Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

The single great joy of his life in exile was his correspondence with Albina, and the charming, poetic image he had formed of her during his visit to Rozanka remained in his soul and now in his banishment grew ever more beautiful to him. In one of her first letters to him she asked him, among other things, about the meaning of his words in the earlier letter: ‘whatever my dreams and longings might have been’. He replied that now he was able to confess to her that his dreams were connected with his desire to call her his wife. She wrote back that she loved him too. He responded that it would have been better if she had not written that, for it was dreadful for him to think about something which was now most likely an impossibility. She said in her reply that it was not only possible, but would most certainly come about. He wrote back that he could not accept her sacrifice, and that in his present circumstances it simply could not be. Shortly after writing this letter he received a package of money to the value of two thousand zlotys. By the postmark on the envelope and the handwriting he could see that it had been sent by Albina, and recalled having jokingly described in one of his earliest letters the satisfaction he felt now at being able by the lessons he gave to earn enough to pay for all the things he needed – tea, tobacco, even books. He transferred the money to another envelope and returned it to her with a letter begging her not to destroy the sacred nature of their relationship by bringing money into it. He had enough of everything he needed, he wrote, and he was completely happy in the knowledge that he possessed such a friend as she was. With that their correspondence came to a stop.

One day in November Migurski was at the Lieutenant Colonel’s house giving his sons their lesson, when the approaching sound of the post sleigh bell was heard, and the runners of a sledge came crunching over the frozen snow and stopped in front of the house entrance. The boys jumped up from their seats to find out who had arrived. Migurski stayed behind in the room, looking at the door and waiting for the boys to return, but through the doorway came the Lieutenant Colonel’s wife in person. ‘Some ladies have come asking for you, Pan,’ she said. ‘They must be from your country – they look like Polish ladies.’

If anyone had asked Migurski whether he thought it possible that Albina might come to see him, he would have said that it was unthinkable; yet in the depths of his soul he was expecting her. The blood rushed to his heart and he ran out gasping for breath, into the hall. In the hall a stout woman with a pockmarked face was untying the shawl which covered her head. A second woman was just going through the doorway which led to the Lieutenant Colonel’s quarters. Hearing steps behind her she looked round. From beneath her bonnet shone the joyful, widely-spaced radiant blue eyes of Albina, their lashes covered with hoarfrost. Migurski stood rooted to the spot, not knowing how he should greet her or what to say. ‘Juzio,’ she cried, calling him by the name his father had used, and she herself had used in the old days, and she flung her arms round his neck, pressing her face, rosy with cold, against his, bursting into laughter and tears at one and the same time.

When she had found out who Albina was and why she had come, the Lieutenant Colonel’s kind-hearted wife took her in and gave her lodging in her own house until it should be time for the wedding.

VI

The good-natured Lieutenant Colonel managed after considerable trouble to obtain an authorization from the high command. A Catholic priest was despatched from Orenburg to marry the Migurskis. The battalion commander’s wife acted as proxy for the bride’s mother, one of Migurski’s pupils carried the ikon, and Brzozowksi, the Polish exile, was best man.

Albina, however strange it may appear, loved her husband passionately but did not know him at all. Only now was she really getting acquainted with him. It stands to reason that she discovered in this living man of flesh and blood a great many commonplace and unpoetic things which had not been part of the image of him which she had nurtured and carried in her imagination; yet on the other hand, precisely because he was a man of flesh and blood, she discovered in him much that was simple and good, which had also not been part of her abstract image of him.