Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Page 3

  “You must be Wladek.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the boy, neither sounding nor showing surprise that the Baron knew his name.

  “It is you about whom I have come to see your father,” said the Baron.

  Wladek remained before the Baron, staring up at him. The trapper signified to his own children by a wave of his arm that they should leave him alone with his master, so two of them curtsied, four bowed and all six retreated silently into the loft. Wladek remained, and no one suggested he should do otherwise.

  “Koskiewicz,” began the Baron, still standing, as no one had invited him to sit. The trapper had not offered him a chair for two reasons: first, because he was too shy, and second, because he assumed the Baron was there to issue a reprimand. “I have come to ask a favor.”

  “Anything, sir, anything,” said the father, wondering what he could give the Baron that he did not already have hundred-fold.

  The Baron continued. “My son, Leon, is now six and is being taught privately at the castle by two tutors, one from our native Poland and the other from Germany. They tell me he is a clever boy but lacks competition: he has only himself to beat. Mr. Kotowski at the village school tells me that Wladek is the only boy capable of providing the competition that Leon so badly needs. I wonder therefore if you would allow your son to leave the village school and join Leon and his tutors at the castle.”

  Wladek continued to stand before the Baron, gazing, while before him there opened a wondrous vision of food and drink, books and teachers wiser by far than Mr. Kotowski. He glanced toward his mother. She, too, was gazing at the Baron, her face filled with wonder and sorrow. His father turned to his mother and the instant of silent communication between them seemed an eternity to the child.

  The trapper gruffly addressed the Baron’s feet. “We would be honored, sir.”

  The Baron looked interrogatively at Helena Koskiewicz.

  “The Blessed Virgin forbids that I should ever stand in my child’s way,” she said softly, “though she alone knows how much it will cost me.”

  “But Madam Koskiewicz, your son can return home regularly to see you.”

  “Yes, sir. I expect he will do so, at first.” She was about to add some plea but decided against it.

  The Baron smiled. “Good. It’s settled then. Please bring the boy to the castle tomorrow morning by seven o’clock. During the school term Wladek will live with us, and when Christmas comes he can return to you.”

  Wladek burst into tears.

  “Quiet, boy,” said the trapper.

  “I will not go,” Wladek said firmly, really wanting to go.

  “Quiet, boy,” said the trapper, this time a little louder.

  “Why not?” asked the Baron, with compassion in his voice.

  “I will never leave Florcia—never.”

  “Florcia?” queried the Baron.

  “My eldest daughter, sir,” interjected the trapper. “Don’t concern yourself with her, sir. The boy will do as he is told.”

  No one spoke. The Baron considered for a moment. Wladek continued to cry controlled tears.

  “How old is the girl?” asked the Baron.

  “Fourteen,” replied the trapper.

  “Could she work in the kitchens?” asked the Baron, relieved to observe that Helena Koskiewicz was not going to burst into tears as well.

  “Oh yes, Baron,” she replied. “Florcia can cook and she can sew and she can …”

  “Good, good, then she can come as well. I shall expect to see them both tomorrow morning at seven.”

  The Baron walked to the door and looked back and smiled at Wladek, who returned the smile. Wladek had won his first bargain, and accepted his mother’s tight embrace while he stared at the closed door and heard her whisper, “Ah, Matka’s littlest one, what will become of you now?”

  Wladek couldn’t wait to find out.

  Helena Koskiewicz packed for Wladek and Florentyna during the night, not that it would have taken long to pack the entire family’s possessions. In the morning the remainder of the family stood in front of the door to watch them both depart for the castle, each holding a paper parcel under one arm. Florentyna, tall and graceful, kept looking back, crying and waving; but Wladek, short and ungainly, never once looked back. Florentyna held firmly to Wladek’s hand for the entire journey to the Baron’s castle. Their roles were now reversed; from that day on she was to depend on him.

  They were clearly expected by the magnificent man in the embroidered suit of green livery who was summoned by their timid knock on the great oak door. Both children had gazed in admiration at the gray uniforms of the soldiers in the town who guarded the nearby Russian-Polish border, but they had never seen anything so resplendent as this liveried servant, towering above them and evidently of overwhelming importance. There was a thick carpet in the hall, and Wladek stared at the green-and-red pattern, amazed by its beauty, wondering if he should take his shoes off and surprised, when he walked across it, that his footsteps made no sound. The dazzling being conducted them to their bedrooms in the west wing. Separate bedrooms—would they ever get to sleep? At least there was a connecting door, so they need never be too far apart, and in fact for many nights they slept together in one bed.

  When they had both unpacked, Florentyna was taken to the kitchen, and Wladek to a playroom in the south wing of the castle to meet the Baron’s son. Leon was a tall, good-looking boy who was so immediately charming and welcoming that Wladek abandoned his prepared pugnacious posture with surprise and relief. Leon had been a lonely child, with no one to play with except his niania, the devoted Lithuanian woman who had breast-fed him and attended to his every need since the premature death of his mother. The stocky boy who had come out of the forest promised companionship. At least in one matter they both knew they had been deemed equals.

  Leon immediately offered to show Wladek around the castle, and the tour took the rest of the morning. Wladek remained astounded by its size, the richness of the furniture and fabrics and those carpets in every room. To Leon he admitted only to being agreeably impressed: after all, he had won his place in the castle on merit. The main part of the building was early Gothic, explained the Baron’s son, as if Wladek were sure to know what Gothic meant. Wladek nodded. Next Leon took his new friend down into the immense cellars, with line upon line of wine bottles covered in dust and cobwebs. Wladek’s favorite room was the vast dining hall, with its massive pillared vaulting and flagged floor. There were animals’ heads all around the walls. Leon told him they were bison, bear, elk, boar and wolverine. At the end of the room, resplendent, was the Baron’s coat of arms below a stag’s antlers. The Rosnovski family motto read: “Fortune favors the brave.” After a lunch, which Wladek ate so little of because he couldn’t master a knife and fork, he met his two tutors, who did not give him the same warm welcome, and in the evening he climbed up onto the longest bed he had ever seen and told Florentyna about his adventures. Her excited eyes never once left his face, nor did she even close her mouth, agape with wonder, especially when she heard about the knife and fork.

  The tutoring started at seven sharp, before breakfast, and continued throughout the day with only short breaks for meals. Initially, Leon was clearly ahead of Wladek, but Wladek wrestled determinedly with his books so that as the weeks passed, the gap began to narrow, while friendship and rivalry between the two boys developed simultaneously. The German and Polish tutors found it hard to treat their two pupils, the son of a baron and the son of a trapper, as equals, although they reluctantly conceded to the Baron when he inquired that Mr. Kotowski had made the right academic choice. The tutors’ attitude toward Wladek never worried him, because he was always treated as an equal by Leon.

  The Baron let it be known that he was pleased with the progress the two boys were making and from time to time he would reward Wladek with clothes and toys. Wladek’s initial distant and detached admiration for the Baron developed into respect, and when the time came for the boy to return to the lit
tle cottage in the forest to rejoin his father and mother for Christmas, Wladek became distressed at the thought of leaving Leon.

  His distress was well founded. Despite the initial happiness he felt at seeing his mother, the short space of three months that he had spent in the Baron’s castle had revealed to him deficiencies in his own home of which he had previously been quite unaware. The holiday dragged on. Wladek felt himself stifled by the little cottage with its one room and overcrowded loft, and dissatisfied by the food dished out in such meager amounts and then eaten by hand: no one had divided by nine at the castle. After two weeks Wladek longed to return to Leon and the Baron. Every afternoon he would walk the six wiorsta to the castle and sit and stare at the great walls that surrounded the estate. Florentyna, who had lived only among the kitchen servants, took to returning more easily and could not understand that the cottage would never be home again for Wladek. The trapper was not sure how to treat the boy, who was now well dressed, well-spoken and talked of things at six that the man did not begin to understand; nor did he want to. The boy seemed to do nothing but waste the entire day reading. Whatever would become of him, the trapper wondered, if he could not swing an axe or trap a hare; how could he ever hope to earn an honest living? He too prayed that the holiday would pass quickly.

  Helena was proud of Wladek and at first avoided admitting to herself that a wedge had been driven between him and the rest of the children. But in the end it could not be avoided. Playing at soldiers one evening, both Stefan and Franck, generals on opposing sides, refused to have Wladek in their armies.

  “Why must I always be left out?” cried Wladek. “I want to learn to fight too.”

  “Because you are not one of us,” declared Stefan. “You are not really our brother.”

  There was a long silence before Franck continued. “Father never wanted you in the first place; only Matka was on your side.”

  Wladek stood motionless and cast his eye around the circle of children, searching for Florentyna.

  “What does Franck mean, I am not your brother?” he demanded.

  Thus Wladek came to hear of the manner of his birth and to understand why he had always been set apart from his brothers and sisters. Though his mother’s distress at his now total self-containment became oppressive, Wladek was secretly pleased to discover that, untouched by the meanness of the trapper’s blood, he came of unknown stock, containing with it the germ of spirit that would now make all things seem possible.

  When the unhappy holiday eventually came to an end, Wladek returned to the castle with joy. Leon welcomed him back with open arms; for him, as isolated by the wealth of his father as was Wladek by the poverty of the trapper, it had also been a Christmas with little to celebrate. From then on the two boys grew very close and soon became inseparable. When the summer holidays came around, Leon begged his father to allow Wladek to remain at the castle. The Baron agreed, for he too had grown to respect Wladek. Wladek was overjoyed and entered the trapper’s cottage only once again in his life.

  When Wladek and Leon had finished their classroom work, they would spend the remaining hours playing games. Their favorite was chow anego, a sort of hide-and-seek, and because the castle had seventy-two rooms, the chance of repetition was very small. Wladek’s favorite hiding place was in the dungeons under the castle, in which the only light by which one could be discovered came through a small stone grille set high in the wall, and even here one needed a candle to find one’s way around. Wladek was not sure what purpose the dungeons served, and none of the servants ever made mention of them, since they had never been used in anyone’s memory.

  Wladek was conscious that he was Leon’s equal only in the classroom and was no competition for his friend when they played any game other than chess. The river Shchara, which bordered the estate, became an extension to their playground. In spring they fished, in summer they swam, and in winter, when the river was frozen over, they would put on their wooden skates and chase each other across the ice, while Florentyna sat on the river bank anxiously warning them where the surface was thin. But Wladek never heeded her and was always the one who fell in. Leon grew quickly and strong; he ran well, swam well and never seemed to tire or be ill. Wladek became aware for the first time what good-looking and well built meant, and he knew when he swam, ran and skated he could never hope to keep up with Leon. Much worse, what Leon called the belly button was, on him, almost unnoticeable, while Wladek’s was stumpy and ugly and protruded from the middle of his plump body. Wladek would spend long hours in the quiet of his own room, studying his physique in a mirror, always asking why, and in particular why only one nipple for him when all the boys he had ever seen bare-chested had the two that the symmetry of the human body appeared to require. Sometimes as he lay in bed unable to sleep, he would finger his naked chest and tears of self-pity would flood onto the pillow. He would finally fall asleep praying that when he awoke in the morning, things would be different. His prayers were not answered.

  Wladek put aside a time each night to do physical exercises that could not be witnessed by anyone, even Florentyna. Through sheer determination he learned to hold himself so that he looked taller. He built up his arms and his legs and hung by the tips of his fingers from a beam in the bedroom in the hope that it would make him grow, but Leon grew taller even while he slept. Wladek was forced to accept the fact that he would always be a head shorter than the Baron’s son, and that nothing, nothing was ever going to produce the missing nipple. Wladek’s dislike of his own body was not prompted by Leon, who never commented on his friend’s appearance; his knowledge of other children stopped short at Wladek, whom he adored uncritically.

  Baron Rosnovski too became increasingly fond of the fierce dark-haired boy who had replaced the younger brother Leon had so tragically lost when the Baroness died in childbirth.

  The two boys would dine with him in the great stonewalled hall each evening while the flickering candles cast ominous shadows from the stuffed animal heads on the walls, and the servants came and went noiselessly with great silver trays and golden plates, bearing geese, hams, crayfish, fine wine and fruits, and sometimes the mazureks, which had become Wladek’s particular favorites. Afterward, as the darkness fell ever more thickly around the table, the Baron dismissed the waiting servants and would tell the boys stories of Polish history and allowed them a sip of Danzig vodka, in which the tiny gold leaves sparkled bravely in the candlelight. Wladek begged as often as he dared for the story of Tadeusz Kosciusko.

  “A great patriot and hero,” the Baron would reply. “The very symbol of our struggle for independence, trained in France …”

  “Whose people we admire and love as we have learned to hate all Russians and Austrians,” supplied Wladek, whose pleasure in the tale was enhanced by his word-perfect knowledge of it.

  “Who is telling whom the story, Wladek?” The Baron laughed. “ … and then fought with George Washington in America for liberty and democracy. In 1792 he led the Poles in battle at Dubienka. When our wretched king, Stanislaw Augustus, deserted us to join the Russians, Kosciusko returned to the homeland he loved, to throw off the yoke of tsardom. He won the battle of where, Leon?”

  “Raclawice, sir, and then he freed Warsaw.”

  “Good, my child. Then, alas, the Russians mustered a great force at Maciejowice and he was finally defeated and taken prisoner. My great-great-great-grandfather fought with Kosciusko on that day and later with Dabrowski’s legions for the mighty Napoleon Bonaparte.”

  “And for his service to Poland was created the Baron Rosnovski, a title your family will ever bear in remembrance of those great days,” said Wladek as stoutly as if the title would one day pass to him.

  “Yes, and those great days will come again,” said the Baron quietly. “I only pray that I may live to see them.”

  That Christmas some of the peasants on the estate brought their families to the castle for the celebration of the blessed vigil. Throughout Christmas Eve they fasted, and the children w
ould look out of the windows for the first star, which was the sign the feast might begin. The Baron would say grace in his fine, deep voice: “Benedicte nobis, Domine Deus, et his donis quae ex liberalitate tua sumpturi sumus,” and once they had sat down Wladek would be embarrassed by the huge capacity of Jasio Koskiewicz, who addressed himself squarely to every one of the thirteen courses, from the barszcz soup through to the cakes and plums, and would, as in previous years, be sick in the forest on the way home.

  After the feast Wladek enjoyed distributing the gifts from the Christmas tree, laden with candles and fruit, to the awestruck peasant children—a doll for Sophia, a forest knife for Josef, a new dress for Florentyna—the first gift Wladek had ever requested of the Baron.

  “It’s true,” said Josef to his mother when he received his gift from Wladek, “he is not our brother, Matka.”

  “No,” she replied, “but he will always be my son.”

  Through the winter and spring of 1914 Wladek grew in strength and learning; then suddenly, in July, the German tutor left the castle without even saying farewell; neither boy was sure why. They never thought to connect his departure with the assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a student anarchist, the event described to them by their remaining tutor in unaccountably solemn tones. The Baron became withdrawn; neither boy was sure why. The younger servants, the children’s favorites, inevitably began to disappear one by one; neither boy was sure why. As the year passed Leon grew taller, Wladek grew stronger and both boys became wiser.

  One morning in August 1915, a time of fine, lazy days, the Baron set off on the long journey to Warsaw to put, as he described it, his affairs in order. He was away for three and a half weeks, twenty-five days that Wladek marked off each morning on a calendar in his bedroom; it seemed to him a lifetime. On the day the Baron was due to return, the two boys went down to the Slonim railway station to await the weekly train with its one carriage and greet the Baron on his arrival. The three of them traveled home in silence.