Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  With their arrival, serious dancing started within the castle itself and not only in the peasants’ barn. Young Barbara, as the bride-to-be, did not dance, nor did she watch the others enjoying themselves; these were critical days for her and she stayed above with the older women, who fitted her with dresses and showed her the linens they were storing in the chests she would take with her to Krzyztopor. But the other visiting maidens between the ages of ten and twenty had a gala time, swaying across the stone floor in pretty dresses and gazing with admiration as young men from other well-born families tested their new shoes in the slower dances.

  On Friday there was real commotion, for in the morning the archbishop arrived from Krakow, and he was met by all the local clergy, sixteen of them, who commented on how fine he looked and how well the affairs of the church were progressing under his leadership. He had been to both Rome and Compostela and was a man of substance in the hierarchy. He had known Cyprjan in Krakow and had participated with him in a mission to Lithuania, where a group of clergymen who had been members of the Russian Orthodox church desired to convert to Rome’s Uniate church under the dispensation of the Union of Brzesc, 1595. The archbishop had greeted the converting priests with a warmth that pleased Cyprjan, who told the newcomers: ‘You have left a church wallowing in darkness and joined one gleaming in God’s light. You will never regret your decision.’ Three of them would, of course, because their conservative parishioners out in the distant villages would not understand their apostasy and would shortly slay them.

  In the afternoon all the peasants gathered at the riverbank, where a small platform had been erected for the Jewish orchestra and another larger one for Cyprjan, Zofia Mniszech and the bishop; again, Barbara was not to be seen.

  Trumpets sounded and there were shouts of There they come!’ and from the west bank of the Vistula three canopied barges decorated with thousands of flowers set out, each with six men rowing and six poling with long shafts that reached the bottom of the river. They came slowly, like faery boats in a dream; the current of the river carried them northward, but the polers fought against this, so that the barges seemed to be moving in a sideways posture. Persons aboard began singing wedding songs, and sound floated over the river, and several fish, disturbed by the unusual procession, leaped into the air as if they, too, were celebrating.

  Thus Roman Ossolinski, attended by two hundred, journeyed from Krzyztopor and crossed the Vistula to claim his bride. As his barge, the one in the lead, approached the eastern shore the orchestra broke into joyous music, and the girls who had been coached how to throw their flowers when the chancellor and his family stepped ashore ran to the water’s edge, but before the flowers could be thrown, the archbishop stepped forward and blessed the river, the barges upon it and all who had made this journey: ‘God blesses this day. God blesses Roman Ossolinski, who comes on such a splendid mission. God blesses the union which will ensue.’ Then five trumpets blasted and the festivities began in earnest.

  That Friday night there was a gala banquet served on plates from Paris, each containing enameled scenes of rural life featuring lovers working in the fields while goddesses watched approvingly and birds flew overhead. An orchestra played slow dancing music as forty servants trained for the occasion and dressed in livery supplied them by the master served nine courses, beginning with a delicate white borsch made from soured rye flour and ending three hours later with small pieces of a cake which Zofia herself had made for this opening occasion: a bottom layer of dark-brown walnut cake, an upper layer of golden-yellow almond cake, and over all, a thick layer of orange preserve with chunks of the rind glistening through.

  The archbishop, who loved to drink seriously at any banquet, gave a rambling speech in which he avowed that he had never had a better cake to end a meal, to which Chancellor Ossolinski agreed. It was a splendid beginning to a wedding and the guests enjoyed themselves immensely, but Barbara had still not made an appearance.

  On Saturday most of the women, including Zofia and Chancellor Ossolinski’s wife, went to the kitchen to prepare the ritual bread which would grace the wedding and unite it with the earth. Using only the best grains, the women ground small supplies of symbolic flour: wheat, rye, oats. This they mixed with large amounts of similar flours obtained in the usual way, and ingredients were laid out for the bread-making.

  This bread had to be made in specified ways: the salt was blessed; the yeast was taken from special crocks in which it had been carefully nurtured; and the caraway seeds were inspected almost one by one to ensure their purity. When the older women were satisfied that ritual procedures had been observed, they gathered the others and said: ‘It is time to fetch the bride.’

  With the two mothers, Zofia Mniszech and Wanda Ossolinska, leading the way and chanting ‘All men to leave the castle!’ the procession of women in their beautiful dresses made its way to Barbara’s chamber, while two guards were left along the way to continue chanting ‘All men to leave the castle!’

  They found Barbara sitting with the old nurse, who was in the midst of reminding her once again that the family of Cyprjan and Zofia was no less distinguished than that of the Ossolinskis, whom fate had placed at the top of the ladder at this particular moment, and when the older women stood around the room, one said: ‘Lady Barbara, it is time now to bake the bread for your beloved,’ and with the mothers once more in the lead, the splendid procession wound its way back to the kitchen as the women again chanted ‘All men to leave the castle.’

  In the kitchen Barbara went to a special table where ritual ingredients were spread out for the making of dough sufficient for one loaf, and as she mixed them and kneaded the dough the other women did the same, using more ordinary ingredients, for on this gala day they would bake thirty-seven loaves, and as they worked they sang:

  ‘May this marriage be fruitful …

  May the mouth that eats this bread sing praises …

  May the womb that this bread nourishes be fruitful …

  May God be praised in all things …

  May Jesus Christ be praised …’

  But before Barbara’s loaf could be placed in the oven the archbishop was summoned from among the men waiting in the courtyard, and when he entered the kitchen he knelt before Barbara, saying: ‘You are to be queen of this household,’ and then he blessed each of the loaves, uttering a solemn prayer for the happiness of the wedding which this bread was to honor. Into the ovens they were popped, and after Barbara retired to her room, Zofia and Wanda peered into the ovens from time to time, reporting to the others: ‘The bread is doing well.’

  That night, when all were seated at the long table with the French plates before them containing nothing, trumpets sounded and the orchestra began playing solemn music, and into the hall came Barbara—dressed in flowing white robes, with a single flower in her hair and the amber necklace about her lovely throat. When she approached the table her attendants withdrew and she stood alone. Walking slowly and with marvelous grace, she went to where the bridegroom sat and kneeled before him, offering on her upturned hands a loaf of the new bread: ‘I give you the soil of Poland. I give you the grain of Poland. Eat this good bread and be strong. Eat this good bread and be my husband.’

  At this moment Zofia Mniszech handed a loaf to her husband, Cyprjan, and Wanda Ossolinska honored her husband in the same way, whereupon servants scurried about giving each guest a small piece of the fresh bread. It was eaten not ritually, as in a celebration of Mass, but hungrily, as if this were substance of Poland upon which all life depended.

  Sunday, both for the gentry in the castle and the peasants in the barns, was given over to religious services, so the orchestras were excused until sunset, when a giant feast was served in the castle and the meat from two large roasted pigs was distributed among the peasants. There were songs and dances, and processions and trumpet blasts, while Cyprjan and Ossolinski sat on improvised thrones beaming their general approval.

  On Monday, at eleven in the morning, the weddi
ng ceremony was solemnized by the archbishop and three of his priests. He realized that he was joining two of the noblest families of Poland, and two of the richest, and in his brief address to the newly married couple he stressed just this:

  ‘Roman and Barbara, because you come from special families you must accept special obligations. Poland needs your leadership. Poland needs your help in preserving its freedom. Jealous enemies beset us on every side, and we must defend ourselves against them.

  ‘You are building a great castle on the other side of the river, one that will withstand any siege, but you must also build in your hearts a love of Jesus Christ so that you will be ready to defend His freedom, too. The church is the salvation of Poland. Holy Mother Mary is the protectress of our liberties. May you be strong in your defense of both.’

  That night there were endless celebrations in both castles and in the barns, and there was dancing till morning. The bagpipe-flute-fiddle scraped away with country dances while the Jewish orchestra alternated lively Polish mazurkas with more serious music from Rome and Paris. Barbara, in a lighter dress than the one in which she had been married, danced with every father and son from her father’s outlying castles, but when the cock crowed she drew aside, as she had been instructed, and with her mother in front holding a candle, she and all the women in the castle, even the cooks, paraded majestically three times around the dining hall while the men applauded, and then they marched up the great stone stairway to the upper floors, where the bridal chamber, strewn with flowers, awaited.

  Now Chancellor Ossolinski lifted a candle, whereupon his son stepped behind him, followed by all the men, and they circled the room, singing ‘Christ is the bridegroom in heaven, Roman the bridegroom on earth,’ after which they headed for the stairway, delivering the bridegroom to the chamber. Dawn broke and roosters crowed and men fell into drunken sleep.

  Early Tuesday morning all who could be spared were placed in carts and driven the short distance to the Bukowo castle to see for themselves that Lukasz really did have a tame bear, an otter that played with a fox, and two storks, and although the crowd was rather large, Lukasz’s animals behaved as if they knew this was a special occasion. The bear moved among the guests, nudging them and pushing them in the chest with one big paw, while the fox darted here and there as if it were his business to greet each guest individually.

  To many, it was the two storks that occasioned most comment, for though all had seen these ungainly birds atop their chimneys, few had ever been close enough to inspect their structure or their curious faces; the storks behaved as if they, too, had rarely seen anything as strange as a human being. So the entire morning was spent with the animals, and this became so tiring to the beasts that before the wedding guests departed, the bear was asleep, with the fox and the otter dozing inside her paws.

  The next years were among the happiest Cyprjan and Zofia would ever know, for the Ossolinskis proceeded with amazing vigor to the building of Krzyztopor, and when the foundations were dug the enormous place looked even larger than it had on paper. It was tremendous, an entire city within great battlements and protected by those four gaunt towers reaching into the sky. The winding stairway to the hidden well was constructed; the immense chapel was built, finer than many cathedrals; the three hundred and sixty-five windows were installed, and the fifty-two rooms, each an apartment in itself with three or four attendant rooms, were completed.

  It was a castle of such strength and magnificence that Cyprjan was proud to think that his daughter was one day to be its chatelaine, and Barbara rose to her responsibilities, applying the lessons she had learned from her tutor while traveling in France with her father, and poring over the books on palaces she had acquired during the year he had served as an ambassador in Italy. She studied the husbandry of the place and how its two hundred servants and groundkeepers and woodsmen were orgainized and supervised. She grew lovelier each year; motherhood enhanced her charm; and she was becoming known not only in Poland but in surrounding countries as a notable beauty.

  At the dedication of the castle and its formal christening as the Battle Axe of the Cross, a Polish poet from the Jagiellonian University at Krakow asked permission to read a poem which he had written in honor of Barbara Ossolinska’s famed amber necklace, and he recited a rather heavily constructed but deeply moving evocation of amber’s mystery and glory:

  ‘Not harsh or brilliant like a challenging diamond,

  Nor stained with miners’ blood like a throbbing ruby,

  Nor brazenly proclaiming its worth like a cube of gold …

  You are an autumn moon rising over a field of ripened grain.’

  The poem, containing three other similar stanzas, occasioned much applause, and various persons asked for copies, so that it became well known and even treasured, but a young French diplomat serving in Krakow considered the poem rather bucolic, and he asked permission to produce a version more in the style of the English poets of the time, whom he admired exceedingly, and on the next night he offered the guests his more graceful version, which he called ‘A Pretty Conceit in Which My Lady’s Amber Is Compared with the Constellation Pleiades’:

  ‘The Pleiades are seven stars,

  But only six are seen.

  The seventh is immured by bars,

  A sad imprisoned queen.

  ‘The Sisters Six glow on your breast,

  The fairest ever seen.

  The seventh shines beyond the rest,

  ’Tis you, their heavenly queen.’

  He recited his poem with such appropriate delicacy that those about Barbara applauded vigorously, but friends of the Polish poet grumbled: ‘The Pleiades isn’t a constellation by itself,’ and one man explained: ‘It’s part of Orion, as everyone knows.’ The Polish poet stared at his defender.

  Then, in the year 1648, frightening rumors began reaching both Krzyztopor and Castle Gorka concerning an uprising of Cossacks throughout the Ukrainian territories of Poland, and since Cyprjan had large holdings there, estates vaster than some European principalities, he had to hasten eastward, taking Lukasz and his henchman Jan of the Beech Trees, to stem the trouble before it reached his estates.

  They rode at the fastest practical speed for more than two hundred miles, but as they approached the vast empty area east of Lwow they saw the ruins of Polish estates, one after the other, and a sick feeling assaulted Cyprjan, for he could guess what he was going to find when he reached his holdings. Four miles west of the first estate the travelers encountered a Catholic priest who, recognizing Cyprjan, gasped incoherently: ‘Peaceful … your four hundred peasants … the little church … the mill … and then the Cossacks.’ They had destroyed everything in one wild protest against the heavy impositions of the Polish landowners and the spiritual tyranny of the Roman Catholic church, since they were loyal only to the Orthodoxy of Constantinople and Moscow.

  ‘All the priests but me … slain. All the Jews … most of the Poles.’ When Cyprjan, trembling with rage, asked how he had escaped, the priest said: ‘A Jew saved me, and then I saved him. We were the only ones who lived.’ Cyprjan asked where the Jew was, and the priest said: ‘He went back. The Jews always go back.’

  It was a time of heartbreak for Cyprjan and sullen rage for Lukasz and Jan, for they saw at each of Cyprjan’s five Ukrainian estates only complete desolation and the loss of at least sixty percent of the former population. But the two attendants applauded the determination with which Cyprjan decided to rebuild: ‘If it takes every zloty we earn along the Vistula and in the north, these estates will be reconstructed. Lukasz, you stay here with Jan and supervise things. I’ll send all the gold I can collect.’

  So the two men from Bukowo were absent from their homes for two years. On the steppes they collected a new group of peasants, who had no other choice but to submit themselves to the custodianship of the magnate Cyprjan. New Jews were imported to operate the stores and the money system, new priests of the Roman faith to rebuild the little churches.

  In
1649, in the midst of the rebuilding and before too many goods or houses had accumulated, the Cossacks struck again, killing and burning as before, but Lukasz had anticipated their coming, and he hid himself, Jan, two priests and a Jew who was doing his trading from a cave which he had prudently constructed, and there they waited in darkness until the hurricane passed. After that second sweep, the Cossacks let this part of the Ukraine alone, and a kind of peace was restored, and magnates like Cyprjan dismissed the Cossack incursion as merely one more of the troublesome invasions from the east.

  In 1654 an event occurred which at the time seemed much less important than the great Cossack raids but which in the long run proved much more disastrous to the welfare of Poland, for as Lukasz and Jan of the Beech Trees had proved, damage done by the raids could be repaired, but the damage about to be done by this new development would in the long run prove fatal.

  The government of Poland had several unique weaknesses that differentiated it from other European nations, making it much less stable than they. First, the magnates dominated the election of the king, but they insisted upon doing so reign-by-reign, lest an inherited dynasty slip into dictatorship. Second, they refused to conduct the election vivente rege—that is, while the old king still lived, for fear he might exercise too much influence and throw the election to his son or some other member of his family. Third, the magnates were afraid to elect one of their own number, who might wax too strong and restrict succession to members of his own clan; they strongly preferred to elect foreigners, which inevitably involved them in the dynastic troubles of other nations with which they had no functional affiliation.