Stacy Gregg - Prince of Ponies

“I am dying,” she said.

Mira looked shocked, until the old woman added, “We are all dying, of course, but I am old, very old – I’m eighty-nine, if you can believe it, so I am closer to death than you. One day I will die from old age, and it might not be that long. And before I do, I have a story – one that I would like to see recorded so that it might be told. It is important, I think. I lived in remarkable times.”

She reached out to Mira with the plate of biscuits now, but Mira noticed how she held it back a little, as if the offer of the biscuit itself was contingent on what happened next.

“You will write for me,” the old woman said. “I will tell you my story and you will put it down in words on paper.”

“And why would I do that?” Mira asked.

“Because,” the old woman replied, “I will be making you an exchange. If you will write my story for me, then I will do something for you.”

“What?” Mira asked.

The old woman took a biscuit herself now and mashed it between her gums and followed it with a vigorous slurp of tea.

“I’ll teach you to be a horsewoman,” she said. “And if you are a good student and you mind what I say, then, yes, I’ll let you ride Emir.”

Mira couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“What do you say, then?” the old woman asked.

Mira leant forward and very slowly and deliberately she took an angel wing from the plate.

“Excellent!” The old woman smiled and Mira saw just how gappy her grin was and how much work it must have been to chew that biscuit. “We shall start tomorrow. You will come back to my house. Bring the little dog with you if you like.”

“I have school tomorrow,” Mira said.

“Well, come before school, then,” the old woman replied, as if this solution were obvious. “I wake early.”

“OK,” Mira agreed.

The old woman stood up and made it clear that, with the arrangements sorted, their afternoon tea was now over. As they walked to the door, she made a fuss of Rolf and gave him one last angel wing. “For being a good boy,” she told him, with a pat. Then she opened the door for Mira. “I will see you tomorrow, child,” she said.

Then, almost as an afterthought, she called after her: “You haven’t told me your name. What do they call you?”

“I’m Mira,” Mira replied.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Mira,” the old woman said. “My name is Zofia.”

My name is Zofia. And as I told you yesterday, I am Polish. I was born in a forest village, Janów Podlaski, to the east, miles from the excitement of the big cities of Krakow and Warsaw.

Don’t worry, Mira. I promise I will not bore you with the dull, happy days of my early childhood. I don’t want you to fall asleep when you should be writing! I will skip the first nine years of my life because nothing of importance happened, and I will begin this memoir on the date my whole life changed forever: 1 September 1939. The day when Adolf Hitler sent his Nazis to invade us and take over Poland. That was the start of the Second World War, of course, although we did not know it then. Within days of Hitler crossing our border, the French and the British declared war and after that … Hey! Mira, are you keeping up with me?

***

Mira, who had been frantically scribbling away as Zofia spoke, was suddenly shaken back to reality and the tiny living room where she was sitting once more with Zofia, Rolf, a pot of tea and a freshly baked batch of angel wings.

“Yes, I am keeping up,” Mira lied. She had such cramp in her hand from trying to write the old woman’s words and – look! They had only completed one page!

Zofia was suspicious. “It’s important that you stop me if you are being left behind, because I want to make sure you are getting all my words down correctly. This is actual history I’m telling you. After I die, who will know the truth about these events except me? This is a record of what happened and I don’t want any of it to be lost, so from here I will go slower for you …”

Rolf, who was sitting on Zofia’s lap, gave a theatrical yawn at this moment and Mira noticed how his little pink tongue unfurled and snapped back again behind his sharp teeth. Zofia chuckled at the antics of the little dog as he stood up and stretched and resettled himself, then she drank a sip from her teacup and resumed her story once more, speaking every bit as fast as before, so that Mira had to scribble frantically to keep pace.

***

Hitler was such a bully! And a liar! Do you know he said we started it? Can you believe that? He claimed that he was only invading Poland because we had attacked first, but of course it wasn’t true. The Nazis struck without warning, sending troops from the north, the south and the west. We weren’t prepared, and none of our allies came to help us. As the Germans advanced closer and closer to our village, my parents decided we had no choice but to abandon our home and flee to safety.

I remember my mother being very firm with me when we left the house. I wanted to take all my toys but she’d said that I could take only one, a brown knitted squirrel named Ernst. I carried him myself in my tapestry carpet bag, along with a change of clothes. My mother and father carried everything else. Because I had my hands free, I was entrusted with taking care of Olaf. He was our family dog, a strapping great hunting hound, not at all like our little Rolfie here. And there was me, just a skinny nine-year-old, trying to hang on to him. It took all my strength to keep him from pulling away from me on the leash when we set off, but after we had left the village behind and we were on the open road my father said I could safely let Olaf off the leash and, sure enough, he trotted along obediently, staying close to me.

On the road, our ranks swelled and other villagers joined us, all heading towards the river. The River Bug marked the border into Romania, and if we could make it across the bridge, then we’d be out of Poland and away from the German danger.

We walked alongside all these other families, hundreds of us making our way to the river. I know it sounds awful to say, but I remember that day as a rather exciting one. There was a sense of adventure about it all. We were all banded together on this journey, and that night the families gathered round an open fire, and we grilled sausages and cooked potatoes in the embers and there was singing. My father had a koza with him – you have probably never seen one and the closest thing I can compare it to is a Scottish bagpipe. My father played it well. He was an academic, a professor of Polish studies, and in Janów Podlaski he was very respected as a member of the Gmina – the district council. Often he would have meetings at our house. As I said, he was very well educated and my mother was too, so I think this made it even harder for them that I couldn’t learn to read or write.

Anyway, I am straying away from the story. My father played the koza that night and we sang. There were couples dancing and we were all singing along and it was only after the embers in the fire had died away to nothing that I went to sleep.

In the morning, we rose early and began walking again, the mood uplifted by the night before. There was talk on the road that day about the river, how it was not far now. We were almost at the border and the sides of the road were dense with forest.