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PUSH NOT THE RIVER
A Novel
By James Conroyd Martin St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 James Conroyd Martin
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-312-31153-2
Chapter One
There are three things that are difficult to keep hidden: a fire, a cold, and love. -A Polish proverb..
Halicz 1791
She stood motionless now, in a painter's tableau of flowers and grasses, a long distance from home, alone. It was only recent events-not the intervening years-that made Anna question her childhood attachment to the mythical. Today, in fact, the young girl who stood poised on the threshold of womanhood questioned the very world around her. The afternoon was idyllic, the meadow at midday a canvas of color and warmth. A breeze stirred the wheat and barley fields nearby, coercing the spikes into graceful, rippling waves. Next year the meadow in which she stood would be made to produce also, but for now it was thickly green with overgrown grasses and rampant with late summer wildflowers, birds, and butterflies.
To all of this Anna was coolly indifferent. She stood there, black dress billowing in the breeze, vaguely aware of a bee that buzzed nearby. In time, though, her eyes found focus as she observed a few fallen leaves hurl themselves at the trunk of the solitary oak, whirl away, and come back again. In them-their detachment and their restless movement-she somehow felt a comradeship. She was as mindlessly driven as they. And from somewhere deep at her core, a keening rose up, piercing her, like that of a mournful siren from some unseen island.
How had it come to this? Only months before, upon the passing of the Constitution in May, Anna's universe had been complete and happy. The reform seemed to place her father in a good disposition. The Third of May Constitution did not threaten him, as it did some of the nobility. Count Samuel Berezowski was of the minor nobility, the szlachta, his great great grandfather having been conferred the title of count when in 1683 he aided the legendary King Jan Sobieski and much of Christian Europe in keeping Vienna-and therefore Eastern Europe-from the Turks.
The count managed his single estate himself and he already allowed his village of twelve peasant families liberal freedoms of thought and action. It was a happy time for Anna's mother, too, not for any political reason, but because she was eight months with child.
As a young girl, Countess Teresa Berezowska had gone against her parents' wishes, foregoing marriage into a magnate family for the dictates of the heart. This did not preclude, however, her own ambition to bring into the world children who would go on to make matches that would distinguish the family. Though her heart had been set on a firstborn boy, she rejoiced with Samuel in the birth of their healthy, greeneyed girl, Anna Maria. She was confident that many childbearing years were left to her and that there would be a troop of boys to fill up the house. Instead, a succession of miscarriages ensued and her health grew frail, her beauty fragile. Still, the countess persisted, against doctors' advice, until at last-seventeen years after the birth of Anna-it seemed certain that she was to bring another child full term. Anna's relationship with her mother improved after the incident with the crystal dove, but a certain distance between mother and daughter remained. Anna came to realize that while she was loved by both parents, her mother was much concerned with bringing boys into the world. While Anna's father gave his love freely, her mother inculcated in her-through the spoken and the unspoken-a sense of inadequacy that sent her into herself, into her own realm of imagination. Alone in her books of fable and fairy tales and the myriad places they took her, Anna longed for a brother or sister to anchor her to the real world. But it was not to be.
Feliks Paduch, one of Count Berezowski's peasants, had always been trouble. Since adolescence he had been involved in numerous thefts and brawls. At thirty, he was lazy, alcoholic, and spiteful, a man who questioned and resented his lot in life. Some peasants whispered, too, that he had been involved in the murder of a travelling Frenchman, but no one dared accuse him. Countess Berezowska had encouraged her husband to evict Paduch, and he had nearly done so twice, but each time relented.
A few days after the passing of the Third of May Constitution, Count Berezowski set out for the Paduch cottage in response to a local noble's complaint that Feliks had stolen several bags of grain. The starosta should settle the matter, the countess insisted, but the count, claiming he was ultimately responsible for his peasants, would not leave the matter to a magistrate. It was on that day that life changed forever for the happy family. Anna was sitting in the window seat of her second-floor bedroom reading a French translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream when she heard the commotion below. She looked down to see eight or ten peasants accompanying a tumbril in which her father's body lay on a matting of straw. Because of the sincere mutual respect between the count and his peasants, this time they seemed unafraid to name Feliks Paduch the murderer. It was Anna who had to tell her mother, and who-in her own bereavement-had to listen to the countess mourn her husband while at the same time, in the same breath, rail against him for playing estate manager and attending to the most ignoble business, business well beneath his station, business like Feliks Paduch. Countess Berezowska was devastated. Anna believed that it was the traumatic effects of her father's murder that precipitated the premature birth of the baby. The boy lived only two days.
The countess never recovered from her husband's murder and the difficult birth-thirteen hours it had taken. After the baby's death, the countess stopped taking nourishment. A week later, in a delirium of grief, anger, and despair she died. And so it was that within a matter of days, Anna had lost everyone. The fabric of her peaceful life at Sochaczew had come undone, never to be made whole. She stood alone in her garden that day, the day of her mother's death, somehow unable to cry.
How her mother had loved the flowers grown there. In fact, Anna had taken to gardening, initially, to please the countess, who so loved to have flowers in the house. Her father had helped her start it that year, the year a five-year-old precocious child had brought home the crystal dove. She had been allowed to keep it and wanted so to please her mother by producing bushels and bushels of flowers. That was the way of it always, it seemed. Wanting to please her mother, yet never quite measuring up. The garden venture took no time at all to instill in Anna a passion for things growing. Her father gave her an array of bulbs, imports from Holland. She dutifully planted them in the fall, wondering to herself how such funny looking things could ever produce something delicate and pretty. But in the spring the green feelers peeked out of the brown earth, and amidst fine rains, reached brave, thickening arms upward. Anna had arranged them in neat rows, like soldiers, so that when the heads burst open with hues of reds, purples, oranges, and yellows she could scarcely contain her delight. It seemed a miracle. That first bouquet to her astonished mother was her proudest moment.
In time she came to see in the flowers an almost symbolic difference between her parents: while her father loved the living, growing flowers still rooted to the earth and warmed by the sun, her mother preferred them cut, placed in cool water, and set out in shaded rooms to be admired. Anna's lesson with the crystal dove so many years before had been a human one, one that provided a defining moment for her relationship with her mother. Anna persisted in her love for her mother, but its foundation seemed to be one of fractures and fissures which, while they never fully broke away, seemed always to hold the threat of doing so. The difficult truth was-in those intermittent moments when she remembered the dove- that she questioned her mother's love for her. The countess' love was a cool kind of love, taking the form of a nod or a light pat on the head, a love given out sparingly, like formal candies in tiny wrappings, and on occasions few enough for Anna to store away in a half-filled memory box. Anna, in turn, grew up confident only in her father's unconditional love, a love that radiated like sunshine. She came to fully place herself in his guardianship, so much so that at his death she found that her reservoir of trust had been emptied. Even he, in dying, had failed her. If what he had done was place himself in the way of destiny, no good had come of it. Just as she refused to shed tears in public, she vowed to trust in no one's love again.
The Countess Berezowska's older sister, Countess Stella Gronska, arrived with her husband and daughter Zofia for one funeral and stayed for three. When they left Sochaczew to return home to Halicz in southern Poland, they insisted on taking Anna with them. The count and countess would provide guardianship for her until she reached eighteen. At first, Anna was grateful. Her world shattered, she was happy to have someone deciding and doing for her. And her aunt and uncle were warm and loving people. Zofia, too, was welcoming.
Anna found her cousin very different from herself, so outgoing and worldly-wise. The Gronskis tried their best to be a family to her. But as the days at Halicz wore on, Anna came to miss her home and its familiar surroundings more and more. Sleep brought with it dark dreams of abandonment, of isolation. At night she sometimes awoke to her own voice calling out for her father. Her aunt and uncle responded to her melancholy with genuine concern, but she would only pretend to be comforted. What she longed for was the cocoon of her father's library, where she had spent countless hours of her childhood transported to other times and places by the stories on the darkly varnished shelves. And, most of all, she missed the opportunity to mourn at her family's graves, to touch the earth that held them, when she could not. Anna often wondered why it was that she survived. Had she done something to lose her whole world? Sometimes she found herself wishing she could join her family in the earth on that little hill where they and three other generations rested amidst daisies, cornflowers, and poppies. What did living have to offer now? Her life had taken on a tragic dimension, one that reminded her of the many tales and legends she knew. So often they, too, ended tragically. Why? In growing up, she would often read a tale only to the point when things went wrong. Then she would stop in order to provide her own, happier, ending. Her favorite story was of Jurata, Queen of the Baltic. If Anna could not quite identify with the mythical beauty of Jurata, she did acknowledge that they had in common their green eyes. What she admired most about the goddess was her passion. Oh, Anna wished for such passion in her own life. Jurata lived in a palace of amber under the sea. One day a young fisherman broke one of her laws, but the kind Jurata forgave him. Falling in love with the fisherman, the goddess courageously defied custom and law, swimming to shore to meet him every evening. Anna thought the myth very romantic. It was at this point that she chose to amend the story. She had no taste for the unhappy ending that went on to depict the god of lightning and thunder, Percun-who loved Jurata-flying into a rage because Jurata, too, broke a law: that magical beings marry only among themselves. Percun destroyed the palace with his thunderbolts and Jurata was never seen again. The pieces of the broken palace, then, accounted for the bits of amber found in the Baltic area. In Anna's ending, Jurata chipped away at her amber palace, breaking it down bit by bit, a mythical feat in itself. She then cleverly created among the gods and goddesses a great desire for the yellow stones. At last, she was able to assuage Percun's anger by presenting him with the largest cache of amber in the world, thus making him more respected and powerful. Jurata's passion was so great that she assumed a human form, giving up her immortality for the love of her fisherman.
Now, transfixed in the meadow, Anna was aware of the sights and sounds about her only in a peculiar and distant way, as though she stood-an intruder-in some French bucolic painting. She wondered if this panorama were even real. Perhaps her very life was no more than a dream. Might she be dreaming her life? Strange as it was, the notion caught hold in her imagination.
Was such a thing possible? Somehow, at that moment, it made sense. If only recent events were illusions, she thought.... If only- Suddenly a voice shattered the trance: "You must be the Countess Anna!" The deep voice jarred her into consciousness, and an instinctive, fearful cry escaped her lips before her mind could work. She wheeled about, shielding her face against the western sun, her eyes raised to take in the mounted rider. Her skin felt the full heat of the afternoon sun. His visage was at first little more than a silhouette cut against the sunlight, like a black on yellow paper cutting. Still, she knew he was not from the Gronski estate.
"It is a fine day, is it not?" He was smiling at her. A smile she could not interpret.
"Who are you?" She hardly recognized the voice as her own. It sounded distant and tiny. Her heart beat rapidly against her chest, and for a moment she thought of running.
"I'm sorry if I startled you." The smile was fading. "I assumed you would have heard my horse."
"You did-and I had not." Anna swallowed hard. She fought for composure. She would not run. "You might have called out from a distance."
"Truly, I am sorry. Really, Countess Anna-it is Countess Anna?"
She mustered decorum now. "Countess Anna Maria."
"Forgive me."
He was maneuvering his horse around her now. "Do you often go about sneaking up on people?" She lifted her head to him, feigning boldness. She found herself turning, too, in a half circle until it was no longer necessary for her to shade her eyes against the sun. She was certain that he had initiated that little dance for just that end. He was laughing.
"It's a habit I thought I had broken, Countess Anna Maria.".
His cavalier attitude was disconcerting. Anna chose not to answer. "And what," he pressed, "is it that brings you out here, my dear Countess?" Anna conjured up one of her mother's smiles that wasn't a smile.
"I might ask you the same question."
"Fair enough."
It was he who was shading his eyes now, but he took his hand away long enough to point. "Your uncle's land ends there to the west with that wheat field. This meadow is mine."
"Oh." Anna felt her confidence go cold and drop within her, draining away like a mountain stream. How neatly he had put her in her place. "I am nothing more than an interloper then, is that it? I'll go back immediately."
He smiled. "You need do nothing of the kind, Countess.
Continues...
Excerpted from PUSH NOT THE RIVER by James Conroyd Martin Copyright © 2000 by James Conroyd Martin. Excerpted by permission.
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