In August Smok, Helena’s favourite prize bull, became ill. She sat up all night with him, dabbing his sweating flanks with a solution of soap and whey.
Then in September, she watched four unfamiliar carts pull up in the yard. A young Jewish merchant from Iwje jumped down: he said he had come for the Mantuski hay. Adam had offered it as surety on a loan to someone he hardly knew.
Helena was furious. She sent a letter to Adam with the merchants. She told him she’d give them only two carts of hay; the rest he was to make up with his own cash; if her cows went hungry that winter, she added, she would divorce him.
By the end of the summer, Helena made the following entry:
Endless trouble with this place! Smok, my dear red-and-white, is now dying. Another bull, Paw, is dead. The cows are forever ill. Adam drops in now and again, hates to listen to the problems, gives nonsensical orders, lets the parobcy use the horses for whatever they want, leaves me with an absolute mess and departs. It is pouring with rain. Stefania the laundry girl is ill. There is no linen. It is enough to make you weep or go crazy…
By Christmas of 1933, with the winter weaving its slow web across the land, the running of Mantuski had calmed. It was clear there would be enough hay; the cows would not starve; Helena forgot all about divorce:
Life is peaceful here, restful, comfortable. Adam is back from Iwje and the house is again full of his high spirits. We are affectionate together. He plays games with the children. If only he were here more often! Late last night we sat and watched the moon and talked. How lucky I am to have such love! Skating has started on the river and skiing. I adore a life of sport…
On Christmas Day both Adam and Zofia became ill. Zofia was much the worse. Within two days, her temperature had risen to 103° and she was delirious. The doctor said it was scarlet fever.
‘But she’s had scarlet fever!’ protested Helena.
‘She has it again,’ he said. ‘It can happen.’
For two days, Helena sat with Zofia while she writhed around and talked nonsense and sweated. On day three her temperature fell back a little and the whole family moved up to Wilno. Adam’s illness, no more than a cold, passed quickly.
At this time, the children were all at school in Wilno. Adam had been appointed director of a bank in the town and the family, during term-time, rented a flat that overlooked the Wilja river.
The Wilja was frozen throughout January and there was skating in the fields below Three Crosses Hill. One Sunday in early February, they were all returning from Mass. Bright sun bounced off the snow in the park and lit up their faces. Zofia and her brothers were walking behind their parents. Suddenly Adam shuffled to a stop. He sat down on a bench and looked wordlessly at Helena. After a minute or two, he said he could continue, but the following day Helena urged him to see a doctor.
He returned to the flat at four in the afternoon. He sat down heavily in a chair in Helena’s dressing room. He too, it seemed, had had scarlet fever and it had ‘reached his heart’. The doctor told him he must have a complete rest.
Helena was horrified. She imagined him being unable to shoot, unable to play tennis. She begged him to go to bed. ‘Please, please, please,’ she sobbed, invoking every saint she could think of for him to take care, to go south to the Krynica spa.
Adam took her hands. ‘Only now, kochana, do I understand that you really love me!’
‘You know I adore you! But please, please look after your health! Go to Krynica!’
The next day they went to order him a new suit for the south. She made him promise to write every day, and to do what the doctors said. They called on the specialist. He had seen the latest x-rays and he shook his head: Adam could make no journey. The x-rays showed his heart horribly enlarged.
He went to bed in the flat. The room looked over the river. Helena read to him, from The Story of San Michele and Edouard VII et son temps. They played halma and chess. Slowly he improved and by March they were able to go out, taking a droshky to the forest wrapped in furs. But Helena said there was now a strange blankness in his eyes. She went back to talk to the specialist, alone.
‘What is happening, doctor?’
The doctor shifted awkwardly in his chair. She repeated the question.
He picked up a pencil and said, ‘If death is Warsaw, Madame Bronska, then the train is just leaving Wilno.’
Back at the flat, the afternoon sun filled the rooms with its orange light. Helena said nothing to Adam. She herself refused to understand what the doctor had said, what they all knew. Adam sat listlessly in a chair. They talked of Mantuski. They trod every corner of the land, inspected every building and wood; they stalked the capercaillie, swam in the Niemen, and she refused his tacit admission that he would see none of it again.
‘I will leave you Mantuski,’ he said.
‘Nonsense!’ Helena took his hand. ‘You will weep at my funeral and then go out and marry that Zboromirska!’
Pani Zboromirska was a young widow who always became animated when she saw Adam. Helena ordered flowers to be sent to him and signed them ‘Zboromirska’. She dabbed water on the card to make it look like tears. Adam believed it; bashfully he pretended they had come from an aunt.
That was Holy Week. His room was full of flowers. The children came to see him twice a day; their Palm Sunday osiers were pinned to the wall. A ruff of newspapers lay below the bed. Helena had come in late on Easter night to check his pulse and he had opened his eyes.
‘Helena, my dear.’
She lay with him that time, the last time, terrified in case he should be hurt. But afterwards he fell asleep and slept while she listened for his breaths, waiting for each one as it fell from his lips, collecting them. His face was placid like an icon.
She rose slowly to prevent him waking and in the darkness crossed to the window. Far below, the river shone silver-grey in the moonlight.
‘Pantarei,’ she muttered. ‘All things pass.’
‘Pantarei,’ she repeated, weeks later, watching the Niemen through the window at Mantuski, while the teardrops fell into her coffee. ‘Pantarei…’
Zofia was alone in the Wilno house. She was twelve, sitting on her bed, doing her homework. There was a sudden noise through the partition. She rushed into her father’s room.
‘He was struggling for breath. I held his hand and spoke to him but he could not hear. There was just this noise from his throat. I picked up the phone and rang the doctor but he didn’t answer. He lived only two stops on the bus so I ran out of the house and ran for the bus which was pulling away. I remember the conductor saying: “Careful, little one! You’ll give yourself a heart attack with all that running!” I found the doctor and we hurried home but of course, Papa was already dead.
‘In his room were dozens and dozens of hyacinths; to this day I cannot see hyacinths without thinking of his death.’
Adam was buried several days later, at the family chapel near Nowogródek. It was a grey, breezy morning. Uncle the Bishop stood over the grave. The wind came through the pines and scuffed the pages of his Bible. Before the coffin was closed, Helena placed on Adam’s chest the pocket-knife he had given her in 1915, and a letter. She copied the letter:
Goodbye, moj ptaszyku. Goodbye, my dearest heart. I shall look after your children as you would wish and I shall be brave. I will make you proud of me. May God bless you, my love, and may the soil rest lightly on you. Thank you for what you have been to me. God will help me. I shall love you always. Be at peace, my dear one, be at peace…
*
1992. Nowogródek. Zofia wanted to find her father’s grave. She was very tired. I suggested she wait, but she said no, she must get it over with.
We drove through dripping forests. The unmetalled road was deserted. A darkness hung over everything.
‘I remember the chapel,’ she said. ‘The family chapel on a kind of low hill…’
We pulled out of the trees and the road passed between a pair of rye fields. It was still raining. Beyond the field
s, perhaps half a mile beyond, the dark green of the forest closed in again. To the left was a small knoll. ‘Yes, look.’
It was a larch, like the larch that marked the ruins of Mantuski – another larch rising above the hazel bushes. Beside it was the chapel.
It was still standing, though in a poor state. We left the car and walked up towards it. One of four columns had collapsed and the roof had buckled and fallen in.
Adam’s grave was outside. An iron railing ran around the plot. Inside the railing was an empty hole. The grave had been ransacked.
A small group of villagers had gathered to watch us. The rain dripped from their hats. It was during the war, they said, during the war – bandits… partisans… the treasure, for the rings and the gold teeth…
Zofia stood there for several minutes; she was unable to speak. She stared into the darkness of her father’s grave. ‘It’s all upside down, Philip, this whole terrible world is upside down. When we come here to the grave, it’s come back up to earth, and when we go to our house it’s buried itself under the ground. It’s all upside down…’
24
FOR ALL OF THAT SUMMER, the summer of 1934, Helena remained at Mantuski. A stream of visitors flowed through the house. They all had their advice, and imparted it: Uncle the Bishop with his whispered devotions, Helena’s mother (‘Your dog’s duty is to the children’), Panna Konstancja (‘that Dame Cross-bones!’), Uncle Nicholas (‘It is us who are now the next row for felling’).
Helena carried on. She carried on mechanically. She rose each morning, dressed, spent time with the children, checked the stables, checked the cows, checked the cheese-making. She trod Mantuski’s dusty summer soil like a ghost. She passed from the smells of the stables, to the clanging pails at milking, to the cool of the house at midday. But, by her own account, she felt nothing, heard nothing, smelt nothing.
July was impossibly hot. The cattle wallowed in the shallows, up to their knees in mud. In the yellow desert of the afternoon, too bright to work, Helena walked and swam, clutching hopelessly at the fringes of her old life.
On one day in August, skirting the fallows, she looked back over the dry tangle of witch grass. She looked over the fur of rye; she felt herself merge with the heat-haze, rising up like the mist, spinning like a dust-devil. She closed her eyes and tilted her head up and it was orange again, like the Wilja river, like the room in which Adam had died, in which they were engaged – orange like the day in 1914 when she’d lain beneath the birch boughs at Klepawicze, the day the war had begun and the walls of her first world had fallen.
With the first cool of autumn, Helena returned to earth. There was a small fire that damaged one of the barns. She took delivery of a new bull. Plough-shares peeled away the stubble and the top layer of soil, and the winter rye was drilled in. A new governess arrived from Warsaw.
Helena knew that her mother was right; her ‘dog’s duty’ was to her children. She wrote out a list of resolutions:
Pray against negative thoughts (worse than evil thoughts).
Be outwardly gay and serene.
Pray for Adam, pray for the children.
Talk to every member of the household, visit the village.
Do not complain.
Stay busy! Walk, ride, swim whenever possible.
One day in early October, she rode out along the banks of the Niemen. Brushing aside a clutch of birch branches, she entered the forest. There was still a little birdsong and for a moment she was transported by it. She felt the familiar fusion of the senses, the feeling the forest always brought her, and knew that here at least, here among the trees, she could be assured of solace. Then she heard the tok-tok of an axe. It was Sunday: there should be no felling.
She rode towards the noise and in a clearing came across three men beside a freshly felled birch.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘This is dwór timber.’
One of the men looked up at her briefly before resuming his work. ‘The dwór has no master now.’
‘I am in charge of the dwór!’
The man swung his axe and it lodged in the bole of another birch. He worked it free. ‘Mantuski’s no place for a woman alone.’
‘Nothing’s changed!’
The man let his axe fall to his side. He looked up at Helena again but said nothing.
‘If you need wood for fuel,’ she said, ‘come to the dwór. We have plenty now. But I will not have this cowardly stealing!’
The man smiled faintly. There was a trace of pity in his face. He called away his men, and there was no more stealing.
Isolation crept up on Helena like a mute stranger. Winter was tolerable, but in the summer, that second summer after Adam’s death, she felt the first whispers of madness.
‘Work,’ she told herself. ‘I must bury myself in work.’ And she smiled to herself: Adam had always called such remedies ‘the refuge of Calvinists’.
She spent her time working on an elaborate plan for replanting the forests. In Wilno she discovered a certain variety of Russian plum and planted a new orchard. She bought two new beehives, swam in the mornings, walked in the evenings, went to Mass; and there were evenings when for a whole hour she managed to forget.
But in early September she met a doctor in Lida who examined the dark smudges beneath her eyes and said, ‘Madame Brońska, you are suffering from nervous exhaustion.’
He recommended a spa. Karlsbad, he said, a very civilized spa. She travelled there by train and took a room in a hotel with high ceilings and clanging pipes. Karlsbad survived in her imagination – from a visit years before with her mother – in two random scenes: the matchbox town viewed from a dangling funicular cabin, and a goat she’d watched near the hotel, chewing its way through the pages of a Bible.
The dining room at her hotel was full of guests at pink-clothed tables, eating alone. There were aspidistras by the door and cascades of rococo plasterwork. In the evenings an ice swan perched on the buffet table.
During the day, she sat on the terrace. She sipped spa water and watched Europe’s leisured hordes drift past her table: the spruce Germans, the Czechs, the Austrians, the Swedes and, a little apart from them all, the Jews and the English with their look of private detachment.
Helena loved being alone in a place where everyone else was alone. She felt somehow better at it than those around her. She received steam baths in the morning and, after a week, a proposal of marriage from a moustachioed Parisian lawyer. She said no, she had children, and a house in Poland – but for days afterwards she felt a tight knot in her chest like a stone.
One afternoon she walked up into the mountains. She passed the last station of the funicular and she pressed on into the forest. It was nearing dusk; there was no one about. The evening was full of the first dusty smells of autumn. A hare bolted across her path and she paused to look down a narrow ravine, to where the ‘V’ of the slopes opened out into a vast, dark expanse of tree-tops. How she missed Mantuski! She thought of the children, the byres and the cheese factory, and the dampness on the banks of the river and the last autumn two years ago with Adam.
Looking up, she saw her path double back up the slope. A rock bounced down through the undergrowth. She noticed the figure of a man in a long, bottle-green coat walking quickly down the path towards her. They met on the corner. She could see his head, bald and globular in the semi-darkness. She prepared to greet him, then saw as he turned that he was wearing a black velvet mask; only his eyes and his lips appeared through it.
Helena was too shocked to move. The man stood before her. She watched him slip both hands inside his coat. Opening it, he suddenly revealed the pale folds of his flesh. He panted something in a bestial German – then lunged at her. He pushed her back against the trunk of a pine, fumbled with her clothes, pressed hard against her with his hips. And all the time, inches from her face, the mask leered at her without moving.
She tried to wriggle away. The material of his green coat was rough against her cheek. He took one
hand from her shoulder and she ducked violently; the man stumbled, and she was free.
She ran. She ran back down the hill, past the funicular station. In the hotel she went to her room and drew a bath; she felt as if her very skin were a thick layer of dirt and spent a long time in the water, scrubbing and scrubbing.
Two days later she saw the bottle-green coat again, crossing one of the cobbled squares. On its arm was a Czech woman whom Helena had been talking to in the hotel. Her husband had also died recently.
‘Widowhood,’ she had confided to Helena, ‘is not something one wants to endure for too long.’
Helena was in the forest, not far from Mantuski village, on a day in spring that had broken free of its early frost to bring the first real warmth of the year. She was walking with a local woman and talking about dogs, books and the ceaseless trials of life.
The Russian Woman, as she was known, was said to be the illegitimate child of a White Russian general. She had arrived in Mantuski after the war and married a taciturn woodman. The villagers were vaguely suspicious of her sudden appearance and never called her anything but the Russian Woman. But she had a passionate, sage-like presence and many – including Helena – learnt to rely on her words in times of crisis. Beneath her scarf was a crown of sand-blonde hair and eyes of a remarkable pale brown.
In the same month as Adam had died in Wilno, the Russian Woman’s taciturn woodman had been found frozen upright in a ditch near the Niemen. He had been there for two days. His arm rose out of a deep snowdrift, stretching for the birch root that would have freed him.
‘No,’ said the Russian Woman quietly. ‘I’ll never be married again.’
‘How can you say never?’
She shrugged.
‘But we were not meant to live alone!’
‘I do not believe that, Pani Helena. I see my own suffering and joy as too great now to share with anyone but God.’
The Bronski House Page 17
