The Bronski House (15 page)

In Cornwall, Zofia still has this photograph; it is the one where Helena is toying with her necklace. Her head is tilted slightly to one side; she looks coy and vulnerable. But in her eyes is a cool determination. There is something about the photograph, something about her, which makes you want to look at it again and again, and no one looked at it more than Helena herself; she admitted that it puffed her vanity to such a degree that if she passed a group of soldiers without turning their heads, she became quite petulant.

At about this time, Piłsudski left Warsaw and went east. He planned to take Wilno. Through a series of cunning manoeuvres and cavalry assaults, he sent the Bolshevik garrisons into confusion. After two days of street fighting, the Red Army withdrew. Piłsudski – himself from Wilno – issued a proclamation:

Not everyone agreed. The Lithuanians saw the Poles not as liberators but occupiers. The eastern borders of the new Polish state, swelling though they were, were far from secure. Helena’s mother was in no hurry to return. In May she took the family south for the summer, to a cousin’s estate near Cracow.

The house, said Helena, was like Platków before the war: intact, with glass-fronted walnut cabinets, Chinese painted screens and gleaming silver. She hated it. It only served to remind her that they still had no home, that their own land was being fought over, that they had no money.

Added to that, Aunt Wanda, who owned the house would say things like, ‘Of course, Helena’s looks are the kind that don’t last,’ or, ‘Intelligence is all very well in a man, but in a woman it merely brings bad luck.’

Helena wrote to the Ursuline convent in Cracow. She said she’d taught English in St Petersburg and Mother Augusta agreed to take her on. She travelled down on the train and was given a small, blue-wallpapered room with a bed and a desk. She loved that room. Her new independence brought out in her a passion for neatness, and she stacked her books according to size, aligned her three pairs of shoes like soldiers on parade, and started a diary. On the opening page she wrote, in English: ‘The Story of Helena O’Breifne, teacher of English, lover of animals, residant [sic] of the House of Ursuline Nuns, ancient city of Cracow, Poland.’

And on the next page:

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.

H
ELENA 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: