Page 46 - WTP Vol. IX #5

Waiting (continued from preceding page)
he bawled. “I don’t want to stay here and wait. It’s
not fair.”
“Just you be quiet,” said his father. “You’ll do as you’re told. This is the way of the world. We can’t always have what we want.”
Just then the picture of a concentration camp out of World War II flashed into Vivian’s mind. Her cousin Ellen and her daughter Betty had been lined up for the gas chamber. The mother on one line was headed for certain destruction, the daughter on another line had been chosen by the authorities to remain alive. In an instant, as a guard turned aside to talk to some- one, Ellen made a choice. She jumped off the line to join her daughter. She saved her own life.
Although her mother had told Vivian this story many years ago, it had made a profound impression on
“When the surviving
prisoner regained his freedom he had lost the ability to enjoy it.”
her. She thought that such action required amazing courage and independence. Most of all, it showed the determination of a person to choose life for herself, over death decided for her by someone else. Vivian felt very proud of having such a relative. Cousin Ellen was now a happy old woman with several grandchil- dren from her daughter. Unfortunately, Ellen’s hus- band and Vivian’s own grandparents had perished in the same camp.
Vivian considered that in our modern times there had been worse tyranny than that experienced
by the family punished in the castle. Yes, and the engineer had stressed that today, in many lands, in- dividuals were still at the mercy of tyrants, but the family of prisoners and the behavior of the people waiting for the boat demonstrated how tyranny was as much a condition of mind and spirit as of outer force.
The prisoners were forced into the dungeon for their beliefs. When the surviving prisoner regained his
freedom he had lost the ability to enjoy it. “You have to be able to exercise freedom in order to keep on valuing it and to maintain it,” Vivian decided.
A lifetime of previous experiences with the bureau- cracies of the world have inured these people to tyranny, Vivian concluded. They were quick to surrender their freedom, to behave like prison-
ers, although they were really free. They had more choice than the poor Jews who were rounded up by armed Nazis and told to go with them where they had decided. And even they too, outnumbering their rulers, could have, but did not rebel. They trusted the humanity of these armed soldiers to take them to a good place.
Vivian tried to get the people to stir themselves to revolt against the unjust treatment, to demand to know if they would be safe on this replacement ship. She said to several people along the line,“ Don’t you think we should ask for assurance?” But she received no answer. Stony, impassive expres- sions were on all the faces. With a shiver of recog- nition, the last lines of the poem, the lines that so frightened her patient, now came into her mind—“A man came to set me free, but it had become the same to me, fettered or fetterless to be, I learned to love despair.”
“I’m not waiting any longer,” said Vivian to herself. She stomped off to find a hotel and restaurant.
After she booked a room for the night, Vivian en- tered the hotel’s spacious dining salon. A picture window offered a delightful view of the lake, so Vivian asked for a window seat. She had come to this village to enjoy her vacation and she felt hap- pier now that she had stopped waiting for the boat. A fragrant beef bourguignon was brought to her candlelit table.
As she began eating, Vivian could see the boat arrive at last. In the dark outside, it seemed that storm clouds were gathering. The group, in very orderly fashion, marched aboard, heads bowed. Vivian re- mained seated, taking small bites. She felt chilly and shivered. Dr. Dichter wrapped her sweater closer around her shoulders. She could hear the boat’s en- gine start up. She watched as the ship slipped slowly away from the shore.
Gerber is an educator (literature, writing), business journalist, and photographer. Her fiction has previously appeared in Ariel Chart literary magazine.
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