Poland: A Novel Part 26

At seven in the morning Buk took the three Arabians out to the parade grounds where hundreds of other horses, equally polished and groomed, awaited their riders, who arrived, like Count Lubonski and Wiktor Bukowski, in private carriages or hired fiacres. By eleven the grounds were filled with some of the most colorful uniforms in Europe, and at noon the emperor himself arrived in a red-and-gold barouche, from which he prepared to review the opening parade of his regiments.

Wiktor, as a civilian, did not partic.i.p.ate in this exhibition, but he and Krystyna watched with pleasure as the units marched past, military bands blaring German tunes and marshals on horseback patrolling the parade. It was the Austrian Empire at its most magnificent, and if the wars that ravaged central Europe could only have been fought on such parade grounds and by such troops in neat array, Austria would surely be the most powerful nation on earth.

'Look at them!' Karl said scornfully from the back seat of the fiacre. 'They haven't won a battle in forty years.'

'Is your uncle there?' Steffi asked.

'He's the fat one on the horse.'

'Which horse?'

'The borrowed one.'

Buk came up to advise his master that the riding exhibition was about to begin, so Wiktor begged Krystyna to excuse him, took from a box at the rear of the fiacre a plumed hat, and walked crisply to where the horses were tethered. Buk had the best of the three, Mustafa, ready, but Wiktor said: 'We'll save him for the race. I've got to win the race.'

He chose instead the horse of middle quality, a most handsome beast who responded well to commands regardless of how they were delivered: a pressed knee, a shift of Wiktor's hips, the shadow of a whip, a change in voice. This mare had lived so long with her owner that she had become an extension of his existence, and if any civilian was going to have a chance to compete equally with the fine hors.e.m.e.n of the cavalry units, Wiktor Bukowski on this mare was such a man.

If Emperor Franz Josef had dozed through most of the musical concert, he certainly stayed awake at the exhibition of horsemanship. In his youth, many decades ago, he had been an excellent horseman, and the portraits of himself that he liked best were those in which German and Italian painters had depicted him astride one of his large horses. Then he looked truly imperial.

Now he sat in his barouche, accompanied by two barons with their baronesses, covered with medals that shone in the sunlight. He was an impressive man, not given to fat, still erect, still captivated by any display of uniform and plume and glittering sword. A more brilliant man could not have held his vast empire together, but he in his b.u.mbling way showed himself so ordinary that he did not evoke great envy.

'Who's the gentleman there who rides so well?' he asked, and his equerry said: 'The Polish n.o.bleman Bukowski who challenged the German critic to a duel over a pretty pianist.'

Franz Josef frowned; the incident had been pejoratively reported in the Berlin press, as the emba.s.sy there had informed him. But Bukowski seemed to be an interesting person: 'Isn't he the one with the Arabian stud? Up in Galicia somewhere?'

'The same.'

Franz Josef said nothing, and the equerry signaled for the compet.i.tion to begin.

Teams of four riders from the various regiments displayed remarkable skill in maneuvering their mounts through displays rigidly prescribed, and not all were officers from cavalry regiments, since army regiments also took pride in having members who were fine hors.e.m.e.n, but on this bright, sunny day it was the cavalry units that triumphed, and the winning four had trained their horses to kneel before the emperor as he bestowed the first prizes. Clearly, the best team had won.

Now came the compet.i.tions for individual riders, and since civilians were admitted to certain of the events, there was a kind of disarray, for they were not in military uniform and this detracted from their general appearance, but when Wiktor Bukowski appeared on his fine mare, he in the uniform of a Polish magnate glorious in fur and shako, the horse in polished silver fittings, he created a stir, and patrons in the carriages told one another that this was the Polish n.o.bleman who had behaved with such gallantry a few nights before. Even Lubonski, who had feared some kind of reprisal because of his protege's misbehavior, observed with pleasure the fine impression Wiktor was making. 'He could marry anyone he wished, that one,' he told his wife, and she agreed.

The compet.i.tion had been arranged so that each rider had maximum opportunity to display his horsemanship: turns, leaps, gallops, twists, obedience and general deportment. Half the contest depended on the horse, half on the man who rode it, and nearly a dozen notable cavalrymen preceded Bukowski in the trials, but when he rode forth, he quickly became the crowd's favorite, and there were both gasps and cheers as he led his horse through the intricate tests, concluding with a wild, mad dash in which he seemed an ancient warrior on upland plains.

He won. And while the crowd cheered he brought his horse to the imperial site, but he did not ask the beast to kneel or bow. Horse and man stood proud in the wintry sunlight and accepted the prize.

'Are you Bukowski from the Vistula?' Franz Josef asked.

'I come from the northernmost of your villages, Your Majesty,' Bukowski said, and this would be reported in the press. It wasn't exactly true. Several villages in western Moravia were slightly more northern, but only by a few miles. Wiktor Bukowski would be proclaimed as his emperor's northernmost subject, a superb horseman and a man of gallantry.

In the race, which he had planned to win with Mustafa, he had the great good fortune to lose to a popular cavalry major. For a Pole to have won two events would have been too much, but he was called back to the imperial presence for a silver medal and additional encomiums.

When he returned to his own fiacre he found Krystyna excited by his performance and eager to grant him a victor's kiss, but on the ride back to the city center the two students asked Wiktor how he could justify such a preposterous display, and to his surprise, Krystyna agreed with them when he tried to explain. She felt the exhibitionism quite brazen at a time when citizens in various corners of the empire lacked food.

Karl said: 'It makes one wonder if the empire can continue.'

'What ever do you mean?' Wiktor asked, and Steffi replied: 'Your Poland, for example. Broken into three parts, no one of them well-governed.'

Bukowski was stunned by such remarks. Poles in Vienna sometimes thought about the part.i.tion of their country, and occasionally in dark corners they whispered about it to friends, but it would be unthinkable, for example, to raise the question with a minister of government like Count Lubonski. And since he, Wiktor Bukowski, might conceivably be such a minister one day, he, too, must refuse to countenance such talk. 'It has been agreed among the powers that Poland should be divided, and you must admit that of the three parts, the Austrian is much the best-governed, thanks princ.i.p.ally to patriots like Lubonski.'

The others fell silent, but when the fiacre, at the end of a long line of carriages returning to the city, reached the Ringstra.s.se, the two students said they would alight, which left Wiktor seated alone with Krystyna. Trembling so much that his hands showed his nervousness, he took a deep breath and asked: 'Panna Krystyna, would you consent to dining with me tonight ... at my rooms?'

'I would be delighted,' she said so quickly that he could only gasp. Calling to the dour Serbian driver, he directed him to Concordiaplatz, where he told the man to wait while he hurried the pianist up the wide, curving stone stairs. Almost thrusting her into the big gloomy room, he said: 'See, I, too, have a piano,' and with that, he rushed down the stairs to ask the driver to go to several stores and purchase the ingredients for a dinner, hurried down to the bas.e.m.e.nt to instruct a maidservant how to prepare the food when it arrived, and then ran back upstairs.

'Well!' he said breathlessly. 'This room could use a woman's touch.'

'Exactly what I was thinking,' Krystyna said, and shrugging, she went to the piano and began half-playing, half-strumming some Parisian music-hall songs. 'They do wonders with an accordion,' she said, and with a skill that astonished Bukowski she struck the piano in a rhythmic way which simulated the effects of an accordion.

'I love Paris,' she said. Then she struck a series of discordant notes. 'But my heart yearns for Warsaw.'

'Why don't you live there?'

'Forbidden. The Russians will not allow me to return.'

'Why not?' Wiktor sat beside her on the piano bench and gazed at her distraught face, seeing for the first time some of the tempestuousness that plagued her.

'I said some things about Polish music. That our Moniuszko was better than any music being composed in St. Petersburg or Vienna.'

'Do you believe that?'

'Of course! That's why I said it.'

'And you were exiled?'

'By the police. I can't go back.' She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders and added: 'Well, it was Moniuszko ... and other issues.'

He said: 'You like things Polish, don't you?'

'I am all things Polish. I play Chopin to proclaim my att.i.tudes to the world.'

'But you do play other composers?'

She turned to face him. 'I am very good at other composers.'

'Like Mozart?' He paused. 'What I mean ... when the Germans played the Mozart concerto the other night. I thought that slow movement was ... well ... exquisite.'

Krystyna turned back to the keyboard and with great poetic feeling played the piano portion of the slow movement, that sigh of autumn wind pa.s.sing through a forest of golden leaves. It was quite thrilling, the way she played it, and Wiktor asked: 'What I mean, do you think the lullaby in Chopin's scherzo ... well ... is as good as the Mozart?'

Now she played the lullaby, that flawless composition, so perfect for its setting within the larger piece of music, and for a while she pa.s.sed back and forth between these two splendid works, and she was allowing her fingers to drift when Wiktor caught her by the shoulders and kissed her fervently.

'I liked that,' she said forthrightly, and by some magic gesture, or by the pa.s.sion of her next embrace, she let him know that she intended spending the night with him, here in this barren set of rooms.

When they stopped kissing she resumed playing the two themes and said: The Mozart is very good. Perhaps as good as music can be. But it's mechanical. It could be anything-German, Moravian, French, even Chinese. Mozart sets the engine in motion and it chugs along. Very little heart.' With heavy, mechanical beat she played the wonderful theme, then slipped easily into the Chopin, with its hesitations, tremblings, delicate nuances. 'Chopin could be only Poland. No machinery animates him. It's impossible to predict where he's going.'

Boldly she contrasted the two great themes, then laughed, kissed Wiktor, and delivered her opinion: 'I like Mozart very much. Love him, in fact. But I revere Chopin, and all Poles should, for he recorded our heartbeats.'

She stayed with Wiktor for three holiday nights and two days, and they were an experience far beyond anything he had hoped for, or ever imagined. She was a vivid, energetic little person, half-woman, half-child, and she made love as if it were the second half of a concert, the culmination of all that she had been preparing for.

'You're a wonderful man, Wiktor,' she told him during the second night, and he was elated at the thought that this established artist could find him attractive, even though when with his horses or on parade he knew himself to be quite dashing. That was public, this was private, and he could not reconcile the two. But on the second day he received quite a jolt when he came back to Concordiaplatz from a visit to his offices to find that Krystyna had moved into his staid apartment two young couples who were seeking lodging in Vienna. How exactly she had met them he never discovered, nor where their permanent homes might be; all he knew was that they were vigorously against the Austrian government because it oppressed Slovenes in some place beyond the Danube. He asked Krystyna if she had ever been there, and she replied: 'No need to go. We're all brothers.'

When she left him, after the third night, he was quite bewildered. He was in love with this mercurial little genius, but he was also perplexed by her unorthodox behavior, and the very fact that she had stayed with him so willingly, almost without his asking, made him suspicious of her motives. Also, the bold way in which she had used his quarters had come close to offending him. He did not like her friends and supposed that if he knew her acquaintances in Paris, he would dislike them too.

His confusion was not diminished when a carriage drawn by two Lippizaners came to Concordiaplatz with a messenger who directed Wiktor Bukowski to report at once to Count Lubonski at 22 Annaga.s.se.

When he hurried up to the reception room he found the count and countess awaiting him, rather grim in bearing, and the former launched directly into the problem: 'Wiktor, the secret police have been here this morning. Reporting on your behavior since the Christmas concert.' Glancing at a typed report, he droned: 'You insulted an official guest of the Austrian government, challenging him to a duel. You did well at Die Schmelz, but then you visited 119 Alserstra.s.se, a notorious center for radical activity against His Majesty's government. You took into your quarters Krystyna Szprot of Paris, a political exile from Warsaw and an avowed enemy of the Russian government, with whom we have peaceful relations. Not content with that, you brought into your home two men and two women who have been agitating in Slovenian territories, and you are in the gravest danger of being declared an enemy of the state.'

Bukowski was aghast, but before he could speak, the countess, whose ill.u.s.trious family had weathered a dozen major storms of Polish politics, said: 'Wiktor, what you must do, at your age ... It's really quite important, Wiktor. Find a respectable young lady of good family, get married and settle down.'

He was too confused to speak, so Lubonski took over: 'The daughter of the American amba.s.sador, Miss Trilling, let me know that she would be pleased to meet you again. I've invited her to our little reception tonight. Please appear in your best presentation.'

The countess laughed. She was the daughter of powerful men and women, those who had built with their fortunes the entire city of Zamosc and from it had helped govern Poland in its good days. 'What Andrzej means is wear respectable clothes and respectable manners.' She paused to allow these suggestions to sink in, then added: 'You have no great family fortune, Wiktor. Only two villages and a strong, clean name. Your only hope in this world is to marry well. And radical pianists from Paris do not qualify. The daughters of extremely rich amba.s.sadors do. Please be prompt.'

But when he returned to his quarters at Concordiaplatz he found that Krystyna had forced her way in, and had brought her belongings as if intending to stay indefinitely. She was a much different woman from the one he thought he knew: pianist no more, she revealed herself to be a dedicated revolutionary, and the force of her comment stunned Wiktor: 'Heroic Poles have been combatting our oppressors for a century, and it's now time for you to join the battle. Do you even know what's been happening?' She drew back, studied the handsome young boulevardier, and said scornfully: 'You, a man of your ability, wasting your time at the Austrian court when you could be in Paris helping to push forward our revolution.'

'I discharge serious responsibilities right here.'

'But the real struggle? Are you aware of it?'

'Not really.'

'Then it's time you learned.' And sitting him down, she recited that chain of events which Poles like her kept in their memories like a rosary, these gallant men and women on the battlements, always praying that some lucky stroke would come along to revitalize their captive nation and enable it to repel the invaders: 'When Napoleon marched through Poland with his soaring promises of freedom, no one else in Europe had a.s.sisted him the way my great-grandfather did, and thousands like him. We were willing to fight the entire Russian army, and we did.

'In 1831 my great-grandfather was with the Warsaw corps that revolted, and we kept the tyrants on their toes for two years. My great-grandfather fled to Paris with Chopin and Mickiewicz. That's why I was born there, because my great-grandfather was a hero.

'In 1844 we supported the weavers in their pitiful bid for freedom and a decent wage. In 1846, more revolution. In 1848, fires all over Poland, and we almost triumphed that time. How many of us died then? And in 1863 we launched our great war against Russia-yes, outright war. As soon as the gunfire started, my father, G.o.d bless him, he came right back to do his part. Escaped Siberia by a hair. Secret police trailing him wherever he went. We almost did it that time.'

'You keep saying we,' Wiktor said, awed by the young woman's fury, and she replied: 'I was part of every revolution,' and he said: 'You weren't even born,' and she said: 'And I shall be part of every move that occurs after my death, because Poland will never surrender. People like me will never surrender, and you must be one of us.'

'I have my duties here,' he repeated, as if that justified everything, and she was about to excoriate him; instead she leaped up, gave him a pa.s.sionate kiss, and said: 'Wiktor, I wouldn't be here if I didn't love you. So Polish, so handsome, so stupid.' Before he could express hurt she caught him by the hands and cried: 'Let's go to the reception and watch the old order dying on its feet.' He was so enamored of her, so irritated by the condescension of the Lubonskis, lecturing him as if he were an ignorant peasant, that despite the dangers Krystyna Szprot represented, he dressed in his most flamboyant Polish costume, sent Buk to fetch the Serbian and his fiacre, and proudly led the beautiful young revolutionary into the Annaga.s.se palace ... twenty minutes late.

Bowing grimly to the countess, whose face was livid, he nodded to the American girl and introduced Krystyna to half a dozen dignified persons who had not attended her concert. It was a chilly beginning, but Andrzej Lubonski had not advanced to level of minister without having mastered the art of diplomacy, so he accepted the affront and made both Wiktor Bukowski and his talented mistress welcome. The accounting would come later; he would see to that.

After dinner some of the guests, learning that Mlle. Szprot was an accomplished pianist, asked if she would honor them with a few selections, and after a polite demurral, she allowed herself to be escorted to the piano, where she played a series of lively numbers by Offenbach and then a potpourri from Die Fledermaus, which, she explained 'had been first presented over twenty years ago in Vienna.'

The audience was charmed, but both Wiktor and the count realized that she was laughing at them, and the latter said coldly: 'Perhaps Mlle. Szprot would favor us with something a little more cla.s.sical?' When the audience responded enthusiastically, she said in her halting German: 'What I like best, the mazurkas of my Chopin.' And with great skill she played a selection, moving from the easy ballroom measures to those intricate, broken-patterned ones which bespoke the very essence of the dance, as if the composer had been seeking music not for a man and woman but for the dance itself.

When she reached a conclusion she said in French: 'I should like to end with a composition which has come to mean much to me,' and she started the etude 'Winter Wind,' with its eight grand notes and tornadolike arpeggios, and this, of course, led to the last etude, the one that captured Bukowski's imagination, and when the mysterious thirteen chords approached, he leaped beside the piano and cried: 'I have composed a poem to this music, a poem of my homeland.' And with st.u.r.dy voice he chanted the thirteen syllables: 'Home!

The fields are green,

The woods are clean,

My soul serene ...'

Krystyna, startled, stopped her playing to look at him: 'Wiktor! You're a poet!' and at that same moment the young n.o.bleman dropped to his knees before her. 'Krystyna!' he cried in French. 'Will you marry me?'

Before she could say anything, three young men in overcoats broke into the room, rushed to the piano, grabbed her, and hurried her out a side door.

'They're after you!' some of the guests heard the men say as they spirited her away, but they were unable to share this knowledge with the other guests, because now four policemen came into the salon demanding of the count to know where the revolutionary Krystyna Szprot was hiding.

Lubonski, who had arranged this charade, pointed to the door through which the conspirators had fled, and out ran the four policemen, banging their way as they went. Wiktor Bukowski, still on his knees at the vacated piano, looked up at the guests as if to ascertain what kind of bomb had exploded in his face, and he saw the American girl in white dress and pale-pink jewels smiling at him. No, not smiling. She was laughing ... quietly ... with amus.e.m.e.nt rather than ridicule.

This triple notoriety-duel, riding championship, public proposal to a beautiful revolutionary-made Wiktor Bukowski a personage in two centers. The secret police began looking into his precedents and found him to be exactly as represented: a rather confused Polish provincial who had oscillated among seven different women of seven sharply contrasting natures, but who had never harmed either them, himself or the empire. When his summary was read, it created the portrait of a rather impulsive fellow who bore watching lest he be duped by those more clever, but German investigators dispatched to check on his Bukowo behavior reported: 'He is no more stupid than your average romantic Polish landowner who has never been away from his estates.'

The second group of Viennese now interested in Wiktor were the marriageable young women, and their investigations, often more perceptive than those of the police, showed him to be a real n.o.bleman, though in distinctly limited circ.u.mstances, a young man of gallant instincts, a dancer of more than average ability, a fellow with a good singing voice and a man who wore his clothes well. They learned also that he lived alone in a rather large apartment in Concordiaplatz, and that if there was any young man in Vienna who ought to have a wife, it was he.

He therefore became a three-week social sensation, with liveried messengers stopping by Concordiaplatz and Landtmann's with invitations, but the most intriguing came from the coachman at the American Emba.s.sy. Miss Marjorie Trilling, whose parents occupied one of the minor palaces among the n.o.bility of the Schwarzenberg Quarter, wondered if Mr. Bukowski would care to join her family at a small celebration. He would, and when his fiacre drove up to the gracious palace, small but elegantly designed, he felt that a new life was beginning for him.

Mr. and Mrs. Trilling were unusually gracious in receiving him, and the amba.s.sador said: 'We watched you at Die Schmelz. Superb.'

'And you, sir,' Wiktor said in English, 'is it that you are also a horseman?'

'Heavens, no! But Marjorie is.'

When he shook hands with the clean-looking, strong-bodied young woman, four years younger than he, he noticed that she was just a mite taller, so he stood slightly on his toes. 'Your excellency father says that you like to ride, perhaps ...'

'I'd love to. No city in the world has finer parks than Vienna.'

'Could it be that you have seen our Prater, yes?'

'No, but I should like to.'

'Then I believe it could be arranged, on a day which I do not work ...'

'You have a regular job?' she asked in French.

He noticed that Miss Trilling bored right in with her questions.

'Oh, yes!' he replied in English. 'All the Poles in Vienna have jobs, even a man as excellency as Count Lubonski.'

'Do you know him? In Poland, I mean?'