Dancing Bears by Witold Szabłowski & Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Author:Witold Szabłowski & Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2018-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

There’s justice in Strasbourg

“Fifteen acres and a good many square feet of land. That’s dandy—don’t you think?” asks the Lady, to be sure.

That’s how much land the neighbors stole from her mother. “Daddy had left us,” she explains. “If he’d been living with us, they’d never have taken it. But as it was, there was no farmer, so no one to defend it. My mother was an even worse cripple than I am. She’d prop her leg on a low stool and just sit there—she couldn’t stand. I used to wait on her. When I was younger I could manage better, but now that I’m older I’ve gone downhill. She died a few years ago.”

After her mother’s death, as she tells the story, her neighbors started to have designs on her land and her cottage. They wanted to send her to a shelter. “‘Over my dead body,’ I said to myself!” says the Lady, getting emotional. “I read in the paper that Strasbourg is the seat of justice. That Strasbourg helps people who are cheated by the Polish state. So I bought a ticket, and off I went to Strasbourg.”

“How do you mean?”

“Quite normally. I boarded the bus and off I went. I thought they might give me a place to live there. I wanted to live there, because it’s a warm country. And I wanted to sue for that piece of land.”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“I was dreadfully afraid! Before then, the farthest I’d ever been was to Lódź. And to my job in Pabianice. I was a machine knitter—I made the linings for gloves. It’s hard work, because you do it standing up. And once I started getting an allowance instead, I never went outside my village at all. It’s a godforsaken place! But in those days I was afraid to go anywhere, because a person’s greatest fear is when he goes away for the first time. So in those days I used to think, ‘Should I go or not? Unless I meet a Pole, I won’t be able to communicate there!’ And that’s just what happened. I was crying like a baby in the street. A girl and her boyfriend stopped. She took me by the arm and showed me the way to the great big tribunal. And there, one of those men who stand in the doorway said, ‘Why did you come here? People don’t come to us! They write!’”

“What about the people in your village? What did they say?”

“When I told them I was going to Strasbourg to appeal, they laughed and tapped at their foreheads. They said I’d never get anything sorted out. And they were right about that, because I failed to fix anything at all.”

“So was it worth going there?”

“Yes, because I saw how easy it all is. Everywhere people helped me, drove me, asked me what I needed. And I thought, maybe it’s always like this; maybe wherever I go, someone’s always going to help a cripple. And one time I was standing at the station when a gentleman came by and gave me two euros.

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