Free The Bronski House by Philip Marsden Page B

out of the crowd; one curled his stubby fingers around the calash hood of Helena’s
bryczka.
He thrust his face in and for an instant she was staring into his eyes. She felt his breath on her face. He shouted something in a strange tongue and gripped her ankle. Then the horses leapt forward and he fell from the wagon, and they were bumping over the stony verge and into the fields.
    After that Pan Rymszewicz avoided the villages. The convoy relied on the forest, and the hospitality of remote
dwóry.
    Some of the landowners were oblivious to the approaching Germans. The convoy arrived one afternoon at Wojopodorsk. The entire household was taking tea on the terrace, sitting at round tables, or on the steps, or standing importantly behind the chairs: old men in silk dressing gowns conferring, a boy with a pet rabbit, a widow with a dog in her lap, a young girl with her arm in a sling playing chess with a woman in a tiara of white lilac. The war, wrote Helena, was not mentioned at all by this family.
    Others waited alone. They stayed once at a place called Barbarin, the home of a Graf Ignacy. A giant of a man, Graf Ignacy lived with his wife half a day’s ride from the nearest town. In his dining room, dozens of elkheads stared down on a table with a worn, gold-threaded military saddle in the middle of it.
    Helena watched him fill and re-fill his pewter plate with slabs of half-cooked roe deer; at his feet two red-toothed borzois pitted their jaws against its globular hip-joints.
    ‘The Germans?’ he spluttered. “What do they know of the forest… We never budged for Bonaparte, why should we budge now?’
    In the morning Helena heard gunfire; she opened the curtains and saw the cupola of Graf Ignacy’s head thrust from a first-floor window; he was shooting rabbits on the lawn.
    Many landowners had already left; sometimes Helena and the others spent the night on the bare boards of an abandoned house, and she would wake to sun in the curtainless windows and pick up her clothes and leave beneath huge chandeliers cocooned in dust-sheets.
    In the first days of October, they arrived at Piesków, to the north-east of Minsk, home of Helena’s uncle and a pair of very odd great-aunts.
    The approach to Piesków, Helena recalled, was from below, over a little stone bridge with a wrought-iron fence on either side. Lilies lay on the lake below the bridge. The drive was made up of loose stones and gravel which crunched beneath the convoy’s wheels. The carts pulled to a stop in a long line. On the steps stood a liveried butler and a fat man with a plum-red face. The butler was called Dominiecki; the red face was that of the land agent.
    ‘Hrabina, Pani Hrabina!’ Dominiecki stepped up to Helena’s mother. He had a flustered manner. ‘We heard of your coming, Hrabina. The Hrabia is fighting and the others have gone to Moscow only two days now. But we have instructions, Pani Hrabina, instructions. Please…’ He bowed, clenching and unclenching his palms. Then he led them all into a hall with a vast, chess-board parquet floor.
    After weeks in the forest Helena was shown up the wide stairs to a crisp-sheeted bed and a deep hip-bath. Lying back on the bed, she tugged off her boots; a shower of pine needles fell on the counterpane. She stepped barefoot to the window and watched the horses, bucking and kicking after harness, running around the paddock.
    They spent a whole month at Piesków. The German offensive had slowed, and they had dug in to the west of Minsk. There would no more fighting, it was thought, until the mud had frozen and the roads were passable again.
    Piesków was a strange household, and nothing was stranger than the two great-aunts who lived in the attic. Their presence hovered over the house like a taboo. The only approach to their rooms was a steep staircase and a door which was always closed. Sometimes they wouldn’t come down for days and at these times their food was left on the stairs.
    Helena remembered the