The Bronski House

by Philip Marsden

  Lord D’Abernon, head of an Allied delegation, recorded the same apparent nonchalance in his Warsaw diary of the time:

  26 July. I continue to marvel at the absence of panic, at the apparent absence indeed of any anxiety… all the best troops are being sent to Lvov, leaving Warsaw unprotected.

  27 July. The Prime Minister, a peasant proprietor, has gone off today to get his harvest in. Nobody thinks this extraordinary.

  2 August. The insouciance of these people here is beyond belief. One would imagine the country in no danger and the Bolsheviks a thousand miles away.

  3 August. The population here has seen so many invasions that it has ceased to pay any attention to them.

  Examining his options two nights later, Piłsudski realized the only hope of defence was to attack. The orders were issued: a large part of the Polish troops were to disengage, hurry south along the front, and cut off the Red Army from the rear. The plan was an absurd one. Yet it worked.

  The Miracle on the Vistula, as it became known, was a decisive victory. Never again was the Soviet army defeated so emphatically. There followed a bloody Russian retreat. The Red Army slid into disarray. The lands of Kresy were trampled by starving, leaderless Cossacks and retributive Poles.

  By October 1920, an armistice was called and Poland found itself with an eastern border more than 500 miles long. Lord D’Abernon, who had witnessed the Polish victory, gave its importance a hyperbolic assessment:

  The Battle of Tours saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran; it is probable that the Battle of Warsaw saved Central and parts of Western Europe from a more subversive danger – the fanatical tyranny of the Soviet.

  In fact it proved only a respite, a twenty-year respite in which the landed families of Eastern Poland carried on living much as before.

  Adam was demobbed in November. He came back to Warsaw and burst into the flat with his customary enthusiasm. He and Helena planned to leave for Mantuski. Helena had no clothes but summer clothes. One day in the street she met her Uncle Nicholas O’Breifne. He gave her some money for a winter coat, but the money went instead towards the price of a black-eyed dachshund puppy. Helena called the dachshund Haust.

  The following morning, she and Adam and Haust left Warsaw on one of the first trains to the re-established territories of Eastern Poland. They spent two days sitting on sacks of grain from America, while Helena clutched her dog for warmth.

  In Lida they stayed with a Jewish family. When she heard where they were going, the old woman clapped her hands in horror. ‘Alone in the forest! How can you live there now?’

  In the morning they left early. They loaded their few belongings on to an old dray with low sides and a high box. They told the Jewish family their horses would be back in a few days.

  Helena remembered the journey well. It was bitterly cold. An icy fog had paralysed the land. Nothing moved in that dead November; the road was no more than a series of frost-hardened ruts, the scars of a dozen armies. And yet, she said, everything seemed hopeful and new: new home, new Poland, new dachshund, new Adam.

  They rode in silence. The reins rested lightly in Adam’s gloved hands. His moustache had thickened in the army. His high forehead rose steeply before shelving back beneath the peak of his peasant czapka. ‘How he loved that czapka!’ thought Helena. And always his grey eyes, hooded at the corners, bright with an eternal uncomplicated joy.

  All morning the forests dozed beneath the fog. There was no one else on the road. Around midday the trees thinned and they entered a plain. A milky sun seeped through the cloud; the unworked fields wore thick fringes of grass. The road dipped and rose through a number of low hills.

  They came to a small river; the bridge had been destroyed and the two horses placed their feet tentatively on the frozen water, which gave way. They crossed the river with the ice just above their fetlocks, breaking it with each step. Adam stood on the box to shout them on, and soon they were bounding up the far bank.

  Sitting down again, he began to talk about Mantuski. He spoke of his visit there last year and the damage that he’d found. The Russians had used the house as a field headquarters and much of the furniture was destroyed. He had managed to arrange repairs and redecoration and ordered new furniture. ‘You will like what I’ve done!’

  The day slid into afternoon. In the colourless twilight, they pulled off the main road and onto a soggy track which threaded its way between the trees and out again into the homesteads of Mantuski village. The houses were low and brown. Each one was penned in by a square of picket fencing. Leafless trees were scattered among the houses; narrow streams of smoke rose from the chimneys. Helena waited to see her new house.

  A cold wind blew through the pines. Broken ice lay across the Niemen. The sky was black as they pulled through the village towards the house. There was no house. Nie ma domu. Only the chimney of the brick factory remained. Not one other building. The house had been burned to the ground.

  Helena says nothing about her or Adam’s response. She says only that it was dark by the time they crossed the Niemen, and that they drove on through the night to Druków.

  One or two of Uncle Nicholas’s retainers were at Druków – Rymszewicz (who had led the convoy in 1915), his wife, Janówa the cook. They greeted Adam and Helena with tears.

  Adam left early the next morning. He had to return the horses to Lida. A week later he was back, stepping out of the forest, crossing the fresh snow in the park and climbing up to the house. Two hares hung from his shoulder. He had spent a night or two at Mantuski; most of the estate workers were still in hiding. The rebuilding, he told Helena, would start at once.

  18

  MANTUSKI TOOK exactly three years to rebuild. In the meantime Adam and Helena lived at Druków, in the old estate office of Uncle Nicholas O’Breifne, a building known as the ‘oficyna’.

  The first winter was the worst any of them had known – worse even than those of the war. The accumulated effect of the occupations, the offensives, the invasions and retreats, the revolution, had sucked the land dry. There was nothing. No cows, no horses, no pigs, no chickens, no corn; no mail and no trains.

  To begin with, Helena had some American tins, most of which were fed to Haust. After that it was just buckwheat. This was boiled into a watery porridge, kasza, the traditional buffer against famine. ‘Kasza is our hope’ went a popular saying, and Adam never tired of repeating it at table, as a joke, as he handed a bowl of it to Rymszewicz’s young daughter, Kasia.

  But Adam was only rarely at Druków. Each Monday morning of that winter he walked through the snow to Mantuski. There he spent the week with a peasant family in a chata, and set about clearing the debris from the dwór.

  There was no consensus as to quite what had happened to Mantuski. Adam gleaned various reports from the villagers. It seemed that towards the end of September 1920, after the Battle of the Niemen, a great number of Russian troops had retreated along the river’s southern bank. Polish cavalry pursued and harried them. At Mantuski, where there was a ferry, the Russians had slowed to cross the river and some sort of battle took place. When it was over, the dwór was in flames. No one could tell him who was responsible – Poles or Russian or looting villagers.

  For Helena, virtually alone at Druków, the weeks dragged. She missed Adam. Each Saturday evening he came back from Mantuski for a couple of nights, shaking the snow from his boots and laying his gun on the table. For her, those nights were the only times during that dark winter that she felt truly alive.

  In February 1921 Helena started to give classes to the village children. She taught them reading and writing, and small gifts began to arrive for her: a lump of bacon, some gritty bread, corn someone had managed to hide, a beetroot. And on one day there was a note, written in almost incomprehensible Polish, begging her to visit a girl’s grandmother.

  The grandmother was a large shapeless woman and she was very ill. She lay on the stove-bed, in a small cabin in the forest. Her family, being Tartars, had fled east
during the years of war and now there was only this one girl.

  ‘Help her, please,’ whispered the recumbent woman. ‘I am nearly through.’

  Helena did what she could. She sent them food when there was any. The Tartar woman lived on. Always she was the same when Helena went there, pale and listless on her heated stretcher, but alive.

  At dusk on a foggy day in March, she was returning from the old woman’s cabin. A soldier in a ragged uniform stepped out of the mist and fell into step beside her.

  The soldier was Polish. He had been living in the forest since his unit had been routed in the last Russian advance. He’d heard there was peace, but he didn’t believe it.

  ‘God has left this country,’ he said.

  ‘God is still here if you know where to look.’

  ‘Among the trees I see only ghosts. The men that have fallen. Those are the ones I know. Ghosts.’ He looked down at his bast shoes and shook his head. ‘I have no one. No one but ghosts. Stop here with me.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Stop here,’ he repeated, and stood in front of her. She was forced to halt. He raised one blackened hand and reached for her shoulder.

  The wind sighed in the trees overhead; it was getting dark. Helena looked him in the eye. ‘I too am a ghost. And if you meddle with a ghost, you can never return to the land of the living.’

  His hand fell back to his side.

  Days later the story reached Helena of a deserter running out of the forest, wide-eyed and chattery with some story about a ghost, a strange and amorous ghost, who had tried to accost him.

  Around this time Stefan arrived from Platków. He was leading two mares, Siwka and Gniadka, the same two horses that had driven Helena and Adam from their wedding. She hardly recognized them; they stood in the yard, and the cage-bars of their ribs poked out through tettered flanks. Stefan said they were due for the wolves, but he knew she’d find a use for them.

  ‘Oj-oj-oj!’ She clapped a hand to her chin. ‘What skeletons!’

  Sick though they were, Siwka and Gniadka were the only two horses at all in that dead country. Helena cleared the old straw and cobwebs from the Druków stables. Three times a day she scrubbed the horses with a tobacco solution; she dabbed the sores with boric acid. Her friend the Tartar woman produced some flax oil and this she rubbed on; someone else brought salt, so they were given salt. She changed their bedding, groomed them, fed them, talked with them, prayed for them – and slowly, very slowly, a little life re-entered their tired eyes.

  In mid March the wind went round to the south; the patches of snow in the park disappeared; one or two mild days slipped in between the frosts. The fields, ungrazed and unploughed, appeared oblivious to the change in the seasons.

  Meanwhile Kresy began to twitch with life. A weekly train now ran to Wilno and every now and then someone would return from Nowogródek with a letter. Helena received one from her mother. It was dated 20 March, and had come from Wilno:

  …Aunt Anna here, dreadfully unhappy. Everyone maddened by shortages. We have recovered the house in Mała Pohulanka. Come to Wilno, dear, while Adam rebuilds Mantuski. Your room is still here. In a few years you’ll be wrinkled like an old baba if you live out there…

  Helena declined.

  One Saturday in late April, Adam arrived after his week at Mantuski, striding out of the avenue with a newspaper, six days out of date. He called the household together – Pan Rymszewicz and his wife, and the families of some of Helena’s pupils. Standing on the steps, in the low afternoon sun, Adam pushed up his cap.

  ‘From the Sejm in Warsaw! “In the name of Almighty God!”’ he read. ‘“We, the people of Poland, thanking Providence for freeing us from one and a half centuries of servitude, remembering with gratitude the bravery, endurance, and selfless struggles of past generations… we hereby proclaim and vote this Constitutional Statute in the Legislative Assembly of the Republic of Poland.”’

  A faltering cheer rose from that small group and the women bent to kiss one another. Pan Rymszewicz hurried into the house. He came out with vodka and a tray of rattling glasses.

  ‘A toast,’ cried Adam. ‘To Piłsudski! To Poland!’

  ‘Poland! The republic!’

  But there were one or two there who were not Poles, who did not share his enthusiasm, and slipped away, muttering, to their bare-shelved homes in the village.

  After that winter, Helena and Adam had the feeling, unstated though it was, that things could never be quite so bad again. In their private conversations, they spoke only of the future. The past was a shadowy place and neither of them wanted to revisit it.

  In April Helena walked over to Mantuski with Adam. It was the week before Easter. The Niemen was high from the flood, and Gregory the ferryman had quite a battle getting them across the river.

  At the site, there was little sign of progress. It had been cleared; there was a stack of charred timber by the trees; the old walls had been knocked down, and the parobcy had started to sort the stone. But they were short of everything – materials, tools and time. Helena was dismayed to think how long it would all take. She returned to Druków full of plans, and one of these was to establish an apiary.

  A week or so later, Rymszewicz found a swarm in the bole of an old oak. They hacked out the section at night. They set it on wooden supports in the orchard and in the morning made a skep and three frames. Helena, waving a faggot of smoking reeds, stepped up to transfer the swarm to the skep. She cut out the wax with the eggs in it, carried it to the hive and placed it inside. Then she dropped the reeds and fled.

  But the bees got in under her veil; she was badly stung. For three days afterwards, she could hardly see. Her temperature soared to 104°. After a week a doctor came from Nowogródek. Pani Rymszewicza showed him into the library where Helena lay on the sofa. He examined her, washed his hands, and said she would start to recover soon. He also announced that she was three months pregnant.

  ‘Lord!’ Pani Rymszewicza sat down hurriedly. ‘And after all them bee stings! What manner of creature will you produce?’

  ‘One used to suffering,’ joked Helena.

  But in truth she was terrified. She sent a message to Mantuski, and two mornings later Adam burst into her room having walked through the night. His hair was lank and, when he took off his czapka, tufts of it stuck out at strange angles. ‘I want a dozen children!’ he cried.

  ‘No, Adam Broński! I am not a machine.’ But she too was smiling.

  Adam threw open his arms and yelped with joy.

  To begin with, Helena was frequently sick. She lost weight, and her cheekbones tented out the pale skin of her face; she became very bad tempered.

  In May the potatoes were dug at Druków; their muddy white bodies signalled the first real sign of life from the dead land. The lilacs came out beside the lake and Helena grew a little stronger; she walked whenever she could and trailed her hands through the high grass.

  At the same time, life at Druków moved towards its old pre-war normality. Uncle Nicholas returned from Warsaw. Helenka the maid and the Angora cats Kiki and Risetka came by train from Wilno; the brother of Pan Rymszewicz, who had lost an arm in 1916 in the Russian trenches, returned. Rymszewicz himself travelled west to Poznan and returned after six weeks with twenty cows and three horses. Uncle Nicholas gave Adam one of the horses, and three cows for Mantuski. For the rest of the summer at Druków there was milk and butter and the first cheeses, and Helena’s cheeks swelled again; she became breathless and clumsy.

  Then, in September, Panna Konstancja, despatched by Helena’s mother, arrived in a battered old tachanka with two ten-pound hams on the seat beside her.

  It was agreed that the baby should be delivered in Wilno and in early October, with Adam and Haust, Helena travelled up there. They stayed in the house on Mała Pohulanka. With the first frost came Helena’s contractions and Adam took her to the Doctor Rymsza hospital. All evening her labour continued. Adam was horrified by her pain. He could not bear to watc
h, so at dusk slipped off to the Church of Sw Yakub to pray. He prayed and prayed and prayed. Then he fell asleep. He woke to find himself locked in. All night he was stuck in that church and when at last he was released, at eight in the morning, he hurried to the hospital, fully expecting Helena to be dead.

  But she was sitting up. She had had a ten-and-a-half-pound baby, a daughter. Adam knelt beside the bed and wept.

  Adam’s father and Helena’s mother, their two remaining parents, were her godparents. She was christened in Wilno: Zofia Aleksandra.

  At Druków when they returned, there was a carriage waiting for them in the yard. A face leaned out through the window, chewing on a carrot. It was the bearded face of a goat. The coachman handed Helena a letter, headed with the Broński crest:

  ‘A goat for the birth of your daughter, Zofia Aleksandra. Stanislaw Broński.’

  PART III

  MANTUSKI

  19

  IN EARLY JANUARY 1993, Zofia received a letter from a cousin of hers in Poland. Would she come and join her for a couple of weeks that summer, at a spa in Lithuania?

  She telephoned me to ask what I thought. ‘You know, Philip, what I’d really like to do? I’d like to see Wilno, where I was born. According to me, this spa is only about a hundred miles to the west. If I could get a bus or something…’

  I had to be in Russia that summer. I told her I could come down and collect her and we could go together.

  So on the eve of the longest day, a battered Soviet bus left me in the small Lithuanian spa town of Birstonas. I crossed the square and headed towards the river. The poplars were shaking their leaves in the wind; a rainstorm had just passed over the town and black puddles lay across the road.

  Beyond the town was a complex of concrete hotels. I found the right one, took the lift to the fifth floor, walked down a darkened corridor and knocked on the door of Room 511.