The Bronski House

by Philip Marsden

  One more scene came back to Zofia from those early years. She was standing near the larch in front of the house. She was about nine or ten. The gardener’s son came across the lawn. He hit the trunk of the larch with a stick, then said, ‘You know where babies come from?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zofia.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Storks,’ she answered. ‘Storks bring them in their beaks from Africa.’

  The gardener’s son laughed. ‘You think so?’

  She nodded weakly.

  ‘It’s nonsense!’

  ‘Well, where then?’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He leaned over to whisper in her ear. She could feel his cupped hand against her cheek, his breath warm on her skin.

  ‘Oj-oj!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘It’s true! I’ve seen it myself!’

  Zofia frowned. ‘How much does it cost?’

  ‘A hundred zlotys for a maid. Three hundred for a boy.’

  She found it hard to imagine. What an extraordinary picture! But, she reasoned, it was no less plausible than storks. She cursed the governess who’d fed her that fable and for years afterwards believed there really was an old woman who sold babies in Iwje market.

  22

  IN JULY OF 1925, Adam was offered the post of judge in Iwje. It meant spending most of the week away from Mantuski but, as he said in a letter to Helena, ‘By judging I can earn enough to put Mantuski back on its feet. Five hundred zlotys a month is a good salary!’

  And from then on, Adam always lived away from Mantuski, returning at weekends and only occasionally for periods of a few weeks.

  Zofia has a photograph of her father at about this time. He is reclining in some long grass, in shirt-sleeves and tie. Zofia is leaning against his knee. He has small eyes and a large head and the scale of him and his wide-open expression give him a look of outsize benevolence.

  His letters confirm the impression. They are full of an apparent delight at all things. In 1924 he had written to Helena during one of her trips to Wilno:

  15 April. Mantuski.

  Helena, my love!

  The last few days have been beautiful. The ice is cracking on the Niemen and you can see the water bubbling beneath it. Spring is on its way! We have started fencing. Tomorrow we begin to milk three times a day… The cows are expecting, the horses are expecting, and there are a dozen little chicks squeaking like cartwheels in the hen house! I am looking for stove tiles in some of the old sheds. But everything seems broken or vanished.

  We had three days of cloud and rain earlier this week, with hailstones like peas. And now – a lovely April day. Not a cloud. I rode out through the fields. I heard the first clucking of the heathercock. The larks are screaming in the heavens. Soon we will start planting potatoes. I feel as fit as a fiddle, my love, as healthy as a fish in the Niemen, a capercaillie on the branch, a wolf in the marsh!

  I have collected the roses and we can plant them at once – they are splendid specimens, great long roots!… How healthy the horses look now – I remember what they were like after the war – ugh! Surely, Hela, things are getting better on earth. The world is speeding towards happiness…

  Adam always kept a close eye on what was happening in Warsaw, and was keen on discussing affairs of state. Where Helena was a pragmatist, he was an optimist; where she railed against the corruption of the Sejm, he remained convinced it would all work out. ‘Time, Hela dear. You can’t break in a horse overnight. Poland is no more than a skittish young colt!’

  Yet since the election in 1921, he had watched the Polish parliament fragment, year by year, into a mosaic of squabbling factions. Minister replaced minister, cabinet replaced cabinet; and each one proved more impotent than the last.

  Adam followed the comings and goings, the coalitions, the broken coalitions, the flaccid promises, with a growing sense of disappointment. Perhaps Helena was right. This was not the Poland he had fought for. Around him, in the villages, he sensed a gathering resentment among the Belorussians; in court his own authority was sometimes shaky. Mutterings of nationalism, from all sides, grew louder.

  In May 1926 Marshal Piłsudski became weary of the bickering. Deciding to rein in the skittish young colt, he emerged from retirement, marched on the Sejm in Warsaw, and sacked it. One thousand people died in the fighting. Though the Marshal declined the presidency, the centre managed, by his intervention, to reassert its authority. A policy of sanacja – ‘regenerative purge’ – was set against the partyjnictwo – ‘party corruption and chaos’.

  In Kresy, the summer of 1926 came early. News of Piłsudski’s coup reached Mantuski with the first dust-clouds, kicked up by timber carts in the village street. In the still air, the lilac hung limply on its panicled stalks; the sand-martins flew to and fro above the Niemen.

  It was hot; still and hot and airless. Dogs lay all day in the shade, loping from shadow to shadow as the sun passed overhead. Jewels of resin swelled from the cabins’ weather boards; the nights were close and heavy.

  Shortly after St Antony’s day, on yet another hot June morning, Bartek appeared shiny-faced and hatless in the doorway of Adam’s office in Iwje.

  ‘Trouble, Pan Adam.’

  ‘What trouble, Bartek?’

  ‘The villagers, Pan Adam. They’ve blocked the timber carts. They say the trees we’re felling’s theirs. Say it was you that gave them, sir.’

  ‘Which trees are they?’

  ‘Up behind the crossways. ’Tween there and the church.’

  ‘But I gave them the woodland above that!’

  Adam cursed. He stared for a moment at Bartek. Then he looked away, at the oblong of light that pierced his office, at the town square beyond. He picked up his hat and led Bartek back to the street.

  On the edge of Mantuski village, the issue had already been decided. The timber workers, their path blocked, had backed away from the militant villagers, taking fright at the armoury of forks and flails waved at them. They’d returned to the dwór steadings. The villagers now sat in a triumphant group. One or two lay on the bank, hats pulled down over their eyes. A group of young men sat in the shade talking heatedly about their victory to the wójt, the elected village head.

  The wójt stood up at the approach of Adam’s bryczka. He was an elderly, quiet-spoken man. Adam had always found him fair-minded and believed the two of them shared the same deep love of the land.

  The wójt put his hand on the wheel-rim and leaned forward towards Adam.

  ‘This is not of my choosing, Pan Adam. It’s of politics.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘I have spoken all I can and they will not move. It’s the younger ones with their ideas.’

  Adam climbed down from the bryczka and approached the group. The core of young men elbowed themselves up and looked at him blankly.

  Adam stood before them. ‘I have given you the woodland beyond the church and the meadows. This wood here belongs to the dwór.’

  The row of stubbly chins remained motionless. Flies buzzed around their faces. There was silence.

  Adam paused, looking at each of them in turn. ‘Tomorrow morning, I will bring the carts back to this wood and I expect to be allowed through. If again you resist, I will be obliged to summon the authorities from Nowogródek.’

  In the morning they were still there. Adam spoke briefly to the wójt, then went with him to the exchange to telephone Nowogrudek.

  The district commissioner was a retired major from the Polish cavalry. The Belorussian cause held little weight with him; he had applauded Piłsudski’s coup. He growled at Adam down the telephone: ‘I will be in Mantuski by noon.’

  Adam met him by the ferry. Four constables rode beside him. Each of them had a rifle in a pouch behind his saddle.

  It was not the first such show of strength the district commissioner had dealt with. He was very clinical. He read a statement, demanding the
villagers to move.

  They stayed put.

  He warned them that if they did not move, he would order his constables to fire over their heads.

  They did not move.

  He ordered his men to dismount. They loaded their weapons and knelt in a short line. ‘Fire!’

  The shots rang out around the forest. A group of rooks rose croaking from the lime trees. The villagers bunched together a little, but none broke ranks.

  The wójt stepped out in front of the commissioner, and approached the militants. He started arguing with them; the group loosened its bonds. The wójt came over and announced they would let the carts through.

  Adam asked, ‘What did you say, wójt?’

  ‘I spoke plain, Pan Adam. I said if you want to die for the sake of a few trees, that’s well and good, but think of your kin.’

  For several weeks after this, wrote Helena, Adam brooded. She had never seen him so withdrawn, so piano. His spirits returned but his unbridled optimism did not. And in the coming years, she heard more and more talk from him of land reform.

  In court, Helena said, Adam could be quite stern. After 1926, he became particularly hard on what he called crimes of nienawiść, of bitterness, either between szlachta and peasants, or between Belorussian and Pole. His summing-ups, all the more striking for coming from a gentle man, left quite a mark on the convicted. But somehow his sentencing never impressed the Polish authorities.

  In the summer of 1927 a woman of about nineteen was brought before him by the sheriff. She wore a pale calico dress. Her thin arms hung loosely from it, trailing like withies at her hips. Coffee-drop freckles were scattered over her nose, and she had very large eyes, like a rabbit’s. She was called Tessa Stanicka, and was accused of attempted murder.

  ‘Was my baby, sir.’

  ‘Your baby? You tried to kill your baby?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Yes, your honour.’

  Adam was unused to such speedy confessions. ‘Why did you try to kill your baby, Tessa Stanicka?’

  ‘I never asked for the baby, sir. I never wanted ’ee.’

  ‘And what did you do to him?’

  ‘I put him on the tip, sir, at night. Under cabbage leaves. But the priest, Father Jerzy, he came to see my mother on ’count of ’er terrible illness in the morning, sir, and his ’orse was nibbling the cabbage leaves and there was the little baby still warm and ’live, sir, when His Reverence came in the morning…’

  The clerk had difficulty keeping up with her admission, and raised a hand for her to pause.

  ‘So you don’t deny it?’

  ‘Oh no, sir!’

  ‘Even though it is a serious crime, and carries a stiff sentence.’

  ‘Well, sir, the way I see it is that if you commits a crime, it’s what happens.’

  Adam nodded. ‘And where is the child now?’

  ‘An orphanage, your honour sir.’

  ‘And you realize you cannot see the child?’

  ‘Like I said, I never asked for ’ee.’

  Adam looked across the courtroom at her. Her rabbit eyes blinked in his gaze. He could see nothing in them: neither fear nor remorse nor evil.

  ‘Tessa Stanicka, you have committed not only a grave crime against the state, but a sin against God. You were given the gift of a child and you squandered it like a runt piglet. Would you do it again?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘How can we be sure?’

  ‘I don’t ’ave another baby, sir. I don’t want one.’

  ‘No –’ Adam was thrown for a moment by her logic. He carried on. ‘However, I do not detect in you any malice and feel that with the right circumstances, you will be able to live a virtuous life. Do you think that is possible, Tessa?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir!’

  ‘And you are sorry for what you did?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir!’

  Adam summoned the sheriff and asked him, in hushed tones, about her family.

  ‘Her mother has disowned her,’ whispered the sheriff. ‘If she goes back to her village they will starve her to death.’

  Adam tapped his fingers on the oak table. Then he leaned towards the girl and said, ‘Tell me, Tessa, have you ever worked in service?’

  When, several days later, Adam returned to Mantuski with Tessa, and announced she was to be a maid, Helena was incredulous. ‘Among our own children, Adam? How could you employ this murderess!’

  But Tessa took quickly to her new role. In time she proved the best of all Helena’s maids. Others came and went, lured to the altar or to the city, but Tessa showed no interest in anything but keeping birds – hawfinches, chaffinches, goldfinches which flocked to her window like disciples. She remained at Mantuski, perpetually naive, perpetually loyal, loved with an unquestioning love by the children and surrounded by an ever-growing choir of passerine song.

  Helena loved that birdsong. It took her back to St Petersburg, to Liki the Chinese songbird and Aunt Ziuta and the smell of herring on snowy street corners, to the astrakhan hats in Gostinny Dvor; and to the sight of her father, frail and smiling by the Moika Canal, leaning on an ivory-topped cane and reciting a couplet from Mickiewicz.

  By the end of the 1920s, wrote Helena, Mantuski was ‘back on its feet’. Yields had grown steadily and cheeses were now being sent for sale to Wilno, to Warsaw and Cracow. The house no longer looked new and spartan but was alive – alive with the three children, alive with dogs; the larch in front of the house had grown level with the eaves.

  Yet it was still a harsh life and there was frequent illness. One autumn, when she was about eight or nine, Zofia’s brother developed a sudden temperature and when it dropped back, he started to cough up blood. The doctor came after three days and told Helena that the child stood little chance of seeing out the winter – unless she could be taken south, to France or Italy.

  There being no money for such a trip at Mantuski, Adam spoke to his father. Stanislaw Broński had little truck with rest-cures.

  ‘Children,’ he told Adam, ‘they’re like glasses! If one breaks, you simply get another.’

  Helena’s Uncle Nicholas was more accommodating. He put up the money and Helena took Tessa and the children to a small villa in Juan-les-Pins. With the help of a very kind Belgian doctor, Zofia’s brother recovered and in early March the party journeyed back across Europe, each of the children parcelled up in a set of brand-new linen clothes, with a spray of freckles on their teak-brown noses.

  The illness had shaken Helena. She had seen the French hospitals, the new drugs and the surgery. Eastern Poland seemed medieval by comparison. Dogged as she was by her own ill health, she told Adam she would set up a clinic for the village.

  ‘But Hela, you know nothing of such things!’

  She explained that she had once studied nursing in Wilno. He looked sceptical.

  But for the most part it proved enough. The ailments that the villagers brought to Helena were simple ones. Anything serious they left to prayer, or the magic of roaming quacks.

  Twice a week, she opened the side door of the house and villagers would come into a small back room that she had labelled: MANTUSKI KLINIKA. At the beginning they came mainly out of curiosity, peering at the jars in the glass-fronted cupboards, at the kidney-shaped basins and steel scissors, at Helena in her white coat. The women of the village remained wary of her powers, but the men soon became fond of the swish of Helena’s lye-starched coat, and the touch of her scrubbed hands on their skin.

  She had a small repertoire of remedies, to match the small repertoire of ailments. She devised a barley poultice for lumbago, a lime and honey balsam for colds and sore throats. She dabbed iodine on burns. For flesh wounds she raided the dairy for fresh unsalted butter and, with a few herbs, made a dressing with lint obtained from ravelled linen. As a sudorific, she used extract of dried raspberries. For the ‘three-day ague’, a common Mantuski complaint, she gave a course of quinine. She refused, outright, requests for ‘them leeches’ to flush out the ‘dark blood’ and kept a s
tore of placebos – herb and cream ointments and infusions. She was quite fierce with time wasters, and particularly short with a Pani Kasia who once a month brought her cat to be cured of ‘his fearful downcast spirit’.

  23

  FROM THE BEGINNING of the year 1933, Helena’s day-to-day diaries have survived. They continue intermittently until the outbreak of the war.

  1933 it seems was a trying year, a yo-yo type of a year, with wild swings of mood and fortune. The spring was late. Planting fell behind. May and June were very wet. Then came July, clear and warm and perfect for mowing. Open canoes crossed the Niemen laden with hay. The barn doors were thrown open; lines of rack wagons creaked through the village towards them. It was a record cut.

  On 11 July Helena recorded:

  What brilliant days! The whole world simply bursting with activity, silver scythes shimmer in the meadows, the cherries better than ever. The house is full of warmth and sun… Adam here for the weekend and I am madly madly happy with him around. He is so good, so loyal, so thoughtful and incredibly kind. I adore him more with each year that passes. We have more and more in common. I miss him so terribly in the weeks…

  On Sundays Adam and Helena would have lunch at a large table by the river. They grilled bream or a Niemen jackfish and sometimes as many as fourteen would gather around that table – the three children, visiting cousins, Uncle Nicholas, Helena’s ageing mother, Panna Konstancja from Wilno, the new governess from Grodno.

  For a while everything fell into place: milk yields were up, the cheeses recovered their distinctive pre-war flavour, and the buckwheat and rye, free of witch grass, blew like silk in the July breeze.

  Then a number of things happened. First the governess from Grodno was found swimming at night with one of the married parobcy. Helena asked her to leave and she locked herself in her room. For nearly two days she refused to come out. Bartek had to prise off her door and the last they saw of the Grodno governess she was lying on her bed, being driven to the station on the back of a farm cart.