“Small But Strong” by Miryam Sas

He looked at her, Henio did, with his big blue Polish eyes. She held her arms around the swell in her belly.  They felt the train, now stopped, settle into waiting. Without moving, they watched out the window as the minutes passed. One by one the passengers left the train and walked out across the hayfield.  Henio poured her sips of tea from the thermos, taking none for himself. She saw Henio begin to worry, and she breathed, slowly, calmly.  There had been no official announcements, but she saw the train conductor, its driver, leave the train and begin to walk out into the field, and then turn back to walk along the tracks in the direction they had come.  It was still early in the afternoon. 

“The war is coming here,” said Henio.  “I will need to get papers. I will need to join my brigade, or find out what is going on.”

The next morning, she lay on her side in the train compartment, and she felt a wave pass over her body. She tried to sit, but she couldn’t sit.  She had not eaten the last roll she had in her small bag.

I will eat, she thought. I should eat. The sun was strong on the field. Henio had left quietly in the night to look for his brigade, and they agreed to leave notes for each other wherever they passed through. Then she had locked the door of her compartment before sleeping, spreading her coat over her.  This field—the hay was already cut and gone—there must be a farmer nearby.  She had said she would wait, but no: this baby would not wait.  She knew that now, as the wave began again, rocking her from one side to the other, rocking her whole body—she held her breath, and then she breathed, held her breath again.  She could not even carry a small suitcase, she knew. This was the moment to leave—the door was already unlocked.  She held herself up, barely stepped down the hall of the train and out to the open doorway.  The hall was filled with packages left behind. The sun shone quietly here.  With all the strength of her arms she held the metal bar and lowered herself one step, two steps, toward the dirt near the tracks.  The wave began again and this time it was in her whole body—her head, her shoulders, her arms, her legs.  She stood clinging to the train handrail. There seemed to be no-one around—could all the passengers have left?  Were there some people, or some partisans, hiding in the miles of woods around? Which direction would the farmhouse be? She saw a path along the edge of the field and she walked toward it; it felt as though she were walking quickly but her legs took very short strides. She turned to look back at the train—the quiet black train, its windows partly open.  There was a slight breeze, on this beautiful day, like the breezes during Gymnasium recess in spring, the breaks between classes. On another day, she and Henio would have enjoyed such a walk in the country.  How many times had they wished that their work would end earlier so they could take trips into the country? How many travels he had promised her, they had planned together: Karlovy Vary, one day Italy, maybe even Paris.  She wanted to spend a summer in the beautiful baths and spas of Czechoslovakia, more beautiful than any in the world.  Her legs shuffled with the slow stride of a convalescent at a sulphur spring resort—the hayfields parched on either side became marble colonnades in her mind as she walked. The baby was waiting, she could feel it inside her.  She was very thirsty, and she imagined herself drinking the sulphurous waters that tasted almost like sweat, like her own sweat, just now washing her upper lip; she walked along the edge of the hayfield and—was it just a shed? she thought she saw a small built structure the color of hay only casting a shadow, off in the distance.

She recited a line of Latin in her head that she had learned in school. As she walked, the rhythms of all the conjugations she had memorized pushed her feet forward in a special step. She licked her lip on purpose now and her eyes blurred—again she was with Henio at the Karlovy Vary, where they had never yet been, but she sipped the sulphurous salts of herself from her lip, she lifted her hand to her mouth and wiped her brow, she walked ahead and there was—was there? yes, a woman: there she was, a farmer woman with her hair tied in a white cloth, coming toward her, or was she a nurse from the sulphur spring resort?

Ela sat down, suddenly, on the hard ground.

It felt as if she had fallen asleep and woken up again.  When she woke she was still on the ground. The farmer woman in white had taken her arm and Ela smelled the woman’s body: it smelled like leaves, like grass—like hay.  She struggled to standing and let go of the woman’s arm.

“Dzienkuję,” she said. Thank you. All around them were the empty fields.

Ela stood straight again before this woman. 

“I need a little milk, some eggs, can you sell me? I need a place to lie down for a minute.”

“You can lie in the barn,” said the woman.  “Here, come.”

With the woman’s help she could stand, she could walk more easily. They walked together along the narrow path, without speaking. After many steps, the woman opened the door to a dusty, dark building.

“Here,” said the woman.  She gathered a bed of straw from a corner of the barn.  “Come and lie. I will bring you some hot water.”

Here, thought Ela. Here I will have my child.

“Good,” she said to the woman. “Some hot water.”

Ela lay on the prickly ground, with only a small bed of hay to raise her off the barn’s dirt floor.  Nonetheless, this straw bed had a certain comfort—the way the stalks curved into an oval teaspoon, just the size of her body: it cradled her there, with its edges just in the right places so she fit.  The barn was dark after the strong, clear light of the afternoon—dark except for the slats of sun that pierced through a crack between the wall and the roof.  That shaft of light, and the dust motes hovering in it, visible to her from where she lay—seemed to offer her some gentleness, as if her mother were here saying “Elush, this baby will be small but strong, like you were.” Ela lay on her side to take the weight of the belly off her spine, and placed her head on her folded hands. Then she reached one hand out to touch a shaft of sun, moving her fingers in it and watching it shine its way through any impediment—blocked for a moment by fingers, it would slither through between them.  Even the smallest sliver of a crack was enough.  The rest of the darkness covered her like a blanket—it was a warm darkness, in spite of the little prickling through her skirt she could feel coming from the escaped straw stalks below.

She closed her eyes, rested. Henio, come to me, I need you. Had he found the brigade? Was he wandering around in the woods? In her mind, Henio was still back in Gostynin, drinking their tea at the small table, packing their neat suitcases.  He was just now reaching the way he always reached for a second sugar halfway through his cup of tea, so the second half would be sweeter than the first. She wished he could rub her belly. Small but strong. Fingers moved in sunlight.  Her body rested in shadow.  Come here, be with me. Somehow, Ela felt the baby was a girl—it had come to her in the voice of her mother: like you, the voice had said.

 The strong wave pulled her under—she lost the sound of the voice, pulled through in this sensation too strange to be called pain.  She rolled onto her back, and her whole body contracted into a tiny powerful spoonful of pushing.  She remembered to breathe, but only after a few moments. Here it comes, she thought, another white wave of it coming on her from the same place inside.  She rolled: rolled in the wave, rolled onto her back, and she felt everything inside her—her heart, lungs, intestines, her bladder, her blood, her plasma—all the liquids and solids flow out in a rush as if it would never stop, rushing out between her thighs onto the straw mat, the oval curve, where she lay in shadow.

The baby had no voice. That is, it had the smallest voice, so small that it sounded just like breathing. Did the baby somehow know not to cry, or not know how to cry? In a war, don’t cry—you never know, where you may be, what may be the situation.  This tiny girl, the size of a teaspoon, yes, born in shadows, let out only a small cough and an “aaah” when she was born, onto the curved straw mat in a rush of blood.  Aaah, she said, and then she began to breathe silently, but Ela felt it in her arms, that she was strong, as strong as the voice of her mother had said she’d be, while Ela had been pushing inside the wave of the arch of her mother’s certainty.

The farmer woman came back from the main house with a bucket of hot water. Not so clean, Ela thought, but the bandages were fresh and new. With her rough careful hands the woman bathed the baby in the warm, dirty water, dipped her in softly and wiped her tiny breathing body, and let the blood soak off of her until—so quickly—she was mostly clean.  The baby’s eyes were closed and her nose was clear. The farmer woman wrapped the clean baby in one of the fresh bandages, as if she had come into the world already knowing war, and Ela could not sit up yet, but the farmer woman brought the baby to her, wrapped in such a bundle, moving her strong arms, breathing her tiny, strong, silent breath.

Who ever heard of a baby who does not cry, thought Ela, cradling the little bundle close to her breast, looking in the falling darkness into her shining face, like a tiny Jewish saint, born onto hay, glowing in the quiet of her own existence. Ela wanted to cry for her, to cry out to the lord, in whom she did not really believe, she was a lawyer, but what matter now— to cry out about this child with no voice, with no father to be seen, just the two of them here and the farmer woman squeezing out bloody rags in the corner, the rag she had used to wipe the straw around Ela’s legs, and then she had put a slightly softer old cloth under Ela’s thighs, so that now Ela could lay back and be with her child, watch the light fade in the barn.

Later, later, Ela would take this child to her mother’s house. They would meet in Zbaraż, a respectable small city, and she would wear the old nightgowns that were still in the drawers in her room, and feed this child from her body in the bed she had slept in as a girl.   Her mother would be so proud. She would protect the child, buy her clothes.  What should this little girl’s name be? She would hold the child against her chest, feel her breathing, and somehow, by train, by carriage, she would find her way home.

Ela still had a small gold chain sewed in her inside pocket, and she still had money. She held the image of her nightgown at home, pink, with ruffles, waiting in the drawer, the soft sheets and flattering mirrors of her mother’s house, in which she almost looked tall—yes, she and the child would make it home.  But first, now, turning in the straw: to sleep, to sleep. The nights were still warm here, summer had not yet ended. The small face radiated sleep.  The farmer woman carrying the bucket stepped out into the night. 

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