Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

‘Zwyciestwo polakòw i kleska moskali! Wiwat!’⁵ – he wrote at the conclusion of his letter. Albina was in raptures. She scrutinized the map, trying to work out when and where the decisively defeated Muscovites must be, and she went pale and trembled as her father slowly unsealed the packets brought from the post office. On one occasion her stepmother chanced to go into Albina’s room and came upon her standing before the mirror wearing trousers and a konfederatka.⁶ Albina was getting ready to run away from home in male attire to join the Polish army. Her stepmother went and told her father. Her father summoned Albina to him, and concealing the sympathy, even admiration, he felt for her, delivered a stern rebuke, demanding that she should banish from her head any stupid ideas about taking part in the war. ‘A woman has a different duty to fulfil: to love and comfort those who are sacrificing themselves for the motherland’ – he told her. Now he needed her, she was a joy and a comfort to him; but the time would come when she would be needed in the same way by her husband. He knew how to persuade her. He reminded her that he was lonely and unhappy, and kissed her. She pressed her face against him, hiding the tears, which nevertheless moistened the sleeve of his dressing-gown, and promised him not to undertake anything without his agreement.

III

Only those who have experienced what the Poles experienced after the Partition of Poland and the subjection of one part of the country to the power of the hated Germans and another part to the power of the still more hated Muscovites, can understand the rapture which the Poles felt in the years 1830 and 1831 when, after their earlier unsuccessful attempts to liberate themselves, their new hope of liberation seemed about to be fulfilled. But this hope did not last long. The forces involved were too disproportionate and the attempted revolution was once again crushed. Once again tens of thousands of dumbly obedient Russians were herded into Poland, and at the command first of Diebitsch, then of Paskevich, quite without knowing why they were doing it, proceeded to soak the earth with their own blood and that of their Polish brothers, to crush them, and once more to set in power weak and worthless men who desired neither the freedom of the Poles nor their suppression, but simply and solely the satisfaction of their own greed and their childish vanity.

Warsaw was taken and the independent Polish detachments utterly defeated. Hundreds, thousands of people were shot, beaten with rods, or sent into exile. Among those exiled was young Migurski. His estate was confiscated, and he himself assigned as a common soldier to a line battalion at Uralsk.

The Jaczewskis spent the winter of 1832 at Wilno for the sake of the old man’s health: since 1831 he had been suffering from a heart ailment. Here a letter reached him from Migurski, written in the fortress where he was serving. He wrote that however hard were the experiences he had already gone through and which still awaited him, he rejoiced that it had been his destiny to suffer for his native land, that he did not despair of the sacred cause to which he had devoted part of his life and was ready to devote that which remained, and that if a new opportunity were to present itself tomorrow, then he would act again in precisely the same way. Reading the letter aloud, the old man burst into sobs when he reached this passage and for some time could not go on. In the final section of the letter, which Wanda read out, Migurski wrote that whatever his hopes and longings might have been at the time of his last visit to them, which would ever remain the brightest point of his whole life, now he could not and would not speak further about them.

Wanda and Albina each understood these words in her own way, but neither confided to anyone else exactly how she understood them. Migurski concluded his letter with greetings to all of them: among these he addressed Albina in the same playful tone he had adopted with her at the time of his visit, asking her whether she was still rushing about as she used to, running races with the greyhounds, and mimicking everyone so beautifully. To old Jaczewski he wished good health, to the mother success in household affairs, to Wanda that she should find a husband worthy of her, and to Albina that she should keep her joie de vivre.

IV