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How the Dear Good Helenka spends her day!
7am. Mass.
7.30. Breakfast with the nuns (Milk, bread, cherry jam).
8am-noon. Teaching at convent.
12.30. Lunch (in a dairy – soup, pasta, dumplings).
2pm–4pm. University (History with Professor Rydel).
4.30pm–10pm. Private pupils.
10.30pm. Cold supper at convent (kielbasa, cheese), prepare lessons.
She kept an account of her earnings and expenditure in a little red notebook, and each month took half of the difference and put it in the Dla Biednych, the convent’s poor fund. The rest she saved and by November had enough to award herself a dove-grey dress, kid gloves and two pairs of shoes. She carried on a weekly correspondence with Józef, had her hair cut fashionably short and never let go of the idea of university. Professor Rydel was confident she could start the following year.
At the end of the school term, Helena took the Red Cross train up to Wilno for Christmas. Reassured by the Polish administration, her mother had returned there in October, with her brother, sister and Panna Konstancja. Their own house on Mała Pohulanka was still closed up. They lodged again with Madame Jelenska, the Pope of Wilno, and Helena was given a room overlooking an abandoned garden. A lime tree scratched at the outer window with its branches. Inside the window Helena set up a desk, and made two piles of books, one of English history, the other of French.
There was to be a ball that Christmas, a charity ball. Helena’s Aunt Marynia was head of the Red Cross and, in the second week of December, she kept them all occupied making red and white paper-chains. She named the ball simply ‘Ach!’ and asked Helena to tell fortunes.
For this she wore Cracow national costume – a black velvet waistcoat and a white shirt, a red floral skirt and black lace-up boots. With eye shadow and cerise lipstick, she hardly recognized herself. She practised a Carpathian accent and learnt a repertoire of Romany expressions.
The night of the ball was 18 December. Thick snow fell for the first time that winter. It blew noiselessly against the winter windows. The streets were soft and silent. There were no sledges and no carriages; the war had taken all the horses. In the portico of Aunt Marynia’s home, a great puddle spread out around the rows of felt boots.
Across the ceiling of the ballroom were strung the red and white paper-chains, arranged in a cross. It was very cold to begin with, and you could see people’s breath as they talked. Nurses stood at one end behind the chairs of crippled soldiers. Aunt Marynia, wearing a red-crossed bib over her ball gown, stood on a bench and clapped her hands for silence.
‘Ach!’ she said, and a murmuring laugh swelled up from the room. ‘You may wonder why this evening has been named “Ach!” Perhaps you think it is because I could think of no other name. Or that it is a reminder, after all these years of uncertainty, that we have lost our capacity for surprise. Well yes, those are reasons. But really it was just that whenever I mentioned the ball to people, they were lost for words. They looked at me as if I were mad and said, “Ach!”
‘So with God’s blessing, enjoy yourselves! Soda is served in the hall and there will be a prize draw at ten o’clock – first prize, a Jack-in-the-box from Vienna!’
The murmuring rose again and a quartet started to play. A line formed at Helena’s table. One of the first in it was Touring Józef.
‘So, gypsy girl, tell me my fate!’
She laid out his cards and looked at them a long time. ‘You have led a lucky life. You have had many joys, and known many fine people.’
‘You speak only the truth, gypsy!’
‘But here, I see your heart is tired of wandering…’
He laughed. ‘Oh, you have the wisdom of Solomon!’
‘And this card, the nine of spades – you know what that means?’
Touring Józef threw up his hands in mock bewilderment.
‘A big decision – something to choose, something to lose.’
Józef laughed, squeezed her hand, and disappeared back into the throng.
A little later another familiar figure stepped up to Helena’s table. It was Adam Broński.
Four years had passed since Helena had last seen Adam, since the first morning of the flight into Russia. He was now thirty. His sisters had kept her up to date with his news, of his brave endeavours with the resistance during the war, of a riding accident, and his unhappy love for a certain Miss Gigant. This woman, red-haired and ‘famously beautiful’, was the daughter of the owners of Minsk’s only cinema. In the autumn of 1917, Adam had fallen in love with her. There was talk of marriage, but that winter she had developed tuberculosis. Adam had sat by her bed every day for weeks. He had watched her die. Since then, said his sisters, he spent his days sitting in darkened rooms, playing his guitar.
As he sat down at Helena’s table, Adam gave her a faint smile; he did not recognize her.
She laid out his cards. ‘Well, I see a riderless horse… and here, two queens beside each other… you have lost a great love… I see a building, perhaps a theatre, and here, death waiting in the wings…’
And she carried on, mapping out the details of Adam’s recent history, while he, still not recognizing her, listened incredulously to every word.
Józef came up, and put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. ‘So, my friend, will you marry a princess or die on the battlefield?’
‘It is uncanny, Józef – how much she sees!’
Józef laughed. ‘Adam, are you blind? You do not know who this is? It is Helena O’Breifne!’
When he looked at her again, it was with a strange mixture of surprise and respect. And, according to Helena, he kept that look for her until the very day he died.
Christmas of 1919 was like a homecoming. Helena felt for the first time in years that she belonged. Wilno was full of familiar faces. There were parties and dances, and skating in the Bernardyński Park. Everyone exchanged stories of the war.
The most disturbing story, or at least the one that remained sharpest in Helena’s mind, came from Witek, a distant cousin.
Witek’s family had bred horses before the war. When the Bolsheviks arrived last year they had taken the horses out into the stable yard. One horse, an Arab stallion, had suddenly enraged the Bolshevik commander. He stormed across the yard. He picked up a scythe, said Witek, and with four strokes, sliced through the stallion’s neck.
‘Why?’ Helena asked. ‘I mean, how can a horse cause such anger?’
‘Because,’ said Witek, ‘he was too beautiful.’
Before long, Witek had become a frequent visitor to the Pope of Wilno’s house. Helena’s mother noticed long before Helena. ‘So, Hela, another corpse! They fall like pigeons at your feet. You really should be more careful.’
Later, Uncle the Bishop took her aside and, half in jest, said, ‘Three of them – Józef, Adam and Witek. Which one will you marry?’
‘None!’ said Helena. ‘I’m going back to Cracow to study for university!’
And that, she honestly believed, was what would happen. But in February, she went down with a heavy cold and had to delay her return; by March the cold had become pneumonia. She lay in bed for two weeks while the lime branches tapped at the window. When the doctor came, he said that tuberculosis had developed in one lung.
She could not return to Cracow. Her mother telegrammed the nuns and told them, with some satisfaction, that they would have to find a replacement. Helena lay there for days. She gazed at the lime branches. She gazed at the clouds. She thought, ‘I cannot live any more like this, I cannot live forever under her wing.’ And in her weakened state, dismissing her options one by one, she decided: ‘I must get married.’
These were the circumstances, according to her own account, of Helena’s engagement.
It was a clear spring day. She lay in bed. Her room was full of sunlight. She wrote a note to Touring Józef urging him to come at once. Panna Konstancja took the note across Wilno and within
an hour Józef was at her bedside. He brought flowers and laid them on her bed. She told him immediately what she wanted.
‘Dear Helenka,’ he said. ‘I cannot marry you. My love is too great to cause you such suffering. I am old and full of debts. I would make a useless husband. You must marry Adam.’
But when he had left she wrote to Witek. Panna Konstancja went off again. This time she came back alone: Witek had left that morning for the front.
So she wrote to Adam; he entered her room with a wide and impulsive smile.
She said to him, ‘Adam, you must listen carefully to what I have to say. I would like us to be married. I will make you a good and dutiful wife. I will look after you and serve you and, God willing, give you a family. I will devote my life to that family. But I do not love you. I need to marry to escape the trap of my mother.’
The two of them looked at each other and for a moment there was silence. Then Adam took her hand, and said, ‘Hela! Don’t worry, my love is enough for two!’
And so they were engaged. Helena’s mother was delighted. She sent word at once to old Pan Broński, who arrived the following day. He went up to Helena’s room to congratulate her. ‘Splendid! I’ll send you a horse for a son, a goat for a daughter!’
Two weeks later she was still in bed. It was a breathless day. A maid was taking off the winter windows. Helena could hear the birds outside and the maid saying, ‘Birds are divided into crows and rooks. Those down there are rooks, Panna Hela, see. You can tell from their beaks, is what my mother told me…’
The door opened. It was Witek. He was wearing his uniform. He dismissed the maid and, grinning broadly, sat on Helena’s bed.
She shook her head; she told him she was engaged. Unclipping the medallion of Our Lady from her neck, she pressed it into his hand. ‘May God protect you, dear Witek.’ And she turned away to weep.
17
HELENA SPENT the spring at Platków: ‘April 1920. Violets everywhere. In the avenues hens and chicks, and duck in the Wodalka lake. Each day the green haze of the forest thickens; the birch trees are coming into leaf…’
She and Adam had a turbulent engagement. Sometimes she hated him – and told him so – for his perpetual high spirits, for frustrating her plans to go to Cracow to study, for not being any of the men she had loved. She wrote to him once breaking off the engagement, and he had come from Wilno immediately, riding out of the avenue and up to the house with a smile stretched across his ever-trusting face.
‘Burzyczka! My stormy storm-petrel! You have nothing to fear!’
In mid April Adam left Wilno to go south. He had been appointed a judge in Lida. His father had also made over a house and land to him and, whenever he could, he went over to prepare it for Helena’s arrival. The estate was called Mantuski.
Helena knew Mantuski; she had stayed there in 1912. She remembered the house and its long, low front, its dark old-fashioned rooms; she remembered the corridors smelling of old meat. It wasn’t somewhere she’d warmed to at all. The only good thing she could think about it was its position on the banks of the Niemen.
The estate, said Adam, derived its income from a fairly even split between its timber and its dairy herd. The cheeses – ‘like great cushions’ – had been famous in Kresy before the war. But it wasn’t very profitable; there was not enough land. Of the three Broński estates it was the smallest. Adam’s father had considered him ‘too free with money’ to trust him with the larger ones. That Adam – the eldest – should be by-passed like this infuriated Helena. But Adam, as always, didn’t appear to mind.
He wrote to Helena:
20 April. Mantuski.
Helenka my dearest,
I am buying tiles for the house. The old tile factory was ruined in the war. New cows are coming from Gdansk. The floods have come and tomorrow we start to plough… How I wish you could be here to see it. Oh Hela, Hela, Panna Hela! The world has never been so marvellous for me! It is ten days until we meet! I think of your hair and its little curls on your neck and your eyes. Aj! One look from them kills all my sadness. I kiss your hand, your two hands. I long to be with you. Do not fear, my little bird, my darling Helenka.
Yours forever,
Adam
*
The wedding was set for July. Helena’s mother became very excited about the plans. Aunt Anna was back at Platków and the two of them sat hunched over the card-table, playing dominoes and discussing the guests, while the cigarette smoke hung over their heads like a rain-cloud.
Aunt Anna was full of stories for Helena. ‘At eighteen, you know, boys are sent to women by their fathers. You’ll soon find out what Turkish habits they picked up.’
Panna Konstancja was gathering what she could for Helena’s trousseau, stitching cotton tea-dresses and handkerchiefs and raiding the attic for bed linen.
In June Adam came to stay for two weeks before the wedding. With him was his cousin Józef Kossak.
They brought worrying news. The Red Army was massing again in the east. Budyonny had already attacked the Polish forces to the south, in the Ukraine. But it was in Belorussia that the main thrust was expected. On 2 July, Tukhachevsky, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian forces, issued his orders:
Soldiers of the Red Army!
The time of reckoning has come.
The army of the Red Banner and the army of the predatory White Eagle face each other in mortal combat.
Over the dead body of White Poland shines the road to world-wide conflagration.
The attack on Poland was the Bolsheviks’ first foreign adventure. The plan was to link up with the burgeoning communist cells in Germany, and thence into Western Europe. Only Poland stood in the way, a country that had only existed for the last two years, and one that had, by common consent, already grown well beyond its capacity to defend itself.
On 4 July, the Red Army crossed the Berezina and took Minsk. On the 14 July, the day of Adam and Helena’s wedding, they swept into Wilno and the city fell. Not one of Adam’s family was able to reach Platków. The chapel was practically empty.
Helena wore a simple white dress and a tiara made from lilies of the valley. Sparrows sang in the chapel’s rafters; a blind fiddler accompanied the ‘Ave Maria’. Helena walked up the aisle – just as the gypsy had predicted five years before – on the arm of Józef Kossak.
Uncle the Bishop performed the ceremony. He stood before them, offering his blessing. ‘Do not expect happiness, my children!’ and his eyes filled with tears.
‘Pathetic priest,’ muttered Aunt Anna.
At the back of the chapel, sitting alone, with the face of someone who had eaten poison, was Touring Józef. A year later he was married to a war widow from Siena and went to live in Cannes. (Helena saw him only once, years later, in the late 1930s, a tired red-faced old man. She couldn’t decide whether it was exile or the war widow that had destroyed him.)
Stefan had painted the Platków carriage. With all suitable horses taken by the cavalry, he had harnessed Siwka and Gniadka, Platków’s surviving plough-horses.
At nine o’clock that night Adam and Helena stood on the Platków verandah. The dusk gave way to night and they stepped inside. Helena went up to bed in her usual room. Adam was given the room next door. Beyond him was Helena’s mother, with Uncle the Bishop on the other side. Panna Konstancja was upstairs.
Adam entered Helena’s room in a dressing-gown. He sat on her bed and kissed her. She kissed him and said politely, ‘Goodnight, Adam.’
Then they knelt for prayers. He kissed her again on the forehead, and went back to his room.
Helena was still wandering the avenues with her rosary, gazing at the high trees, humming her breezy tunes, bending in the grass to pick flowers. It took Adam some time to explain, to gain her trust. She found the whole thing faintly comic. Their real honeymoon took place that winter, on a snowy night in a Warsaw hotel; and during the months in between, to Helena’s great surprise, they forged a remarkable friendship, a friendship without secrets or conc
eits, whose boundaries grew with each day, and which provided the basis for the only real love she ever knew.
The day after the wedding it was hot again. Helena and Adam sat by the lake. Adam read out passages from Majewski’s Kapital, and sang the ‘Dubinoczka’. They talked about the future. At midday they walked back to the house.
Five Lithuanian soldiers stood on the steps; they had come to intern Adam.
There was nothing anyone could do. They took him away and Helena saw the cart sliding off into the avenue, flickering between the chestnuts like a running trout.
‘Damn those Lithuanians!’ Helena’s mother threw her cigarette to the ground.
That afternoon she and Helena went to see the district commander, a man with tiny eyes who divided his hatred evenly between Poles and landowners. Helena could see he was enjoying their misfortune.
‘Pani Hrabina,’ he said with mock respect, ‘you must understand. The old countries are gone. Six wars are being fought around your beloved Poland and when they are over, all Europe will be one. Please, be patient.’
Patience was not something Helena’s mother found easy. For three days she smoked and paced the verandah, until Adam appeared one morning from the trees. He had escaped the internment camp by pretending to be a doctor.
That same night they all left Platków, just as the year before, fleeing on farm-carts. Adam was keen to join his regiment. They travelled west, crossed the border into East Prussia and reached Gdansk on a small fishing-boat; Helena was horribly sick the whole way. Several days later they were in Warsaw, where Adam kissed Helena on the cheek, and went to find the 13th Uhlans.
Such was the first week of their married life.
The Red Army was closing on Warsaw: six armies, more than 100,000 men, were moving rapidly towards it. All attempts to slow them had failed. Poland’s brief independence was being shattered. Yet in Helena’s account there is nothing about the threat, nothing but a list of who she saw and where she stayed and the fact that Warsaw seemed ‘rather hot’.
The Bronski House Page 12
