All through August and September, once a week, Freiherr von Sanden took Helena riding. One evening, she remembers, they were coming back along the river. They dismounted, watered the horses and sat on the bank. He said, ‘Winter is coming, Helena. Soon we must leave.’ Then he turned to her and whispered, ‘Come back to my castle on the Rhine with the black birds and the mist. Marry me, Helena.’
She was too surprised to answer.
‘What do you say, Helena?’
She said no, she could not marry him. She did not love him. She was fond of him but she did not love him. She knew what love was now, real love, as for several weeks she had been in love with a man named Józef.
At that time, Józef was a man of about thirty-five. Part Lithuanian and part Tartar, he had a shallow v-shaped brow and dark skin. He had two estates, either side of Platków, and spent his time travelling between them in a green-painted bryczka. Whenever he passed Platków, he called in.
All that remained of a long line of hybrid nobility was Józef, and his mother who lived in Wilno. According to Helena, she was known as ‘the best-dressed woman of Kresy’ – despite having not risen from her bed since the day her husband died, fifteen years earlier.
Józef had inherited her elegance. Having no family at home, he would, when he was bored, pull on a nankeen frock coat and leap into his bryczka. He would go ‘touring’, an expression he used for turning up unannounced at any one of the neighbouring estates. Being unmarried and a great raconteur, he was usually welcome. But now that most of the dwory were abandoned, his ‘touring’ was confined to Platków.
In late August there was a spell of very hot weather. Between the heated-up days were heated-up nights. In the evening the Platków household gathered in a short-tempered silence on the verandah. On the second of these evenings, in the heavy light of dusk, Józef’s bryczka had come rattling out of the avenue.
‘Full moon and a warm night!’ he cried, climbing the steps to the terrace. ‘You know what that means?’
‘Love…’ sighed Aunt Anna.
‘Crayfish!’
Józef asked Tekla to pack up some potatoes and, with three buckets, he led everyone down to the Wodalka lake.
The moon was fat and motionless on the horizon. Reeds stood thin-legged on the fringes of the lake. Among them, among these frail stalks, countless frogs conducted their languid debates.
The fire flared quickly. It sent sparks up out of the birch logs to glow briefly against the stars. Tekla cut some stakes for a sway and hung two kettles of water over the flames. Aunt Anna sat beside it with Helena’s mother, a flask of black coffee, and two packets of Turkish cigarettes.
Józef took Helena and her sister to the lakeside and, instructing them to jump up and down on the banks, lay flat on the ground with his bare arms trailing in the water. The crayfish wriggled away from the bank and he snatched them out.
Józef was a brilliant mimic and later, in the firelight, while they cracked open the warm shells, he resurrected Wilno society with such skill that it seemed as if the war had never happened. The night echoed with Aunt Anna’s laughter.
It was after midnight when Józef found Helena alone by the lake. He took her hand. ‘Hela, I love you. I love your silky hair and your thin arms and the freckles on your nose. I love your distant look and the stars in your eyes. I love you, I love you, I love you.’
And that was that. The next day he left. Helena was baffled. Whenever he came again to Platków, the same thing would happen: he would behave as normal towards her until they happened to be alone. Then he would take her hands and tell her of the agony of his heart and the depth of his love. But not once did he ask her to marry him.
It took Stefan, the coachman, to notice what was happening. ‘That Count Józef comes here too often. What’s to come of it, Panna Helena?’
‘I don’t know, Stefan.’
‘No good, I tell you. He should spend more time fixing his leaking roofs than here, troubling you.’
‘But supposing I married him, Stefan? You could come and work for us and divide your time between here and there!’
‘Marry him? That old Tartar bankrupt? May he be kicked by ducks! He has debts he will never escape.’
So that’s it, thought Helena. That’s why he has not yet asked me to marry him – his debts! And for this noble sacrifice, which inspired in her an admiration that was as profound as it was blind, she began to love Józef all the more.
15
THE SUMMER OF 1918 had been hot. The war was at a standstill and the country caught its breath. Helena watched the process of regeneration begin.
Each morning she walked down through the avenue, into the cherry orchards, across the fields to Mass. To begin with the fields were spread with rye- and barley-shoots. The shoots grew level with Helena’s ankles, then her calves and her knees. In July the stalks dried and yellowed; the parobcy took down their scythes and in mid August swept across the fields in a slow twisting dance. They sheaved the crop and stood it in shocks while the sun dried it. Lines of rack wagons took the sheaves to the barns. In September everyone gathered in church to thank God for the harvest. They were all very nervous about the winter.
Throughout the autumn months, Touring Józef continued to profess his love for Helena. She felt content with him. His pressing attentions reassured her. She knew that as soon as his estates were back in order after the war, as soon as he was ready, he would ask her to marry him.
Poland became free. No one had dared predict what happened in Warsaw that November. On 11 November, the German occupation of Poland ended. The soldiers of the Wehrmacht were disarmed on the Warsaw streets. Piłsudski was released from prison, came to Warsaw and three days later was appointed Chief-of-State. For the first time since the eighteenth century, Poland was a sovereign state.
The news reached Platków on a frosty morning, with the sound of hooves in the chestnut avenue. Freiherr von Sanden came out of the trees on his bay stallion. He swung down from the saddle. He stepped up to each of those gathered on the steps. He kissed the hands of the women, shook the hands of the men. Then he bowed to them all and remounted. His stallion shuffled back, tried to rear, and von Sanden cried, ‘May God bless Poland! God bless you all!’
And he swivelled his horse around and left, riding out of the avenue, out of their lives, back to his black birds and his misty schloss on the Rhine.
In December, Uncle the Bishop arrived at Platków from Warsaw. He had been appointed Bishop of Riga and, while he waited to take up his new see, was accompanied by a young chaplain whose task it was to teach him Latvian. The chaplain was pale and thin and very shy. In the evenings, when Uncle Augustus sat playing chess with Helena, she would watch the chaplain shuffling round the edge of the drawing room, stalking his bishop with a textbook of Latvian grammar.
At Christmas, Mass was said in Platków’s large hall. Uncle the Bishop stood on the stairs. The chaplain was on the step beneath, clutching the chalice. Three soldiers – two amputees and an artillery-deafened subaltern – sat at the foot of the stairs, while others crowded the hall and the corridors beyond.
Villagers lined up afterwards to kiss his amethyst ring. Unsure of how to treat a bishop they left him honey and eggs, which he accepted with delight, before directing these gifts back to the village through different channels.
The day after Christmas, Uncle the Bishop left Platków to go to Wilno for his investiture. Helena and her mother went with him, the three of them driven by Stefan in the old bryczka.
Years later, Helena concluded that this was the coldest journey she ever took. Each day the wind blew hard from the north-east. The muzzles of the horses froze and turned white. Stefan’s beard filled with icicles. Huddled in the open carriage in thick furs, Helena watched the ceaseless parade of frosted branches, the grey skies, the frozen lakes. The whole thing took three days.
The first night they spent in an inn run by an elderly Jewish couple. Because of the cold, everyone gathered in one room. They
ate stuffed pike and drank Jewish mead. The windows were patterned with hoarfrost. After they’d eaten, the old man scraped at a fiddle and sang. Then they laid out their furs, and with the wolves baying from the forest, settled down to sleep.
That night Helena dreamt of her father. He was trying to tell her something; he was standing on the edge of a frosty wood and shouting, but his words were lost in the wind. She struggled to get closer but the snow was too thick. She dragged her legs; she twisted and lurched. The snow would not release her. Her father stood unmoving on the trees’ edge, calling. She woke and pulled the fur up to her chin. She lay there for a while, watching the embers of the fire. In the morning one of the horses was found frozen to death in its stall.
They arrived in Wilno exhausted. Everything had changed. Their own house on Mała Pohulanka was shuttered up and deserted. They took a couple of rooms in the home of Madame Jelenska, known as ‘the Pope of Wilno’ on account of her passion for good works.
Wilno itself was neglected and grey. The colours of its buildings had faded; rust stains ran down the walls. Those few people who shambled through the uncleared snow were dressed in ragged shawls and scarves. Hollow-cheeked soldiers of the Lithuanian army patrolled the streets, surprised as anyone to be wearing the uniform of their own country.
‘These Lithuanians,’ scoffed Helena’s mother, ‘they have no idea how to be gay. If they were Poles, they would know how to celebrate!’
Uncle Augustus’s investiture took place the following day. The cathedral of Sw Stanisław was icy cold, but full of people. Helena borrowed a long grey skirt and a dark felt toque. She wore an aquamarine necklace. She stood with her mother close to the front. She watched Uncle Augustus prostrate himself on the steps of the altar, his chin in the dust. She watched the priests hover over him with candles. She heard the strains of the choirs, the thunder of the organ, and felt the old glow of her pre-war piety.
After three hours Uncle Augustus, now Bishop of Riga, turned to face the congregation. He raised his arms to give the blessing. A whisper rustled in from the back of the cathedral. It ran down the side aisles, in amongst the green and white columns. It spread into the domed chapel of Sw Kazimierz with its blood-red marble walls, its silver statues of Polish kings.
‘Riga has fallen! The Bolsheviks have taken Riga!’
So instead of taking up his new see, Uncle Augustus went back with the others to Platków. He loaded his cope, his casket of pectoral crosses and rings, and hauled himself up onto the bryczka. They then drove another three days through the snow-crusted forests.
The following days at Platków – the last few days of Christmas – were a whirl of activity. Everyone was dusting down their high spirits; they hid the years of destruction; briefly, they forgot about the Bolsheviks. There were dancing parties and parlour games, and in the afternoons they pulled toboggans across the park to the small hills. They skated on the lake. At meal-times people stood and gave tear-sodden accounts of the refugee years, of staggering odysseys and chance encounters, of the dizzying shock of return.
One evening Touring Józef came and spun Helena around the ballroom in a wild écossaise. He professed his undiminished love and gave her a spindly-legged fawn.
The fawn delighted Helena – more so for a time than Józef himself. She called him Pierre – she was reading War and Peace. Later Pierre turned out to be a girl, so he became Natasha. Helena kept Natasha in an unused stable on the edge of the woods and each morning waded through the snow to feed her.
The first threat to this new-found harmony came on the sixth day after Christmas. Helena’s mother ran out of cigarettes. Like everything else that couldn’t be grown, tobacco was still unavailable. Helena’s mother had been living off a box of Italian cigarettes Uncle Augustus had acquired from a visiting monsignor. The whole household watched anxiously as she smoked the last ones. It was Uncle Augustus who saved the day. He discovered some mysterious herb with a strong flavour and rolled her cigarettes from this.
‘Augustus,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what this is, but it is wonderfully aromatic. You must tell me your secret!’
‘Bishop’s oath,’ he said, and tapped the side of his nose.
But a week later she found out. He had been taking the hay from Natasha’s litter. After that whenever Uncle Augustus tried to speak, she would say:
‘Oh, shut up, Augustus! Remember that the Holy Ghost only speaks through you in your diocese.’
But there were deeper threats to which Helena said she was largely indifferent. She was much too involved with her deer. In early February, at a party given for her own name-day, Helena’s mother stepped into the drawing room. She stood by the piano and called for silence.
‘The Bolsheviks,’ she announced, ‘are within two days’ march.’
Everyone, remembers Helena, adopted their most serious expressions. Aunt Anna cocked her chin and straightened her back. Uncle Augustus led a short series of prayers. The women tried hard to look brave to each other; the men tried even harder, promising the greatest sacrifices for wives and families that they usually ignored.
Old Pan Romauld, with his squeaky voice, became particularly gallant. ‘I will fight to the last to defend my land! I will not let this Godless mob violate my people!’
Helena and her sister nudged each other and giggled.
Uncle Augustus, seeing them, muttered, ‘Youth fears nothing as it understands nothing!’
But for a time everything was quiet. Several weeks later, Helena developed a high temperature. That winter’s ’flu epidemic reached her before the Bolsheviks. Her mother blamed it on ‘her damned deer’ and with Helena in bed, released Natasha into the forest.
Uncle Augustus worked out a plan with Stefan. If the Russians arrived, they would take the back drive to the village, and there hide as peasants.
But the Bolsheviks, when they came, came swiftly. There was no time to escape. A small unit of Red Army troops rode up out of the avenue one dusk. Helena was too ill to be moved.
Uncle Augustus never left her bedside. Downstairs Stefan and Ewa kept the soldiers at bay. They took over the dining room, ate most of the food in the house and, thinking it some expensive Polish liqueur, drank the shoe resin of Helena’s mother.
In the middle of the night, the O’Breifnes fled Platków. They harnessed a farm cart and headed west. Helena remembers sitting propped against the side of the cart and the rain and the bare fields. She remembers the sound of the wheels in the mud and the figure of Uncle the Bishop, silent and stony-faced in the dawn light.
It was mid morning by the time they reached the German positions. Two days later they were on a train bound for Warsaw.
16
THE O’BREIFNES SPENT the spring of 1919 in Warsaw, free Warsaw. Warsaw was alive that spring. The squares were full of debates, the newspapers full of rhetoric; the banks of the Vistula were spotted with dandelion. Helena spent much of her time studying, her sights set on Cracow University.
Meanwhile, all the strain of the past months fell from her mother. She discovered a new brand of Polish cigarettes and became suddenly happy and benevolent. She bought Helena a white cotton dress and a white hat and took her to a Jewish photographer near the old palace.
In Cornwall, Zofia still has this photograph; it is the one where Helena is toying with her necklace. Her head is tilted slightly to one side; she looks coy and vulnerable. But in her eyes is a cool determination. There is something about the photograph, something about her, which makes you want to look at it again and again, and no one looked at it more than Helena herself; she admitted that it puffed her vanity to such a degree that if she passed a group of soldiers without turning their heads, she became quite petulant.
At about this time, Piłsudski left Warsaw and went east. He planned to take Wilno. Through a series of cunning manoeuvres and cavalry assaults, he sent the Bolshevik garrisons into confusion. After two days of street fighting, the Red Army withdrew. Piłsudski – himself from Wilno – issued a procla
mation:
I, who was born in this unhappy land, am well acquainted… with its state of perpetual subjection… Now at last in this land which God seemed to have forsaken, liberty must reign… The Polish Army brings Liberty and Freedom to you all…
Not everyone agreed. The Lithuanians saw the Poles not as liberators but occupiers. The eastern borders of the new Polish state, swelling though they were, were far from secure. Helena’s mother was in no hurry to return. In May she took the family south for the summer, to a cousin’s estate near Cracow.
The house, said Helena, was like Platków before the war: intact, with glass-fronted walnut cabinets, Chinese painted screens and gleaming silver. She hated it. It only served to remind her that they still had no home, that their own land was being fought over, that they had no money.
Added to that, Aunt Wanda, who owned the house would say things like, ‘Of course, Helena’s looks are the kind that don’t last,’ or, ‘Intelligence is all very well in a man, but in a woman it merely brings bad luck.’
Helena wrote to the Ursuline convent in Cracow. She said she’d taught English in St Petersburg and Mother Augusta agreed to take her on. She travelled down on the train and was given a small, blue-wallpapered room with a bed and a desk. She loved that room. Her new independence brought out in her a passion for neatness, and she stacked her books according to size, aligned her three pairs of shoes like soldiers on parade, and started a diary. On the opening page she wrote, in English: ‘The Story of Helena O’Breifne, teacher of English, lover of animals, residant [sic] of the House of Ursuline Nuns, ancient city of Cracow, Poland.’
The Bronski House Page 11