She untied the uppermost box, and peeled back the folds of tissue. There was a tailored riding habit inside. In the next box was a hat wrapped in heavy white silk and fixed with a tiny bunch of violets. In the next was a long wine-red coat. In another was a whole set of thin summer frocks, and a yellow-striped pinafore, and an evening gown of pale pink silk. There were boxes of shoes and belts and gloves.
Helena looked up at her father.
‘Try them on.’
She went through the bookshelf door, into his dressing room. She set down the boxes. The room had her father’s smell. In the middle of it was a tall looking-glass, which pivoted in the middle and Helena pushed it down to see herself. He was right – she looked a mess!
She tried on all the clothes, then re-entered the library in the evening gown.
‘Now, enough of these ponytails!’ Her father slipped off her hair clasp. He gathered her hair and reassembled it on top of her head. One or two fronds twisted down her temple.
‘Look, you see?’ he said.
‘Thank you, Tatuś.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He bent to kiss her forehead. ‘I will explain it all to your mother.’
Her mother thought him mad. She said it was a sin to spend so much on clothes. Now, at this time! Ach! But seeing that his furlough in Wilno was so brief, she let the matter drop.
It was the middle of May, 1915. In Wilno the trees had burst into flower; white lilac and bird-cherry crowded the streets with their bridal blooms; the parks were spotted with camomile. Helena grew restless. She wrote of a sense of undirected excitement, a physical feeling. Something was approaching and she could not see it, she could not touch it, she did not know its name. It had nothing to do with the war. Did everyone feel like this? She had no idea. She had no one to ask.
At times the feeling of expectancy was overwhelming. On slow afternoons she took to walking alone through the town, blinking in the strange light, constantly alert, constantly surprised by familiar things. For her, spring never came again without bringing back something of May 1915.
On most days there was a wind. In the avenues it swept through the rowan trees with a sound like water; it tugged at the horse-chestnuts; it set the fat fingers of their leaves flopping to and fro. Helena took in the sweet-and-sour smells of Wilno’s markets, the shouts of the hawkers, the slinking forms of tinkers. At midday she felt fiercely alive; by late afternoon she was exhausted.
In the evening a cooler wind brought the sound of church bells. She toured the chapels, praying, indulging her earnest and precocious piety, gazing at the Miraculous Madonna of the Ostra Brama. The sacrament was exposed in all of Wilno’s churches. People spilled out of the pews, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, cramming the west doors. Men squeezed their caps in knotted fists; women knelt in the aisles. All sent their eager prayers drifting upwards – urging God to hold back the Germans.
The Russians were in retreat. From the west came reports of whole villages fleeing. All over the country, households were sending their livestock east, away from the hands of the Kaiser. Journeymen told of roads choked with guns and muddy soldiers and herds of lolloping beasts.
One afternoon Helena was standing on the balcony. A hay cart turned off the main road and into Mała Pohulanka. Behind the cart was another cart, then a larger wagon and a string of brood-mares attached to it; their clumsy-footed foals trotted beside them. Helena recognized her grandmother’s troupe of Lithuanian Zmudziaki horses; it was then she knew that they would all have to leave.
The O’Breifnes went south at first. The horses were sent on ahead. Their own party, six of them, travelled by train: Helena’s mother, Helena, her brother and sister – both much younger – Panna Konstancja and Tekla.
Over the coming years, Panna Konstancja and Tekla accompanied the family wherever they went. Panna Konstancja was a large, matronly figure with a sharp tongue and a roguish humour. She, almost alone, had brought up Helena; she was a much less distant figure than her own mother. Tekla was the family’s cook, the fatherless child of a ‘corner-woman’ taken in by Helena’s mother.
A thirty-five-kilometre drive took the party from the station at Nowojelnia to Druków. It was a drowsy evening. The heads of the horses were heavy, bullied by flies. Helena’s mother fanned herself with a book. Tekla had acute diarrhoea and there were frequent stops.
Helena felt daunted by this retreat. Would it end at Druków? What if the Germans like Napoleon could not be stopped and they were pushed on, deeper into Russia? The east! Russia! Helena baulked suddenly at the thought of the snowy steppe, the grey hills, the unkempt beards of the Orthodox priests, the rows of high-cheeked Tartars against the snow. Then she fell asleep in the familiar regions of Panna Konstancja’s chest.
When she woke they were almost there. The driver clicked his tongue and the horses turned off the road and into Druków’s twisting avenue. Tekla made a final leap from the bryczka and ran for a bush.
Druków was the home of Uncle Nicholas O’Breifne, a softly spoken, bookish man who had never had children and treated Helena as his own. They spent much of that summer at Druków.
It was a quiet summer; news of the war punctuated it only rarely. Helena spent much of her time – when not in her mother’s makeshift classes – walking or riding. She walked with Uncle Nicholas out beyond the avenue. She loved to hear him name the trees and flowers, identify the call of each bird.
One afternoon they returned via the Druków church. Inside it was cool and dark. In silence, the two of them stepped up to the chancel and knelt – Uncle Nicholas huge and barrel-shaped in his old camlet coat, Helena slim beside him with a blue velvet ribbon in the tangle of her hair.
Uncle Nicholas pointed out the commemorative plaques to his father, his grandfather and other O’Breifnes.
‘Uncle Nicholas,’ she asked, ‘have your family lived here for a very long time?’
The first O’Breifne at Druków, he explained, was the General; he would have been her great-grandfather. The Russians were very proud of him, even though he was not Russian. In Serbia he had once saved the Russian army from the Turks. On the night before the battle a nun named Dovergill had come and warned him that the Turks would attack the following day. He prepared his positions well and was victorious. But when the general asked in the neighbouring convents for Dovergill, he drew a blank. ‘Dovergill? Devorgil? There is no nun by that name.’
Only later did he find out who she was – an ancestor of his, an Irish queen of the twelfth century. She had been abducted by the King of Leinster and the row that followed led to the invasion of the Normans. This, said Uncle Nicholas, was the beginning of the end for the ancient Irish kings and chiefs. Four centuries later, they suffered their final defeat at the Battle of the Boyne, when the O’Briefnes themselves fled Ireland to end up in Russia.
General O’Breifne, he continued, bought Druków and its five thousand souls. The serfs were mainly Polish Catholics. One day he rode down to inspect the estate. He found a great number of them in church. A Mass was being said. The general strode in just in time to hear an anxious petition raised to protect them all from the ‘Russian general’ who had bought them. General O’Breifne walked up the aisle. His spurs clanked on the stone floor. He knelt at the front. The priest fell silent.
‘Carry on,’ the general said, and the priest stammered on through the liturgy.
‘When the Mass was over the general rose from his knees and turned to face the congregation. “Please, there is no need to fear. I am not Russian. My name is O’Breifne and I am a Catholic. I come from a very old Catholic country – a country far to the west called Ireland.”’
O’Breifne meant nothing to them, nor Ireland, and they were not at all convinced by this foreigner and his strange name.
‘Only when he returned with a Polish wife,’ said Uncle Nicholas, ‘did the people begin to believe him.’
Klepawicze was no more than a few hours’ ride away from Druków and Adam Broński was a frequent visitor. He was close
ly involved with the Polish underground movement and, wrote Helena, had the unquestioning respect of the peasants.
Though he completely ignored her, one thing about Adam made a particular impression on Helena at that time: he seemed utterly oblivious to rank. Her mother found this very strange. He appeared to come to Druków more to be with the land agent than with the O’Breifnes.
‘Wartime, dear. Farmers are very important in wartime. Adam must do his duty.’ And because he had such good manners, was the heir to Klepawicze, and was the son of Pan Stanisław Broński, she forgave him.
One morning, Adam rode over to help the agent clean the carp pond. Helena sat on the bank and watched. The two men opened the sluices and Adam stripped to the waist. He bent to pick the wriggling fish from the mud.
‘Breeding!’ he cried, or, ‘Cooking!’ and threw the fish into one or other of two galvanized bowls.
After lunch Helena stood before the high mirror in her bedroom. How could she get Adam to talk to her? Panna Konstancja had said if she made herself smart for once, she might be surprised.
She picked up her hairbrush. She pulled it down through her long auburn hair. It would not fall straight; she wanted it straight! But with each stroke of the brush its stubborn curl sent it springing back. She threw the brush down.
In the wardrobe were the Petersburg clothes her father had given her. She pinned her hopes on a dress of sky-blue cotton and a straw hat. Chewing a cherry to colour her lips, she went out into the park.
Beyond the drive was a small birch copse. Helena said she heard Adam’s voice echoing through the trees. She stood on the edge of the copse and pulled back the leaves to see in. He was alone. Now he would talk to her!
He was standing there beneath the trees, singing. He did not see her. He broke into a strange Indian dance. He threw open his arms and spun. He tried a one-legged pirouette but fell to the ground.
Helena could not help smiling. But she remained where she was. She watched him get up. She watched him run backwards and forwards through the trees. He did not once look in her direction. Soon he had run off into the distance. She waited for him to come back, but he did not. She returned to the house in silence. She threw her hat on the bed. What a waste of time it all was! Animals, as she always suspected, were much less bothersome.
9
IN THE DINING ROOM at Druków one wall was painted with a scene of Diana hunting in the Arician grove. Each morning, at breakfast, a samovar was placed against this scene. It filled the room with strange bubbling noises and Panna Konstancja would come in, wink at Helena, and cock an ear to the samovar: ‘German idyot… German idyot… Do you hear, Hela? The Germans are coming!’
And the German forces pressed on. From Klepawicze, the Brońskis – all except Adam – had already been sent to St Petersburg. Long lines of carts and livestock were filing every day through Nowogródek. News, rumours, counter rumours were all anyone mentioned. Adam Broński was about to empty the great vats of the Klepawicze still; the spiritus and the grain would be given to the peasants. Adam himself would wait and join the retreating Russian army.
Uncle Nicholas was unequivocal. He was sending all his valuables east. He told Helena’s mother to take her children with them. He himself could not leave his land.
So one morning in early September Helena and her mother, and her brother and sister, and Panna Konstancja and Tekla rose at dawn and gathered on the drive in front of the house. Uncle Nicholas stood on the steps. He was wearing a long overcoat and a pair of Berber slippers. He traced the sign of the cross over each child.
A train of wagons already stretched away into the avenue. All Druków’s valuables, all the furs and goldplate, the Persian silk carpets, the Saxony china and Kiev ware, and the trunks and trunks of Moroccan leather books, joined the bedding and fodder for the journey east. The horses were fidgety. Uncle Nicholas’s foresters ran up and down the line shouting to each other, checking the harnesses, finding space for the last few boxes.
In charge of this strange caravan, and its team of parobcy drivers, was Pan Rymszewicz, Uncle Nicholas’s gamekeeper. He put his lips to a hunting-horn and gave two blasts: the first carts lurched forward.
They drove out of the avenue. To the right a mist clung to the river but the water-meadows were empty. The cattle had already left. Passing the church, they joined the main road and turned into the sun. A small hill rose above the road and the track to Klepawicze led up over it. Waiting on the crest of the hill, beneath a clutch of larches was Adam Broński, seated on a bay mare. He galloped down to meet the wagons.
Reining in his horse he slowed to a walk and touched his hat to Helena’s mother. ‘Dzień dobry, Comtesse.’
Some of his own carts, he explained, with the silver, had also left that morning. Could they join theirs? They would be waiting at the Niemen. He rode alongside for a few minutes, then trotted up to Helena: ‘Good morning, Hela.’
‘Good morning.’
There was silence between them.
‘Panna Hela, you mustn’t worry.’
‘I am not afraid.’
‘Are you sure?’
Helena nodded, looking across at him. He wore a peasant czapka with the peak pulled down to his forehead. She thought: what tiny kind eyes he has.
‘Dobrze!’ he cried suddenly and, reaching into his coat, pulled out a pocket-knife which he pressed into her hand. He was galloping back up the hill before she had a chance to thank him.
At noon they reached the Niemen. A narrow wooden bridge stretched across it and, while they waited for the Broński carts, Helena climbed down the mossy bank.
It was, she remembered, a hot and windless day. She stared into the water; the ink-blots of scattered clouds lay on the surface. Helena broke them with her fingers. She rolled up her sleeves and pushed her arms into the water. The water was cool and oily, and she splashed it on her face. No, she was not afraid. Quite the reverse. She was excited. She was overwhelmed by the familiar sense of something approaching.
She took out the pocket-knife and rinsed it; the haft was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and set into it, in silver, was a worn Broński crest. That a Broński should be capable of kindness, any kindness, was quite a shock to her.
Pan Rymszewicz’s hunting-horn sounded and they carried on. They left the banks of the Niemen and plunged into dark forests where the sun slanted through the trees and the air was filled with the smell of pine resin. The noise of the convoy was louder among the trees, a noise of creaking axles, cracking reins and low voices.
At dusk they arrived in front of a small dwór. An elderly couple stood on the steps. Two ridgebacks jumped forward a few paces and then, seeing the size of the convoy, stood still and barked.
That night Helena ate in a vaulted dining room full of family portraits. She was given a room in the top of the house where the moon streamed over the boards and she slept deeply. At dawn Pan Rymszewicz’s hunting-horn sounded out across the park and the whole convoy set off down a pale road that skirted the forest. They climbed and came out of the trees. Topping a low ridge, Helena saw the chalky ribbon of the road for miles ahead, meandering across the plain, splitting in two the brown smudges of small villages, dipping into hidden valleys, following the perimeter of a distant forest before burrowing into it.
The days fused one into the next. They travelled for one week, two weeks, a month. Sometimes they stopped for a few days before continuing their eastward trek. The forest banished all thought of war. Helena felt happy, exhilarated. Each day was different. Her mother withdrew the barbed constraints that normally surrounded her. She relaxed; the progress of the convoy imposed its own loose authority and, in years to come, Helena looked back on those weeks in the forest, seeing the horses’ twitching ears, the arc of the wooden hames, hearing the creak of carts, and knew that this was the closest she ever came to any sort of freedom.
One night they stayed in a cabin on the summit of a small hill. All around them were camped the carts. Helena watched the fires stret
ch towards the trees. She left the cabin and walked through the camp. The smoke weaved up towards the great starry sweep of the Bird’s Way. She felt like Queen Jadwiga wandering among her troops.
On another occasion, in late September, they passed through a village. An ox-cart blocked the road and, while waiting for it to be cleared, the Belorussian villagers gathered round the wagons. Their children were barefooted and the men had dirt in the lines of their faces. Pan Rymszewicz ordered them to clear the way but they pressed in closer.
He pulled his team off the road and led the convoy round towards the back of the village. He cracked a whip at two men who lunged for his reins. Others surged out of the crowd; one curled his stubby fingers around the calash hood of Helena’s bryczka. He thrust his face in and for an instant she was staring into his eyes. She felt his breath on her face. He shouted something in a strange tongue and gripped her ankle. Then the horses leapt forward and he fell from the wagon, and they were bumping over the stony verge and into the fields.
After that Pan Rymszewicz avoided the villages. The convoy relied on the forest, and the hospitality of remote dwóry.
Some of the landowners were oblivious to the approaching Germans. The convoy arrived one afternoon at Wojopodorsk. The entire household was taking tea on the terrace, sitting at round tables, or on the steps, or standing importantly behind the chairs: old men in silk dressing gowns conferring, a boy with a pet rabbit, a widow with a dog in her lap, a young girl with her arm in a sling playing chess with a woman in a tiara of white lilac. The war, wrote Helena, was not mentioned at all by this family.
Others waited alone. They stayed once at a place called Barbarin, the home of a Graf Ignacy. A giant of a man, Graf Ignacy lived with his wife half a day’s ride from the nearest town. In his dining room, dozens of elkheads stared down on a table with a worn, gold-threaded military saddle in the middle of it.
Helena watched him fill and re-fill his pewter plate with slabs of half-cooked roe deer; at his feet two red-toothed borzois pitted their jaws against its globular hip-joints.
The Bronski House Page 6
