Read Online The Bronski House by Philip Marsden - Free Book Online Page A

blooms; the parks were spotted with camomile. Helena grew restless. She wrote of a sense of undirected excitement, a physical feeling. Something was approaching and she could not see it, she could not touch it, she did not know its name. It had nothing to do with the war. Did everyone feel like this? She had no idea. She had no one to ask.
    At times the feeling of expectancy was overwhelming. On slow afternoons she took to walking alone through the town, blinking in the strange light, constantly alert, constantly surprised by familiar things. For her, spring never came again without bringing back something of May 1915.
    On most days there was a wind. In the avenues it swept through the rowan trees with a sound like water; it tugged at the horse-chestnuts; it set the fat fingers of their leaves flopping to and fro. Helena took in the sweet-and-sour smells of Wilno’s markets, the shouts of the hawkers, the slinking forms of tinkers. At midday she felt fiercely alive; by late afternoon she was exhausted.
    In the evening a cooler wind brought the sound of church bells. She toured the chapels, praying, indulging her earnest and precocious piety, gazing at the Miraculous Madonna of the Ostra Brama. The sacrament was exposed in all of Wilno’s churches. People spilled out of the pews, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, cramming the west doors. Men squeezed their caps in knotted fists; women knelt in the aisles. All sent their eager prayers drifting upwards – urging God to hold back the Germans.
    The Russians were in retreat. From the west came reports of whole villages fleeing. All over the country, households were sending their livestock east, away from the hands of the Kaiser. Journeymen told of roads choked with guns and muddy soldiers and herds of lolloping beasts.
    One afternoon Helena was standing on the balcony. A hay cart turned off the main road and into Mała Pohulanka. Behind the cart was another cart, then a larger wagon and a string of brood-mares attached to it; their clumsy-footed foals trotted beside them. Helena recognized her grandmother’s troupe of Lithuanian Zmudziaki horses; it was then she knew that they would all have to leave.
    The O’Breifnes went south at first. The horses were sent on ahead. Their own party, six of them, travelled by train: Helena’s mother, Helena, her brother and sister – both much younger – Panna Konstancja and Tekla.
    Over the coming years, Panna Konstancja and Tekla accompanied the family wherever they went. Panna Konstancja was a large, matronly figure with a sharp tongue and a roguish humour. She, almost alone, had brought up Helena; she was a much less distant figure than her own mother. Tekla was the family’s cook, the fatherless child of a ‘corner-woman’ taken in by Helena’s mother.
    A thirty-five-kilometre drive took the party from the station at Nowojelnia to Druków. It was a drowsy evening. The heads of the horses were heavy, bullied by flies. Helena’s mother fanned herself with a book. Tekla had acute diarrhoea and there were frequent stops.
    Helena felt daunted by this retreat. Would it end at Druków? What if the Germans like Napoleon could not be stopped and they were pushed on, deeper into Russia? The east! Russia! Helena baulked suddenly at the thought of the snowy steppe, the grey hills, the unkempt beards of the Orthodox priests, the rows of high-cheeked Tartars against the snow. Then she fell asleep in the familiar regions of Panna Konstancja’s chest.
    When she woke they were almost there. The driver clicked his tongue and the horses turned off the road and into Druków’s twisting avenue. Tekla made a final leap from the
bryczka
and ran for a bush.
    Druków was the home of Uncle Nicholas O’Breifne, a softly spoken, bookish man who had never had children and treated Helena as his own. They spent much of that summer at Druków.
    It was a quiet summer; news of the war punctuated it only rarely. Helena spent much of her time – when not in her