The House with the Stained-Glass Window

Book 7: MacLehose Press Editions

by Zanna Sloniowska

Genres: Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

"Zanna Sloniowska writes beautifully; with empathy, sensitivity, and with real political impact . . . an important new voice in Polish literature" OLGA TOKARCZUK, Nobel Prize-winning author of Flights

"Remarkable, a gripping, Lvivian evocation of a city and a family across a long and painful century . . . A novel of life and survival across the ages" PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West Street

Amid the turbulence of 20th century Lviv, meet four generations of women from the same fractious family, living beneath one roof and each striving to find their way across the decades of upheaval in an ever-shifting city.

First there is Great-Granma, tiny and terrifying, shaped by a life of exile, hardship and doomed love, now fighting to keep her iron grip on the lives of her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter. Then there is Aba, arthritic but devoted; cowed and despised by her mother, her one chance of happiness thwarted and her hopes of studying painting crushed. Thirdly, Marianna, the brilliant opera star: bold, beautiful and a fearless crusader for Ukrainian independence, who is shot during a demonstration and whose life and martyrdom casts a shadow upon the young life of the fourth and final woman, her daughter.

More important even than these four women though is the character of the city of Lviv (or Lwów, or Lvov, depending on the point in history). A city of markets and monuments, streets and spires, where history and the present collide, civilisations clash and stories rise up on every corner.

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Release date: July 19, 2022

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 272

Sample

One of the characters in this novel is a city, the place that we now call Lviv, in western Ukraine. But over the course of the stormy twentieth century this particular city changed its nationality and name a number of times. Before the First World War it was Lemberg, in Galicia, the northernmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a territory that Poland had lost in 1772 at the time of its first partition. After the First World War, Galicia was restored to newly independent Poland, and the city was renamed Lwów. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Polish Lwów was occupied by the Soviets, but then in July 1941, the Germans captured it. In the summer of 1944, the Red Army recaptured it; when the war ended, in 1945, the eastern part of Poland was incorporated into the Soviet republic of Ukraine, and the city became Lvov, the Russian version of its name. Finally, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became an independent country, it gained its present, Ukrainian name, Lviv.

Polish literature generally retains the Polish versions of proper names, regardless of historical period, and so in the original text of this novel, Żanna Słoniowska has called the city “Lwów” throughout. That’s no challenge for the Polish reader, who is likely to know the history of Lviv, as a former and much-loved Polish city. The story is firmly set there, but as it moves between historical periods, I have chosen to use the Polish name, Lwów, when the historical context demands it, the Russian name, Lvov, for the era of Soviet Ukraine, and the Ukrainian name, Lviv, for that of post-Soviet, independent Ukraine.

*

Here are some key dates and basic information to help the reader with some of the historical events mentioned in the novel.

• 1918–19: the Polish–Ukrainian War. After the dissolution of Austria–Hungary, newly independent Poland fought against the West Ukrainian People’s Republic for control of eastern Galicia. There was fierce fighting in Lwów, famously between the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, and the Polish Defenders of Lwów, who included the teenage soldiers known as the “Eaglets”. Legendary heroes to their own sides, they were buried in the city’s Yanivksy and Lychakiv cemeteries respectively, places that have retained their patriotic significance (though to the Poles Lychakiv is Łyczaków, and in this book the name also features as the Soviet era, Russian Lychakov).

• 1918–39: the Second Polish Republic. Lwów was Poland’s third largest city, with a mixed population of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews (who made up a quarter of the population). Polish discrimination against the Ukrainians meant the closure of Ukrainian schools and universities that had flourished under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Ukrainians were deprived of opportunities to advance their careers.

• 1939–45: the Second World War.

° 1939–41: Soviet occupation.

° 1941 – July 1944: German occupation. With Nazi encouragement, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the U.P.A., known as the banderovtsy – “Bandera’s men”, after the Ukrainian nationalist movement leader Stepan Bandera), carried out pogroms against the Poles in Wołyń (Volhynia) and eastern Galicia, the provinces adjacent to Lwów. Meanwhile, in 1941, the city’s Jews were massacred by the Nazis.

° July 1944: Soviets recapture the city.

° 1945: The city becomes Lvov, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Poland’s borders are shifted west and, as well as Lwów, it loses the city of Wilno (Lithuanian Vilnius), but gains the “Recovered Territories”, formerly part of eastern Germany, including the cities of Danzig (Gdańsk) and Breslau (Wrocław). The citizens of Poland’s lost eastern territory gradually move west. Poland becomes the Polish People’s Republic under a socialist government loyal to Moscow.

• August 1991: Dissolution of the Soviet Union. Ukraine becomes an independent country and holds its first presidential election in December. The city that was Soviet Lvov is now Ukrainian Lviv. Soviet era dissident and independence campaigner Viacheslav Chornovil runs for president, but is defeated by former communist head of state Leonid Kravchuk.

• 2004: The Orange Revolution peaceful protest rejects pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych in favour of Viktor Yushchenko, but in 2010 Yanukovych is re-elected.

• November 2013 – February 2014: Euromaidan protests in central Kiev against Yanukovych’s rejection of an E.U. Association Agreement in favour of closer ties with Russia. The violent civil unrest that takes place in mid-January claims ninety-eight lives. Yanukovych flees the country and is replaced by pro-E.U. president Petro Poroshenko.

ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES

London, 2017

On the day of her death, her voice rang out, drowning many other, raucous sounds. Yet death, her death, was not a sound, but a colour. They brought her body home wrapped in a large, blue-and-yellow flag – the flag of a country that did not yet exist on any map of the world. She was tightly shrouded in it, like an Egyptian mummy, though in one spot on the surface a dark, blood-red stain was breaking through. As I stood and stared at that stain, I was struck by the feeling that someone had made a mistake. At school they’d explained to us that every flag is red, because they’re all steeped in the blood of heroes. They told us the story of the worker who was shot dead when he came onto the street to fight for his rights with a white flag – when the gendarmes fired their bullets, his blood dyed the fabric red. But since then everything had changed, and now I knew that the colour red more often brought terror than liberation. And yet, as I stood over Mama’s body, I couldn’t help thinking that red would have been more fitting.

The red flag was solemn and tragic, but the blue-and-yellow one was relaxed and kitschy. It made me think of a hot summer’s day, of a rural rest in the fields. Mama said the blue was the sky and the yellow was the corn. There are moments in life when strange, if not highly incongruous, thoughts occur. If Mama had known what I was thinking then, she’d have been horrified. And so, seconds later, when the men who’d brought her home unwound the flag to show us the ragged wound near her shoulder blade, I stopped focusing on the colours and started to think about her skin. Mama used to undress in front of a tall mirror, never making me feel in the least embarrassed, and then she’d stand there naked, examining herself, often singing as she did so. I would sit nearby, visually stroking her white, freckled skin, her small, firm breasts, and her long legs coated in little red hairs. She was my own personal Snow Queen, as well as all the naked Venuses and clothed Madonnas rolled into one from the albums on the bookshelves. Her body spoke of the fact that it was indeed the spirit, and it would have been perfect, if not for a certain flaw. On her back, near her left shoulder blade, there was a satin-white impression the size of a maple leaf – the only bit of her skin that had no freckles, it looked like a crookedly sewn-on patch. I realised it was a defect, but I loved it best of all. I often asked Mama where it came from. “It’s the scar from an enemy bullet,” she’d say with a laugh. When I was very small, I took this answer seriously, and imagined the enemies of our system chasing her one dark evening, setting dogs on her, Mama hiding in a phone booth, and the bullet coming through the glass and smashing it into a thousand sharp, glittering slivers, hailing down on her body as it slumped torpidly to the ground. But the truth was different: when she was a little girl, a chain of moles had appeared on her back, something like the birthmark Gorbachev had on his forehead, and the doctors had decided to remove them. That was how the satin hollow came to be there.

So when her body was brought home, wrapped in the Ukrainian flag and unveiled before our eyes, my second thought was of that same bit of her skin. A real bullet had hit her right, freckled shoulder blade, and I realised that by doing so it had brought about a certain symmetry between the satin hollow on the left and the gaping hole on the right. Just like my thought about the flag, this particular thought definitely was not appropriate to the situation. So I stood tense and motionless in the main room where, despite the glaring sunlight, every lamp was on, trying to wipe out all these unpalatable associations. This made a totally blank, white space appear in my head – like the freckle-free impression in her skin, but I had no idea if it was in the left or right hemisphere of my brain. It was July 1988, and my mother had been killed in the unequal fight against Soviet totalitarianism.

*

On the day of her funeral, it felt as though the sound of the military band was going to blow the ornate façades off the houses on our street. The first notes opened many windows, revealing the faces of people who seemed to be expecting an earthquake or similar calamity.

“For me a public holiday means the sound of a brass band,” Mama always used to say, on May 1 or November 7, as we pushed our way through the cordons of militiamen standing in the city centre to find our place on the tribune. Those Soviet parades were the only mass gatherings that did not prompt blind fear in me. There were balloons, hand-held flags, and in particular there was undeniable order, decreed from above. Today’s crowd was quite another matter. If there had been a biblical deluge, it would have looked like this. And with no escape either. I stood at a closed first-floor window as the human torrent surged higher and higher. There was an open coffin drifting on it, with Mama lying inside.

Opposite our house was a militia station, and several uniformed officers were crowded onto a rounded balcony at exactly the level of my window. What if one of them raises his gun and aims it at me, I thought. What an idle fantasy! I’d have died instead of Mama without demur, but I was well aware that on the day of reckoning they’d give a dozen like me for one of her. She was great. She wanted to die. She succeeded.

The river of unfamiliar heads was moving, sighing, murmuring. Its every motion was harnessed to the fear jumping inside me. It had the power to swallow me. In the crowd there were pregnant-looking middle-aged women swathed in calf-length overcoats and grey shawls. I knew what they were hiding under their clothing. There were also men dressed in black, with sticks like fishing rods poking from under their arms. I could guess what that meant. And at the same time I had no idea who these people were, or what they could have had to do with Mama. With her mezzo-soprano voice and her collection of all the world’s operas on L.P. records, with her fair complexion, her very long, almond-shaped fingernails, and her habit of reading at table. She had never invited them home, nor had they attended her concerts. They had not exchanged greetings in the street, nor had they been for coffee together at the Armianka. They had not worked with her, or brought her those manuscripts that had to be read at night. But now here they were, weeping and wailing as though a branch had been cut from their tree! Yesterday, a strange woman had rung our doorbell to ask what time the farewell to “our Marianna” would start.

Were they guilty of her death?

I adamantly refused to take part in the funeral. I stood by the window until the last young fellow with a fishing rod had disappeared around the corner of a building resembling an ocean liner, the noise of trumpets had dissolved in the air, and just a few crushed packets of Orbit cigarettes remained on the cobblestones. I turned away from the window and went to play the piano – nobody but me would have called that cacophony playing. Except for Great-Granma. We spent that day in her room, without exchanging a word. In the breaks between exercises, I could hear her scratching the wall with her yellow, manicured fingers, and the sound of the tree growing in our courtyard.

Aba – my grandmother – came home in the afternoon, with dark red rings around her eyes, in which I detected a newly taken decision to devote her whole life to me from now on. This is what she told me about the funeral.

The wave of people carrying Mama’s coffin towards Lychakov cemetery kept growing. By the time its head was half way down Pekarska Street and the student doctors had started to join it from each medical school building in turn, its tail end was still winding its way through Halytska Square. The rumours said that militia units were already in wait near the cemetery, but how could that possibly have influenced the flow of the tsunami? When it came to be roughly parallel with the Anatomical Museum, where for many years the hands of the city’s official hangman had slumbered in a jar of formalin, impervious to every change of regime, the band stopped playing Chopin. Nor did they play the usual Soviet marches. What happened was that the trumpeters struck up the forbidden Ukrainian anthem, “The Red Viburnum”:

“We’ll raise the red viburnum with jubilant refrain,

Rejoicing in the triumph of glorious Ukraine!”

Gradually the trumpets were joined by singing – dramatic and bad. The women produced icons from under their coats and up flew the faces of Saint George and Saint Nicholas, and the Archangel Michael too, pallid from many years of lying in cellars and attics.

“Shame on Marianna’s assassins!” someone shouted.

“Shaaaame!” a thousand voices bellowed back.

“Shall we avenge her death?”

“We swear to avenge it!”

As though to confirm these words, the men with fishing rods cautiously began to shake them, revealing the proscribed blue-and-yellow flags attached to them. The cortège kept moving forwards, inexorably approaching the three arches of the main cemetery gateway. On Mechnykov Street, at right angles to Pekarska, the trams had already been suspended, and all along the cemetery wall a chain of militiamen had been deployed, shielded by a row of armoured cars. Heedlessly, the demonstrators kept surging forwards.

The moment the coffin-bearers drew level with the tramlines, the conductor of the band, a small, bald gentleman, swiftly raised his large hands skywards. This sign was interpreted instantly – the people began to croon another banned hymn, “The Glory and Freedom of Ukraine Has Not Yet Died”.

The militiamen seemed to have been waiting for this moment too. Obeying the sign, they began to wrestle the icons from the women’s hands and the flags from the men’s. In turn, this galvanised the men in black leatherette jackets, holding large Alsatian dogs on leads – they rushed after those who had fled down side streets, hiding their coloured cloths in their coat fronts and discarding their rods on the run. The ones who were caught were packed into vehicles.

Aba could not forget a boy with a banner who, seeking to escape, had battled his way to a phone box, but as there was already someone inside it, he had jumped onto the roof. Feeling safe up there, he set the flagpole between his feet and gaily began to give the militiamen the finger. A man in black barked a sharp command, and seconds later a trained dog was also on the roof of the phone box. But Aba hadn’t had a chance to see how this scene ended before the cortège entered the cemetery grounds and, passing the graves of the great Ukrainian opera singer Solomiya Krushelnytska, the Polish writer Maria Konopnicka and the Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko, headed up the hill. With black rings around his eyes today, the independence leader Viacheslav Maximovich Chornovil walked in step with the coffin the entire way. For the first time in his life he seemed not to notice that his people were being hounded by dogs, beaten with truncheons and taken into custody. On he strode, staring straight ahead. He must have been considering the fact that he, not Marianna, had been the intended victim.

Few people actually reached the grave site, apart from those who knew Marianna in person. From here, on a rise, they could see the vandalised Eaglets’ Cemetery, the number seven tram loop and the secluded villas on Pohulyanka Street.

“The Ukrainian people can be proud of their daughter Marianna, who sacrificed her life for them,” said Chornovil solemnly, and it never crossed anyone’s mind to mention that Mama wasn’t an ethnic Ukrainian.

“Her killers think they have silenced our song. But even today they could hear for themselves that its sound is growing louder!” Just then, as if in spiteful mockery of his words, militia sirens began to howl from below: the demonstrators were still being driven away. A white crane glided across the pure July firmament. Today, Mama was no longer wrapped in a flag – a piece of cloth steeped in blood was laid over her like a sheet. The gravediggers closed the coffin and carefully began to lower it into the ground. That was when Aba burst into tears. Much later I found out what she had been thinking at that moment – just as a pregnant woman becomes lighter when she finally gives birth, a mother who surrenders her child to the earth starts to weigh less too. Perhaps that was why she managed to descend the steep cemetery paths unaided, down to the point where some large orange vehicles marked “Water” were gushing generous fountains onto the battlefield. Her legs, bent by rheumatoid arthritis into an ugly arc, moved with more energy than usual. They were hurrying back to me.

Something else happened that day too – I had my first period. Despite the expectations, instead of a majestic flow of purple and crimson rain, two meagre, dirty-brown streaks stained my underwear. The world seemed a different place from the one I had imagined it to be.

Much later on I found out that I was not the only deserter from Mama’s funeral. And it has nothing to do with bogus friends from the theatre, or with somebody who didn’t show up because they were afraid for their life. It concerns a man who was just as ready as I to share every last drop of his own blood with her. It concerns Mykola.

He was with the funeral cortège until it reached half way down Pekarska Street, when he slipped away down a side street that crossed Mayakovsky Street, and th. . .