Lala Read online

  Leonard Brokl (in white hat) on a pleasure boat in Abbazia (now Opatija, Croatia), 1907.

  As I’ve said, after a golden period of prosperity on the Kiev stock market, Lala’s grandfather went bankrupt for the first time. Brought up in a solemn belief in steam and electricity, the natural sequence of events and the logic of cause and effect, he must have felt cheated. And how – he’d been buying shares, just as before, and selling shares, just as before, but instead of gaining money, he lost it. Unfortunately, the cast-iron consistency of chemistry, the precision of elements combining to form compounds and the exact proportions of bromine and chlorine molecules had no raison d’être among the voracious sharks of Little Russian high finance. Once bought, shares could either rocket in value, or drop, and no amount of potassium could possibly help or hinder them in this process.

  Yet Grandpapa Leonard Brokl was brought up not just in a belief in steam and electricity, but also some extraordinary ideas about a businessman’s honour, which even the Buddenbrooks would have found perplexing, because he turned out to have talked several of his close friends into buying shares (after all, if it’s such a splendid way to acquire manna of gold…). So not only did he lose his own capital, he also felt obliged to reimburse everyone who had lost money as a result of his advice.

  ‘And then,’ as his wife Wanda told Lala, ‘my husband, who was your grandfather, went bankrupt. We locked and bolted the house, stopped receiving guests and dismissed all the servants, so only the butler and the housemaid remained.’

  As my monologue had gone on for too long, at this point Basia took my photograph, partly because it was a nice shot, and partly to draw attention to herself.

  ‘Thanks. Aha… and so Lala’s grandfather went bankrupt. Somehow he and his wife could cope with the fact that only the butler and the housemaid remained, but they could no longer afford to pay the fees for their three daughters’ boarding school. Their son Maciej was at the polytechnic in Germany, which was costly, but he was a boy. Whereas the young ladies… would just have to stay at home, play the piano, paint and embroider in the expectation of making a reasonable match. And then Irena’s friends from school clubbed together for her – Lala’s future mother and my future great-grandmother. They were all so fond of her that for two or three years they jointly paid her school fees. Her sister Róża wasn’t all that upset, because she had never liked school, whereas the third sister, Ewa, who was very intelligent, went wild with rage, because her friends didn’t club together for her. Apparently she had great artistic talents, embroidered and painted beautifully, but chose rather psychedelic themes for it.’

  ‘Psychedelic embroidery?’

  ‘Well, maybe not the embroidery. Although there was a cushion decorated with rapacious sundews… I meant the paintings. On the Japanese lacquered cabinet… as Granny would say, “you know, that hideous object, my grandfather brought it back from Japan, but it’s such a piece of junk”. I’d give a fortune for a Japanese cabinet, but never mind. Ewa painted a manor house on its doors, quite like Lisów, their country place, but not Lisów, with a flowerbed in front of it, on which there was a huge toad, bigger than the house. Ewa hated her sister Irena, partly because she was jealous of her education, and partly because she was simply a nasty person, who probably had a screw loose too.’

  ‘I’m not surprised Ewa hated her…’

  ‘Her hatred grew, because by the time their father recovered financially, it was too late for Ewa, but Irena went on to college. First to the conservatory, then to study astronomy. On top of that she knew five languages – English, German, French, Russian and Polish. As you know, in those days such a well-educated woman was a rarity.’

  ‘I’m not surprised Ewa felt like that…’

  ‘Well, quite. To cap it all, now that their father had money again, a car and a sugar factory, he was corresponding with chemists all over the world, collecting works of art and cruising around Europe, and he always took Irena with him on his travels, because she was his favourite, cleverest, most beautiful daughter.’

  ‘I’m not at all surprised Ewa was upset.’

  ‘Nor am I. But that’s nothing. Ewa had a fiancé. He was called Mech. Too bad. But as the name implies, Mech – meaning moss – was soft and nice. He was also charming and intelligent, as the name does not particularly imply. But meanwhile, out of boredom and the need for some intellectual occupation, Ewa had been going to meetings of the young anarchists and regarded herself as a liberated woman, emancipated and modern. She’d stuffed her head with all sorts of theories, which found fertile ground in the unweeded garden of her mind, to put it rather grandly, and now she wanted to dazzle Mech with her erudition and anarchic ideas. But who should spring up in her path?’

  ‘Irena?’

  ‘Irena! And she “was a woman ahead of her time…”’

  ‘Not amused by “flirts who flatter”?’

  ‘No, but by intelligent young men, absolutely. Eventually the poet Bolesław Leśmian* fell in love with her, whom she always spoke of as “Bolek Lesman”. She used to play the grand piano while he stood leaning against that varnished whale, gazing into her eyes. He probably dedicated something to her. It was the same for Mech – officially he came to see Ewa, but he always knocked at her hated sister’s door first, and spent a long time discussing things with her, either books, or music, or philosophy – while Ewa waited.’

  ‘Do you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m surprised Ewa didn’t do her any harm.’

  ‘You may have a point there. Either way, in the end she got her Mr Mech. He was her official fiancé, and he became her official husband. It was worse for the other sister, Róża. She too had various admirers, some of whom were regarded as excellent matches, but she refused each one in turn. Until finally, when she already counted as an old maid because she was over thirty, General Szymiczek appeared. He courted her, and asked her parents for their daughter’s hand in marriage, to which they said: “My dear sir, we’d be delighted to have you as our son-in-law, but unfortunately the final word belongs to Róża, and she usually refuses proposals.” They went to Róża and said: “Róża, you won’t marry the General, will you?” And Róża said: “Weeeell, I think I might.” And she did. She became Mrs Szymiczkowa,* the general’s wife. And every time someone said: “Szymiczek? Is your husband a Czech?” Aunt Róża went purple with indignation and cried: “Not a Czech, not a Czech. He’s Austrian!” Or she said of him: “My husband, General Szymiczek. He’s Austrian.”’

  ‘What about your great-grandmother?’ asked Basia.

  ‘Irena? Irena fell in love with Dr Bieniecki, a murderously handsome man, an army doctor who specialised in, would you believe it – gynaecology. And he fell for her too, they got married, and had a daughter, Romusia.’ And then I revealed the story of the house in Kiev, which I must have told her at least three times more since then. But I know, I know – I must make an abrupt shift from Pelplin to Gdańsk, to tell it the way Granny told it to me.

  It all starts with the word ‘Kiev’, which I heard over and over in my childhood. ‘Kiev?’ What could Kiev mean to me, that strange name, which to my Polish ear sounded like a piece of wood tapping or dry twigs snapping, a name that cast glints of Byzantium on bulging cupolas? I knew that on one of the most elegant boulevards – which Granny called ‘prospects’ – carpet sellers who came to the city from the east used to spread out their wares.

  ‘Even in the worst mud, in rain and slush the carpets lay out on the cobbles, on the pavements,’ said Granny. ‘Your great-grandmother told me she didn’t want to step on them to avoid dirtying them, though they were already covered in mud, but the carpet sellers, with their glittering eyes and dark complexions, beards and eyebrows so black they looked dark blue, would come out of their tents and invite people to tread on their rugs, because they were new, and no one but the nouveaux riches would buy a new carpet. So people walked about on them, muddied and soiled them, even drove droshkies over them, unt
il they were patinaed enough to be cleaned at last and spread out inside the tents. They came out and asked.’

  So in the recesses of my childhood Kiev took on this picturesque image of a city whose streets were covered from end to end in patterned Persian carpets, touted by clamorous salesmen with beards and eyebrows so black they shone dark blue.

  There, in a large residential house on such-and-such Prospect, lived three families – the Bienieckis, the Karnaukhovs and the Korytkos. Their fates were closely observed, not just by the nosy neighbours, but also the Secession gargoyles with protruding lips and the busty caryatids holding up the balconies on their frail shoulders and on bouquets of lilies; however well acquainted with knots of art-nouveau tendrils, they could not cease to wonder at the tangle of human emotions they witnessed, and were always raising their eyebrows in speechless amazement until the plaster began to crumble on their foreheads.

  On the first floor lived the solicitor Valerian Karnaukhov – a Russian – his wife Alla, their two children, a nanny and a maid.

  ‘Let’s go, let’s go,’ said Granny, pinning a mother-of-pearl brooch at her throat, ‘we’re always late everywhere we go. Do you know,’ she added, once we were on the stairs, ‘I inherited it from my mother? Mama was always late too.’ There was a hint of pride in her voice. ‘Whenever she and my father were off to the theatre or a concert, at the very last minute she’d remember some fact – that she’d forgotten to tell the maid something, that her dress wasn’t right, or her hat was a little too light or a little too dark… And if they finally did manage to get going on time, because my father had started the exodus ceremony far enough in advance, Mama would stop on the doorstep, cast an eye around the drawing room or the dining room, and suddenly be seized by the temptation to move a chest of drawers, shift a table or, worst of all, turn a carpet to the diagonal, which required lifting up all the furniture; my father would pant and groan as he uprooted first an armchair, then a sofa, while Mama commanded him with the tip of her umbrella. They always came in at the beginning of Act Two or the second half of a concert. And once, I’ve forgotten when it was, it may have been a recital by Hofmann* – no, I went to the Hofmann recital on my own, by some miracle I managed to get a ticket from some friends, just imagine, what an experience! Hofmann played so incredibly well, he made some of the notes within a single chord sound a tiny touch louder than others, I sat there riveted to my seat…’ (Meanwhile we were crossing the evening city by taxi; the driver was a bit lost, because he found himself in the middle of a dynamic narrative, but had to be content with a curt: ‘To the Philharmonic’, because Granny wasn’t going to interrupt her flow) ‘…and I listened to all those wonderful chords, until suddenly after the interval a man in black came onto the stage and said in a sepulchral voice that the pope had died. And just at that point in the programme there was a sonata with a funeral march. Amazing, isn’t it?’ and she turns to face me abruptly, as if expecting me to react to this revelation with an ‘Oooh!’ or a bit of dumb show, just as if I had never heard the whole story before. Nothing doing. Granny goes back to her earlier theme, and the driver makes some progress in getting lost.

  ‘Anyway, they were going out somewhere, to a concert or the opera. And once again, Mama was tugging at a kilim, demanding a hammer and some nails. Papa stopped and gazed at her with boundless love as he said goodbye to Act One of La Traviata or Norma, took me aside and whispered: “I remember I was once on my way out to a party with Alla. She was wearing a lovely dress made of cherry-coloured silk, with four flounces at the bottom. And as chance would have it, one of them got caught on a chair leg and the seam gave way. I said I would wait for her to change, but she just said it was a waste of time… and riiiiip! She tore off the cherry-coloured flounce, flung it onto the chair and we were off.”’

  Apart from ripping off her flounce in one sharp go, Valerian’s first wife, Alla, had lots of special merits. She was educated and well read, extremely intelligent and progressive, she believed in the idea of improving humanity and in liberation from oppression, she read and had things to say.

  ‘What about the children?’ I asked.

  ‘The children? Well, what about them?’ Granny looked at me with a patent lack of understanding. ‘Irinka was looked after by the nanny and Igor was taken care of by the tutor.’

  One day, amid all her pressing affairs, Alla saw the light. The entire house had already seen this particular light earlier, from cellar to attic, because everyone, including the caryatids, gargoyles and little children, knew that the neighbour, Mr Korytko, was an alcoholic. Alla, however, had to have a revelation to discover this fact. Quite simply Mr Korytko, a man as handsome as he was drunken, appeared to her one day on the stairs leading up from the ground floor in the full glory of his beauty and drunkenness.

  Alla Karnaukhova, c. 1905.

  ‘Valerian,’ said Alla to her husband after a brief conversation with the rather flushed Apollo, ‘I shall be frank with you. Mr Korytko is a man of great virtues, but since his wife’s betrayal he has sunk into a terrible addiction, which is destroying all his sound and noble instincts. He needs a strong woman. We both know that’s the sort of woman I am. I must take care of him and rouse his dormant seam of strength and decency. I’m leaving you. Forgive me,’ she said, stroking his cheek, ‘you will manage without me, Valerian, you will manage in life. You are a person of action, just like me. Anyway, you have Marfa and Olga to help you. I will visit you and the children.’

  And she moved in with Mr Korytko.

  Meanwhile we were driving up to the Philharmonic – just in time for the second half of the concert. ‘So what happened after that?’ I asked politely an hour later as we emerged into the fresh air.

  ‘After what? Do up your top button.’

  ‘No, it’s all right as it is. What happened to Mr Korytko, Alla and Valerian?’

  ‘Ah, yes. As chance would have it, Valerian saw the light as well. In the throng of his daily duties as legal adviser to South-Western Railways, halfway through the afternoon, between conducting a case for the South-Western Railways versus Andrei Porfirych Ketterl and his evening violin lesson, one frosty January day he had a revelation too. Do up your top button. The entire house, from cellar to attic, including…’

  ‘… including the caryatids, gargoyles, little children and servants…’

  Kazimierz Bieniecki, c. 1900.

  ‘… and servants knew that at number six lived the beautiful but sad Mrs Bieniecka, with her husband and their teenage daughter. Dr Bieniecki had been cheating on her left and right for ages, he had incredible charm – I met him when I was still a student in Warsaw, I happened to be with a girlfriend from school, I introduced them to each other, and she went completely red… he was well over sixty by then, and she was about twenty. As long as there were lots of these girls around, Mrs Bieniecka didn’t get too upset, but when he made do with just one, and a neighbour to boot, a certain Mrs Korytko, ooooh… then she realised it wasn’t for the best. She tried thwarting their plans and mixing up their pre-arranged signals by moving flowerpots, lighting or extinguishing candles on the windowsill. And grew sadder and sadder. Which everyone could see, except Valerian, who needed a revelation. One day he bumped into her in the entrance hall. “Allow me, Madam,” he said, offering her his arm before they went outside, “it’s very slippery today.” And beautiful Mrs Bieniecka looked up at him, with sapphire-blue fires burning in her sad eyes, and from a proud height of one-and-a-half metres she retorted: “A Russki? I cannot take the arm of a Russki.” And of course, as she was always running about and falling over, she was soon lying on the ice, with Valerian looking at her despondently. “Well?” she cried. “If you’re such a gentleman, aren’t you going to offer me your arm?” “But I am a Russki! Surely you can’t take the arm of a Russki?” As he said this, he leaned over and gently picked her up.’

  And two months later when Alla came home repentant, painfully admitting that she had failed to rouse Mr Korytko’s dormant seam o
f strength and decency, Valerian said that of course she could come and live at number five on the first floor again, but meanwhile he was caring for beautiful, sad Mrs Bieniecka at number six, whose husband, an army doctor specialising in gynaecology, was most conspicuously cheating on her with Mrs Korytko.

  And so, as Julek used to say, one word led to another, and Lala was born.

  III

  But before Lala is born, we should mention Aunt Sasha and Misha de Sicard.

  Valerian had two sisters, Lola and Sasha. Sasha was boring and ugly, so of course he was stuck with her for half his life. Lola was the same sort of crazy scallywag as he was – she was his favourite sister and best friend, so of course for half their lives they never had the chance to see each other. They grew up in a beautiful, secluded spot on one of the big Russian rivers – the Volga, the Dnieper or the like. Their father died when they were little, and their mother had to deal with running the entire estate. And it’s only thanks to divine providence that the children didn’t drown in that great big river, because they were brought up by the housemaids, who thought the best way to be rid of Lola and Valerian was to send them off on all-day boating trips. They were given food for the whole day, a pot of buckwheat and dripping, apples, pears and goodness knows what, and they’d pack it into the boat and cruise about on the great big river until late at night, when they’d come home with bruised knees, grubby faces and empty stomachs, by which time the docile Sasha, who spent the livelong day practising scales and reading, would have been sleeping the sleep of the just for hours.