Against a Crimson Sky

by James Conroyd Martin

  Lutisha’s large face reddened and her grandchildren chided her for it. She blushed all the more.

  Jan sent Walek to the reception room for the bottle of vodka, and toasts were made all around for the health of everyone there, for Poland, for the king.

  Later, just before sunrise, Anna and Jan sat facing each other in the reception room, alone for the first time. Jan had lighted the hearth and found fresh candles. He studied Anna in the flickering light. “Why on earth did you tell them not to wake me, Anna?”

  “I don’t know. I was afraid, I think. Two years is so long . . . and your wound—you wrote so little about it—I didn’t know what to expect.”

  “A shoulder wound—it’s nothing.” He shrugged. “A lancer nearly knocked me off my horse.”

  “Is it painful?’

  “No, it’s well healed. I have a bit of a scar, though. He paid for his inaccuracy, I can tell you.” He gave a nervous laugh. “I do hope a little damage doesn’t affect our bargain.”

  “Bargain?”

  He moved from his chair and sank to his knees near Anna. He took her hand in his. “You will marry me, Anna?”

  She nodded. Color was rising in her cheeks. “It’s been so very long . . . are you certain?”

  “Of course, I’m certain!” Jan said, then paused, peering into the green eyes. “Are you?”

  Her long-lashed eyelids sank slowly and retracted twice before she could summon speech. “Yes. . . . Jan, two years ago . . . at Halicz . . . you joined Kościuszko’s army before I could tell you . . . that I love you.”

  Jan’s very core—one hardened by soldiering—seemed to melt away. “Oh, Anna, know that I love you.”

  “But I wished a thousand times that I had not allowed you to go off to war without having told you. . . . Had something happened—”

  “Anna,” Jan said, pressing her hand, “I knew. I knew! How could you think that I didn’t know? Words weren’t necessary then, and they aren’t now.”

  Anna’s eyes assessed him. It seemed that, rather than give herself over to tears, she laughed. “Then my worry was all for nothing.”

  He kissed her now, taking her by surprise and feeling her lips yield to his, her mouth to his tongue. He had not given her such a kiss since that day in the forest more than three years before. Jan opened his eyes slightly to see that Anna’s green eyes were open wide. He pulled back. “You were kissing with your eyes open!”

  Anna smiled. “I had to assure myself it was really you, Jan, and no dream.”

  Jan returned her smile. “And your verdict?”

  It was Anna who kissed him now, without reservation. His arms went around her. Her mouth was warm and sweet.

  “We’ll be married as soon as possible,” Jan whispered, drawing back at last. “Next week—”

  “Oh, Jan, there are conventions. The banns need to be read at church . . .” Anna stopped speaking, and her face went as white as a Sunday napkin.

  Jan laughed. “I know what you’re thinking. That I’m of the Arian faith. Well, I have a bit of a surprise. I’ve become a Catholic.”

  Anna’s deep-set eyes grew large.

  “That was your concern, yes?”

  “But when . . . why?’

  “Last year, but I made up my mind to do it long before that—just after you asked me to be godfather to your son and I was unable to do so because I was not Catholic. I converted so that it would never be a concern again. But as far as other conventions, Poland has been reduced to nothing, so conventions be damned!”

  “Jan, you meant what you wrote, about Jan Michał.”

  “About adopting him as my own? Of course. Although two Jans in the house may be confusing. Maybe you should call me Janek.”

  “No, I think not.” Anna said. The reply came immediately and with a kind of abruptness.

  “You don’t like the diminutive?”

  “No,” she responded with a certainty meant to close the matter.

  Her peremptory reaction to the diminutive was odd, but the lips that he longed to kiss turned up in a half-smile now, and he put the thought aside and kissed her yet again.

  “As for the name,” Anna said after the kiss, “we shall come to some resolution for what is the most happy of problems for me.”

  “Well, it’s one you should sleep on. I must go and let you rest.” Jan stood now. He did not want to leave. He wanted desperately to kiss her again—but he was afraid that another kiss would not be enough—

  “Go?”

  “Yes, I’m staying at the Szraber cottage.”

  “But there are two guest-chambers here.” Anna rose from her chair. “Haven’t you been staying here?”

  “Yes, but now it’s hardly proper.” Jan felt himself blushing. “Not until we’re married, Anna.” He attempted a laugh. “What would Lutisha say?”

  Anna thought a moment. “Sometimes I do think it is the peasant class that sets the moral tone for the szlachta!”

  “They do say,” Jan added, “that the lining is sometimes better than the coat!”

  They both laughed.

  “Anna?”

  “Yes?”

  “The starosta—he treated you well, did he?”

  Anna’s eyes moved away. “Come to the window, Jan.” She spoke as she walked, her hand in his. “Oh, he kept us waiting some time, but all’s well now. . . . Look, Jan, the sun is just about to break!”

  Later, as Jan walked to the Szraber cottage, his eyes fixed on the sky that was becoming tinged with red, but failing to bring it into focus. His thoughts inexplicably came back to Jan Michał and his elation was tempered just a little. He had vowed to adopt Jan Michał as his own, and he had meant it. Why, then, did the promise carry with it a weight that tugged at his heart?

  Anna looked in on her son before going to her own room. The blond hair of his babyhood was more brown now, but the face was just as angelic. She dared not awaken him. Before retiring, she sat in her old window seat, watching the blue-black of night recede. Below a rabbit skittered across the snow, making for the bare acacia trees near one of the ponds.

  Alone now, the memory of Grzegorz Doliński’s face, voice, and touch returned. She had been kept waiting, listening to the ticking and pealing of those clocks for hours on end for no good reason. All on his whim. Then she was allowed to go. “I hope you enjoy your visit, Lady Berezowska-Grawlińska,” he had said as she left. Anna turned around. “It is not a visit,” she said dryly. “I have come home.” Doliński smiled. “All the better.” Those words, delivered in his gravel-like voice chilled her then, chilled her now, but Anna became determined not to permit this man—the man who had allowed the escape of her father’s murderer—to haunt her.

  Anna sat a while longer. It was from that window seat in June of 1791 that Anna had watched in horror as peasants brought home the body of her father. Memories of the father she worshipped and that terrible time flooded her. The serfs on her father’s land loved and respected him, all but one: the scoundrel who took his life, Felix Paduch. The irony was that her father treated the families on his estate well and believed that the Third of May Constitution would bring the country closer to a full democracy.

  Her father’s death had seemed to initiate other tragedies. . . . Anna shook her head, hoping to clear her mind . . . .As tentacles of light pushed their way into the dark nave of the sky, Anna watched the snowy landscape glow pink, as if lighted from beneath. She forced herself back into the present. She was to be married. She was to have the marriage she should have had four years before. With Jan’s conversion to Catholicism, the last obstacle was set aside. She remembered how Jan had told her years before that he did not disbelieve the gods of the religions, that his was a personal god, one found in essence of the flowers, trees, and sky. He had puzzled her then, but in time she had come to understand. Oh, his conversion did not mean he had not abandoned his iconoclastic beliefs, either, she knew. He had converted for her sake alone.

  She smiled, warmed by the thought. He could no
t have known that his stand on religion would not have kept her from him. Nothing would have kept her from him. Not after all that had happened. And she would never call him Janek. That was a diminutive Zofia had used on occasion as a way of pretending some intimacy existed between her and Jan. Anna knew that Zofia had purposely set out to undermine her relationship with Jan. Oh, she had done her damage. But she would do no more, Anna thought. No more.

  Anna willed away her fear of happiness. She would be happy.

  A motion outside the window took her attention. She looked out now into the winter dawn to see a white eagle winging its way against a crimson sky.

  3

  Friday, 2 January 1795

  “Zofia! Zofia!” Count Paweł Potecki’s own broken cry brought him into consciousness. He lifted his head from the pillow, his face wet with perspiration. He had dreamt of her again. She had been so close, had seemed so real that he thought he could reach out and take her hand that reached out to him. But a step toward her did not bring him closer. Nor did any number of steps as her figure receded into a thickening fog.

  It had been that way in their relationship, too, he thought. There was a closeness and yet a great distance between them, a distance that she controlled. A power that she possessed. How had he fallen so completely under her spell?

  He threw back the covers now and pulled himself into a sitting position at the side of the bed. He remained there, trying to shake himself of the dream. A few minutes passed.

  Finally, he rose and walked to his bedchamber window, as was his morning custom of late, to see what activity was afoot in the capital. Viewed from the second floor of the town house, Piwna Street was quiet enough. A peddler pushed a cart toward the Market Square. Here and there passersby with serious faces braved the cold, their shoulders leaning into the wind that rose up off the River Vistula.

  The bells at nearby St. Martin’s tolled eight. To look out at Warsaw, Paweł mused, one could not guess the city had fallen. Not a single building had suffered damage. Only Praga had been destroyed, and the Russians had made a good job of that. Only Praga, he thought bitterly—and the heart of the Polish people.

  The physical well-being of Warsaw belied the political actuality. News had gotten out that King Stanisław proposed to the victor that he keep his monarchy while allowing himself to be tied to Russia by treaty. Paweł could well imagine Catherine’s laughter upon hearing it. She would have jettisoned the French language of her court for colorful oaths in her native Prussian idiom. The proposal was a wingless bird—too close to what Poland’s status had been for years. And, by God—she had rewarded her General Suvorov with a golden baton for the Praga massacre! No, Poland was to be treated like what it was: the conquered enemy.

  Those Poles who had taken part in the insurrection had been arrested and packed off to Russia. Somehow Stanisław had convinced—or bribed—Suvorov to be lenient in his dealings with Polish officers. Both Paweł and Jan Stelnicki had benefitted from that. He prayed their good fortune would hold. Paweł knew only too well fortune had not held—nor Suvorov’s word—for the city’s president, who had been assured by Suvorov that he would be safe if he returned to the capital where his leadership skills were needed. He did return, but Catherine had different ideas, and he, too, had been provided with a ticket to a colder climate.

  Paweł dressed—no uniform any longer—buckled shoes, breeches, a short waistcoat, cravat, and a frock coat. Then he went downstairs to scare up a servant and a cup of coffee. Both were scarce these days. And the house was quiet since he had sent Anna off to meet Jan. Anna and Jan—at least one good thing had come out of the tumult.

  He looked into the coffee that his longtime servant Fryderyk had brought him, wishing to read the future of his country as a gypsy might tell his fortune. He saw nothing, only the liquid, dark as ink. What might be done? Poland was being pushed from the world map into obscurity, and there was nothing, nothing to prevent it. No one to help. Why was it that he somehow felt personally responsible for Poland’s fate?

  Oh, he had given good fight in the final hours. He had risen to the occasion. But he had come late to the party. He should have joined Kościuszko earlier, much earlier, just as Jan Stelnicki had done. It wasn’t cowardice, he gave himself that. Or at least what one usually thought of as cowardice.

  It was ignorance. Ignorance of the plight of the common man, the peasant, in Poland and elsewhere on the continent. Joining Kościuszko’s band of patriots had opened his eyes. He had witnessed firsthand the thousands of brave and simple souls who had left home and family to come fight for their Poland. Yes, the Third of May Constitution promised democracy and a better life, but Paweł doubted that was the true reason they turned out with scythes and other crude farm implements that had never been meant to harvest souls. He lived among them, fought with them, ate with them, slept on the hard ground with them, celebrated with them, cried with them. There was Franciszek, a grandfather of thirteen; Ignacy, with his faith as large as his girth; young Kazimierz, an idealist and newlywed. None of them lived to return to their loved ones. These and thousands like them cared more for their Poland and the threat from outsiders than for anything else. Centuries of invasions from Swedes, Turks, Tatars, Cossacks and a half dozen other nations had steeled their marrow with patriotism.

  And it was Zofia, too, he had to admit, who had kept him home and safe. For the longest time he had been unable to bring himself to leave her. How she had mocked him when he spoke of Kościuszko with respect.

  Much earlier, against his judgment, against his principles, she had managed to beat him down until he signed the Confederacy of Targowica. In doing so he had become an accomplice with the magnates who invited Catherine into Poland so that their own powers would not be corrupted by the Constitution. It made him sick to think of it now.

  In time he tried to make things right, to redeem himself by joining Kościuszko and his patriots. He thought back to Zofia’s reaction, and the moment came back with cold clarity. Zofia had exploded into a rage that lasted nearly half an hour. He remembered little of what was said on either side, only her beautiful face made ugly by her anger, only her last words flung at him as he left. “You will die, Paweł Potecki, stupid man! You will die, and for what? For a map and its boundaries that shift year by year anyway, no matter what little people like you might attempt!”

  But it was Zofia who had died. Paweł’s despair, once nonexistent and now most often hidden deep within, bared itself. He drank down his coffee.

  Anna had supplied the details. She told him how at the siege of Praga one of the brawniest of the Russians had swooped down on her, but Zofia had diverted his attention so that Anna could escape across the bridge to safety behind the Warsaw walls. Paweł knew that Zofia was too cunning not to know that doing so was placing herself in the very jaws of the enemy. So shaken with emotion, Anna had hardly been able to speak as she told Paweł of Zofia’s falling from the broken bridge and being carried away by the River Vistula’s cold and swift current. Zofia paid the ultimate price for her sacrifice.

  At least everyone believed her dead. Yet there was some part of Paweł that would not accept it. Was it a presentiment? Or a fool’s notion? He could only wonder how someone so vibrant, so alive, could be gone in the blink of an eye?

  Oh, he had gone to search immediately, riding along either bank days at a time, stopping to inquire at villages or lone huts. Few victims had survived the river. Once he came across a team of peasants working at a mass burial site. Time was of the essence, for the winter would soon harden the ground. He’d come away wondering if Zofia lay somewhere beneath the bodies he had seen thrown like drowned kittens into the makeshift hole.

  He had heard of a few survivors, men and women given succor by the peasants and sent back to their homes in Warsaw and elsewhere, so that when he gave up his search of three weeks and returned to the capital, he did not give up on Zofia. She may yet appear, he thought, against all odds, against all reason.

  He had proposed
marriage a dozen times, and she had refused as many. His friends could not understand his fixation for Zofia. He maintained that they didn’t know her, not really. They knew the gossip, some of which was based on fact. Paweł himself had witnessed her changeable nature, her selfishness, her unchecked sensuality. But there was a hidden side, too, one that told him she could be reclaimed. That side had come forward at last, propelling her to save her cousin’s life. Now, however, Zofia was as inaccessible as the figure in his dream.

  Paweł took his china cup and crashed it to the floor where it shattered into a hundred pieces. Not even the optimistic Fryderyk would be able to put the pieces together. Paweł put his head in his hands and wept, unreservedly.

  He left the house an hour later, as the St. Martin’s bells tolled ten. It was but a short walk to the Royal Castle.

  The royal sentries were Russians. He had tried four days running to gain an audience with the king, and four times he had been turned away. The king was not receiving, he had been told. He had no reason to expect the reaction today would be any different.

  What good could come of seeing the king? he wondered. Why did he persist? What was there that could be done to make things right? He had no answer, but he was driven to go, nonetheless. Some faith, some spirit, had come of his experience with Kościuszko and his mighty band of nobles and peasants and it was that mysterious force driving him now. He would not just sit back and watch Poland’s dissolution.

  On the previous occasions he had gotten past the downstairs sentry at the Senators’ Gate. Today the man gave a slight smile of recognition and waved him on. From the ground floor Paweł climbed the curved white marble staircase to the first floor, his destination the Throne Room by way of the Great Assembly Hall.