Poland by James A. Michener
Roman was in this preferred position when they entered a picturesque gorge, which apparently was going to run deep into the mountains, and he signaled for Feliks to join him, so that together the two young men led the way into terrain which offered constant surprises: now a sheer wall, now a tumbling rapids in the river whose bank they were following. A local guide employed by the count to lead them through the forbidding land told the young men: ‘Any merchant traveling from Budapest to Krakow must pass along this route, so bandits have always infested our area. They’re still here today, even though the Austrian government tries to control them. If we didn’t have soldiers with us, whssssst! Out of those hills they’d come and cut our throats.’
Hoping that bandits would attack, so that gunfire would explode about them, the explorers hurried ahead, and as they rounded a bend in the tumbling river Roman cried: There they are!’ and in the distance, perched on two massive hills, one to the north of the river, the other to the south, rose the twin castles of Niedzica, forming a unique and stunning sight. Had these castles stood in some accessible spot, they would have been famous throughout Europe; hidden away in this remote gorge, they were legends spoken of with respect by all who had actually enjoyed their hospitality.
The Lubonski party rode for half a day with the castles in view, and when they were so close that Roman thought a human voice would alert the inhabitants, the guide discharged a volley, at which men appeared on the ramparts of the southern castle to fire back, and a lively set of echoes reverberated through the gorge, and after a while people began to emerge from the castle, a great train of them, men and women alike, and as they proceeded down a steep footpath to the river’s edge, both of the young men thought: Elzbieta Mniszech is among them, and they began to strain their eyes for a sight of her.
Since the pathway up the gorge had followed the north bank of the river, the travelers would have to use a ferry to reach the Niedzica castle on the south, and as they rode up to a rude departure area, four shallow skiffs poled by mountaineers in heavy felt jackets started across the river to fetch them. As soon as the count and his two young charges stepped gingerly into the first skiff, there was much gunfire and shouting from the castle side, and as the skiffs were brought to shore, Roman and Feliks stared at their waiting hosts, who now crowded the landing area.
That’s Ignacy Mniszech,’ Lubonski told them, pointing to a huge man with long mustaches and head completely shaved, dressed in the old style, ‘and that smaller man in green-and-gold jacket is Horvath Janos, the Hungarian who owns the castle. And remember that they give their last names first, so don’t call him Pan Horvath.’ There were four other large men with heads shaved almost clean, and a larger number dressed in the distinctive fashion of Hungary. Halfway up the stairs leading to the castle waited sixteen soldiers in green uniforms, and far beyond them, some hundred feet higher, began the castle walls.
And then the young suitors saw standing in the shadow of Ignacy his daughter Elzbieta, twenty years old, dressed in a Hungarian peasant costume adorned with heavy braid and wearing big clumsy fur boots. Like most of the Mniszechs, she had dark hair and fair complexion, and as soon as the young men identified her, they both saw her as the next in line of heroic and romantic Mniszech women, but that was perplexing because this one looked as if she was gentle and soft-spoken. When she became aware that the visitors were staring at her, she withdrew behind her father.
A confused bustle developed as the Hungarian gentlemen reached down to help the visitors disembark over the frail, narrow boards that were thrown out from shore to the edges of the skiffs, and when one of Lubonski’s men slipped into the water, not deeply, there were cheers. Ignacy himself reached out to grab for Roman, and after he pulled the young man safely ashore he gave him a huge bear hug and a kiss on the forehead: ‘Welcome to Niedzica, young man, and this is my daughter Elzbieta.’
Not shyly, for she was a mature woman, but with a lovely reserve, Elzbieta extended her two hands and grasped Roman’s, and later when she did the same with Feliks that young man realized as if in a blinding flash that he was at last in love. Katarzyna Granicka had been attractive in the general way that all young women are, and Nadzha the Ukrainian without a name had been deeply moving, and the great Lubomirska had been a kind of stimulation, but Elzbieta Mniszech was the culmination of a long journey, and he knew that as long as he lived he would love no other. In his instantaneous infatuation, and perhaps not so instantaneous, for it had been kindled by the preparatory legends of old Urszula, he quite forgot that the more important Roman Lubonski was also looking for a wife and that Roman had been as deeply affected as he.
The next days were enchanted, for this Niedzica castle contained seven round towers, each topped with battlements from which one could look down upon the gorge or across to the northern castle, standing upon its own rocky prominence, and occasionally one could see a caravan of horses slowly following the river on its way to Krakow, and once as Roman and Feliks watched, Elzbieta came to stand with them at the top of the highest tower. ‘Right there’—she pointed—‘is where the robbers strike if the merchants are caught in the gorge at night.’
‘Have you ever seen it happen?’ Feliks asked.
‘No, it comes in the dark, the attack. But it did happen one night while we were sleeping. Two Austrian Jews left dead.’
Like her great-aunt Urszula, she was a storyteller, and her account of things that had happened in these twin castles kept the young men bewitched, for she spoke in a soft voice, allowing it to rise in excitement as she approached important climaxes:
‘My uncle said that these twin castles, remote though they are, summarize Polish history. When the Tatars swept the land in 1241, the frightened Duke of Krakow fled here for hiding. And have you ever heard of Jadwiga, the glorious Hungarian princess who married Jagiello? When she entered Poland to become our queen … here’s where she slept on her first night in our country.
‘Our last Swedish king, Jan Kazimir, came hiding here during the Deluge, and my uncle thinks it was here that the grand Jerzy Lubomirski hid the royal treasury when the Swedes conquered everything. One of the False Dmitris hid here, too, before he became czar, and the famous robber-peasant Kostka led his revolution from these castles.
‘When I first saw the castles I thought: My God, this is the end of the world. But it was often the center. And now here we are, at the end or the center, who knows?’
When snow fell, the area became a silent wonderland, with deer moving down from the hills and ice immobilizing the skiffs. Then everyone stayed in the great halls, with fires crackling and stories echoing. Ignacy Mniszech dominated whatever was under way, a huge opinionated man, his head glistening in the firelight, his mustaches threatening anyone who disagreed with him: ‘By God, it would be better for us all if Russia took over what’s left, and the part Austria has, too. Catherine knows how to rule.’
Feliks noted that at such moments, without ever raising his own voice, Count Lubonski resisted Ignacy’s arguments: ‘I think we’ll find, in the long run, that Austria is going to govern its part of Poland much better than either of the others.’
When Ignacy stormed, his voice growing louder and louder, Lubonski patiently rebutted his arguments, and when he was alone with the young men he reminded them: ‘The Mniszechs have always been in the pay of Russia. He has to say what he does.’
Ignacy looked at his best one snowy day when someone suggested a bear hunt in the nearby hills. ‘Aren’t bears asleep now?’ Feliks asked, at which Mniszech bellowed: ‘They are, and it’ll be our job to wake them up.’
When the hunt was organized—enough gentry and soldiers to storm a castle—Elzbieta announced that she would join it, and at first her father said angrily that she should stay home with the cooks and be damned, but when she persisted, he awakened to the fact that she was eager to be with the young men, to observe how they behaved, and he gave her a huge hug, crying: ‘If you get your pretty face clawed, that’s your fault.’ Felik
Feliks could still not understand how there could be a bear hunt when there were no bears, but when they were far into the woods and up the side of a mountain, Ignacy called for the brands, and when they were well lighted and throwing smoke, he climbed into several dangerous spots from which he thrust the brands into caves that might contain hibernating bears, and after three disappointments, which left his hands and one side of his face scratched, he found a cave which he judged to be especially promising. Calling for more brands, he stuffed their smoking ends into the entrance, and after a while he shouted: ‘By God, a bear!’
And from the cave, sleepy and distraught, emerged a large brown bear who took one look at Mniszech and retreated in terror, but his cave-refuge was now so filled with smoke that he could not enter it, so in desperation he shied away from Mniszech and started lumbering through the sparse and leafless woods. With wild shouts, armed men loosed their dogs and started in pursuit, with Roman and Feliks making a way for Elzbieta, who reveled in the chase.
For about a mile the bear kept ahead of his pursuers, but he was emaciated from his long sleep without food, and in the end he tired so pitifully that the dogs had an easy time with him, sinking their sharp teeth into his flanks, and with four of the dogs tormenting him in this way and making any further progress impossible, the weak creature turned to face his encircling enemies. With wide swipes of first one forepaw and then the other, he punished some of the dogs, sending them away with agonized yelps and bleeding faces, but always the men moved closer, and in the end Ignacy lunged forward with a long pike, transfixing the bear with a mortal thrust. Feliks felt sick at his stomach and showed it.
He did not perform well, either, on the night soldiers trapped two bandits as they attacked peddlers moving from Hungary into Poland, for when the heavily garbed robbers were dragged into the castle, their pockets still crammed with the goods they had stolen, soldiers were encouraged to beat them, and Feliks protested: ‘They killed no one.’
‘They probably killed those two Jews last month,’ Mniszech stormed, and the beatings continued, to Feliks’ disgust.
He was ill-prepared for what happened at dawn. Bugles sounded and everyone in the castle assembled in the large square subtended by the towers, where a rude platform had been erected, hastily rather than sturdily. It wobbled when one of the soldiers with an axe mounted, and when the first of the robbers was shoved onto it the props almost fell. ‘Hold them up!’ Mniszech cried, and three soldiers were assigned to each pole to keep it steady.
They failed, and when the man with the axe tried to chop off the head of the first robber, the neck moved and he bungled the job horribly. The second robber, aware that he was going to be treated the same way, stared in horror as the axe came down the third ineffectual time, and fainted.
Feliks almost did the same, but he steeled himself to look as the inert body of the second robber was lifted onto the rickety platform, where the man with the axe prepared to decapitate him. ‘Do it right,’ Mniszech bellowed, ‘or you’re next.’ Since it was entirely possible that this threat might be carried out, the executioner’s hands trembled visibly, but with two powerful and ill-directed blows he managed to sever the head. Feliks could watch no longer, a fact which Elzbieta noted with approval, for she, too, had turned away.
In the week after Christmas, Feliks showed to excellent advantage, for all in the castle journeyed to a small town nearby, where snow in the narrow streets had been packed flat by the feet of many peasants and where teams of swift horses had been harnessed to sleighs of an extraordinary nature. They were so narrow that only one person, always an unmarried girl, could find a place to sit. The runners were waxed and razor-sharp, extending in back as a kind of platform from which the driver, always an unmarried young man, would direct the horses with long reins and an even longer whip of extreme flexibility made in France.
The ride through the narrow streets was not a race, because two sleighs could not run side by side, but it was nevertheless a test of competitive skill, because each driver whipped his horses to their top speed, with the girl hanging on desperately and forbidden to scream, regardless of what happened. Often the tiny sleighs, little more than a foot wide, upset, throwing the girl into a snowbank, and sometimes horses in the following sleighs had to leap over her; this was a discredit to her driver, who must keep his sleigh upright no matter what.
Roman Lubonski flatly refused to engage in this perilous sport, for once he had seen a girl disfigured, and his father did not press him to change his mind, for such rides were a Cossack invention and a fallback to more primitive society, but Feliks, seeing a chance to have Elzbieta as his partner, jumped forward to volunteer, and he was given a sleigh with the painted name Firebird, and on its narrow seat he placed Elzbieta, assuring her they would win this competition.
Heart galloping like his horses, Feliks whipped his team into the narrow streets, kept them roaring around the corners, waved to the watchers, and headed for the critical passage in which two sudden turns were required. ‘Hold on!’ he warned Elzbieta, and with a skill that astonished the mountain people, who were unaware of his love for horses, he negotiated the dangerous twists and brought his narrow sled and its precious cargo safely home.
The crowd applauded and Roman ran up to shake Feliks’ hand, but he was prevented from doing so by Elzbieta, who reached up at this moment to give her driver a triumphal kiss. ‘We did it!’ she kissed him, but then she saw Roman, and grasping his hand, she said: ‘Roman, I’d have fallen off if he hadn’t warned, just at the bad part, “Hold on!” ’ Together the three walked back to where Mniszech and the count waited to applaud them.
Mniszech and the count waited to applaud them.
Two days after New Year’s, men whom Feliks had not seen before and whom Roman did not know either, arrived at Niedzica from two different directions. From Vienna came Count von Starhemberg, descendant of that brave Austrian who had helped defend Vienna against the Turks; the twin castles and all the territory around them were now Austrian property, and Feliks supposed that he had come to inspect it. He was a young man with a sense of command, and Feliks guessed that he was intended for some superior post in the Habsburg government.
The other man was more perplexing: Baron Ottokar von Eschl of Prussia, in his sixties, reserved and proper, and impatient with the normal social niceties. When Elzbieta was presented to him he barely acknowledged her, and he ignored completely her two suitors, for obviously he wished to get down to business after his long and tiring journey to this remote spot. But what that business was, Feliks could not guess.
At the large dinner that launched the unusual meeting, with snow swirling about the parapets and the fires crackling, Von Eschl attracted the young men’s attention by speaking almost disrespectfully to Count Lubonski: ‘Why can’t you Poles discipline this fool Kosciuszko? If he continues, he’s going to make serious trouble.’
‘We hold him in no regard, Baron,’ Lubonski said with obvious conviction.
‘But if he keeps talking over your heads … exciting the peasants—’
Mniszech broke in: ‘If the peasants make one move, we’ll crush them the way Catherine crushed hers.’ And no more was said.
During the following days, while Mniszech and Lubonski met long hours with the two visitors, Feliks Bukowski was left alone to ponder the various shreds of information he had gathered on this disturbing trip, because if his four love affairs had been disorienting, his experience with the problems of Poland had been catastrophic. He was, he always remembered, the son of a man who had given his life to preserve Polish freedom, and Feliks knew precisely what his father’s definition of freedom had been: ‘Feliks, the time has come when we must move like France and England and America. The freedom of fifteen great families to dictate in all fields isn’t good enough any longer. Men should own land. They should work for themselves, not for some castle, and
Feliks would never forget Przamowski, of the petty gentry in a nearby village. By every device known in Poland he extracted labor and money from his serfs, charging them duties, which the Bukowskis never did. Przamowski had his own grinding mill, which his peasants must use for an exorbitant fee, and his own brewery, which his serfs had to patronize. One hot summer a peasant in one of Przamowski’s cottages refused to buy his ration of beer because neither he nor his wife liked it, so Przamowski came screaming to the cottage: ‘You owe me for three gallons!’ And when the peasant said: ‘But we don’t drink beer,’ Przamowski in a rage poured the beer on the ground at the man’s doorstep. ‘Now, goddamn you, you have your beer and I want my zlotys,’ and the man had to pay.
Feliks could not shake out of his mind his memories of Lancut palace, the endless rooms used a few weeks every other year, the battalions of servants, the gardeners picking at individual pieces of grass, the eighteen other palaces and the teams of architects perfecting them for visitors who never came. He could see that row of sixty faces about the long table, the faces of men and women who had used Poland to their private advantage, and he began to wonder what the phrase Golden Freedom really meant.
At first he had been disposed to accept Granicki’s judgment that Poland had known greatness only because the magnates ruled it well, but he knew that those days were gone, flames flickering in the wind, and that now new solutions were required. Because he held Count Lubonski in such high regard, he had once been prepared to believe that all magnates were like him, but now that he was seeing others at close quarters, he began to suspect that they had always been a robust, thieving, self-centered lot who had given Poland not good government but one of the poorest in Europe. They were eager to defend their country against powerless robbers who lurked in river gorges, but extremely loath to protect it against real robbers like Prussia and Russia, who were invited to conduct their depredations openly.