The Bronski House

by Philip Marsden

  ‘Philip! I thought you’d never make it!’

  I kissed Zofia on both cheeks and followed her into the room. She was wearing a pale blue skirt and a navy sweater and a string of plastic beads. She turned and sat down. Her face, with its network of lines, the etched-out legacy of a lifetime of charm and suffering, was tanned and glowing. I said she looked well.

  ‘Yes, I am. But I tell you, two weeks here and it is enough! It is stultifying here. If it wasn’t for my books and the Niemen, I think I would have gone mad.’

  On the table in front of her were two or three stacks of books. I could see the poems of Zbigniew Herbert, a new book by Kapuscinski and a biography of Daphne du Maurier: Polish and English; Poland and Cornwall, her two worlds. I asked if she had been writing.

  ‘Yes, a few verses. But only in Polish.’

  That evening we spent with her cousin and a couple of other Polish widows. We sat in one of their rooms and drank a bottle of Dubonnet. We ate chocolate. The late sun came through the window and fell on the widows’ grey hair and on their old-fashioned dresses; and the bottle went round the group and they told their stories, the fifty-year-old stories, the same stories that sooner or later every conversation turned to here – the stories of deportations and exile and death – until it seemed there was nothing more to say. Silence flooded between us. From the outside came the sound of a truck changing gear and Zofia smiled, saying: ‘Come on, enough gloom! A song!’

  She sang her Belorussian song, and then one of the women started the ‘Red Belt’ and gradually the others joined in. Their voices stretched across the evening, spilling out of the open window and down towards the river. They made a strange medley, those Polish widows, the one with a mannered soprano, another with a plaintive mumbling voice, another spirited and sharp. I thought of their stories as they sang and looked at their faces – at the one whose husband had died a month before, and the one whose mother-in-law had been crushed beneath a German tank, the one whose family had all died in Auschwitz, the one who’d been deported to Kazakhstan and saw a woman in the cattle truck slash her own throat.

  The singing finished and I noticed in Zofia’s eyes a familiar mist of tears. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘just think how lucky we’ve all been! What a charmed life we’ve led!’

  ‘Lucky?’ I blurted. ‘How can you say that, Zosia!’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Philip. Just consider. Why was it that we were spared while all those others perished?’

  The next morning we left Birstonas and the Polish widows and took a bus up into a region of lakes and kolkhoz fields and forested horizons. Zofia was curious to see Vilnius. She called it by its Polish name, Wilno.

  ‘It just shows you how stupid and unthinking I was as a girl. I never imagined Wilno was anything but Poland. We were never told in school how Piłsudski had just come and annexed it from Lithuania – and only the year before I was born!’

  We topped a hill, and Vilnius was spread out before us – an archipelago of old church towers in a bay of new grey tower blocks.

  We looked for the hospital where Zofia had been born but had no luck. Crossing the square in front of the old KGB headquarters, we reached the church of Sw Jakub. It was being restored. Inside, a network of wooden scaffolding rose up into the vaults like some elaborate stairway. A team of women was sweeping building-dust from the stone floor.

  Zofia went up to them. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘that seventy-two years ago, on the night I was born, my father came here – to this very church – and he prayed so hard that he was locked in all night! Imagine that!’

  The women smiled at her, and looked at her clothes. They didn’t understand a word of Polish.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Zofia, as we came out of the church. ‘Mickiewicz street was somewhere here. We had a flat there – number sixty-two.’

  I asked an ice-cream vendor what the street was called.

  ‘Gedimino.’

  ‘And before?’

  ‘Before?’ he scoffed. ‘Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, you name it…’

  ‘What about before the war? In Polish times.’

  ‘Oh then! Then it was Mickiewicz.’

  ‘So,’ said Zofia, ‘the block is down the other end. The last one before the river.’

  It was a long way. Small blue plaques announced the numbers. We followed the evens down the left-hand side. Number sixty was opposite the new parliament building. But there was no sixty-two, just a wide-open space, the road and the river.

  We stepped into the middle of the space. It was empty. Zofia looked around and shook her head.

  ‘It’s all so strange, Philip! You know, if I saw my sixteen-year-old self now, crossing this square, I really think she would be a complete stranger to me.’

  We circled back along the river and into the old town. Zofia wanted to see the Miraculous Madonna. The chapel in which it hangs stretches over one of the old gates, ‘The Gates of Dawn’, the Ostra Brama. Outside were rows of beggars and a group of autistic children. A woman was struggling up the stairs on her knees.

  Inside the chapel, Zofia stood for several minutes before the painting. The candle-light played on her face. All around her were the muttered devotions of the old, the ill, the curious, the trickling new recruits of post-Soviet Catholicism.

  The image itself was extraordinary. As you looked at it – that tallow-faded face, encased in silver, with hooded eyes and tilted head (based, it is said, on the face of Barbara Radziwiłłóna) – it became sadder and sadder and sadder until it seemed as though no sadness could be too wide, no suffering too great for her to bear. The devotees and pilgrims, fingering the beads of their rosaries and mouthing incantations, stared at her as if in an inescapable trance.

  Zofia stood apart from them, no rosary in her hands, no incantations on her lips; on her face was an expression of loss that was so characteristic it was like a signature. I could never tell whether it was closer to tears, or laughter.

  Beneath the painting, like a smile, was a silver crescent moon. All around it were panels and panels of gold and silver hearts, embossed names, praying figures, silver arms, legs, hands and feet – and messages: ‘Thank you for listening to the prayers of my heart. St Petersburg 1912.’

  That was the year Helena started to come here on her own. She was thirteen and had just begun to cross swords with her mother. At Ostra Brama, she wrote later, she could air her adolescent fury in an atmosphere of apparent understanding.

  Outside it was raining, a soft rain which fuzzed the skyline and sat like dew on Zofia’s grey hair. She put on a waterproof hat and tied it up under her chin.

  ‘In the worst years of the war in London, Philip, I wrote a poem about the Madonna here. It won some prize or other. I can’t think why, it wasn’t all that good…’ And she was smiling as we crossed the cobbles and went out through the gate.

  One evening in Vilnius we met a Polish businessman and his wife. They were friends of friends in Warsaw. They had started a company importing processed food from France and Germany; it was going well. No, they said, there was no trouble for the Polish minority in Vilnius, not if you made good business.

  We ate in a new restaurant. The waiters outnumbered the diners by at least two to one. We sat on chrome-and-leather chairs at a table of smoked glass. The businessman dabbed his mouth with a napkin, touched Zofia’s arm and said, ‘Afterwards we want to take you for a drive, we would like to show you the new buildings.’

  It was dusk. We drove up out of the old town, past the avenue where Helena had lived in 1915, where she had watched the prize horses arrive; past the church where in 1918 she had prayed, piously, that all the chaos should end and had clutched her rosary so tight, she recalled, that it had left deep red marks in her palms.

  ‘My mother lived somewhere here,’ Zofia told the businessman. ‘In 1915 and again in 1918.’

  ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘And I was born in a hospital somewhere there…’

  ‘How interesting!’

&
nbsp; But he didn’t slow the car.

  On towards the edge of town were the new buildings. The skyline was filled with them. They stood in ranks against the darkening sky, lights dim in the windows, their ordered façades defiant and cold, row upon row of them, like radiators waiting for installation.

  The businessman’s wife turned towards us. She was smiling. ‘It is beautiful, yes?’

  I nodded.

  And then we were among them. Everywhere were cranes, stacks of pre-stressed concrete blocks, holes in the ground. The grey of the buildings fused with the grey of the sky. The buildings seemed interminable. We drove around one set of blocks and there was another, and another, until I imagined we were in some sort of grim modernist maze where the minotaur was a yellow earth-mover, Theseus a quantity surveyor, and his ball of string nothing more than a builder’s extended tape measure.

  ‘Just think,’ said the businessman, grinning with the joy of it all, ‘five years ago, this was just a village. A village! Now look!’

  As if to illustrate his remark we reached the edge of the maze, suddenly, and the horizon dropped back to the forest. And there, lodged between the piles of torn-up turf, the concrete pipes, high and dry on an island of untouched ground, half hidden by fruit trees, was a wooden cabin. A dog was chained to the wall and in one of the windows a single light glowed through the curtains.

  20

  BY CHRISTMAS OF 1921, with the snow drifting against the banks of the Niemen, the rebuilding at Mantuski had to be abandoned. Adam returned to Druków. He took a post as judge in the village assembly. He continued it in the spring, leaving Bartek in charge of the work at Mantuski.

  Adam and Helena spent two more winters in the oficyna. They were bright years, but austere. Poland at the time was pulling itself out of the mire of war and revolution and was settling into a more innocent routine of political squabbling. At Druków, no one was aware of much beyond the village.

  Progress at Mantuski was made in fits and starts. The brick factory was working again, as were the timber yards. But sometimes the whole site lay idle for several weeks while they waited for cement, or a bucket, or a box of nails, or everyone left to plant or plough and attend to the more important business of trying to feed themselves.

  Adam and Helena settled into the slow, convalescent rhythm of the land. Only one thing marred the process of regeneration and that was Helena’s health. In the spring of 1922, she contracted pleurisy, and in the summer developed a haemorrhage in one lung. Trusting Zofia to Panna Konstancja and the goat’s milk, Adam took Helena to a sanatorium in southern Poland. The doctors said she must stay six months.

  Rabka sanatorium was an old dwór with high ceilings and long echoing corridors. Helena had a painting of Cracow above her bed and a sash window with broken shutters. The days were slow and heavy and Helena felt trapped – trapped by her own frailty, trapped by the distant mountains, trapped by the fresh-faced nurses. She longed for the forests and Druków and Mantuski; she longed for Adam and Zofia and the animals. She wrote letters:

  19 May. Rabka sanatorium.

  Adam darling,

  It seems I’ve been here a hundred years, each day is exactly like the last. I go to my meals. I come back to my room. I read until my eyes ache from reading. I feel better, though in the afternoons I get so terribly tired…

  Adam, I have let you down. What sort of mother am I to be, ill always and far from my child? Send me news, please. I think of you each moment and darling Zofia and Haust and everyone at Druków. Kiss them all for me!

  Helena.

  *

  27 May. Druków.

  Miraculous Helena! Your letter came today and I took it out and waved it in the wind. Don’t be hard on yourself, kochana, don’t look at yourself from the side… Imagine, this afternoon a shaggy-haired bandit was in the courtroom. He had tried to steal the priest’s horse. While he was talking, and telling a tale about the priest’s stables and his mother who had just died, I suddenly realized I was not listening at all but thinking of you! You were standing in your fur coat before the oficyna with your cheeks glowing against the snow. ‘Helutka!’ I muttered. ‘Helutka!’ The poor bandit thought I was quite mad! I had to let him off… Haust has a very sad face and misses you very much…

  *

  I June. Rabka sanatorium.

  …Today I spent the afternoon on the terrace. The bees were tireless – what a din they made! I have been reading a lot. There is nothing else to do. Some of these Polish authors are really not worth it with their endless side-taking, but I adore the Scandinavians. I have been reading Ibsen. I have found a dear woman from Wilno who has some terrible wasting disease but we cheer each other with talk of Wilno and Mickiewicz. How are the horses?

  *

  11 June. Druków.

  …I tried to harness Gniadka and she broke a swingle-tree, then she refused to plough, but Siwka went into harness like an angel. I sent eight hens to Mantuski today! The priest is very angry about the bandit, but how could I explain! Haust is fine. The baby is fine. But we all ask – where are you? Oh my love! My bird of passage! We all think of you. The world is wonderful when I am with you. What eyes I have, they see you everywhere! I will go now into the fields and look for your face in the buckwheat, in the pines, in the empty places of the forest. I kiss your lips, my darling. My lips are quite painful from kissing…

  *

  20 June. Rabka.

  Adam darling, Everything is much as before. I look out of the window. I watch the clouds above the hills. What a torment it all is! I must leave this place. I think of Zofia’s little white face and wonder why God has denied me her first months. A young soldier died here today, from a leg wound he received fighting the Bolsheviks. He looked about seventeen. There was a special Mass in the chapel…

  *

  I July. Druków.

  Darling Hela, I am in our room in the oficyna. It is the middle of the night. I have found a dressing-gown from before the war. The silence is buzzing in my ears. Zofia is asleep. Two days ago I went to Mantuski and the roof is almost finished! One hen died but the others are laying well. Tomorrow I must attend an autopsy. The doctors will cut up the corpse and I will ask questions. Ugh!

  …Goodnight, my Hela, because the cocks are crowing. There are mice everywhere. We must buy mousetraps. I am very tired and my hand is slowing. Goodnight, my dearest love,

  Adam.

  *

  16 July. Rabka.

  …I have decided to come home, Adam. The doctor will examine me again but he has said: ‘I cannot force you to stay.’ I take that to mean I can leave. I will let you know when I will return…

  *

  When Adam realized finally that she meant to come home, he travelled himself to the sanatorium. He wore a new coat and black polished shoes. He looked thinner. They sat for a long time on Helena’s bed, talking too much and too quickly. Then they went in to see the doctor.

  The doctor had half-moon glasses. He looked at them both, then peeled the glasses from his ears. He held out his hand to a pair of wicker chairs. ‘Sit down, please… Pani Brońska, your lung is now healed. I would like you to stay another few weeks, but if you insist, well, what can I do?’

  ‘Thank you, doctor.’

  ‘But I must warn you that it would be very unwise for you to have any more children.’

  Back at Druków, they consulted Uncle the Bishop. He consulted Rome. Months passed and Helena justified, in her own mind at least, that using birth control was all right; if it would save her, enable her to mother Zofia.

  But the reply from Rome was unequivocal: ‘The soldier dies on the battlefield, the woman in childbirth.’ And within a few months, she was expecting another child.

  That second winter in the oficyna was cold and dark and very long. Helena lay for days beneath her counterpane. She watched the black boughs of the beech tree brush against the sky. Half-completed cushion covers lay beside her. Zofia lay swaddled in a cot in the corner, Haust in his curled-up crescent bef
ore the fire; the wind prodded at the eaves.

  Helena waited. She waited through the long mornings and the yellow dusks; she became indolent with waiting; in her darker moments she became convinced, alone in the wooden fastness of that cabin, that her whole life had been like this: a sentence, waiting for release.

  In March, release was given. She gave birth, without any hint of complication, to a son; a week later, a three-year-old mare was standing in the Druków yard, the gift of Adam’s father.

  Helena’s account of her early life ends at about this time. Pictures of the 1920s and early 1930s – the first ten years at Mantuski – emerge from her papers of the time: letters, stories, scraps of diary, all the bits and pieces that survived the escape. Certain important events she chose to write up in detail, and one of these was the move to Mantuski. She had chosen for it the pages of a small green, leather-bound notebook. At Braganza, Zofia had once read the passage out to me, translating as she went.

  From my cottage I phoned to ask if we could go through it again. Zofia said she’d dig it out and ring me back.

  I heard nothing that afternoon, nor in the evening. In the morning she rang and said, ‘Philip, I just cannot understand it. I have looked and looked and looked!’

  I told her not to worry.

  ‘No, I am like a dog with a bone when I get like this – I must chew and chew! Do you know,’ she chuckled, ‘I even prayed, once to Mama, and once to St Antony! I promised five pounds to the poor if it turns up. Are you sure it is not with you?’

  I said I’d look, but I knew it wasn’t. The following day she phoned again. ‘Well done!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You found the book, didn’t you? It was here when I got back…’

  The book had appeared on the chair in her room. She had sat frequently in that chair during the two days of looking. Whether it was Helena or St Antony who’d left it we couldn’t decide. But whoever it was, they clearly approved of the story being told. And the poor got their five pounds.