The Bronski House (18 page)

‘So,’ said Zofia, ‘the block is down the other end. The last one before the river.’

It was a long way. Small blue plaques announced the numbers. We followed the evens down the left-hand side. Number sixty was opposite the new parliament building. But there was no sixty-two, just a wide-open space, the road and the river.

We stepped into the middle of the space. It was empty. Zofia looked around and shook her head.

‘It’s all so strange, Philip! You know, if I saw my sixteen-year-old self now, crossing this square, I really think she would be a complete stranger to me.’

We circled back along the river and into the old town. Zofia wanted to see the Miraculous Madonna. The chapel in which it hangs stretches over one of the old gates, ‘The Gates of Dawn’, the Ostra Brama. Outside were rows of beggars and a group of autistic children. A woman was struggling up the stairs on her knees.

Inside the chapel, Zofia stood for several minutes before the painting. The candle-light played on her face. All around her were the muttered devotions of the old, the ill, the curious, the trickling new recruits of post-Soviet Catholicism.

The image itself was extraordinary. As you looked at it – that tallow-faded face, encased in silver, with hooded eyes and tilted head (based, it is said, on the face of Barbara Radziwiłłóna) – it became sadder and sadder and sadder until it seemed as though no sadness could be too wide, no suffering too great for her to bear. The devotees and pilgrims, fingering the beads of their rosaries and mouthing incantations, stared at her as if in an inescapable trance.

Zofia stood apart from them, no rosary in her hands, no incantations on her lips; on her face was an expression of loss that was so characteristic it was like a signature. I could never tell whether it was closer to tears, or laughter.

Beneath the painting, like a smile, was a silver crescent moon. All around it were panels and panels of gold and silver hearts, embossed names, praying figures, silver arms, legs, hands and feet – and messages: ‘Thank you for listening to the prayers of my heart. St Petersburg 1912.’

That was the year Helena started to come here on her own. She was thirteen and had just begun to cross swords with her mother. At Ostra Brama, she wrote later, she could air her adolescent fury in an atmosphere of apparent understanding.

Outside it was raining, a soft rain which fuzzed the skyline and sat like dew on Zofia’s grey hair. She put on a waterproof hat and tied it up under her chin.

‘In the worst years of the war in London, Philip, I wrote a poem about the Madonna here. It won some prize or other. I can’t think why, it wasn’t all that good…’ And she was smiling as we crossed the cobbles and went out through the gate.

One evening in Vilnius we met a Polish businessman and his wife. They were friends of friends in Warsaw. They had started a company importing processed food from France and Germany; it was going well. No, they said, there was no trouble for the Polish minority in Vilnius, not if you made good business.

We ate in a new restaurant. The waiters outnumbered the diners by at least two to one. We sat on chrome-and-leather chairs at a table of smoked glass. The businessman dabbed his mouth with a napkin, touched Zofia’s arm and said, ‘Afterwards we want to take you for a drive, we would like to show you the new buildings.’

It was dusk. We drove up out of the old town, past the avenue where Helena had lived in 1915, where she had watched the prize horses arrive; past the church where in 1918 she had prayed, piously, that all the chaos should end and had clutched her rosary so tight, she recalled, that it had left deep red marks in her palms.

‘My mother lived somewhere here,’ Zofia told the businessman. ‘In 1915 and again in 1918.’

‘Really?’ he said.

‘And I was born in a hospital somewhere there…’

‘How interesting!’

But he didn’t slow the car.

On towards the edge of town were the new buildings. The skyline was filled with them. They stood in ranks against the darkening sky, lights dim in the windows, their ordered façades defiant and cold, row upon row of them, like radiators waiting for installation.

The businessman’s wife turned towards us. She was smiling. ‘It is beautiful, yes?’

I nodded.

And then we were among them. Everywhere were cranes, stacks of pre-stressed concrete blocks, holes in the ground. The grey of the buildings fused with the grey of the sky. The buildings seemed interminable. We drove around one set of blocks and there was another, and another, until I imagined we were in some sort of grim modernist maze where the minotaur was a yellow earth-mover, Theseus a quantity surveyor, and his ball of string nothing more than a builder’s extended tape measure.

‘Just think,’ said the businessman, grinning with the joy of it all, ‘five years ago, this was just a village. A village! Now look!’

As if to illustrate his remark we reached the edge of the maze, suddenly, and the horizon dropped back to the forest. And there, lodged between the piles of torn-up turf, the concrete pipes, high and dry on an island of untouched ground, half hidden by fruit trees, was a wooden cabin. A dog was chained to the wall and in one of the windows a single light glowed through the curtains.

B
Y CHRISTMAS OF
1921, with the snow drifting against the banks of the Niemen, the rebuilding at Mantuski had to be abandoned. Adam returned to Druków. He took a post as judge in the village assembly. He continued it in the spring, leaving Bartek in charge of the work at Mantuski.

Adam and Helena spent two more winters in the
oficyna.
They were bright years, but austere. Poland at the time was pulling itself out of the mire of war and revolution and was settling into a more innocent routine of political squabbling. At Druków, no one was aware of much beyond the village.

Progress at Mantuski was made in fits and starts. The brick factory was working again, as were the timber yards. But sometimes the whole site lay idle for several weeks while they waited for cement, or a bucket, or a box of nails, or everyone left to plant or plough and attend to the more important business of trying to feed themselves.

Adam and Helena settled into the slow, convalescent rhythm of the land. Only one thing marred the process of regeneration and that was Helena’s health. In the spring of 1922, she contracted pleurisy, and in the summer developed a haemorrhage in one lung. Trusting Zofia to Panna Konstancja and the goat’s milk, Adam took Helena to a sanatorium in southern Poland. The doctors said she must stay six months.

Rabka sanatorium was an old
dwór
with high ceilings and long echoing corridors. Helena had a painting of Cracow above her bed and a sash window with broken shutters. The days were slow and heavy and Helena felt trapped – trapped by her own frailty, trapped by the distant mountains, trapped by the fresh-faced nurses. She longed for the forests and Druków and Mantuski; she longed for Adam and Zofia and the animals. She wrote letters:

When Adam realized finally that she meant to come home, he travelled himself to the sanatorium. He wore a new coat and black polished shoes. He looked thinner. They sat for a long time on Helena’s bed, talking too much and too quickly. Then they went in to see the doctor.

The doctor had half-moon glasses. He looked at them both, then peeled the glasses from his ears. He held out his hand to a pair of wicker chairs. ‘Sit down, please… Pani Brońska, your lung is now healed. I would like you to stay another few weeks, but if you insist, well, what can I do?’

‘Thank you, doctor.’

‘But I must warn you that it would be very unwise for you to have any more children.’

Back at Druków, they consulted Uncle the Bishop. He consulted Rome. Months passed and Helena justified, in her own mind at least, that using birth control was all right; if it would save her, enable her to mother Zofia.

But the reply from Rome was unequivocal: ‘The soldier dies on the battlefield, the woman in childbirth.’ And within a few months, she was expecting another child.

That second winter in the
oficyna
was cold and dark and very long. Helena lay for days beneath her counterpane. She watched the black boughs of the beech tree brush against the sky. Half-completed cushion covers lay beside her. Zofia lay swaddled in a cot in the corner, Haust in his curled-up crescent before the fire; the wind prodded at the eaves.

Helena waited. She waited through the long mornings and the yellow dusks; she became indolent with waiting; in her darker moments she became convinced, alone in the wooden fastness of that cabin, that her whole life had been like this: a sentence, waiting for release.

In March, release was given. She gave birth, without any hint of complication, to a son; a week later, a three-year-old mare was standing in the Druków yard, the gift of Adam’s father.

Helena’s account of her early life ends at about this time. Pictures of the 1920s and early 1930s – the first ten years at Mantuski – emerge from her papers of the time: letters, stories, scraps of diary, all the bits and pieces that survived the escape. Certain important events she chose to write up in detail, and one of these was the move to Mantuski. She had chosen for it the pages of a small green, leather-bound notebook. At Braganza, Zofia had once read the passage out to me, translating as she went.

From my cottage I phoned to ask if we could go through it again. Zofia said she’d dig it out and ring me back.

I heard nothing that afternoon, nor in the evening. In the morning she rang and said, ‘Philip, I just cannot understand it. I have looked and looked and looked!’

I told her not to worry.

‘No, I am like a dog with a bone when I get like this – I must chew and chew! Do you know,’ she chuckled, ‘I even prayed, once to Mama, and once to St Antony! I promised five pounds to the poor if it turns up. Are you sure it is not with you?’

I said I’d look, but I knew it wasn’t. The following day she phoned again. ‘Well done!’

‘What?’

‘You found the book, didn’t you? It was here when I got back…’

The book had appeared on the chair in her room. She had sat frequently in that chair during the two days of looking. Whether it was Helena or St Antony who’d left it we couldn’t decide. But whoever it was, they clearly approved of the story being told. And the poor got their five pounds.

It was 8 November 1923, a sharp autumnal day. Two farm-carts and a
bryczka
stood beneath the lime trees at Druków.