‘WAITING FRONTIER ORANY GREAT PERIL ENTREAT
IMMEDIATE ADMISSION HELENA BRONSKA + CHILDREN’
She left the carts and the children and crossed the bridge alone. She came out of the shade of the ravine and into the sun. As she walked, she could see beyond the guards to a small, busy settlement. Two or three oxen stood beneath a large oak tree, and villagers and soldiers milled around them.
Helena smiled to the guards as she approached. One of them flicked his gun at her, urging her back. She stood her ground. Out of the guardhouse came a bearded officer. A wedge of hair stuck up to one side of his head which he scratched noisily. He yawned.
‘Please, Major, I have an urgent wire. Please send it.’
The officer looked at her, then smiled slowly. ‘No.’
But she only half heard him. Over his shoulder, a man from the settlement had stopped on the edge of the bridge and was watching the scene – a young priest. Without thinking, Helena pushed past the guards. She could hear the soldiers shouting, the sound of their boots on the gravel. She reached the priest, pressed the note and the coins into his hand, and whispered: ‘In the name of God, Father, send this wire!’
She felt the guards take her arms. She shrugged them off and turned, walking swiftly back ahead of them. ‘Thank you, Major,’ she said as she passed the officer.
She reached the others. No one said anything about the gunfire and shelling, which was getting closer all the time. They rode up out of the valley and back along the main road to a group of two or three wooden cottages. The place was choked with refugees. Three old men sat in the shade; one of them was picking at his boots, the others were staring at the trees. On the cottage benches, arranged outside, women sat peeling cabbages and plucking chickens.
Helena jumped down from her cart and spoke to one of the elderly men, a Pole.
‘Can we wait here?’ she asked.
‘You have salt?’
She took down a large block of salt and said they had coffee too and brandy and some money…
‘Money!’ he scoffed. ‘What use is money now?’
But he gestured to one of the buildings and there they found space to sleep. They went back outside to prepare food.
‘What will happen now, Mama?’ asked Zofia.
‘Your grandmother will go to President Smetona.’
‘And why should he do anything to help us?’
Helena smiled. ‘When he was young the president had been a shepherd boy on her estate. She paid for his education and now he would do anything for her.’
But Helena herself was full of doubts.
That night, the shelling subsided. Word reached the refugees that a battle had been going on all day, near the railway line to the east, and now the Russians had won control of it. In the morning, everyone knew, they would be continuing the advance.
There was nothing they could do. Helena slept little. Around midnight, she left the cottage and went out to walk up and down the main road. A steady wind chased the clouds across the moon. There was a smell of apples in the air and also the dust of mushroom spores. Autumn had overcome the indolence of summer and Helena thought of Mantuski. She had always loved September’s calm, the longer nights, the permitted sadness. Now she felt oddly robust. An inevitability had set in during the day. She had done all she could.
The morning began soon after six. Helena was asleep on the cottage floor when she heard the first shells falling on Orany. Tanks were approaching through the trees.
Helena rose quickly. ‘One cart, Zosia, harness the two chestnuts. I will wake the others.’
On the road, the sound of fighting drew closer. The horses had about half a mile to go before the road dropped down towards the frontier. They could hear rifles now, and the voices of men in the trees. A group of Polish soldiers ran out suddenly in front of the cart, crossed the road, and dropped down into the ravine. Helena urged the horses into a canter.
Out of the trees came a unit of Russian troops. For a moment they appeared confused; they looked up and down the road. They saw the cart and opened fire. The bullets whined like hornets around it; one thudded into the side, splintering it. Then the road slewed down to the left and Helena did not look back. She saw the bridge, and the guardhouse beyond it and an armoured car. She drove for the bridge; if they shot at them, she thought, so be it. It was better than the Russians.
The officer waved frantically.
Beside him, his troops raised their rifles. Away up the ravine the Polish soldiers had regrouped on the edge of the river. A shell dropped into the water near them, and they hurried away downstream, around a bluff, out of sight.
‘Madame Brońska!’ The officer stepped in front of his troops.
She drove on towards the troops, but they did not fire. The officer waved to her and she drew level with him. ‘Your cable,’ he said. ‘Your cable came through last night, from the President.’
The troops closed in behind the cart, and the Brońskis crossed into Lithuania.
‘She was as brave as a lion! Goodness, when I think of it now, Mama’s courage seems in-ceredible!’
In Belorussia, shortly after we had been to Mantuski, Zofia told me what she remembered of the escape. It was a much less detailed account than her mother’s. She said that at the time she was ‘too young and foolish’ to be frightened. There was only one moment which really alarmed her.
They were driving through a village. It was late at night. They had no idea whether it was a friendly village or not, so they were cantering. Zofia was on her own in the last cart. She felt something tug at her reins and the horse slowed. She saw two or three men close in around her.
‘I had a rifle and waved it at them. I shouted at the horses and shook the reins. Somehow we broke free.’ She paused. ‘But if there was one thing that really saved us, it was that Lipniszki priest. I wonder what happened to him.’
The next morning we went to Lipniszki. The church was set back a little from the main square. It had a high tower, and a compound with the leafy look of under-use. A cabin stood outside it, and on the verandah dozed an old man.
He woke as we approached and the white spade of his beard rose from his chest. ‘Father Jarosław?’ The old man nodded and led us back into the compound. Father Jarosław! He pointed to a neat well-kept grave near the fence.
The priest, it turned out, had also reached Lithuania. He had spent several years there. In 1944, during the German occupation, he returned to Lipniszki with the church’s monstrance. He resumed his ministry. There was a typhus epidemic in the village and he had tirelessly visited the sick.
The old man’s voice dropped to a whisper and he leaned towards us. ‘But Father Jarosław got the typhus himself and the Lord took him.’
Zofia stood for a moment before his grave and crossed herself. Then she said, ‘All these years I had wondered whether that priest wasn’t some sort of angel, sent to guide us to safety.’
28
THE BROŃSKIS spent the rest of September in Lithuania, then October, and half of November. They stayed with Helena’s mother at Platków.
After the dash to the border, the relief with which they crossed it, the reality of their position began to sink in. Helena wrote:
So, the most feared and the most appalling thing happened. We fled Mantuski, left our beloved Mantuski. The house rebuilt by Adam, the precious rooms, the carpets, the furniture and books – gone. Our beloved staff, the dogs, the herd carefully bred over seventeen years, the forest, the bees, the orchards, the dreaming river, all gone. We are homeless, beggarly, broken. No Poland. No Mantuski. Everything vanished like a fata morgana. And so many, so many left behind: Uncle Nicholas, the Stravinskis… I don’t think I can write any more…
Zofia took long walks in the forest. Of that time she remembers the trees and an overwhelming sadness. She wrote to Eric:
We are living, but our moral forces are extinguished. Probably the Bolshevics will come here, so we try to go further. If I come to England, please
help me to get some job. I can be a very good cook if I learn a bit because now we have nothing. I hope you are all right. If we are not dead or made prisoners or so, I think I will see you in this life.
Goodbye Eric.
Three generations waited at Platków: Helena’s mother, frail and timid in her old age; Helena herself, widowed, thirty-nine years old, hobbling with a stick on account of her knee; and Zofia in loose cotton dresses, long gypsy hair and pale blue eyes.
The Russians stopped at the Lithuanian border. They signed a pact with Smetona and the pressure eased for a while. But in November Helena made the decision to leave. Her mother urged her to stay, saying it would all be over soon and they could return to Mantuski. But Helena had been chased out once too often.
In late November, Zofia wrote to Eric; she told him they were trying to get to Britain:
…Perhaps sometimes, if we don’t drown in the sea, you will meet me on a London street, sad and hungry. I will say ‘hallo Gugu’ and you will say ‘can I give you a penny for your bread?’ And I will say, ‘Oh no, I have lots of money.’ Now goodbye, dear Eric. If I don’t write for two months, that means I am no more in this world.
They reached Britain in December 1939, by way of Estonia, Stockholm and Oslo. In Bergen, there was a small coal ship bound for Newcastle. Eric met them at the docks. Zofia was struck by how formal he seemed. ‘I learned then that an Englishman in England is very different from one in a Slavic country.’
The Broński family was dispersed, billeted on various families around the country. Zofia ended up at the Convent of the Holy Family of Nazareth in Enfield. She learnt to type, to take shorthand, perfected her English and was accepted to read English literature at Reading university.
She continued to see Eric. They referred frequently to those two summers at Mantuski. So much was changing; that alone seemed constant. Zofia wrote to him in May 1940:
Enfield.
…streets streets and houses and chimneys and a sun so uncomfortable in all this town town town… I sit in the window and try to imagine. It is Mantuski – I walk in the marshes and the water makes a funny little noise at my feet and the song of the forest is all around. You are there too, Eryk, because I am not happy here now seeing the Enfield station and the old dirty houses and a brown train speeding past with a noise. And you are not happy either and you are going to the army and you can’t be free any more – so let’s imagine… Oh, it’s all too real and annoying a life!
To begin with, during the phoney war, Eric had stuck to his pacifism. But when the fighting began in earnest, he joined up with the sudden zeal of a neophyte. At the end of 1941 he was sent to the Far East. He wrote to Zofia from the ship:
…It is evening and everyone is leaning over the rails and dreamily watching the waves. We have been to two ports since I last wrote and there is so much to tell you I don’t know where to start. You know, always moving, and stopping for a few days at these fairy-tale towns is marvellous and as you go on a kind of excited madness mounts and you feel the whole world is at your feet and that all the marvellous places you have ever heard of lie open to you… It was you who had much more imagination than I did. You always wanted to travel to the ends of the earth and I loved the forests of Poland and the Swiss mountains and was content to stay near them. Dear Zosia, how you would love this now…
By early 1942, Eric was stationed in Singapore with an anti-tank unit. The Japanese had begun their offensive.
Since the very beginning, strangely enough, I seem to have been involved in all the big engagements and lots of minor ones as well. Somehow I do not get frightened, because I have too much to do, but I don’t feel a bit like Rupert Brooke. I don’t believe in fate at all, but only in the blind Goddess of Chance.
You know, Zosia, lately when I have been in action and often since, I keep on having sudden lovely glimpses of Mantuski. It is strange. Just for a moment I see the branches of the fir trees on the edge of the forest near the house, waving in the sunlight, but most of all the river, the sandbank and the sweep of the river opposite the village, and the river beside the meadows and the swirling of the surface and the noises of the water.
Just then, there was a specially big burst of shell fire a few miles away and I wanted to weep as I wrote. I think it was the contrast. I must stop now. Goodbye, darling Zosia. I think you will find me more natural when I get back.
With love. Eryk.
That was his last letter. At the time, Zofia was working in the Polish section of the BBC in London. Eric’s sister telephoned her there. She told her what she knew: that Eric had been captured during the Japanese advance, that he had been imprisoned, that he had escaped with an American, that he was betrayed by some villagers, made to dig his own grave by the Japanese, and bayoneted into it.
I asked Zofia once if she would have married Eric.
‘Philip, I really don’t know. We talked of the future, of course, but we never made plans. Everything was happening so fast in those days. If I’d been sure about Eric, perhaps I would not have been able to marry so soon afterwards.’
A year after Eric’s death, Zofia married a Spitfire pilot, a Pole. The wedding took place in the Catholic church in the Fulham Road. Helena was unable to come; she was ill with angina. The honeymoon was spent in Wales, in a lakeside hotel which granted free board to Polish airmen. Zofia remembers a series of fine autumn days and damp bracken. It was a brief spell of happiness stolen from the brown horror of the war. And it was a beginning.
After ten days, her husband had to go back to his squadron in Northolt; Zofia returned to London. They talked by telephone on the evenings he wasn’t flying. A week after the honeymoon, he ran a mission into France. His Spitfire was returning home when it was shot down. They had been married less than three weeks. At the age of twenty-three, Zofia was a widow.
After the war she married an American diplomat. They settled in Cornwall and became hotel-keepers. They bought Braganza. Zofia ran the hotel cellars, wrote poems and sailed, badly, in Memory. She planted roses and escallonia hedges and camellia, and they had two children. But the pattern of loss continued. Their son was killed at twenty-one in a car crash. They went bankrupt and lost the hotels. Zofia’s second husband died, quite naturally, at the age of eighty.
At Braganza there is a picture of her son, a pastel drawing. He is wearing a moustache. He had tried to brush his hair for the portrait, but you can see it made no difference: it was too wild and bushy to be properly controlled. He has Zofia’s hooded eyes.
I saw that same face again, in St Petersburg. It was framed in a small portrait in the Heroes Gallery of the Hermitage. Here, individually painted, are all the generals who helped push Napoleon back across the Niemen in 1812. Tsar Alexander I dominates the whole of one wall. His generals line the walls on either side. Half-way down on the left is one who, alone, is not looking at the portraitist. There is the same moustache, the same untameable hair.
Beneath the painting is written, in Cyrillic: General Graf I. O. O’Breifne.
One evening in 1992, several months after returning from Belorussia, Zofia and I were in her sitting room in Braganza. The picture of Mantuski hung above her head. It was dusk and the wind was rattling at the doors; a summer gale was on its way. Through the window, one of the trawlers was coming back into the bay. To one side of the window, the monkey-puzzle stood in the semi-darkness.
‘Just here, about fifteen years ago,’ said Zofia, ‘I remember sitting with Mama. On the lawn the grandchildren – her greatgrandchildren – were playing some noisy game. Not one of them spoke a word of Polish. English, French – but no Polish. None of her descendants had married a Pole. Mama was almost blind by then. She turned to me and said, quite matter-of-factly, “Sometimes I wonder whether I was right to bring you all out of Poland. Perhaps it would have been best just to have waited for the Russians.”’
In exile, Helena settled in a corner of Surrey. There she shared a large mock-Tudor house with a female companion and various cats.
It was an unremarkable house, in an unremarkable place. Except for one thing. In the pictures of it that Zofia showed me, it was surrounded by exactly the pine and birch woods which had surrounded Mantuski.
‘As she got older, her eyesight failed. She became very demanding. Her own mother had died in Dublin just after the war. Being an O’Breifne – one of the Wild Geese, or at least the widow of one – made her a curiosity there. For Mama it was different. She lived here for more than forty years but never really settled. She was always trying to get me to go and live in Surrey, but how could I? I had my own family here. In the end she came here, in January 1981.
‘She arrived wearing dark glasses and had a cat under her arm. I imagined she’d be here for years. But you know after only three weeks she had died. Dear Mama…’
Zofia looked out of the window. It was now almost dark. The trees were just a shadow against the bay beyond. Mist was spreading in from the west. From the lighthouse came the moan of the fog-horn.
Back in Mantuski, the larch was still standing. Pani Cichoń’s house stood next to it. Twice, she had stepped in to stop the authorities cutting it down.
‘Look,’ she had pointed at the trunk, ‘you can see the axe marks.’
Pani Cichoń had asked about the family, about Zofia’s aunts and her brothers, and her mother and what had happened to them all. Suddenly she leaned forward, interrupting Zofia’s reply. ‘Yes, ten years ago the children were playing there and there was a thunderbolt. It came out of the sky and hit the tree! Hairs of the tree came spinning down’ – Pani Cichoń made a spiralling motion in the air – ‘it must have been then – it must have been the time Pani Helena died!’
Zofia plucked three of the green seed-cones from the tree. Back at Braganza, we tried to nurture them. We planted them in pots in the greenhouse, but nothing appeared in the pots except a couple of weeds. Only the following spring, with the pots half-forgotten on the floor of the greenhouse, did it become clear that the weeds were tiny larch shoots.
The Bronski House Page 20