Part 19 (1/2)
In the manger ...'
The girls' voices blended nicely, and they bowed together as if studiously trained, so that even Pan Grabski, who was not a happy man and who disliked Ukrainians, admitted openly to everyone: The cobbler's daughters bring the best eggs and the brightest smiles.'
By Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when all the required eggs had been delivered, seven by seven, the large room in the manor house resembled a field of flowers, or a jeweler's shop, for the decorated eggs, each a work of superlative art, shone in the shadows: red and green and blue and gold and a dazzling black that made the other colors dance. Each family had its own preferred designs, several hundred to choose from, and each colored its eggs according to secrets long protected, but in the end the total collection from the village formed a kind of hymn to nature and to G.o.d, a subtle and magnificent blending of a small fragile thing and the longing of human beings to create something of beauty.
Feliks was awed by the Easter eggs of the Ukraine and pleased by the imaginative use to which Count Lubonski put them. On Easter Monday, at nine in the morning, he allowed the children of Polz to gather at his grounds, about which his servants had hidden the eggs provided by the parents, and at the firing of a gun the little ones were free to run where they wished in search of the colored eggs, but Lubonski held in his personal reserve about four dozen, which he himself distributed to the children who were too small to find any for themselves. Mothers and fathers beamed at the benevolence of their count.
After the rigors of Lent were relaxed, the village held a dance at which the cobbler's daughter and her young man were feasted, and it lasted three riotous days, during which the fiddle, the flute and the tambor were constantly at work, one player after another a.s.suming responsibility for the music-making.
Here for the first time Feliks and Roman saw the robust, artistic dancing of the Ukrainian peasant, so much more earthy and vigorous than that of their homeland, and Feliks in particular noticed the enticing manner in which Nadzha twirled to cause her heavy dress to flare out parallel to the floor while she flashed her pretty eyes this way and that as her head turned in the echoing air. She was delectable, the essence of a young woman flirting, whispering, laughing to the young men of her village: 'Here I am, Nadzha the cobbler's daughter, Nadzha the beautiful dancer.'
Feliks Bukowski was dangerously attracted to her, for after he had danced with her several times at the extended party, and the fiddle and flute fell silent, he walked with her along the edges of the village, and although he was himself responsible for the peasants of three similar villages in Poland, it was only through her that he learned what village life meant, and the grave obligations he undertook when he presumed to direct it.
'We girls are beautiful for a few years,' Nadzha said one day in a remarkable confession. 'Then the five babies come, and we grow fat, and we lose a tooth here and there, and'-she pointed to the women moving through her village-'at twenty-seven we're old women and the felted skirts are put away. At thirty-eight we're dead, and our husbands find themselves a second bride, and the dancing begins again. And it is like this forever.'
As the days pa.s.sed, with Lubonski inspecting all things and holding long meetings with Grabski over the accounts, Feliks and Nadzha wandered farther and farther from the village, until at last they reached that grove of birch trees by the small stream where, like others before them, they were hidden from sight, and they allowed the full springtime flood of pa.s.sion to sweep over them. Nadzha, even though she appreciated the ignominy that would result if she became pregnant, could not reject this fleeting opportunity for love with a sensitive man, even though he was Polish.
Her older sister was more prudent: 'Oh, Nadzha, you're doing a terrible thing. No man in this village will have you when he leaves.'
'I do not care,' she cried defiantly, glancing at her mother as she tended her ch.o.r.es.
Benedykta-miraculously safe in her own marriage, for often, she had observed, it was the most beautiful girls who had the greatest difficulty in landing a man-brought her mother into the argument: 'Nadzha is destroying herself. Speak to her.'
'Time destroys us,' the old woman said, and she left it at that.
'He will leave you,' Benedykta predicted. 'And with a baby, no doubt. And then where in G.o.d's h.e.l.l will you be?'
But Feliks did not propose to leave this impeccable girl, so much more sincere than Katarzyna Granicka, with whom he had been so deeply in love three weeks before, and as he pondered what to do, it occurred to him for the first time that magnates like the count and gentry like himself had family names-Lubonski, Granicki, Bukowski-whereas peasants, who were just as vital and important to the land, had none. Nadzha, the most exciting and challenging woman he had ever met, was nameless, and when she died, having borne her five children, she and all memories of her would perish from human record and from her corner of the steppes.
Then he had an idea. Reporting to Lubonski early one morning, he said: 'Grabski is not happy here, and I can see you're not happy with Grabski. Why not let me be your factor for the Ukraine? Here and the three other estates. I could earn you-'
'Feliks!' the count broke in peremptorily. 'The most terrible thing a young man in your position could possibly do, I mean even worse than murder, is to accept a job as factotum, for anybody, anywhere, under any conditions.'
'But why? I can count. I can manage.'
'Once you retreat from being real gentry, however mean, and become a manager, you announce to the world that you have surrendered ambition, that you are of the fifth category-as disgraceful as if you were in trade, or lending money like a Jew.'
'You mean ... I can never work?'
'Of course you can work. For the king ... for the Austrian emperor ... for the church if you have the vocation ... or for the cavalry. But never as the manager of someone's estates. That contaminates you ... demotes you from the ranks of gentry.'
When Feliks started to explain that he could reorganize the Lubonski estates and produce real income, the count said gently: 'I know very well what's causing this insanity. You've fallen in love with some girl in the village and you imagine yourself-' He broke off that line of reasoning and added harshly: 'Whoever she is, she can't read. She knows nothing. She has one dress. She's Orthodox, with all the corruption that implies. And in ten years she'll be old and fat and lazy, and then where in h.e.l.l will you be, saddled with such a wife?'
He rose and stamped about the room. 'Where is your undying love for that little Granicki girl? You could have had a magnate's daughter ... and you set your heart on some Ukrainian peasant. I'm disgusted with you.' And he would say no more.
Feliks kept to his room the rest of that long day, angered and embittered by the count's behavior and deeply tormented by the problem of the Ukrainian peasants, who labored so diligently and received so little, but even in those troubled hours he did not yet equate the plight of the Ukrainian serf with that of his own peasants. Nadzha's mournful summary described the peasants of Polz, not of Bukowo.
After a sleepless night he rose early and walked through the quiet village to the cobbler's cottage, where he knocked on the wooden door, polished and waxed for Easter, and called out that he wished to speak with Nadzha. To his surprise, it was Benedykta who opened the door, and she said grimly: 'Nadzha's gone. She's gone for good.'
'Why?' Feliks cried, pain echoing in his voice.
'Grabski came yesterday in the afternoon. He took her to the manor house, to see you I supposed. But it wasn't that. The count told her that she must leave this village forever ... that she no longer had a place here. And Grabski brought her back and told us all: ”If she sleeps here this night, you lose your cottage and your cobbler's bench and this girl's wedding will be forbidden,” meaning me.'
'What happened?'
'We wrapped her a little bundle-her felted dress, her sewing-and she started to walk to some village not belonging to the count.'
'Where did she go?'
'Who knows?' As she said this, Benedykta drew back into the protection of her dark cottage. 'You did this, you know. Now go away. Leave us, or I shall lose my intended too.'
Feliks ran to the stables attached to the manor and leaped upon a horse already saddled and intended for the count's morning ride. Spurring it cruelly, he galloped out to the road that Nadzha must have taken, calling for her vainly as he went. It was a narrow pathway, hardly a road, but it led through flowered glades and out into the immensity of the Ukrainian steppe, and when he reached a spot from which the village could no longer be seen, or any other habitation, he realized that Nadzha must have followed some other route into her exile, and he leaned down upon his horse's head and wept.
The first four days of the journey back to Poland were a solemn affair, because the count was openly displeased by the behavior of his young protege and would not speak with him, but Roman was more kindly disposed and it was now that the two young men drew closer together.
'She was beautiful,' Roman said.
'Have you ever known love?' Feliks asked. 'I mean real love with a wonderful girl?'
'Oh, no!' Roman said quickly.
'Are you going to marry Katarzyna Granicka?'
'Oh, no!' They rode in silence, after which Roman said tentatively: 'I thought you were in love with Katarzyna ... the camel rides, I mean ... and she did kiss you goodbye.'
'I was in love with her,' Feliks said, sitting sideways in his saddle so he could speak more easily. 'I think anyone would find himself in love with her.'
'I think I was ... in a way,' Roman said, but then he blushed so furiously that Feliks dared not question him further.
On the sixth day, when they had pa.s.sed Przemysl, the count resumed the instruction of his young charges: 'In the morning we shall arrive at Lancut, and riders have informed me that the Princess Lubomirska is already there for her summer visit. She's an extraordinary woman and deserves your fullest respect.'
He told them that she had been born Izabella Czartoryska of the great family at Pulawy. 'She's about my age, a little older maybe, and has become a handsome woman.' Realizing that this must sound odd to the young men, as if she had not been a handsome girl, he added: 'On one point you must remain silent, even if she touches upon it. As a young girl she was supposed to marry Stanislaw Poniatowski, who became king, but he refused her ... said she was too ugly. The wound never healed, and even though she married the best of the Lubomirskis and inherited their many castles, she has borne the scar and has worked day and night to drive Poniatowski from his throne. She is his mortal enemy, and before this century is out she will have her revenge.'
'Is she an ugly woman?' Feliks asked.
'Heavens, no! In European courts she is known as a beauty, but I find that European courts use that word for any woman with four towns, sixty-three villages, a hundred and forty-five thousand serfs and nineteen castles.'
'Has she so much?' Feliks asked, and Lubonski said: 'More.'
They broke camp at seven and made an easy ride to Lancut, a vast establishment with which the count was familiar but which stunned the young men, for its size and grandeur exceeded even what they had been told. A tall iron fence, its segments imported from Prague, enclosed a park the size of a large town, in the center of which, surrounded by a broad, deep moat and perched on a man-made hillock, rose what had once been a walled castle of enormous strength but which had recently been converted into an Italian-style palazzo with the original castle buried somewhere within it.
Its main entrance, set in a three-storied pink-and-white wall, and flanked by two tall towers with onion-bulb tops in the Russian style, was an ornately carved doorway which would have graced a cathedral, composed as it was of four concentric arches, each handsomely carved with allegorical marble figures. Its roof was a bright pink, and the same color was used in the nine or ten very large buildings on the palace grounds: the orangerie, the games house, the music hall, the little Greek-and-Roman museum and the huge stables. The lawn, which was kept meticulously trimmed by forty-seven scythe-wielding peasants who worked incessantly, was enormous; truly, one could not see the end of it, so far did it reach, broken here and there by lakes and fountains and running streams.
One of the towers was completely covered with pale-green ivy, which made it appear to be very old, like some castle along the Rhine; the other, of gleaming white marble, seemed as if it had been built a month ago. And everywhere Feliks looked he saw the tall, n.o.ble, varied trees of Lancut: pines from Norway, cedars imported from Lebanon, poplars s.h.i.+pped in from Lombardy, oak trees from England, cl.u.s.ters of birches from Russia and specimens of all the strong trees from Poland itself.
Lancut was a feast to the eye, all parts in perfect balance, but the construction which gave it distinction, and notoriety throughout Europe, was the central palace. It contained three hundred and sixty rooms, a resplendent art gallery with works by Rubens, Correggio, Watteau, Fragonard and a dazzling sculpture by Canova, a library unequaled in Poland, and a host of affectionate little refinements: one room incorporating frescoes imported from Pompeii, another with the best art of China, and a third furnished with the rarest treasures ever allowed to leave Persia. As it stood in the summer sunlight that morning in 1793, it represented a treasure of incalculable dimension, acc.u.mulated by the Lubomirskis over many generations.