The Bronski House Read online

  ‘Never forget,’ his father had told him, ‘that you are a Catholic and an Irishman.’

  Obliged to become Orthodox if he married a Russian, his only option was to marry a Pole. Three generations followed suit. The Irish blood was diluted. Yet in the stifling climate of Eastern Poland’s landed families, Helena and the O’Breifnes were always outsiders. They read books, for one thing. Some of them had liberal Tolstoyan ideas. They discussed dangerous things like land reform. And there was always that name.

  The O’Breifnes, as Helena was reminded, constantly, by the stage whispers of dusty dowagers, were ‘not really true Poles’.

  Zofia too remembered the whispers. ‘All these grand Polish women used to pretend they couldn’t pronounce it. “Orbrefna? Orbrefska? What sort of a name is that? There’s dozens of them in Ireland… Living in hovels all over the place…”’

  On one visit to Braganza Zofia handed me an envelope. Out of the envelope fell two photographs. They were the only ones to have survived the war.

  The first picture was taken on the edge of a forest in 1936. Helena was bending down, with one hand on the back of a dog. She was looking up at the camera and her mouth was set in a half smile. There was a kind of sprung vitality about her.

  ‘That was taken near the house at Mantuski, with Barraj, one of the Great Danes.’

  The other picture was a studio portrait, taken in Warsaw in 1919. Helena was almost twenty. I looked at her white high-collared dress, the cocked head, the smile and her narrow eyes, the strange polished complexion of her face.

  Zofia pointed a finger at it. ‘You see here the way she is toying with the necklace, below the neck? She used to say that that was the way to make a man fall in love with you.’ Zofia hushed her voice. ‘You know, I believe it works! I have even tried it a few times…’

  I looked closely at the two pictures. I tried to tell myself it was something else. It was the diaries, the letters, her extraordinary story; it was the way that this woman, Helena O’Breifne, had crossed the steepest contours of our age; that for me, living in flatter decades, in a quieter corner of Europe, her world represented everything that had been lost, a place of slow villages, muddy livestock and unfenced fields, of time passing with only the backdrop of the seasons, of lives exaggerated – exaggerated in wealth, in poverty, in suffering – lives buffeted by a history no one seemed to control: Helena’s was a bigger world, a crueller world, a world of half-mad nobles living on borrowed time, of noble peasants living outside time, another Europe, an older Europe.

  But of course Zofia was right. My interest was also much more commonplace. It had just as much to do with the way Helena toyed with her necklace.

  3

  I WENT AWAY for six months and returned to Cornwall the following spring. At Braganza, Zofia was combing the hair of her dachshund. Out of the window, I could see daffodils at the foot of the monkey-puzzle. The bay beyond was grey-blue and ruffled. The SOLIDARNOSC banner had gone from the mantelpiece.

  Zofia greeted me with her sad, open, blue-eyed smile.

  ‘Philip, how good you’re back!’

  We sat and talked for a while, then her eyes lit up and she said, ‘Look, I’ve got something to show you. Something extra-ordinary!’

  She stood, and from the next room fetched a large marquetry jewel-box. Among the strings of pearls, the amber brooches, the diamanté ear-rings, was a wedge of concrete. ‘It came last week in the post. Can you guess what it is?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘From Berlin! My cousin sent it.’ She picked out the small relic and held it. ‘The wall. It’s a piece of the wall.’

  She paused. Decades of loss crossed her face. I knew that expression well; her whole being seemed about to burst with the force of what was behind it: the half century of separation, her two lives torn apart, Europe torn in two.

  It was fifty-two years since she had fled that morning, on a farm cart, in the early autumn of 1939. And since then, nothing. Not a word of news had reached her – of the village, or the house, or the people she had known. After Yalta the Poland she knew was no longer Poland. It was Stalin’s Belorussia, and a part of it too close to the border to let foreigners visit. Not even rumours slipped out – only wild speculation: that the village had been destroyed in the war, turned into a military camp by the Soviet army, contaminated by fall-out from Chernobyl.

  Zofia replaced the concrete fragment and closed the box. ‘I am going back, Philip. I don’t think I could die not knowing what happened. You will come with me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Maybe we will find the silver!’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  For a year or so I heard nothing and wondered whether, on reflection, Zofia had decided against lifting the lid on all those monsters from her old world. I went to the Middle East, to Egypt and Israel. One evening in the old town of Jaffa, a letter caught up with me:

  My dear Philip,

  You haven’t forgotten our journey, have you? I was thinking of next May or June. I hope that suits you. How should we go about getting visas – does the Soviet Embassy still deal with Belorussia? Should we drive? Everyone says the place is full of bandits! I hope we’ll be safe. It would be maddening to be slaughtered there after all these years.

  Torquil my dachshund is ill. The weather is lovely, the bay deep deep blue. Are you writing? I have started an enormous long poem about ‘roots’.

  My love to you, dear Philip. Z.

  Back in London, someone gave me the name of a Polish art dealer in Jermyn Street. He put me onto a professor in Minsk, who in turn issued an invitation. After a couple of mornings standing on the pavement outside the Soviet consulate, I had the visas. I took them down to Cornwall at the end of April. Zofia was working in her flowerbed.

  ‘Oh, how marvellous, Philip! Look!’ She slipped off her gloves, took the visas and thumbed through them. ‘So, we are really going!’

  Only the sight of her own name written in Cyrillic muted her enthusiasm.

  We spent several days in preparation. I re-read Helena’s papers; Zofia bought some crepe-soled shoes. ‘Travelling shoes,’ she whispered. ‘Ghost-hunting shoes!’

  The day before our departure we walked to a creek above Ruan Lanihorne. It was the first week of May. The woods were covered in a tentative, filmy green; toadflax tumbled from an old stone bridge. The river bubbled beneath it, before sliding into the creek, losing itself in the tide.

  ‘Duty,’ mused Zofia. ‘Perhaps more than anything else my mother drummed into me the notion of duty.’

  ‘Is it your duty to go back?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s something else. I am going back for myself, not for my mother. No, it was more a code she had, a fiercely rigid code of duty that ordered her whole life.’

  ‘And yet she was always trying to escape.’

  ‘Yes, or being forced to.’

  When Helena wasn’t fleeing marauding armies, she seemed to be struggling perpetually against the strictures of her own position – her mother, her family, her suitors.

  The earliest story in her diaries concerns a brief spell at a convent in Cracow. She was fourteen; the year was 1913. On arriving at the convent, she had looked at the other girls, at the nuns, at the shiny brown corridors; and for two weeks plotted her escape. One night she took a loaf of bread and a flask of water and climbed the convent wall.

  It was a still, cold night and the frost was thick. Helena crouched on the wall, ready to jump.

  ‘Helena O’Breifne! Stay where you are!’

  She froze. It was the headmistress, standing beneath the wall.

  ‘Helena!’

  ‘Yes, Mother Immaculate.’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘You’ll never get anywhere without your passport. Here, I have it with me. If we hurry we can reach the station for the Warsaw train. What do you think?’

  Helena’s plan crumbled before her. It seemed
suddenly childish and naive. She climbed back into the convent grounds.

  Mother Immaculate took her inside and sat her in her office. ‘Now, Hela, I know how unhappy you feel. But it would be a terrible waste if you didn’t study. Don’t you agree?’

  Helena nodded.

  ‘I want us to be friends. You must come and see me whenever you want.’

  How can one be friends with a nun? thought Helena. But over the coming weeks, she found herself spending more and more time with Mother Immaculate. They sat in her office and talked after Mass. The other girls chastised Helena for it, but she didn’t mind. For the first time she felt affection for someone who was not one of her family – nor one of her animals. No one else, before or since, encouraged her in quite the same way.

  The following summer, during the holidays, Mother Immaculate wrote to say she was passing through Wilno. Could she come and see the O’Breifnes? Helena was delighted. ‘Look, Mama, you will meet Mother Immaculate!’

  Her mother read the letter. She shook her head. ‘Your friendship with this nun is not natural. I forbid you to see her.’

  That autumn Mother Immaculate was posted to China. She was sent to teach in an Ursuline mission. Though Helena wrote to her frequently, and received long letters in reply, and though in these letters she gained constant reminders of the duty she had to her own talents, and though the phrases in those letters stayed with her for the rest of her life, she never saw Mother Immaculate again.

  In 1916 this elderly nun was attacked on the steps of her own chapel by the lackeys of a Chinese warlord. Helena received news of her death early in 1917.

  The tide had crept up the creek. A cold wind was blowing from the north. Zofia pulled up her collar and said, ‘Yes, I remember that story. She had those letters at Mantuski. She kept them in a Chinese ivory box. Goodness knows what became of them. Looted I suppose, like everything else…’

  She looked up into the trees. The boughs of the scrub-oak were twisted into strange, serpentine forms. ‘What are we going to find, Philip? What will we find there?’

  4

  ON A DAMP MAY NIGHT, we crossed the border into Belorussia. The train pulled into a siding to be raised on vast hydraulic jacks – Polish bogies rolled out, Soviet bogies rolled in. Border guards climbed on board to inspect papers; the ‘jer-jink’ of their stamps rang out along the corridor.

  Inside the old Soviet Union, I opened a bottle of vodka. We toasted the crossing and Zofia tapped the bottle and said, ‘Philip, I think we might need this again. Will you keep it to hand?’

  We reached Minsk at about two a.m. The train pitched us out onto a dark platform, then sped on into the night, on towards Moscow. Zofia shivered. She looked at the dim ranks of Soviet buildings, the alien shapes of Cyrillic script and said, ‘Ach! What a grim place!’

  Her fear of Russia was something elemental, instinctive. It had been bred into her with the unassailable prejudices of frontier peoples. She had been brought up in the shadow of the new Soviet border, less than sixty miles to the east of Mantuski. In those days, only stories permeated its barbed-wire coils, stories and bodies floating face-down in the waters of the Niemen. She learnt two things intuitively: that upstream in Russia, they killed girls like her, nice land-owning girls; and that peril, when it came, came always from the east.

  ‘Do you know that the first Russians I ever saw were the soldiers in the trees as we fled into Lithuania.’

  And here she was, at two in the morning, fifty years later, east of her old home, on Soviet soil for the first time.

  A war-like darkness hung over the city. I found a taxi which crept through the lampless streets in search of a hotel. At the first one, they said, ‘Nyet!’ At the second the receptionist didn’t even bother saying ‘Nyet!’ but simply shook her head. At the third they said, ‘Nyet!’ and the taxi driver came to argue. They still said, ‘Nyet.’

  He and I stepped out again onto the street. In our absence, a man had got into the car. I could see Zofia cowering in the back. I ran across just as he jumped out, slipped around the other side, beat the car’s roof, then started to flap his arms like a bird. Before we could stop him, he was off, shouting bestially.

  I opened the car door. Zofia was laughing, but in the darkness I could see her hands clasped tight over her handbag. They were shaking.

  ‘Oh, Philip, thank God you came back! Was he mad, do you think, or just drunk?’

  Either way, it confirmed her worst prejudices.

  We returned to the first hotel and, in the end, managed to bully a couple of rooms from them. The hotel in fact was virtually empty. In a room on the eighth floor, I reopened the vodka and poured two glasses.

  ‘Well, Zosia,’ I said. ‘To success!’

  ‘Success,’ she said, unconvincingly.

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  She looked up at me and nodded.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I don’t know, Philip. I just feel a deep apprehension. Perhaps this is all madness. I mean, how can we go back? How can we ever go back?’

  I tried to see it through her eyes. How could I? Reading Helena’s diaries had only made me realize how distant it all was, how completely 1939 had divided their lives into two.

  She looked down, fingering her watch-strap. ‘I don’t know, I just don’t know…’

  When she looked up again, she said, ‘You remember what Konrad Lorenz said about those rats, how if one is killed they mark the place with their urine? Then the others know not to go back… and here am I – going back! It is madness!’ She raised her glass. ‘More vodka, Philip! Then I am going to bed.’

  I stumbled back down the ill-lit corridor. I could not sleep. I propped the bottle on the window-sill of my room and looked out. The city of Minsk winked lamely in the night. This trampled, luckless city! Twice destroyed – once in the first war, again in the second. Eighty per cent of Belorussia’s towns and villages had been destroyed in the second war; one in four of its people had died. Zofia was seventeen that time; Helena was seventeen the first time.

  I kept thinking of the patterns their two lives made across this dark century. Helena came of age with it, lost her innocence with it, was there – in St Petersburg, in 1917 – at the outset of its great and glorious experiment, the same experiment which forced her, several times, to flee for her life. Zofia and the new-bordered Poland were born in the same year, Polish twins, and both were seventeen when the borders collapsed: seventeen, 1917, 17 September, 17 on Memory’s distant, flapping mainsail.

  Czesław Miłosz was born ten years before Zofia, in the same town, Wilno. ‘1914,’ he once wrote, ‘was the manifestation of all of Europe’s defects and of her end… the longed-for war of nations had brought Poland to life as a posthumous creation.’

  Looking over the dark, lifeless pathways of modern Minsk, thinking of Helena when young, Zofia when young, the Russia of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the Poland of Mickiewicz and Reymont, I found the idea a compelling one: of living in a posthumous Europe, a Europe repeating in death precisely the mistakes it had made in life.

  The next morning was bright; from my window, I could see the early mist lingering over the municipal lakes. In the hotel café Zofia was already up, already surrounded by coffee and books and bread, and already talking to a man called Vladimir.

  Vladimir was an enormous man. He had thick black hair and hairy bear hands. His story as he told it began in 1940 when a Polish girl, a frail Polish village girl, first held in her arms the little bundle that was to become Vladimir. His father, she told him, had been a Russian officer. The war had brought him to the village, and the war had taken him away. For years Vladimir wondered about this man, this ghost of a man who was his father. When doing his national service he began his search: it went on for fifteen years. ‘Fifteen yerrs lukeing!’

  In Moscow he had some success. He tracked down another of this man’s children. It seemed that Vladimir had twelve half-brothers scattered across the Union. Through a series of letters they all agreed
to meet in Moscow.

  ‘Well, when I see them,’ explained Vladimir, ‘when I see them on railway station I hug, hug, hug. Twelve times hug! An the teers they come up, they roll like peas down the cheek. Like grreat beeg peas!’

  Afterwards, when Vladimir had taken his briefcase off into the new uncertainties of the morning, Zofia tutted, ‘My goodness, how they weep, these poor people!’

  Later I found her bending over a book in her room; she too had been weeping.

  ‘The dogs… You know, we abandoned them when we escaped, we left them behind…’

  She was reading the account of a wounded partisan in a cave in 1940. A skeletal creature appeared at the cave mouth, licked the partisan’s face, then curled up at his side, dead.

  ‘Perhaps that was one of ours…’

  And the tears rolled down her cheeks like peas.

  We left Minsk a couple of days later, on a road lined with wooden cabins painted blue and green and yellow. Our contacts had found a Lada and a Russian driver named Andrei.

  We drove west, beyond the fringes of the city, into the forest. A muddy sky hung over the morning, swollen with rain. Beneath it the land had flattened itself, and cowered in the shadows. We drove in silence. The forest thickened, the villages became fewer, then gave way altogether to the Puszcza Nalibocka, an expanse of bison-filled, tree-covered territory the size of a small county. The rain began to fall in large droplets which shattered on the windscreen. Andrei stopped the car, jumped out, clenched his lapels together and with his other hand attached the wiper-blades.