One Hundred Short Stories

2. Miec Wiare

The night is dark. The dark ashes that filter slowly through the air make it darker though. I’m fairly sure it’s actually dawn but it feels more like midnight.

  “Arianna?” I whisper in a hoarse voice, then I cough. My throat feels strange, all parched and dry and crackly, like the brown paper you wrap gifts in. I try again. “Arianna?” My voice is stronger now – too strong: the loudness frightens me and I look around nervously even though I know there’s nothing to see.

  “Yes?” whispers a voice nearby, and I hear movement.

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  “Yes?” Arianna repeats, coming closer, “What is it, mała siostra?” Mała siostra means “little sister” in Polish.

  “Just making sure you’re still there,” I say hurriedly. Perhaps it is a little too hurriedly because the next thing Arianna says is “Why? What’s wrong?”

  I press my lips together hard as they start to quiver and take a deep breath as my eyes begin to feel moist. I swallow nervously as images – memories – flash through my head at a rapid, dizzying pace.

  I see my mother and father – my Matka and Tata – smiling down at me whilst assuring me that we were a strong country. I see the soldiers pouring into our little country town with their uniforms and signals and discipline – and guns. I see my Matka and Tata telling Arianna and I to run. They don’t say where to. “Keep your mała siostra safe,” they say urgently to Arianna. And then more quietly, to me, “And you keep your sister safe too.”

  I see my older brother, Iwan, being shoved into a crowded train full of other dirty, scared people while I watch, helpless and hidden. At the last possible moment, just as the soldiers are about to slide the side of the carriage back into place Iwan shouts out, knowing I would hear; “Have faith!” Then there is the final bang of the bolt on the carriage being drawn.

  I’ve pondered the meaning of those two words, in spare moments between hiding and fear. Did he mean have faith in him, and know that he would come back? Or did he understand the meaning behind the trains – did he accept what it meant – there was going to be no coming back for Iwan.

  Did he mean have faith in our Matka and Tata, know that they’d protect us? Well that hadn’t worked out either: our Matka and Tata had told us to run. They’d told us before it was too late, before the inevitable – the trains.

  Did Iwan mean have faith in our faith, in Judaism, and know that God was on our side? Surely God could not support Hitler. Surely God does not support death.

  Or did he simply want to leave me with a few simple words that I would remember – and so I would remember him.

  Arianna’s voice – “Sara?” – jolts me unpleasantly back to the present and reminds me of the question I have to answer.

  I cough briefly to clear my throat before answering. “I’m scared,” I say finally, and the tears begin to fall. Big, hot, blubbering tears that sear and burn my cheeks as if they contained acid. I sob, and it’s a small sound but it seems to alert Arianna that I’m crying. She clambers quickly over to where I am sitting and envelopes me in a warm, open hug. “Oh, mała siostra,” she mumbles into my hair, stroking it with one hand and cradling me with the other. “Mała siostra, do not cry.” But now I’ve started I can’t stop and I keep crying and clinging onto Arianna as if she were a piece of driftwood in an endless sea.

  “Sara, do not cry,” whispers Arianna again. “Do not cry, I am here.”

  Memories are flashing past my eyes again – Matka and Tata smiling, Iwan laughing and teasing Arianna – and I seem to gain some strength from them. I give a sort of resolute final sob, take a breath, and am silenced.

  “There, you see, Sara,” says Arianna, drawing back to look at me, “All is well.”

  “All is not well,” I mutter bitterly despite myself, “All will never be well again.”

  There is a pause.

  “Sara,” says Arianna in a strange voice, “Let me tell you a story.

  “Once upon a time there lived a farmer and his wife and their five children. They lived in a very cold country, where it is hard to grow crops and feed animals because of all the snow. You know what I mean by cold, right?” I nod. Poland is a freezing country.

  “Anyway, the farmer was poor and his wife bitter. Every night their evening meal grew smaller. One day the wife woke up to find her youngest child dead – he had died from hunger.

  “The wife was blinded with grief. She wanted a proper burial for her son but the farmer said they didn’t have the money. ‘Why are your eyes dry?’ she screamed at him, ‘Why do you not mourn?’

  “The farmer replied in a soft voice, so quiet that the wife did not hear over her own grief. He replied, ‘Mieć wiarę’.

  “Over the winter, the remaining four children all died, from the hunger or the cold. Each time the wife was driven closer to a place where grief and sorrow is all there is. Each time she took her fear and her anger and her sadness out on her husband, screaming at him and demanding why he did not seem to care. Each time the farmer replied, too quiet for the wife to hear, ‘Mieć wiarę’.

  “On the day her last child died, the wife did not dissolve into tears and anger. She simply sat on her cane chair, sinking into a sort of resolute, final sadness. She said, ‘What have you been saying all this time, Husband?’ And he replied, and this time she heard: ‘Mieć wiarę’.”

  Arianna finishes her story.

  “Mieć wiarę?” I whisper, the words sounding familiar – then I realise.

  “Mieć wiarę, little sister. Have faith.”

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A/N: Different version of this story orignally published in Wasted on the Young.