And the Rat Laughed

Part Five
The Diary
15 September 1943
Day of Our Lady of Sorrows


Do not bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Do not absolve me. I have been your faithful servant all my life, but now I am forsaking you and succumbing to the sin of despair. I feel sin welling up in every part of my body, and by sunrise it will permeate every cell. Do not forgive me, Father. I cannot fulfil my duty, and I have no faith. But pardon this little girl, who has no name. Because she is the unwitting source of my despair. Embrace her, and grant her salvation.
She is huddled in the wings of the church, mute as stone, and I pray in vain for slumber to engulf us both. Only the soft hand of sleep will succeed in dusting off tormented memory, suspending for a brief moment all that which had best be forgotten, and prepare the rememberer for a new day.
What new day awaits a little girl who is nothing but night?
I am Your chosen one. You have entrusted this girl-child to me, a little girl who is the source of my despair. When I first saw her, in the confessional, I asked myself whether this creature could be part of what You had wrought. Do not forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I doubted her being human. I stood there paralyzed. The black walls closed in on me, and my foot faltered on the threshold. I wanted to flee from the soundless body, with its stench of excrement, all its limbs dripping. I sought prayer, but found none. All I found was the cry that pierced through me.
My Father, what is this test that you are making me endure? Terrified, I crossed myself again and again. The farmer’s wife was shouting things at me, but I could not make them out. And yet, I could not help but steal a glance at her. A pair of eyes blazed at me through the lacework screen. As if I were standing under the cross at Golgotha, watching the man bleeding to death between two thieves.
If only I could have ripped the screen with my own bare hands, and reached out to her. Tonight, I kneel – not before you, Father, but before this child. Do not pardon me, for I denied myself to the soul floundering in the fetid flesh.
I carried her to my living quarters, but even the jostling did not elicit a sound from her. Five years old, or six. Emaciated, dishevelled, the rags sticking to her torn flesh. Her face I cannot quite discern.
A girl-child.
I had never held one in my arms.
I pray that I do not break her.
I sit in the dark, and the words pour out. A man is born into Your world as a creature of light, but other humans fill him with darkness. This is what I have preached all my life. Even I know full well what parts of the body tore through this child. My body has such a part too.
I do not know how to nurse her. It would have been better if...
No.
To pry out the nails, and to wipe away the blood.
What You are demanding is beyond my power.
I am trying to grant her some respite. Her weightless body is quivering. With whatever strength she can muster, she resists, and kicks me. For a moment I imagine myself removing Your Son from the cross.
Our Father in Heaven, O Blessed One, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Thousands of times, I have recited this prayer, but tonight the words turn into a meaningless jumble.
Our Lady of Sorrows, we call this day. Instead of remembering the sorrow of the Mother, I am immersed in the despair of the daughter.
The farmer’s wife fought me, refusing to hand the girl-child over. An asset, a steady income. Her voice dripping like honey, she said: Father Stanislaw, she will defile the House of the Lord.
I’ll pay you, I told her. The farmer’s wife said: We are not about to slaughter the cow that gives us milk. Then she laughed: Soon there will be no trace of the Christ-killers in this world. If it weren’t for our Stefan, we would have turned her in long ago. A good lad, Stefan. Knows how to appreciate a good thing. But now the Germans are offering ten thousand marks for every Jew. They posted a notice at the community house. Didn’t you see it, Father Stanislaw? That’s quite a sum, isn’t it? We could mend the roof of the church, so it doesn’t leak in winter.
To soften her heart, I addressed the farmer’s wife as “My Daughter”. From a secret shelf, I pulled down a golden candlestick, its base embossed with crosses. Give me the child, I said, and I will reward you.
Years ago, someone in the big city told me that Jews regard the ransom of captives as a sacrosanct commandment. Even the least remembered, after all, the unloved, are Your children. But I kept all this to myself. In a servile voice, I pleaded: Give me the child. I will know what to do with her.
The farmer’s wife had trouble making up her mind, but finally she pushed the girl-child towards me. Slaughter the little Jew with your own hands, and avenge the blood of our Savior. But be careful, Father Stanislaw, make sure she doesn’t infect you when you use the knife. Soon we will be celebrating a solemn mass for a world cleansed of Jews.
Her laughter thundered as she lit another candle by the altar.
Her only son was also with her in the church. A huge fellow. Big hands. Doesn’t say much, darting eyes. He always kisses my hand submissively, making sure his mother sees. I baptized him on Saint Stephen’s Day. He always knelt before the large crucifix, a devout expression on his face. Every Sunday, he would take his place at the head of the line leading to the confessional. May God be in your heart, and may you be truly contrite as you confess your sins – and he would whisper about small thefts. Trifling transgressions. Last week he drank too much and got into a brawl in the neighboring village. He always confesses some service he missed, and I pardon him and send him on his way.
A girl-child.
He never mentioned her.
What he did to her in the dark was with the knowledge of his father and mother. Perhaps he bought their silence. Do not forgive me Father for my sinful thoughts. By surrendering to despair I am defying You, but as I look into the future I see nothing but death. They pushed this little girl along the path to her death, wrenching her away from her mother and father, and from everyone who loved her. I cannot fight off this despair.
Tonight I will be the message-bearer. I will announce: In the face of absolute evil, there is no escape from despair.
And yet before sin conquers me completely, I offer You a bargain. If You perform a miracle, and erase the horror from her memory, I will atone for the sin.
A sign.
I am waiting.
In vain.
A man can make a bargain with the Antichrist but not with You.
16 September 1943
I try everything. Water, bread, a blanket, but she will not let me near her. All night long I watch her, contorted in her strange position – half lying, half sitting. Protecting every part of her body, trying to keep from being noticed. Whenever I approach her, she shrinks into the little niche in the wall adjoining my quarters. I yearn to tell the huddled soul: There is a place for you in this world. If only I could promise her a place in the next world.
I kneel before the little girl who was violated in the dark. My Father, did You not see what was happening underneath the soil, or did You turn your back?
My entire life was devoted to You, drawing on my deep belief that Yours is the compassion and the goodness that I preach. It would have been better had You not separated light from darkness. If only You had left the Tohu and the Bohu – the Chaos – as they were, and not separated darkness from light, because the order you created is nothing but a delusion, luring us to believe that justice will be meted out at some other time and place. But if You do not love Your creatures, how dare You demand of us that we love one another? The true Hell is not in the world beyond this one, on the Judgment Day that I rant about from the pulpit. It is here on earth. Hell is a legend that I trade, so we can deny the Inferno we create right here with our own hands.
Empty words, spat onto a piece of paper. If I had the courage, I would demolish the church in the heart of this beautiful village. I would stand on the ruins and proclaim, for all the world to hear: Father, You have failed, and because of You we are beyond repair! You know that I have spent my entire life in awe of You. I have submitted to You at all times, accepting Your authority without question. The distance from a fear of God to a fear of men is not great, after all. Acquiescing to You or acquiescing to them – it’s all the same. Perhaps I was more eager to acquiesce to them than to You. Now, despair consumes whatever fear remains within me, and sin sets me free. Tonight, and on the nights to come, You and I will conduct our reckoning.
Show me a sign, Father. Even from my abyss of despair, I have no other Father but You.
You are tarrying. Night proceeds along its tracks, dragging the wagonloads of darkness, while the little girl sprawls here, hovering between life and death.
17 September 1943
Her eyelids are shut tight. She shies away from my touch. Let her not die in my care. I pour water on her head and prod a few drops into her mouth. She hunkers in her niche like a clump of mud, but it is I who wallow. Where shall I lead despair? I who thought that suffering was not beyond my ken. In my sermons, do I not dwell on the sufferings of the Son, and insist that my flock share in them? But tonight, I confess my ignorance. Even Your Son was not a little child when He was made to suffer.
As You led Him down the Via Dolorosa, You provided for Him. A mother to console him, an embracing father. The arms of Mary Magdalene were etched in his memory. Not a five-year-old child, but a man of thirty-three, His years as numerous as the buttons on my habit. Even then, on His final journey, He was not alone. Veronica emerged from her house and wiped His brow with a handkerchief, and Simon of Cyrene bore the cross for Him when He stumbled. His own mother fell at His feet, and mothers that He did not know lamented. “Do not weep for me, Daughter of Jerusalem,” He told them, “but for your own children.”
So many times I have tried to envisage the scene, always seeing myself as a Daughter of Jerusalem. Fortunate was Your son with so great a crowd to comfort Him in his last hour. But the little girl whom You sent to the pit is a hostage of her own loneliness. If it was not You who created this suffering, perhaps the Antichrist has prevailed, and it is his kingdom rather than Your own.
I am afraid to find out.
18 September 1943
The village is asleep. My window overlooks the hill nestling below. Wooden houses, with thatch-and-shingle roofs. Their walls are painted white, and the cornices red, like the colors of our Polish flag. All around are fields of rye and sugar beet, oats and potatoes.
My church stands in the centre of the village. Storks nest in the belfry every spring. In the shade of the pear tree I compose my sermons. For hours I observe the foliage changing hues, and I am filled with awe at the cycle of the seasons. I see the bed of nasturtiums that I planted in the garden on the day I came to serve here, many years ago. The community house and the school are on either side of the church, and on the outskirts of the village is the roadside chapel. Passersby stop, say a prayer and hang some green branches and flowers on the statue of “The Troubled Christ”.
A small place. There are many like it. Who will know its name? Who will remember? And it moves along as if there were no War raging on at all. The pigs have been fed, the cows milked, the eggs gathered from the henhouses. The people eat their little meals. But what do they hide in those basements and pits, behind their Ave Marias? Their daily routine deceived me, and I too was immersed in my duties and did nothing to stop the scourge.
When the German tanks arrived, I went out to greet them by the roadside shrine. I rode in the first one to the village square. There they stayed. I shook hands with the German Commandant, welcoming him. The entire village cheered. Conquerors come, conquerors go. How are these conquerors different from the ones who came before? I have put my trust in the Church, and I believed that if I preached mercy and compassion, I was fulfilling Your most important tenets. I pretended that there was no horror being committed – anything to spare myself the sin of despair.
And now, despair swallows me. If these are the people who sat through my sermons, and seemed to follow in my footsteps, then I am the one who deserve to be condemned: they have absorbed nothing of my preachings. Every Sunday, that farmer and his wife have been coming here, and I have given them the bread and the wine so that they may enter into Holy Communion with Your Son, but all this time they were devouring the flesh of that child, sucking her blood. And I knew nothing of it.
I chose not to know.
19 September 1943
St Thomas Aquinas was right: despair leads to hatred, unbridled fury and bloodthirstiness. I kneel at her side, and imagine my hands around the neck of the farmer’s son. I take pleasure in envisaging his death, watching as he flails his arms and gasps his last. And You too, why didn’t you just kill her, and be done with it? You would have spared her a life filled with the memory of the Stefan inside her.
I refuse to grant pardon. I will not turn the other cheek.
I close the pages, and cover the child with another blanket. The support of the body I can attend to, but not the needs of what lies inside it.
Whom should I pray to?
20 September 1943
Another day has gone by, and her condition is unchanged. I carry out my duties, hearing confessions, performing rites. And from time to time I return to my quarters in the back, kneeling at her side, and listen to her breathing. She is still alive, but it is as if she has lost consciousness. I listen. Maybe she will mumble something. But her lips are sealed. I give her some water. Her lips do not move. I push a spoon into her mouth, trying to feed her some potato soup. She convulses and spits it out.
Again I sit in the dark. My hand moves, but I cannot see the letters. Her presence in the darkness grows more and more intense. She is afraid of me. Nobody has ever been afraid of me before. Even the dogs give a friendly bark when I pass them in the village, and the pigs sniff at my heels. Maybe she recognizes the Antichrist in me. If she’d come out of purgatory, I would know how to offer her solace. But she was among human beings, in their care and under their wings. You have given me the weapons to confront the Antichrist, but in the face of those who were created in Your image I am helpless. If everything has been wrought by You, then despair too comes from You.
If only I could perform a miracle in Your name. But You have no name, and there are no miracles in Your world.
Light is breaking now, but it cannot dispel the darkness.
21 September 1943
This morning she allows me to clean her with a damp rag. I dip it, and the water in the basin blackens. I pump some more water from near the giant trough. I cook pieces of birch bark and wash off her wounds. First I peel off the rags that stick to them, begging her forgiveness for the pain I am causing her, but she has yet to make a sound. The dirt covering her is Yours, Father. Even Lazarus lay on the ground in his shrouds, his body cleansed and anointed with perfumes.
I cut her hair, rinse her scalp with kerosene. I will not hurt you, I tell her. In this house you are safe. She turns her back to me at once. Finally she pillories me with her stare. Deep in their sockets are an old-woman’s eyes. They remind me of...
No. I refuse to remember.
Her skin has been gnawed. Bite-marks, bruises and lesions. She is covered with sores, but the flesh has the power to heal itself. I rub the wounds with herbal salves, concocted from the plants I grow on the outskirts of the cemetery. Our supplies of medications ran out long ago. She is burning with fever. Her breathing is irregular. I change the bandages, wrap her in all the blankets I own, and keep silent.
Keeping silent. That is the only thing I do well.
Saint Stanislaw, you who once rescued a little boy who fell into the well, Patron of the Broken Limbs, help me. For you too are human.
Father who art in Heaven, if I knew that You too are in despair, I would despair less.
22 September 1943
I take her in my arms, covering her private parts with my shirt, and dip her in the barrel after heating the water with hot bricks.
Don’t be alarmed, little girl. On the second day, the Almighty separated the water under the vault from the water above it. Then He commanded the waters to be gathered. In your body too the water is gathered. Now I have added honey and the leaves of the hazelnut tree and thyme to make you strong.
The little girl is trembling, and the basin shakes. Some of the water spills. I swaddle her sore-covered body with a black cloth, the way they once shrouded the lepers.
23 September 1943
In a back closet I found some novice’s outfits. They are too big. I sit in the dark and alter them. My movements are clumsy, and I prick my fingers with the needle. I can feel the blood running, but don’t bother to wipe it up. If asked, I will explain to the villagers that I have taken in a relative whose mother was killed in the bombings and whose father is a soldier who has been missing for two years.
A few short days that she’s been here with me, and already everything is different. I am a stranger to myself. A child in a house which never saw any. I have not known a woman, and have not begotten children. My loins are dry. Years ago I took the vow of celibacy. Who will teach me how to take care of her? Even Adam learned how to be a son before becoming a father, and Christ was never a father, but he was a son, and I, who have been neither son nor father, how will I know?
During my studies at the seminary I had a dream, night after night: I am a white-haired old man, sitting in a well-lit room. Before me is my small grandson, holding a notebook on his lap, and writing something. In my dream I know that the words he is writing do not come from me, since I am silent. And even when I want to speak to him, to utter some words of affection, I am struck dumb. My heart pours out to the child, but I’m a captive of my silence. Even my arms, which long to embrace him, are paralyzed. When I woke, overcome by guilt, I hurried to the father confessor. The urge to beget a child cannot be undone overnight, he used to tell me.
It took many confessions to erase that dream...
24 September 1943
She shies away from the light. Even the faintest disturbs her. I’ve drawn the curtains, so that not even the moonlight can shine through. I’ve blown out all the candles – but even in the darkness she cringes when I come close to her. My questions go unanswered. I asked her for her name. I begged. Her stubborn refusal was an encouraging sign. Maybe she has not lost the spark of rebelliousness, and a tiny flame of life continues to flicker. Could it be that she has forgotten who she is? Or maybe she has been rendered speechless? In our village, children are forbidden to look in the mirror, lest they be struck dumb as adults. But this child did not see her reflection in the pit. Rather, the body of evil beat against her. I am not the evil one, I promise her over and over. I know she can hear me.
How can I rake off the black filth that has clung to her spirit? No prayer will do.
In my helplessness, perhaps being foolish, I tell her about my own childhood, lending her some memories of my own for the time being. This is my bed, and there are the quilts, filled with goose down. So soft. Embroidered with lace. I thread my fingers through the fine lacework, afraid to tear it. Those are my slippers, always laid out on the rug. Don’t walk barefoot, Stanislaw, or you’ll catch cold. I didn’t have a birthday cake. Another child blows out the candles one by one, instead of blowing them out all at once. Someone laughs. Maybe it’s my grandmother. A rocking-horse is what the little boy received as a present, and for me an illuminated copy of the Old Testament. Moses climbing down the Mount with the tablets in his hands. His expression is stern but compassionate. That must be what my father looked like ... Him I never saw.
I stick to the good memories, and bury the rest. My mother ambles through them, but I dare not mention her.
Mother – a painful memory. Mustn’t even think of it. Sleep evades me. So long as the child is awake, I am destined to stay awake too. All night long I sit at her feet and write. My body disappears. Even my hands are engulfed. Only the whiteness of my diary pages would shine in the darkness.
25 September 1943
Today she took a few bites of food. Slowly I fed her some oatmeal, and she did not throw up. I asked my congregation for a chicken and some eggs, and they stared at me. Never before had I requested an offering of food. I said, it’s because of the War. You would not want a minister who is hungry and weak. Eventually, Zosha the innkeeper brought me a drumstick and an egg. In return, I blessed her and her family for seven generations to come.
The child’s sores are beginning to heal. I remove the bandages and struggle to give hope. Soon you will stand on your own. Soon you will play, the way children do. But the promise rings false, even to me.
It is only because of her that I have come to think back to that distant province called childhood. Naively, I thought that the infant years were the same for everyone. Boundless tenderness and warmth are lavished on the small child. Why then does everything come undone?
When does the sweet, rosy-cheeked child turn into a predator?
Like the Stefan.
26 September 1943
What remains of her childhood? I do not know what is stored in the tiny memory sprawled out beside me. Who will help me plant the seeds of innocence within her? The soft blanket with which I cover her, the flame forming a shadow on the wall, the food I bring to her mouth – where does the comfort of fragmented memory begin? Is there any spike left to latch on to, any echo of the little joys in her distant past? Of a father’s embrace? A mother holding out her arms? A cookie with a glass of milk, or a doll, or a birthday cake? Where are the goodnight kiss and the lullaby hidden? I try to retrieve them from my own memory. All I need to do is to tug the thread of a single memory, and others follow. A second one, and a third, and the entire skein of memories unwinds, allowing me to take hold of things without which I would not be what I am. The sordid memories I cast aside, because they too threaten to cross the threshold. Like the Angel Gabriel, I weigh the good fragments against the bad ones and look at the scales to see whether they have been tipped.
If she had the memories of someone else, then...
27 September 1943
I covered her in the clothing of a novice, and pulled the hood over her head. There was no need to instruct her to hide from strangers. Her senses have grown sharp. Her silence is complete. When I hang the cross from her neck, she swings it wildly. It’s if she is trying to remove a noose. It will protect you, I explain, for now.
I ask: what shall I call you? Tell me. I swear I will keep your name to myself.
As soon as I asked her what name her mother had used, she turned her back.
I dropped it.
29 September 1943
Day of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael


I almost succeeded in wiping out the memory of myself crying. Even when my grandmother...
I was not there with her when she died.
The little girl doesn’t cry.
Even animals cry.
4 October 1943
Day of St Francis of Assisi


Slowly she feels her way. First, she ventures out of the niche. Then she starts walking gingerly through my quarters. Suddenly I am made to realize how bare the walls are, apart from the crucifix over my bed. A bleak little room. Asceticism can be unsettling. I hurry to remove the icons from the dusty shelves in the sacristy, and scatter them in the corners. A child needs pretty things to look at, I rationalize for my own sake and for the painted saints, the only humans I trust.
From time to time, she steals a glance at the icons, but leans tightly against the wall of her niche, so as to leave it free.
At night I discover that she is riveted by the painting of the nativity in Bethlehem. She traces the ox and the donkey, then carefully places the icon on the wooden floor, and arches her back.
You should have put her in a nunnery. If only I had a womb...
7 October 1943
Day of Our Lady of the Rosary


I gave the little girl the crucifix hanging over my bed. I turned it over, flung it in the air and caught it, but she refuses to play with it. The painting of Mother and Child she relinquished at once. With great effort I managed to push a rosary in-between her fingers. I let roll the words of St Francis for her. Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury – pardon. Where there is doubt – faith. Where there is despair – hope. Where there is darkness – light. And where there is sadness – joy.
I pause. Repeat after me, little girl. If we recite these words again and again, we may come to believe in them. Together, we may struggle to believe, for alone there is no faith.
An echo returns, mocking and garbled. Though her body has started moving again, her mouth is still sealed. When it is time to sleep, she clings to the wall of the niche. As if her very presence, here or anywhere, is in doubt.
15 October 1943
Though she remains silent, she moves about in the church. Even the fringes of her garment flutter voicelessly. She has blended in, as if she has been here forever. Even when I am performing my duties in the front part of the church, I can feel her presence in the back. This morning she polished the wooden floor, and put fresh water in the flower vases. Then she dusted the large crucifix in front of the altar. She could not reach as high as His nailed hands. Maybe she was avoiding them.
When a member of the congregation is about to enter, she can tell in time, and vanishes as if the earth has swallowed her. The region is infested with informers, and I know that my habit will not guarantee my immunity. If the child is found out, I will pay with my life. And what would become of her then?
And yet, I am more afraid of life than of death.
The world around us is asleep. Not a cock crows, not a dog barks, and even the night predators have stopped preying. I place her on my mattress, but she slips back into the niche. Her eyes are burning. What does she see in the dark? If only I knew how to excise the malignant memory from within her.
Memory. The most painful member of the body. Almost as painful as the event that caused it.
How can I know the feelings of a person whose memories have been wrenched away? My mother jabbed a pin in her body. She swallowed a concoction of gunpowder, vodka and ashes, to rid her body of me. And who was my father?
I jump off my mattress and rush outside to vomit.
1 November 1943
All Saints’ Day


I toss and turn. Every part of my body is aching for sleep, but as soon as I dare shut my eyes, I am overcome by memories of the future, of events that are liable to happen any moment. The murderers will break into the church. They will kick in the door, shatter the holy vessels and drown her in the baptismal font. “Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.” I leap up, thrust my kneecaps onto the wooden floor, and frantically repeat the words of St Paul in his epistle to the Corinthians. What else do I have but the prayers I have recited my whole life? For lack of anything better, I latch onto them, trying to persuade myself that they were written by humans like myself – pathetic creatures surrendering their spirit and their body to despair.
2 November 1943
All Souls’ Day


When will she speak? I am afraid she will never make a sound. That is why I cannot give up, but the healing memories do not come easily, and I am forced to pursue them in every recess of myself. My grandmother did not buy me toys. She could not afford them. To console me she would say: Whoever laughs too much will cry later on. I would pull the cushion over my head to dispel the vague suspicion I could not help feeling. There will be nobody there with me in moments of anguish. At the time, I was not able to give it a name. Even at the seminary, I would secretly hold on to the blanket, pretending to be clinging to the chair of the Holy Mother. I buried my face in the wall, so they would not hear me weeping. I would do anything for you, Mother, if only you would allow me to be close to you. I am so frightened, but not allowed to admit it. I want to go home.
Now all the memories come back to haunt me. Tonight is the night when the dead return to earth, and visit their former homes. As for me, if I were to return to my childhood village, perhaps my grandmother would appear again.
The ghost of my mother too.
The beggars have gathered in two rows in front of the church, and all of the villagers have given alms. The women feed them small loaves of bread.
At midnight a great light will shine in the church. And I am waiting for the dead souls to kneel in prayer before the altar. I wait in vain. This church they will not visit. Every door and window in the village has been opened to receive them. From every direction there are cries of “Holy sainted ancestors, we beg you to fly to us and eat and drink whatever the Lord has granted us.”
Hospitality for the dead, while the living have the door slammed in their faces.
The little girl listened. I could almost hear her voice. How it is still caged inside her.
10 November 1943
For the past few nights she’s been taking apart the wooden floorboards and digging in the dirt underneath. And although I cannot fathom why she does it, I feel a strange sense of relief. Maybe she’s looking for something.
I’ve long since stopped asking You for omens, and I grope for them myself.
I look at the child moving a fistful of earth, packing it between her fingers. As a child, I used to play with mud too. My grandmother would scold me: Don’t get dirty, Stanislaw. God sees you everywhere.
The little girl kneads the earth, shaping it like clay. She tears off a piece of the bread I gave her, and stuffs it inside. The earth crumbles, and she packs it again. Her little hands are swallowed in the clump of earth. What does she create? Be careful, Stanislaw, God is in the mud too. He is following you, whatever you do. Now, not on the Last Judgment Day.
Suddenly something rises to the top. She leans over, and still does not utter a sound. Moves her lips closer to the earth. Dips her face in it, rubbing it over her bristling scalp. I am overwhelmed, but I do not know with what. Perhaps it is the sin that blinds me.
What is the thing that flickers in the vestiges of her memory? Even if I had been a witness to Creation itself, I would not have understood it.
Why did you entrust this child to an ignoramus?
11 November 1943
St Martin’s Day


Whatever few stories I still recall were told to me by my grandmother. On winter nights, she would sit in her rocking chair, patching clothes or spinning yarn and talking about the lives of the saints. I told the little girl, if St Martin comes riding on his white horse, it will be an omen that we too will be covered by snow.
She cringed in the niche that she dug in my quarters, and covered her hair with dirt. I barely managed to pull her out of there so she could breathe.
In church, I gave my sermon. Today we begin preparing for Christmas. Time for soul-searching and for readying ourselves for the Second Coming.
The farmer’s wife stiffens. The Savior has already come. Here is the proof. The Jews are all dead. And you, Father Stanislaw, have you kept your promise yet?
1 December 1943
I have dismantled all of the floorboards in my quarters, and in the niche.
I grovel in the dirt. I dig in myself. At night I rest beside her in the niche, until finally we both fall asleep. This diary too is being written in the dirt, tattered and stained. Sometimes I gnaw at the pages with my teeth. In the dark, on my stomach. The dirt works its way under my skin, tingling beneath my habit. I’ve grown accustomed to the taste. It’s part of me now. I breathe in the dirt, and do not choke.
The two of us wallow in it, and I believe she is finally beginning to recover.
Ave Maria of the dust-dwellers. Blessed is the fruit of Thy dust. Amen.
4 December 1943
Whatever it takes to erase her memory, I’ll do.
I get down on all fours.
I crawl.
I wag a tail.
I burrow.
When she taps her fingers, I thrash with my claws. I leap up.
When she motions me to move back, I keep my distance.
Who am I?
In whose image am I being created now?
It is not You but I who must search the depths.
I am no longer in need of comforting memories from some buried past. Like the bed of nasturtiums I planted in the garden years ago, we are growing new memories now. Our own making.
6 December 1943
St Nicholas’ Day


It is getting cold. I heat the stove with logs I gathered in the forest before nightfall. When I return, I see her little face, pressed against the glass with its frosty floral sheath. I told her, the last deed of the Almighty was to send flowers to earth. But since he created too many of them, some had to go. The Holy Mother took pity on them and said, I will give the leftover flowers to the humans. They will stick to the windows on cold days, and give people a touch of happiness.
I can read the question in the little girl’s eyes.
Father, who art in Heaven, was I ever happy? Every night I talk to her and to You. I’ve grown used to the sound of my own voice. The howling of wolves reaches us from the forest. Saint Nicholas, patron of the herds, bring the keys from Paradise, and lock the jaws of the wolf.
They play Catch the Wolf in our village. Whoever catches all of the geese is the winner. This is a game I never played.
The little girl lies quietly in her niche, as if she knows the rules of the game.
25 December 1943
Christmas Day


The church bells chime at midnight. The church is packed. I carry the holy bread over to the altar. Take this, all of you and eat it. This is My body which will be given up for you. Then I raise the wine glass. Take this, all of you and drink from it: this is the cup of My blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.
After the festive mass, the members of the congregation file past me and shake my hand. That was a fine sermon, Father Stanislaw. People from the neighboring villages came to listen too. But who will deliver the true sermon? Even the Holy See in Rome is keeping silent. And who will cry out in Your name that our churches must offer refuge?
If only I could shake the congregants in their pews as they offer their devout supplication. If only I could tell them: the Jews are part of the body of mankind. This part cannot be severed. That is the pit that all of us came from. Remember how you invite anyone who is hungry to join you in your holiday meal, and you even say: A guest in our home is God in our home. After the meal you will pull the bundles of straw out from under the tablecloth, a symbolic wish for longevity. If only they knew what I want to wish them, protected by my sacred vestments. Yes, they look up to me and they trust in me, but in fact I am their hostage.
I want to scream: Look at those who march along the Via Dolorosa. See fathers and mothers and children. They beg for a measure of compassion, and you, who call yourselves true Christians, turn your backs on them. Of all these admonitions, not a word passed my lips.
The farmer and his wife were sitting in the front pew, with their son by their side. Had I denounced them in public, the little girl’s fate would have been sealed. All day long she was at it, spreading fresh branches of spruce in the furthermost corners. I asked her to save her strength, but she ignored me. She sat there facing the crack in the wall, waiting for the Star of Bethlehem. During the Christmas mass, she hid in her niche. I hung the Christmas tree upside down from the ceiling, but I could not muster the strength of spirit to decorate it.
Perhaps because she was so tired, she agreed for the first time to sleep on my mattress. Her curls which have started to grow back rested on my pillow. Under the hairline, I could see the scars. Her lips moved. I recognized the Latin slipping out.
The clearing in the forest facing me is covered with snow. The frost has glazed the puddles, and everything is shiny as a mirror. Even the animals can open their mouths and speak tonight, but only those who are without sin can understand. People talk about a farmer who eavesdropped on the conversation of a pair of his oxen and heard them speak of his impending death. Tonight, even the bells in the frozen riverbeds are groaning. I want to groan along with them, but I cannot. The stars over the fields are bright. Their light I use to write these entries.
The beauty of the tall cypresses and of the untrodden snow is so painful. If the world were to show its ugliness now, our bells would sound a warning. But You have covered Your world in a sheath of beauty, to keep us immersed in utter ignorance. As for me, I have chosen to confine myself to the protected side of this covering, and to turn my back on the hidden Tohu and Bohu that are beyond my grasp.
I do not question Your existence, Father. You exist, as I do. I was created in Your image – cowardly, selfish and weak. The dead light of the stars bears witness.
Dawn is here, and the pale light puts a new coat of paint on the heavens. All this beauty. The letters under my hand are becoming clearer. I hear a voice. Or do I? Maybe I’m suffering from delusions, brought on by fatigue or madness.
Stash.
I fall to the ground at the little girl’s feet.
Stash.
This single word embraces the tip of a comforting memory.
Maybe You do eavesdrop, after all.
Be that as it may, I shall be her Stash.
26 December 1943
St Stephen’s Day


All day long, they sing hymns of childbirth. Our farmers throw seeds at one another, auguring a fine crop. When I sprinkle the holy waters, the farmer’s son throws fistfuls of barley and oats at me, and shouts: Today is my birthday, you know!
Today slave and master are equal and all men are free. That is what I told the little girl.
Stash, she utters, no longer mute. Her entire vocabulary is one word.
Stash.
I carry this word. My only prayer.
28 December 1943
Holy Innocents’ Day


This morning, in the middle of mass, the soldiers arrived. A young officer broke away from the group, crossed himself quickly, but did not kneel. He was wearing a long grey coat which covered the tops of his boots, and a grey helmet. He pointed his rifle at my chest. A calm overtook me. If she has been sentenced to die, at least she will not die alone.
They marched between the pews, crawled underneath, inspected the icons and the holy vessels. They fingered the large crucifix from side to side and from top to bottom, as if someone was hiding there. I wrapped my arms around the altar under which she was hiding, knowing she would not make a sound. Her gift for silence is perfect. I walked the Germans to the door, and slowly closed it behind me. They walked away. The young officer stalled for a moment, then crossed himself.
I heaved a sigh of relief. At the nearby cemetery I spotted the farmer’s son hunkering down between the tombstones. When he saw me he made a Sieg Heil salute, then left.
31 December 1943
St Sylvester’s Day


It’s cold in the dirt tonight. Her teeth are chattering. I rake up mounds of earth to cover us both, and tell her another story I heard from my grandmother. When the Holy Mother was fleeing to Egypt with Baby Christ, for fear of Herod’s soldiers, she came across a farmer sowing his wheat. She took a seed sack from him, sowed his field with her own hands, and promised him: You will harvest tomorrow. The following morning, when the farmer harvested his miraculous crop, soldiers came by and questioned him about the mother and child. The farmer replied: Yes, I saw them, but that was many days ago, when I was sowing my field. The soldiers gave up their pursuit, and left – and the child was saved. For the time being.
The ending I do not tell her, for I’m sure she knows.
1 January 1944
Stash.
She brings her dirt-soiled hand closer, and the word comes out, riding on a clear voice. Only when her small finger touches my cheek do I realize that I am crying. She leans over me, perhaps in fear, or taken aback. I take her finger and trace the muddy line formed by the tears on my cheek, praying that some day I will be able to wipe her own tears away.
If she cries, perhaps a day will come when she will be able to laugh too.
6 January 1944
Epiphany


Tell me more, Stash.
I whisper: That day, three kings of the East came to Bethlehem, to bow to the King born to the Jews.
She hurls a fistful of dirt at me, enraged.
Not the Jews. You’re lying, Stash.
It is believed that God himself walks the earth during this time of year – the days between the birth of Christ and His baptism – keenly watching us.
I don’t believe it – because if You saw what I see, You would demolish the world. But maybe You too are in their hands.
2 February 1944
Candlemas Day


Holy Mother, Our Lady of the Candles, you know best what it means to be impure, cast out from all the rest. For forty days after the birth you were forbidden to speak to anyone, even to those who are most precious to you. After all, if a woman dies before the purification ceremony, she changes into a Mamuna, a witch who snatches babies and replaces them with the warped fruit of her own womb.
The farmers brought their candles to the church, for me to say a blessing. Then they set out in a procession towards their homes, carrying the flames and shielding them from the wind, since a flame that goes out is a bad omen. Tonight they will spread the sacred light throughout their homesteads. They will place the candle on the wall over the bed and will guard it for an entire year. It will be placed in the hands of the dying, to ease the agony of passing from this world.
Stash.
Only when the little girl speaks do I feel alive.
5 February 1944
Today I read to her from the Old Testament. I crawl along, hunching my back, waving a tail like a rat and recording the letters in the dirt to teach her to read and write. In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth. She imitates me. Suddenly, she stops, her legs in mid-air.
Tell me a different story.
She shakes her curls. I want to stroke them, but do not dare.
I mustn’t evoke any memory of the Stefan.
There is no other story. That is how it all began. In the beginning, our Father created...
She cuts me short.
Stash, promise me He isn’t a Jew.
I reply: He is what He is, and He has no name.
16 February 1944
Ash Wednesday


On the day marking the commencement of Lent, I sprinkle ashes on the heads of the congregants, and make the sign of a cross on their brows. My body performs the ritual perfectly, but my spirit wanders. Who is this strange man carrying out his duties so cordially? They know nothing of my true nature.
My inner self was aflame at the thought that they were branding their fellow humans. Abstaining from eating meat, yet devouring human flesh.
For a moment I imagined You, Father, covering Your body in the dirt.
When I turn the pages of my diary, I discover the passage of time outside, so different from the clock that the little girl and I share. With all the power that I possess, I will try to drive the timepiece of her memory off course.
22 February 1944
Day of St Peter’s Chair


What is a miracle? she asks.
Something unusual, that never happened before.
Who causes miracles?
God.
And who is God?
Our Father.
And where is He?
In Heaven.
Heaven – is that above us or below us?
I don’t know.
When does He make the miracle?
When He decides to intervene.
And if we become Father and Mother ourselves, will we be able to intervene?
I say nothing.
23 February 1944
And where are His father and mother?
I dig in.
You don’t know anything, Stash.
She is so disillusioned. She pushes me into the niche. I lie there. My ears are always attuned to echoes, so I will be able to detect the enemy.
29 February 1944
I hop.
I sniff.
My whiskers twitch.
My ears are upright.
I beat my hairless tail against the walls.
I am her human rat.
I pad our den with leaves – a warm cradle for our young. My teeth keep growing, which is why I must keep gnawing.
All this time I go on looking for escape routes, because our very lives depend on them.
7 March 1944
St Thomas Aquinas’ Day


When he was the age of the little girl, Thomas Aquinas asked his teacher: What is God? He too had been forcibly separated from his mother, and had been taken captive.
So what? Is this a way of telling me that there is nothing new under the sun?
19 March 1944
St Joseph’s Day


If those are the questions that children ask, what do their parents reply? I don’t know what the carpenter Joseph told the little boy that he adopted in Nazareth, when the child asked the meaning of a nasty word whispered behind his back. Maybe the boy shed his tears in secret. There is nothing in the Evangelists about the child’s hurt.
All winter she asked. Plainly, matter-of-factly. Where do we come from? What was here before us? What will there be here after we’re gone? And I did not have the answers.
We climb up the stairs to the belfry. I want to show her the world. First, she walled herself in. I devised ways of luring her out of the niche. As we climb up, her body starts to tremble. I recognize her fear of heights immediately. She is dizzy, and her body reaches out for something to lean on. When I hold out my arms, she turns her back and starts running down the stairs. I swear, Stash will not let you fall, child.
She walks by my side, apprehensive. Are we there yet? she asks. When will we get there?
From behind the belfry wall she watches children skating on the icy lake. A bevy of spots circling on the glaring white surface. We cannot see their faces, but I recognize them anyway. That’s the blacksmith’s son, and that’s the innkeeper’s daughter. I baptized all of them. A child needs the company of other children, which is why I try to be a child to her as well.
The parents of the children in the village where I grew up forbade their children to include me in their games. They pointed at me, and whispered. For many years, I had no idea what they were saying.
Bastard. A boy with no name. Now the dagger of memory returns, stabbing me.
“Mother hen cooked some porridge. She fed this one. And this one. But she pulled this one’s head off. And fru-fru-flew away...” How can I remember what nobody ever told me? I was the shameful evidence of my mother’s corporeal sin.
Although the little girl is fascinated with the sight of the children skating, she wants to go back down. And I did not tell her that there are places that one should avoid because the ice is too thin.
25 March 1944
Day of Annunciation of the Lord


This day will be called The Day of Our Lady of the Brook, because the ice is beginning to crack. The Holy Mother will open up the covering of the earth, and will breathe life back into all those who sleep below.
Sleeping below?
Whenever I think that I’ve succeeded in prodding her onto the road to recovery, suddenly the malignant memory slashes through and pushes her all the way back.
How will I find a message of hope to convey to this child?
27 March 1944
Nothing will make them abandon their rituals. This year, like every other, they set out for the carnival, carrying likenesses of the horse and the goat and the rooster, and with them the effigy of Marzanna, Goddess of Death. Generations of Christian faith have not succeeded in eradicating that ancient memory. I often think that my mission was futile from the very start. In the evening, men and women will gather at the inn for an auction of matings. Years ago, my father chose an innocent girl, and took her to the haystack, where he inspected her teeth and her nose and later her other parts too. I do not know whether upon returning to the inn they exchanged coins and colored Easter eggs, as evidence that the transaction had been finalized, nor at what point she was banished in disgrace, leaving me in the care of her mother. The stories that a child seeks are precisely the ones not intended for his ears.
I will not let You hurt this child, Father. If I cannot erase the evil deeds from her memory, I can at least rid her of the nasty names.
Even while she seems to be healing, I am in a constant state of despair.
2 April 1944
Palm Sunday – a week before Easter


The children of Jerusalem greeted even the donkey of Christ by spreading out their coats at the gate to the city. Commotion in the church. Today the farmers come and go, willow branches in their hands, and I say the blessing. They were picked in the first week of Lent and left to soak so that their buds may open on this very day. St Jerzy opens even the jaws of the frogs with his keys, as I explained to the little girl who was frightened by the croaking.
Flogging the congregants. For them, it is a way of inducing health and prosperity. The women will beat the members of their family with gooseberry twigs until they cry in memory of the crown of thorns. I flog them till they bleed. Despair has its rewards, Father. It gives me strength.
At the pig-slaughtering ceremony, the men place the animal on a special platform. They turn the suckling pig on its back, and grab it by the legs. The farmer gave me the honor of holding the tail of the floundering animal as he stabbed a sharp knife in its throat. The farmer’s wife presided over the women who were draining the blood into a bowl, to be used in the preparation of sausages and salty meat delicacies. In the evening, they sent me pig’s liver mixed with buckwheat. I buried it in the bed of nasturtiums. The little girl’s eyes looked longingly, but I was determined.
We will have no part of this forbidden meat.
3 April 1944
Monday before Easter


Late at night they came banging on the church doors. Instantly, the little girl hid in her dugout and was silent. She knows how to keep her very breath from making a sound. In haste, I put on my habit. I could barely button it. I kept thinking that someone – whoever it may be – has found out and informed. But I discovered that I was being summoned to perform extreme unction.
I retraced my steps. This was the first time I had no choice but to leave her alone at night. I promised her: Stash will return. I let my tail swoosh loosely along the ground, but she turned her back.
At the dying man’s bedside I was asked why my habit was covered in dirt. The farmer’s son was there in the doorway too. Murderers can be recognized by their lack of a shadow, but behind Your back a new breed has evolved, with shadows larger than their bodies.
4 April 1944
Tuesday before Easter


Inside the coffin lies the oldest man in our village, and beside him is the comb he used on his hair, and the needle used for sewing his shrouds, as well as a handful of coins – entrance fee into the next world.
The mourners are delighted, since these are the most auspicious days for dying. All of the graves are wide open, and the soil will not weigh down on the dead person. That was one lucky man, that Antek, they tell each other. Dying in the week that commemorates the dead – that’s no trifling matter.
People here tell the story of a farmer who disobeyed the rule about refraining from all work during this Holy Week, and was swallowed up by the earth, plow and all. Whenever a carriage enters the cemetery, the mourners riding in it cross themselves, because they imagine that the dead man’s shouts for help are rising from under the wagon wheels.
Three times I sprinkled dirt on the coffin and extended my wishes to the dead man. After leaving the cemetery, the mourners did not look back. I refused to attend the wake. I remained on my own by the fresh grave, thinking about death, in the form of a tall woman draped in white. Once a farmer locked her in a tobacco box for seven years, until the earth complained that it could no longer bear the weight of the humans, and the farmer was forced to release her. These are stories I never tell the little girl.
Through the crack in the wall, she followed the coffin adorned with flowers, watching as it was lowered ever so slowly.
Where are the dead, Stash?
I don’t know.
She rummaged in the dirt, pulled out a piece of charcoal, and drew a line on the wall.
Who knows?
I don’t know.
If they are below, then why didn’t I see them?
I would like to console her by saying that her father and mother still exist too, somewhere, but I must obscure them in her memory to keep her from being engulfed by her grief over their loss. And as I make my notes, I realize that perhaps it is the sin of despair that causes me to pillage her parents’ memory in such a way, because I am competing with them for her love.
This love I want to keep to myself.
Do not forgive me, Father. I am not worthy.
7 April 1944
Good Friday


They brought their food to church in baskets. Then I went from house to house, from table to table, bestowing my blessings.
The more I become Stash, the emptier her memory becomes, and the fuller my own. What was wrought upon her in the dark is branded into me. I carry the burn for her now.
I force myself to refrain from vomiting in her presence.
9 April 1944
Easter


Before the Resurrection Mass, the men fired in the air as a sign of rejoicing. I covered the little girl’s ears.
At dawn, right after the service, they burst through the gate, led by the farmer’s son who pushed all the others out of the way. After all, the first one to reach home will harvest his crop before all the others.
The little girl and I sit on the ground eating Easter eggs. The shells we will hang from my pear tree as a symbol of fertility.
The customs are ingrained in me, Little Girl. If I deviate from them, I will be endangering your life. If only I knew how to figure out the dates of the Jewish holidays. My memory is too sparse, and I have nobody to ask. There are rumors ... unthinkable. The mind cannot grasp such horror.
Let Easter be Passover, Little Girl.
Let Pentecost be the Jewish Feast of Harvest.
Let the Sunday be the Sabbath.
1 May 1944
The farmer’s wife came to church this morning. People in the village gossip about the couple’s new wealth. They’ve bought another plot, and now their land extends all the way to the forest.
With a proud stride she marched right up to the altar, and announced that she had found a worthy mate for her son. Having searched in vain in our own village, she had turned to another nearby, and discovered a bride who was in a class befitting their own newly acquired status. She had sent her son to lay soft birch branches on the threshold of the girl’s house, a symbol of his intentions. The farmer’s wife asked me to schedule the ceremony.
How can I pronounce the wedding vows for this man, whose very name is too profane for me to utter.
What he did to the little girl in the dark.
The farmer and his wife had been childless for many years. For the sake of procreation, they had fasted and had given generous offerings and other gifts. Eventually they made a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, who answered their prayers. There isn’t a soul in the village who does not remember the baptism of this son.
If only I could add to the Scriptures “a seed for a seed”. How can you ask me to bless him and his wife-to-be? May his children be damned, and cursed be his name.
The farmers are celebrating outside. They have tied scented reeds and ash branches to their hair, and have launched a procession, carrying an effigy of the Princess of May, in green clothing.
Come out to us, Father Stanislaw. The fragrance of spring is in the air. Everything has been created anew. Their spring is my eternal winter. Do not forgive me, Father. I am beyond hope.
I hide between the branches and relieve myself.
3 May 1944
Feast of the Virgin Mary


The first day of sowing. The farmers are out in their Sunday best. They waited for me to bless their seeds before setting out towards the fields, mimicking the movements of my hand as it sprinkles the Holy Water.
Today I baptized the youngest son of Zbyszek the blacksmith. He was actually born on Sunday, but he couldn’t be baptized on a Sunday, or else he would spend his whole life seeing death coming to snatch its victims.
On their way out, the congregants chanted: “My dear kinsmen, we are back from Church. We took a little Jew. We bring back an angel.”
What is the matter with you, Father Stanislaw? Come celebrate with us. We have not had such joyous tidings since the angel Gabriel delivered the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. With my very own eyes I saw the Jews being taken in freight cars to their deaths. A great celebration in the heavens above.
Zosha the innkeeper calls Zbyszek the blacksmith a rumormonger, and says he drank too much.
I return to the empty church, and fall on my knees.
What do you see, Stash? What do people see if they’ve been blind since birth?
Christ and the Mother Mary divested of their clothing, huddling with the rest of the group, waiting in silence for their turn. First on death row.
On the ground I inscribe the words: King and Queen of the Jews. In the morning, the little girl will erase it all as she hops about.
4 June 1944
Pentecost is over, and the Feast of the Holy Trinity has arrived. The shorter the nights, the more apprehensive she becomes. It seems that only in the dark does she feel safe. I tell her that the light-giving heavenly bodies were created on the fourth day. Here is the light of the stars, Little Girl. It has come a long way, and now it is reaching us...
She covers her eyes.
If I were in Your place, Father, I would turn off all the stars for her sake.
8 June 1944
Corpus Christi


We roll on the ground, spreading dirt around us. She pulls at my tail.
Stash, you’re the best rat in the world.
It’s my body that is being jostled. My guts are in a knot. My mouth opens wide.
Alarmed, she quickly retreats into the niche.
What was that sound you made, Stash?
I am laughing, Child.
What does laughing mean? she asks.
Then she says: Teach me, please.
24 June 1944
St John the Baptist’s Day


It is the height of summer. The earth becomes transparent and shows up the riches in its depths, glowing with celestial fire. That is what my grandmother told me. I never dared to ask where my mother was.
The old woman also told me about a rare flower that grows somewhere in the mountains, protected by evil spirits. Anyone who succeeds in picking it will gain happiness. I sprayed holy water on the horns of the goats, festooned with wreaths of alfalfa, and on the geese with garlands of daisies round their necks.
Little Girl, even the sun is going to dip in the river today. It capers through the heavens in honor of St John. The village girls dance and sing: “Play with us, for we are your sunshine.” As the sun sets, they quickly gather camomile for medicinal uses.
There are birch branches hanging in every cowshed tonight, to ward off the witches who gather on bald mountains and plot to steal the cows’ milk.
Everything that I see I tell the little girl. Out there is the world, but we are here.
25 June 1944
Just as You are cautious about what You reveal to us, so too I must be careful not to disrupt her memory for the future. Old people are required to be prudent in what they say. After all, it is their little stories that shape the generation to come.
Memory, I tell myself, is the story’s only legitimate offspring. The story’s prodigal son.
I am quick to commit to paper everything that surfaces as I scour my memory, to curb any temptation that I might have to pass it on. One woman had her son taken by a witch, who replaced him with a different baby. The woman put the flawed infant on the doorstep and started beating him with all her might with a stick. The child’s crying was carried across the bald mountains, bringing his mother the witch, who called out: “Give me mine, and I will return yours!” There’s a thought for You, Father. Even witches love their children.
I burst out laughing.
The little girl tries to imitate me. Her body contracts. She rocks this way and that, but all she produces is a gurgle, a kind of chirping sound.
Why can’t I do it, Stash?
What am I doing wrong, Stash?
Tell me, Stash.
You promised, Stash.
I take her by the hand. I tell her that it does not say anywhere that God created laughter. Laughter is created by magic, without the Creator having any part of it.
And God saw that it was good, and left the flawed world as it was, because whenever we laugh we remind Him of our presence below and repair the damage that He Himself wrought.
Without our laughter, God Himself would be no more.
7 July 1944
I am proud of her. My little pupil is wise and perceptive. Today we finished reading the Old Testament. Before she falls asleep I remind her of her Matriarchs, Eve and Sarah, Rachel and Leah, Rebecca and Dina, Miriam and Deborah, Yael and Judith, Ruth and Esther, and Michal and Mary. Inscribed over my grandmother’s grave in a distant village are the words: “You have been a good mother to me.”
The child recites the names and asks: How do you know they all actually existed?
I say: We roll out our memory, the way you roll those beads between your fingers.
And what if the string tears? she asks.
Sleep well now, Daughter of all Mothers. Some day you too will be...
On my own tombstone it will say: And what kind of a son were you?
12 July 1944
St Veronica’s Day


On the sixth station of His final journey, a woman named Veronica came out of her house. It was very warm in Jerusalem that day, and Christ was perspiring profusely. Veronica wiped his brow with her handkerchief, and an imprint of His face remained on the cloth. I do not know where the handkerchief is. In vessels of precious gold in churches all over Europe they keep pieces of cloth bearing the imprint of His solemn face, but I think that if they ever discover the real handkerchief we will see the Son laughing.
Child, when you practise laughter, the Father struggles too, with all his might, to laugh with you.
26 July 1944
Day of Sts Joachim and Anne


Sometimes I forget who bore me. There is what little I know, and there is all that I will never know. The bed of dust is our schoolroom. With what little knowledge I have, I mark the boundaries of the world. I pour water in the indentations which serve as oceans, rake up mounds to serve as ridges, carve out valleys and expose deserts. Look, Child, deep inside there hides a lost continent.
She listens, and is careful not to tread.
I stick crucifixes in the ground. We have brothers living there, with slanted eyes, and here there are brothers whose skin is dark as coal. At once she touches herself in astonishment.
Children, so I discover, demand absolute truths. I was once like this child, but now I am riddled with doubts. One thing she refrains from asking: where are her own brothers.
Every time I use the word Jew, she is horrified.
I tell her, Joachim and Anna, father and mother of Mary, were Jews. She covers her ears with dirt to keep from hearing.
After the lessons, I find her squatting in the niche, drawing on the walls with her piece of charcoal. When I try to peek, she hides it with her body.
Stash, she says, promise me something.
I am silent. Of all my promises, especially my promises to You, Father, none have been kept.
Stash, swear to me that you will never ever die.
I am so afraid she mistakes my embrace for a promise.
1 August 1944
Blessed is the child who has heard the laughter of a rat. Somewhere in the heart of the light that leads to the traces of the life that was, this memory too lives on. To expect laughter in pitch darkness is complete madness. But the rat continues to gape.
And God saw that laughter was good, and left the flawed world as it was.
Teach Him to laugh, Little Girl, and He will be forever grateful.
2 August 1944
The candle near my head is burning. The wind enters through a crack; the flame flickers and dies. Shadows follow the child, and I cannot make out her face. I do not remove my habit, and I jab my claws into the flesh underneath the garment. The body is a receptacle of sins – so I preached in my sermons. If only I could turn into a spirit too.
I am being depleted onto paper.
Why do we not come into the world equipped with a bundle of ready-made memories, a bequest that would nail a lesson into us?
What a monumental concatenation of malignant memories could be avoided if only man could contain the torments of his precursors, imprinted into him like an innate warning system.
But had the little girl known in advance what was waiting for her, wouldn’t she have refused to be born?
Only after she falls asleep do I light the candle. Every night I study her lips, to see whether a trace of a smile has begun to grow there.
3 August 1944
But nevertheless, I am at peace.
I who never thought I would be cradling a child or leading her to the serenity of peaceful dreams, am having a revelation. Her hand grasps mine, and I feel the light shine within me. She mumbles something in her sleep. Is it a comforting dream, or a nightmare? I hold my ear closer, prepared to slash through the horror and to draw her back to me.
Mama.
And again, Mama.
Do not forgive me, Father. For if I am the mother in her dream, then I am the happiest creature on earth. Despite all of Your efforts, You have not succeeded in keeping me from having this experience of parenthood. I thank You, Father. And I call out Your name with complete devotion.
10 August 1944
St Lawrence’s Day


In the early morning hours, the planes began circling overhead. The bombs fell so close that the blast caused the ground and the walls of the church to shake. The trees at the edge of the forest made a mighty roar as they fell. We huddled in the niche; the little girl shut herself in there at once. The smell of fires and smoke filtered through.
I want to live. Only now do I realize how desperately.
Today the farmers were supposed to begin the first harvest. Instead of sheaves they are harvesting death. Sinful priest that I am – I gloat over the dead who did not have a chance to receive extreme unction.
We lie there until nightfall, and I try to distract her. All day long I have been anticipating bitter sobs, but her tears are sealed in.
When the ground settles, I discover a charcoal drawing of the Last Judgment on the wall of the niche. She has painted it in the dark, like those ancient cave people. In her drawing, the hand of God reaches under the altar, tipping the scales in full view of the archangel Gabriel. Above them is the Holy Mother on her throne, holding a rat in her lap.
11 August 1944
After they buried their dead and cleared the rubble, the farmers hurried to church. Help us, Father Stanislaw, give us consolation. That is your duty.
Another sermon that I never delivered.
15 August 1944
Assumption of the Blessed


Virgin Mary Morning


The crop has turned golden. It sways in the wind at night, as if by a will of its own. As dawn breaks, a woman sets out into the field with her baby, rocking him continuously. Then she exposes her breast. The harvester has covered one plot of land already, and is now approaching the next. As the two of them come closer, they are careful not to tread on the strips of grass delimiting the plots, because those harbor evil spirits.
A world without sinners.
A world without Jews.
Their laughter cuts through the blades of grass. The harvester leans down towards the woman. She places her baby on the ground beside her, and drops into the wave of gold. A cow lashes it tail over their heads. They abandon themselves to their lust, so much so that they do not notice the baby’s crying.
Night-time
The farmers placed the first crop of the harvest inside the church and I blessed it, walking along the pews with the censer in my hand. They breathe it in, and I yearn for my despair to cling to them.
The emptier I become, the fuller my diary is. If ever I were to deliver all those sermons, would I be able to make any difference? I compose them only to soothe my conscience.
The conscience. An organ that cannot be excised.
And there is no prosthetic conscience either.
Maybe these sermons will be delivered by someone else some day. Worthier than I am.
18 August 1944
All week long the village women prepared the enormous wedding cake. The farmer’s wife invited the entire complement of German officers to the celebration. With their very own hands they kneaded bread without salt, omen of a sweet married life together. At the top of the cake they hung golden biscuits in the shape of the sun and the moon.
I make sure all the openings of the church are sealed shut, to keep the smell from entering.
20 August 1944
I’ve performed my duties. My mouth uttered the “Till death do you part”.
I am incapable of adding a thing.
28 August 1944
The sound of thunder is heard in the distance.
The little girl and I are waiting.
Will they arrive?
When will they come?
There is a fleeting look of yearning on her face. Or maybe it’s her fear of the future. I don’t dare think about it. Perhaps she does not want them to keep their promise.
What have I done?
1 September 1944
It seems she is sleeping peacefully. How hard I fought to attain this luxury for her. Suddenly her little body convulses and her pain bursts out.
I am tormented for her. Remembering and reminding – this is the only commandment that still has any meaning, and yet I have been doing everything in my power to erase her memory. For her, forgetting is healing, but for the world, forgetting is the very disease itself.
If I succeed in my efforts of obliteration, perhaps I can place the little girl back on course towards a normal life. But if everything is erased, where will the memory come from? If she forgets, who will remember for her?
All of us are sentenced to march along the Via Dolorosa, but each of us in turn tries to break away from the procession. The most suitable position is that of a bystander, looking from the side of the road on that man kneeling alone under his load. All of us, after all, heave a sigh of relief, whether in our hearts or out loud, when we discover that the cross is being borne on someone else’s back, rather than on our own.
14 September 1944
Day of Triumph of the Holy Cross


On this date, in AD 326, the true cross was discovered, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was consecrated in the City of the Jews.
Perhaps I have been chosen as the last witness of their existence, because if all memory of them has been lost, I have a sacred mission: at all costs I must preserve not only the tangible existence of the little girl, but her spiritual existence as well.
The last Jewish child.
And as I write those words, I am overcome with nausea, as if I had written a name-tag over the reliquary. If all of my efforts are aimed at preserving her as a mere relic, then I am no different from those who are trying to annihilate them. Even they leave an isolated exemplar on display, protected in a precious vessel behind glass. It would be their way of signaling their triumph, and making certain that it lives on.
15 September 1944
Day of Our Lady of Sorrows


She has been with me for a year now. Let this be your birthday, I told her. The date on which a person arrives in this world is a cause for celebration for those who cherish him. I place a candle upright in the dust and ask her to put it out. She plunges her hand right into the flame, puts it out, and asks: how old am I?
My grandmother never told me when I was born. I suspect I came into the world on St Stanislaw’s Day. Perhaps the old woman did not want to hurt me, or maybe she wanted to drive out the anguish I had caused her daughter. In the villages they call a woman who is with child “a woman with hope”, but my mother was “a woman with despair” – a hereditary sin.
Disappointed, the little girl overturns the candle. Some children are old people, and some old people are children, and maybe they are a mixture of both. Had I not been prevented from bearing children, I might have been able to tell them apart.
I open the Scriptures. She reads the Psalm, and I listen to her clear voice. “Yea, the darkness shall cover me; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.”
A king wrote those words, Child. His name was David and he was a wonderful musician. On gloomy nights he would sing to his predecessor King Saul to drive out his despair, but in the end he was defeated by it.
“I was wrought in secret.”
The little girl is struggling with the words, and I do not bother to correct her. I tell her: One day you will travel to a land both far and near. There is a city there, a real city and not a heavenly one. A place of dubious beauty, but it is yours.
And some day, when you visit the mountain where the Holy Mother sank into eternal slumber, walk down the steps to the crypt and place a small stone there. Direct it towards the light, and it will swallow the memory and set out on the long journey from your past to my future.
I am the bearer of memory, placing my own memory at your disposal because you will not be able to carry the cross by yourself. I am your remembearer.
“We were wrought in secret.”
A Psalm to the children of David.
14 October 1944
The echoes of the shooting are very near. I spot some movement in the bushes at the edge of the forest. The wind carries the thundering of cannons. At twilight the Red Army tanks enter the town square. The villagers grovel before the soldiers, offering up vodka and pork sausage. The farmer’s son is riding on the first tank, and the soldiers are patting him on the back and filling his pockets with cigarettes. In the evening I hear that there is a Jewish officer among them. All day long he went from house to house asking whether there are any Jews among us. Even when people laughed in his face – they’re all dead! – he did not give up.
I went looking for him. Entered the inn even. Into the church he refused to come, as if I were setting a trap for him. Two Hebrew words surfaced suddenly in my mind. I don’t know what memory they came from.
Shma Yisrael – Hear O Israel.
The Jewish officer followed me to the churchyard and waited at the gate. I took the little girl to him.
Don’t be afraid. This man is your brother.
She clutched the edge of my robe, started tugging at my body.
Make him leave, she cried.
The officer put his hand on the butt of the gun and turned to go.
I knelt before her. I said: I am a Jew too. Forever a Jew.
Frantically she kissed the cross around her neck. I removed my own and put it on the ground.
The officer began to speak to her in the language of the Jews, but she did not respond. He pulled a piece of candy out of his uniform. Her body froze, like on the day when I took her in. I buried my face in the dirt at her feet. I rubbed my nose against the candy, then licked it. Sweet dirt.
Hesitantly she fingered the candy, fluttering over it and withdrawing.
The Jewish officer was kneeling now, on the ground before her.
Whose child are you? What is your name? You can say now.
When he promised to look for her parents, she turned her back and ran inside.
I stood up, my robe forming a cloud. I told him: The Knights of the Holy Grail were forbidden to reveal their name or where they came from.
The officer said: The Zionists are going through the orphanages now. Go hand over the girl.
1 November 1944
All Saints’ Day


I lit all the candles in the church. The shadows are scampering in all directions, and the saints are fixing their doleful gazes on me. Perhaps I have infected them with my own despair. How many children of pits and of basements, children of cupboards, children of boxes and niches are coming out of their holes now?
Who will wait for them in a light that is no light?
I wish I were the last sinner.
I doubt it very much.
2 November 1944
All Souls’ Day


At night she begged me to baptize her. She swore to do anything to keep me from handing her over.
My Father, give me the strength to withstand the torment I am causing her. The tears I had hoped for so badly are streaming down now. She dropped at my feet, her tiny body convulsing. She hit me with her fists. A Holy Communion is what she craves, to partake of the bread and the wine. A tiny bride, draped in white, marching towards the altar. A nun she wants to be. I put my arm around her. If only I could swap places with her. Her warm tears wet me.
In the end she immersed herself in the baptismal font.
I told her: Baptism won’t do any good, because my faith does not force itself on anyone. A child is only baptized with both parents’ consent.
But they promised, she screamed.
She tore the rosary and pulled off the beads. They rolled over the church floor.
Apostasy – that is the term that Jews use for their spiritual annihilation, the officer told me, for reneging on one’s faith.
How can I explain to the child that if I cause her to renege on her people there will be no forgiveness.
The beads scatter. I crawl around and hurt myself.
I did not succeed in finding all of them.
3 November 1944
Stash!
You’re bad, Stash!
The worst, Stash!
Her cries cut through me. I will know no peace, day or night. The beast of memory will remain trapped in the lair of my body, sinking its teeth into me and biting. But I am grateful, because the bleeding wound will keep me from forgetting her.
Mother, Mother, why have you forsaken me!
Thus cry all of the nameless children.
6 December 1944
“Parents, do not mourn your children too much.” If the village elders knew of the rupture in my world they would try to comfort me with the banal saying and throw in the story about the daughter who was sentenced to carry buckets upon buckets of her mother’s tears in the world to come. And about another daughter who was said to return to earth just so she could beg her mother to stop crying, or else her grave would be flooded.
For the child’s sake I will keep silent.
My grave will remain dry. This is a promise I will keep.
25 December 1944
Christmas Day


I sit in the niche, facing the drawing of the Madonna with the rat. She has a Star of David around her neck, which I added using a twig that had been covered over with dirt. It seems as if I can feel laughter taking form in the darkness. The rat is not laughing out of joy or derision. The rat’s mouth is gaping at the horror of that which will be and that which has been. It is the laughter of those who accompany the dead, as they stare into the pit.
People around are hushing them. A disgrace. A desecration. But against their will they are rolling with laughter.
1 January 1945
I am sealing the diary because I cannot trust the memory of humans. It is not a part of Creation, because Adam was born without a memory. But memory is the only thing that was created in Your image. Both You and memory are a decaying image, hobbling along on crutches and tagging behind all the others.
Little Girl, if only I could see you before I leave this world, because there is no other.
You are flesh of my flesh.
To embrace you, one more time, body to body.
28 February 1945
Thomas Aquinas put down his pen and said: “I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears to be of little value.”
As for me, I feel that everything that is of value has already been written, and I have nothing to add.
I seal my diary, and bury it deep in the empty lair. The farmers have set traps and placed poison bait at all the openings, and the scourge has been eliminated.
For now.
But the rats will come back, sooner or later, because they follow us everywhere. The stowaways who travel along with us are not monsters, because they were created in order to survive.
They will survive when we are gone too.
Maybe history is a kind of story, a kind of poem, a collection of legends or dreams that people tell themselves at night. And these stories and legends and poems and dreams embody the truth, in a code that few will want to decipher.
Some day in the future, memory will be packaged like merchandise, turning into nothing more than a thick cloud, and the story of one little girl will be swallowed up within it.
And I cannot count on the little girl’s memory either, because I did everything within my power to erase it. I destroyed it, knowing full well that this would preserve her body and her soul for the rest of her life, which had been entrusted to me for safe keeping. But I do not absolve myself of responsibility for doing so, which is why I bury the memory in a box outside the boundaries of her body, a kind of light-giving heavenly body that will circle her and shed its reflected light – so long as she herself is not branded by it. This testimony will lie in the darkness until such time as the girl is no longer with us, and I too will have gone the way of all flesh. And perhaps I will then be in a place where I can confront You with my reckoning and demand that You pay.
And I will be closer to You than ever before.
I tear my clothing as mourners do. Bury my head in the dirt. Her novice’s outfit lies on the ground beside me. I lie in the lair breathing in the smell of her, and ask myself how much longer I can rely on such a flimsy means of regaining my memories of her.
Like a blind man, I feel the charcoal drawing with my fist and try to create laughter. This memory will live on, I promise myself, just as the laughter of the rat will always be there. It is a laughter that evolves in such utter darkness that we cannot even suspect it exists. Even if we ourselves never laugh it, we will always hope that someone else might, no matter what happens, in spite of everything.
I bury this testimony and seal it shut. Lazarus in shrouds. Some day it will rise from the dead.
The Jews did exist.
The little girl does exist.
Against all forgettings, this memory shall prevail.
I hoist everything that I am and brandish it beyond my corporeal self, beyond my spiritual self too. St Stanislaw knew that his death was near, while I know that mine has already taken place.
Maybe Your death too, Father.
I lost not only the little girl, but even her memory in days to come. And her love too. This will be my punishment.
She will despise me, and will justly sentence me to oblivion.
You and I are both in mourning now. Bereaved parents. You are my Father and I am not Your son. I am her Stash, and she is my daughter.
Daughter. This is your true name. I had a daughter and I lost her.
And perhaps some day a miracle will happen, and you will find the strength to remember me. One vibrant moment of razor-blade memory. That is my only wish. I will rise out of the Tohu and Bohu within you, I will stretch out my rat tail, and I will laugh to you.
Before the end – forgive me, my daughter, bless me, for I have sinned.