Epilogue
ZOFIA WENT BACK once more to Belorussia. It was June, a high blue Kresy June. The skies were cloudless, the air a matted buzz of insects. The chatter of finches filled the forests. In the hay-fields, teams of reapers swung their scythes with the eagerness of those who know that good days – like everything else – were in short supply.
It was two years since our first journey. Belorussia had dropped further into its particular well of post-Soviet torpor. Fistfuls of banknotes were needed for the tiniest purchase; the whole fabric of the towns was rotting. Disparities had grown, hostilities sharpened. A sense of stasis pervaded everything; only the forest seemed truly alive.
In Cornwall, in the meantime, Zofia had been raising money. She had opened an account, at the National Westminster Bank in Truro, and named it simply: ‘Chapel’. Into this account went funds for the one thing she felt would bridge her two worlds, that would pay the debt of duty she felt towards her abandoned past: the restoration of the family chapel and the looted graves of her ancestors. House guests, friends and family had all chipped in; even her dentist had waived his fees for the cause when he heard that bodies had been dug up solely to recover gold teeth.
That April, down a crackling phone line, the Nowogródek priest had announced that work on the chapel was now almost complete. The opening ceremony would be on 30 June.
‘Philip,’ mused Zofia as we crossed the Belorussian border, ‘supposing we get there and it is not finished. Supposing there is no roof. What do we do then?’
‘It’ll be ready,’ I reassured her – though felt less than reassured myself. I poured two large measures from the bottle of expedition vodka. ‘For crossing the border,’ I said. ‘Remember?’
Father Antoni Dziemianko, Polish Catholic priest of Nowogródek, was a man practised in dispelling doubt. I remembered him well from the last time. I remembered his didactic liturgies. I remembered his teak complexion, his large face, his large horizons. He had in the bad years spent several years as an underground priest, but now had come into his own. He alone in that dazed town had had energy; he alone managed to get things done.
That evening, with the final instalment of the Chapel Fund lodged in smuggled dollars in my pocket, we knocked on his door. He was writing up a sermon on an old Soviet typewriter. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. ‘Pani Zofia! Pan Philip! Proszę!’
We sat down.
‘Now, everything is ready for Thursday. A bus is leaving here at two o’clock. The village are killing a calf, and the bishop is coming from Grodno.’
‘Oh, my goodness!’ exclaimed Zofia. ‘A bishop!’
Father Antoni rose and closed both doors. Sitting down at his desk, he unlocked a drawer and produced a small wooden box. Inside the box was a gold wedding ring and an oval locket. Behind the maculated glass of the locket, rested a tiny wisp of dark hair.
‘The builders found them near the graves.’
I took the ring and squinted at the inscription on the inside: HB 4 VII 1842. ‘Who would that be, Zosia?’
‘I’m not sure. Some Broński or other…’
We handed over the dollars and took the small wooden box and its contents. Father Antoni saw us to the door. As we were leaving, Zofia turned. ‘Oh, one more thing, Father. I wonder, could you ask the village to spare that poor calf?’
Outside it was dusk. The ruined castle of Nowogródek stood on the opposite hill like a shipwreck.
‘What I can’t understand,’ said Zofia, ‘is how the looters missed it. A wedding ring – I mean, wouldn’t that be the first thing they would look for?’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t found by the builders at all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Perhaps someone in the village had a guilty conscience.’
The day of the ceremony had been chosen as a day of obligation, the Feast of St Peter and St Paul. By midday, it was very hot. A faint-hearted breeze did no more than tousle the fringe of the forest. Zofia and I arrived at the chapel early: she was to greet the bishop when he arrived, and present him with the keys. As we stepped up the path, a nun was laying a trail of blue lupins around the chapel door.
But the door was padlocked. A man went off to the village for the keys and returned, breathless. He shook his head. ‘No key!’ He began to force the lock with a crowbar.
‘So,’ I whispered to Zofia, ‘that is what you must give to the bishop – a crowbar!’
The restoration, though, was magnificent. Outside, four robust columns supported a timber pediment; a simple black cross topped the pediment. One of the outer walls had been completely rebuilt – but so neatly that it was hard to tell which one. White-wash covered the columns and the walls and was so bright that Zofia had to dip into her handbag for a pair of sunglasses.
Inside the chapel, it smelt of new paint. Accustomed as we were in Belorussia to seeing ruins, it seemed odd to be looking at the fruits of fresh building. The interior was neat and modest. It was no more than forty feet long. A parquet floor stretched to a simple altar. All around the altar and the chapel were jars of lilies and peonies. The ceiling was made of stained larch, cut from the tree that had stood beside the ruins, and which two years earlier had guided us to the site.
Into one wall was set a granite tablet, and on it had been chiselled the inscription: Adam Broński 1890–1934. Zofia placed her bag on a chair and stood before the tablet. She stood there for several minutes.
Sixty years. Sixty years since her father’s coffin had been carried into that chapel. Sixty years since the horse-drawn cortège had travelled through the forest from Mantuski. Sixty years. Sixty years in which all she’d thought was solid, all the people she’d loved, had vanished one by one. Here was where the parade of loss had begun.
We went outside. The heat rose from the stripped earth around the chapel. Zofia sat in the shade of one of the columns. Parties of villagers climbed the hill. They bore sheaves of flowers. They chattered in small groups, peering at the new elegance of the building, at the old elegance of Zofia. Slowly, they shuffled towards her, eyeing her clothes, her shoes, her sunglasses.
Proszę Pani, tell us, where is your home? Is this your son? Please tell us, where is the rest of the family? What has become of them all?
Canada, Anglia, Francja, Australia…
When will they come back? Proszę Pani, why are they not here?
It’s far. Far, and many are poor. (How could she explain how difficult it was to return, how difficult it was to face what had happened?)
But they will come, Proszę Pani, won’t they? Please tell them to come…
The Bishop of Grodno arrived at a few minutes before three. His German car slid to a halt. The crowd parted to let him through, and he smiled an episcopal smile and handed out plastic rosaries to the children. He entered the chapel, bowed, took his seat beside the altar, and placed a biretta on his head. There was no presentation of keys.
Six priests followed the bishop. Their suitcases of props – the mitre and crozier, the various liturgical soutanes, all the starched and glittering paraphernalia of the host, took up a sizeable part of the chapel. The people crammed in, packed the doorway; and those who could not fit – the majority – stood outside.
The service itself was a conventional Mass, with the addition of a reconsecration ceremony. This involved a series of prayers, and the bishop parading around the chapel with an aspergill, scattering holy water.
After Mass, Zofia stood to make a speech. She cleared her throat and looked at the faces before her.
‘This chapel,’ she began, ‘holds memorials to my family, the Brońskis. Once they all lived here and used this chapel for Mass, for their baptisms and weddings, and for their burials. I remember my father’s funeral here sixty years ago – some of you told me you were here then too. That means an enormous amount to me. Thank you for coming.’
The crowd outside pressed in closer to hear; there was some jostling in the packed aisle.
She raised her head before
continuing. ‘Like you, my father lived all his life on this land. He loved the land more than anything else. He spent his life working it and when he wasn’t working it, in the first war, he was fighting for it. He loved the people here and the forests and it is in his memory that this chapel has been restored.
But there is one thing you must understand. For more than half a century now, no Broński has lived here. Once this was our home, but not any more. The family is scattered around the world and the life we knew here is gone. The restoration of the chapel is not for us; it is not for my family, but for you, for all of you – Belorussian and Pole, Orthodox and Catholic. You must look after it as your own home. You must use it. Come here and pray whenever you want, whenever you can – even if there is no priest to officiate; you must say the rosary and in the spring cut back the forest around the building.
‘And be warned,’ she smiled, ‘that if the chapel again falls into disrepair, it will be my ghost that comes back to haunt you!’
The next morning, Zofia rose late. We were staying with a Polish family, on the fourth floor of a crumbling block of flats in Nowogródek – six of us in three rooms.
‘Dzień dobry, Philip. I feel rested,’ she said.
‘Dzień dobry, Zosia.’ I kissed her cheek.
She sat down at the small table in the kitchen. ‘Oh, I can’t tell you what a tremendous relief I feel today!’
She had given me no idea how much she’d been dreading the whole thing – dreading the ceremony, dreading the speech, afraid that her Polish would fail her, or her legs, or that no one would come, or that those who did would be hostile.
‘Yet you know, Philip,’ she said, ‘I honestly think that it was one of the best days of my life. Does that sound ridiculous?’
‘No, Zosia, it does not.’
Before leaving Belorussia, there was one more thing we had to do. We drove to Mantuski.
Pani Wala Dobrałowicz, Zofia and Helena’s one-time dressmaker, was feeding her bantams when we arrived, scattering seed on a patch of bare earth before her cabin. The bantams squawked at her feet. A single birch tree stood beyond her vegetable patch, its silvery leaves quivering in the wind. Beyond the birch was the Niemen.
When she saw us, Pani Wala let her pan of seed clatter to the ground. ‘God, my God!’ she cried, and came over, hugging us both as if we might fall apart.
Of all the people I met in the old region of Kresy, all the Poles and Belorussians, the Lithuanians and Russians, the priests and nuns, none left quite such a mark on me as Pani Wala. She had eyes of the deepest cornflower blue and a pure and powerful presence. But it was her speech that I remember best.
As she talked, you could sense a reservoir of feeling behind her face; and sometimes the reservoir would spill over, filling her eyes with tears, setting the corners of her mouth twitching. The words would tumble out with the fluency of music. Then pausing, she would laugh. The switch was miraculous; she was the only person I have ever met who seemed utterly oblivious to her own mood.
We followed her into her cabin, and sat while she bustled around, shaking her head and muttering, before sitting down with us.
‘Only a little longer,’ she sighed, looking up at the wedding portrait on her wall. ‘Just a little more of this and God will let me join my Kazik.’
Her Kazik had died two years earlier. In the years before the war, he had been the head gardener at Mantuski. He it was who had tended the roses, trained the honeysuckle, and with Helena each spring made the plans for planting.
We had lunch. Pani Wala laid out a clean white table-cloth; she laid it with plates of potato and kiełbasa and herring. Zofia presented her with a pair of shoes and two jerseys from Marks & Spencer.
A bottle of vodka appeared. Normally, Pani Wala explained, she never drank. ‘But, Pani Zofia, I shall drink your coming! I shall drink until I fall. I shall drink, drink, drink – three times until I am completely out of knowledge! I shall drink for you, Pani Zofia; I shall drink for you, Pan Philip. I shall drink like an Englishwoman!’
And we did drink, and talked and ate and drank again, and slept it off in the close heat of the afternoon – the two widows on beds behind a screen, me on an old sofa next to the stove. It was nearly four when I rose and tiptoed out of the cabin.
I walked out along the river. Its eddies twisted and slid past my feet. The wind pulled at the high grass on the bank. Down near the dwór were the ruins of the brick factory. The chimney still stood, the same chimney that had been there in Zofia’s day, the same chimney that rose above the ruins when Helena arrived in 1920. Some hardboard huts had been erected beneath it, and inside them were signs of the new age, the age of ‘beesnees’ and kiosks: village girls were filling bottles marked Tutti Frutti Shampoo and Fleur Raspberry Bath Essence.
I carried on. Nearer the site of the old house, one of the limes of the avenue had fallen in the last year. The larch still dominated the skyline, though one or two of its boughs were bare with age. On the mound – all that remained of the old house – shards of red brick were still visible in the soil.
We spent the night in Pani Wala’s cabin. Zofia wore a pair of white satin pyjamas. I could hear the two women talking behind their screen long into the night.
In the morning, shortly after dawn, I left the cabin. I went outside and sat beneath Pani Wala’s birch tree. Zofia came out shortly afterwards, tying up the cord of her red silk dressing-gown. She walked into the vegetable plot. She stood there watching the Niemen, watching the mist rise from the water. All around her were calf-high potato plants, cabbages, sprigs of parsley and onions.
For several minutes nothing moved. Then from the pines there came a cackle of rooks. Zofia raised her head to listen. It was the same sound that started her days in Cornwall, that spilled out of the high chestnuts at Braganza.
She placed one hand casually against her throat. She remained there for some time, quite still, while her dressing-gown trailed like a bridal train through Pani Wala’s sprouting onions.
We left Belorussia as we’d come in, on a beaten-up old bus. The whole chassis of the bus was skewed; a sunburst fracture filled the windscreen. The driver shrugged. ‘Perestroika,’ he said.
The bus had been chartered to take a party of schoolchildren on holiday to Poland. Their parents followed them on board, bringing with them bags and bags of old clothes and household goods to sell in Warsaw for ‘ice cream money’. The bags made us feel like refugees.
We sat at the back, among the refugee bags. Zofia leaned against them, and said, ‘Philip, what do you think? Will I ever come back here?’
‘No.’
She looked out of the window, watching the buildings of Nowogródek give way to the fields and the forest. The sun was low on the horizon. ‘No, I think you’re right.’
Then she raised her chin and smiled her reckless half-smile. ‘But maybe when I’m very old I’ll come here in a car and stay in a little cabin in Mantuski and die there all alone!’
We reached the border at dusk. Queues of stationary buses stretched back down the road, like the vertebrae of some fossilized reptile.
There was an incident at the border, a small everyday incident. After seven hours of waiting, seven hours edging down the line, filling in forms, passing checkpoints, we cleared the Belorussian side. By then it was well after midnight. On the other side of no man’s land, a Polish guard came on board. He was very different from his Belorussian counterparts. With high uhlan boots, a hay-maker’s tan and a hero’s blue eyes, he had all the swagger of the re-emerging Poland. He stepped down the aisle. He counted the children’s sleeping heads, asked for the driver’s papers, tapped them with a pencil and said no, you must go back into Belorussia, back to your own town.
Zofia told me later that she saw red; she felt her blood boil – it was the look he gave ‘that poor Belorussian driver’. She came hobbling down the aisle. She’d started shouting at the guard before she reached him: ‘How dare you! Can’t you see these are just children? Really, y
ou make me ashamed. You make me ashamed to be Polish!’
I told her to keep quiet. Pragmatism had taught me two things at borders: ‘no’ does not always mean ‘no’, and never lose your temper, never argue principles.
But who was I to know? What use had pragmatism proved at that other border, fifty-five years earlier, with Russian bullets hissing around her head, with the world gone mad, with Poland dying at her feet?
The Polish guard left the bus. He took the papers with him. In the end he did let us through. Perhaps we were both right.
Beyond the frontier was another queue of cars. They were lit up briefly in our headlights. We passed the queue’s end and carried on into the night. Everyone on the bus settled down to sleep. The driver lit a cigarette; soon the only sound was the growl of the engine. In the darkness, the ranks of birch trees slid past the window.
At the back of the bus, resting against the refugee bags, her legs stretched out over the broken seats, lay Zofia. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing evenly; her arms were wrapped tight around herself for warmth. Above her, one of the windows was open and the night breeze was coming through it, flicking at the curtain, and tugging at the tuft of grey hair that hung down over her face.
BACK IN LONDON, we went our separate ways. Zofia had her paying guests to look after, I had a book to finish. All that summer when I telephoned or we wrote, she seemed to be ill, beset by a series of minor complaints. In November when I returned to Cornwall she looked tired and said she was going to hospital for tests. Two days later they operated, and found her abdomen riddled with cancer.
She outlived the couple of months the doctors gave her to live. She recovered well from the operation and had treatment in the spring. She also kept an imaginary black knife, she told me, and in the still hours after dawn would steer it down towards the cancer and cut it away, cell by cell. One morning she rang, laughing with the laugh I knew hid some elemental fear. She said she had had a terrible nightmare – the Red Army had come to Braganza and thrown her on the rubbish heap; for some time after she woke, she lay there convinced she was back in Mantuski, back beside the Niemen – until she heard the sea breaking against the rocks below.
The Bronski House Page 21
