you the jam! You must not go to hunger…’
At that moment, the main door opened. Helena’s father stood breathless on the threshold. ‘Quick, Hela… Fighting has broken out…’
Outside, there was the sound of gunfire. Groups of men were running through the streets; some were clutching shards of ice from the canal.
The three of them hurried out of the school. They crossed open squares, passed boarded shops and iced-up trams; they made progress street by street, doorway by doorway. Helena’s long skirt became stiff with snow and swung like a bell against her felt boots. The cold tore at the back of her throat.
‘Quick!’ coaxed her father. But he too was in pain. He gripped his side. Ivankienko ran ahead, checking at each corner for barricades, the pot of raspberry jam clutched tight against his chest.
On a bridge over the Griboyedov canal, three men were standing on a dray cart. They were addressing a small crowd of workers and soldiers with rifles. Some were firing into the air. Ivankienko put an arm in front of Helena and halted her. They retraced their steps.
Around the back of Gostinny Dvor, they stumbled across a group holding red banners. Someone was signing the ‘Marseillaise’. Ivankienko pressed Helena into a doorway. The men were standing in a semi-circle. They were shouting at a police officer; the officer was on horseback. He was trying to spur himself away, but they closed in around him. One of the group had the reins and the others were tugging him from the saddle. The officer fell. He tried to run away, but they pushed him to the ground. One of the crowd took a lump of ice, about the size of his fist, and started beating it against the man’s head. His head flopped forward. Someone held it back by the hair. They carried on beating him until he was dead.
Helena never forgot that scene; she never forgot the look in his eyes, nor his blood in the snow. It was the moment, for her, when the world finally lost its innocence.
For some time the city was in chaos. Helena didn’t go out, not even to see her father. Tekla would come in after hours of foraging with only a loaf or a few pickled vegetables to show for it. She fed them the latest rumours – that the Volhyn Regiment had mutinied, that Khabalov was mounting a counter-attack, that the Corps des Pages were defending the Winter Palace, that the Tsar was far away; that the Tsar had abdicated.
And then a kind of order returned. The trams and buses ran again and a little food found its way into the shops. Helena resumed her classes and her clerks came back, one by one, looking thinner, with tighter grins, until the class was twenty-three again. They finished The Water Babies, and moved on to Kipling.
One afternoon – it was a Saturday and the lime trees were a hazy green – Helena walked home across the Mars Fields. She remembered the dark clouds overhead and the rubbery squeak of the snow beneath her feet. She thrust her hands deep inside her coat. Across the expanse of the park, she could see a crowd gathered in the corner. A man was standing at the front on a wooden box. He was hatless and nonchalant in the cold. She drew closer and could make out his words:
‘Every man is master of his destiny… He must shape his own destiny and help shape that of his country… Your time has come, people…’
Back at home she found Uncle Augustus standing in front of the Dutch stove.
‘Uncle.’ She stretched to kiss him, then started to take off her gloves. ‘Such a curious man was speaking today in the Mars Fields. But what a beautiful voice he had! Such intelligence!’
‘Who was he?’
‘They said his name was Lenin.’
And the situation had not really improved. There were still men with brooding eyes everywhere, still shooting in the streets. Running to her father’s flat with a flask of Tekla’s vegetable bouillon, Helena frequently saw the bodies discarded like rubbish in the doorways.
Her father also remained in a state of uncomfortable limbo. Helena spent Sunday afternoons with him. When in pain, he would hold a towelling-wrapped samovar to his stomach. As the pain eased he slept. She watched him sleep. She listened to the French ormolu clock chiming away the hours. There was always a point when his hands dropped away from the samovar, his head sl
ipped to one side, and the skin around his cheeks softened; then for a while he seemed at peace.
In April, Aunt Ziuta took Helena to a ballet at the Mariinsky. Even though the city was in flux, the auditorium was full, the performance flawless. To Helena it was much less of a spectacle without the silks and jewellery, without the archdukes, without Yusupov.
Afterwards, in the square, a babushka stepped out in front of them. She had blue eyes and grub-like fingers. One of these she thrust at Helena. ‘I have a hat for you, my girl, a crepe mourning hat!’ She put a piece of paper into Helena’s hand.
Aunt Ziuta led Helena away. ‘C’est rien. La femme est folle!’
Later Helena unravelled the bit of paper. There was an address on it, somewhere behind the theatre. She traced it, several days later, to the fourth floor of a soot-blackened house. A pipe was leaking in the hallway, and a stream of water dripped down the stairwell. The rooms were full of people on straw mattresses. She was about to leave when her babushka came hopping across a row of sleeping bodies, holding a hat.
‘Your hat, Miss. I made it for you.’
‘But I don’t need a hat.’
‘You will,’ she laughed, and taking a clutch of coupons from Helena’s hand left her with the hat.
Meanwhile her father grew worse. He could not hold down even Tekla’s broth. The doctors decided to operate and on the 10 May – 27 April in the old calendar – he was taken to a large army hospital. Helena, her mother, Uncle Augustus and Panna Konstancja waited outside.
It was mid afternoon when the surgeon came out. He was smiling; the operation had been a success. Helena’s father was wheeled out on a trolley, and they waited for him to wake.
Half an hour later, he opened his eyes. He tilted his head towards Helena and her mother, and smiled. Then he went back to sleep. Soon afterwards his eyes opened suddenly. This time he looked surprised. The professor rushed to his side. He took his wrist, leaned on his chest. He shouted for a nurse and they both pummelled his chest. Then the professor pursed his lips and pulled the sheet up over his patient’s face.
Helena’s mother stared at the trolley. She had seen it before in her dreams. She had seen it after his ‘visits’ in the early years of their marriage. These fleeting encounters used to fill her with such horror that she would become blind afterwards and the only thing that ever broke the darkness was this: the vision of her husband, harmless, lying on a table wrapped in a white shroud.
In Poland the custom was to take the dead home and make a ‘Chapelle Ardente’ where family and friends could come and pray before the body was buried.
Helena wanted a Chapelle Ardente but her mother refused. ‘These are dangerous times, dear. It’s best to leave it.’
All the following day Helena stayed in the flat. She sat unpicking the stitches of a cushion; Liki chirruped over her head. By the evening, Panna Konstancja could take it no more. She took her aside and told her where her father was lying.
The dvornik swung open the oak door. It was 10 p.m. and very cold. She pulled a woollen scarf up around her mouth and hurried along the canal. There was no one else on the street.
What Helena remembered of this journey was hazy and disjointed. She followed the route mechanically. She crossed the Neva with the moon broken to pieces in the rippled water. There was then a white-bearded night-watchman who muttered amiably as he admitted her to a room of low vaults and simple altars hidden in the niches.
The room was full of corpses. They lay on stone plinths and tables; they lay between the tables, on planks and loose duckboards. Some were wrapped in sheets and sackcloth, but others were still in their clothes.
‘Counter-revolutionaries!’ whispered the old man.
Her father was on his own in a corner. He was wrapped in the same hospital sheet. She took a candle and sat with him and laid a hand on the sheet. She felt the calico warm and sticky against her skin. Her fingertips were covered in fresh blood. She jumped up. ‘He bleeds! Look, he is alive!’
The watchman came over and shook his head. He left Helena with a clutch of candles, and she sat there all night. She slipped in and out of sleep. Then she slept properly and when she awoke the candles had burnt down and the shadows had receded. Dawn had entered that dank ward and her father’s face was grey.
The attendants came down the stairs. They crossed to the basin; they chatted while scrubbing their forearms. They hauled the bodies off the plinths and on to stone slabs.
In a daze, Helena watched these corpses being washed. In a daze, she watched Tekla arrive and Panna Konstancja and Uncle Augustus who said Mass in one of those cave-like niches. She remained motionless on her stool, unable to focus on anything but the pale and beautiful face of Aunt Janienka bowed before the altar, the slow leonine way in which she moved: this woman who had taken her father away. It was the only time she ever saw her.
And then, wrote Helena, there was another great blank in her memory and there was nothing of the burial nor the last days in St Petersburg nor the goods train which hurried them away. There was only the image of herself, a listless figure back at Piesków, in black, too tired to take in a word of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities which lay unread in her lap.
13
HELENA SPENT most of the summer of 1917 at Piesków, just to the north of Minsk. Of these days she recalled:
When I think of that summer it is not the uncertainty nor the shock of our flight from Petersburg, nor even the gloom at my father’s death. It is the sunny days, the columns of the old manor, the light falling through the forest, the sound of the stream at night, and the bench on which I sat listening to the passionate words of ecstasy and love, repeated over and over again, by the debonair and handsome Medeksa.
The arrival at Piesków marked the beginning of Helena’s most turbulent years. Germans and Russians came and went; borders shifted like the tide, washing everyone up in different towns, in different countries. There were farm carts and forest drives and nights in Jewish inns. But something had changed. The journeys were different from the flight of 1915. That had been an adventure. Now the world was a darker place. Everyone Helena knew or loved was either scattered by the war, or dead.
Her mother, widowed, became harder. She took to drinking black coffee and smoking Turkish cigarettes. She was keen for Helena to marry, yet couldn’t bear seeing her with men. Helena frequently promised herself to be rid of them all and live alone, without her family, without admirers, in some cabin in the forest, surrounded by dogs and horses and wild bees.
But Medeksa’s words of ecstasy and love were very pleasant – so pleasant that after several weeks of them, Helena became convinced she had committed some sin.
Medeksa was ‘old’ – more than twenty-eight. He had been serving in the Red Cross Otryads in the Bukovina and was now stationed in a field hospital near Piesków. He was widely read in English and French and when it came to talking of poetry – as it always did – he would quote great tracts from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, or Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer. He knew that words alone were the key to Helena’s heart.
In time, her mother found out. She was very angry.
Helena reassured her. ‘It’s all right, Mama…’
‘What do you mean, “It’s all right”? The man is untrustworthy!’
‘I am going to marry him.’
‘What?’ She drew sharply on her cigarette. ‘One does not marry doctors!’
Her mother’s vehemence pushed Helena closer to Medeksa. He took to writing her long letters from his hospital, always headed with a couplet of French or English verse, and always scented with apple blossom.
Then in September her mother said they were moving to Minsk. It would be safer in Minsk, she said. Safer with Uncle Augustus.
He too had fled the increasing chaos of St Petersburg. He was now a bishop and had been given a large house near the cathedral in Minsk. It was a beautiful house, its outside walls feathered with creeper, its high rooms decked out in episcopal splendour. But in those
dark days it felt oddly deserted. Helena had the sense that there was always someone missing, that they had pushed open the door and simply stepped inside.
They were constantly hungry. Everyone was hungry. That winter was even worse than the last. They would gather in the dining room knowing, as Uncle the Bishop said Grace, that all they were thanking God for, at best, was a few cubes of horseflesh.
Helena’s grandmother was also with them. She was oblivious to most things and, humming quietly, spent her time sitting in the parlour stitching brown flannel shirts for the poor.
At the other end of the house lived a young curate, tall and thin like a poplar. He painted scenes from the life of Christ: great blocks of colour with twisted, scarecrow figures. Helena used to watch him work. She marvelled at the care that went into something which turned out so dull. He took her interest for admiration, and when he left, on a special mission to Rome, presented her with a picture of the disciples crossing a cornfield.
‘How lovely,’ she exclaimed. ‘Boats, on a lovely yellow lake!’
Helena carried on her teaching. She gave classes in English to two ‘dim-witted’ Russian princesses. She discovered her lifelong intolerance of mediocrity. One evening in October, her princesses came to her in tears.
‘Oh Helena! We have to leave, this evening!’
‘Where to?’
‘Away!’ they said.
‘Where away?’
‘We don’t know!’
‘Well, why must you leave?’
‘Oh Helena, we don’t know!’
Typical of their answers, she thought.
But the reason was soon clear. Later that week, with the trees bare and all but the crows flown south, the Bolsheviks took control of Minsk.
The Bronski House Page 9