Chapter Fourteen

Stolen

One Saturday morning, Marusia burst through the front door with a grin on her face and a grocery bag in her arms. I had been at the library all morning and had just gotten home a few moments before.

“You will never guess what happened today,” she said, taking off her winter coat.

“You got a new job?”

Marusia’s face fell. After harvest finished, she hadn’t been able to find another full-time job. Since the beginning of December she had been working four mornings a week at the laundromat that had opened up downtown, but it didn’t pay nearly as much as what she had made at the farm.

“Not that.” She dug her hand deep into her coat pocket and pulled out three small stubs of paper. “Tickets to the movies — for tonight,” she said. “One of my customers gave them to me.”

How exciting! I had walked past the movie theatre with Mychailo, but never dreamed that I could ever go. “What movie will we see?”

“Cinderella is playing,” said Marusia. “It’s the English version of Popelyushka.”

Popelyushka was a fairy tale that tugged at my memory. It seemed that I had known the story for my whole life.

Ivan was working at the church, but as soon as he got in, we told him the good news. We had a quick supper, then we bundled up for our special evening out. It took only a few minutes to get to the theatre. A lineup had formed, but Ivan walked up to a man wearing a red hat and showed him our tickets. He waved us inside.

The first room we stepped into was a huge open area decorated with old-fashioned paintings on the ceiling and red velvet curtains. One wall was plastered with old movie posters. There was a dark-haired woman with red lipstick on the poster for a movie called Gone With the Wind. I tugged Ivan’s hand and pointed. He grinned. Marusia looked just as pretty this evening, with her hair combed out and her lipstick on.

We walked through the opening in the curtains and into the theatre itself. The seats were filling quickly, but I pointed to the front row. It was nearly empty. We hurried before others noticed, and got the three seats in the exact centre. I snuggled into my chair and leaned way back so I could see the whole giant screen above me. Cinderella started like a big book being opened and a voice saying, “Once upon a time in a faraway land there was a tiny kingdom … ”

I felt like I had stepped inside a story book. Never before had I seen a movie made with drawings instead of people, and never before had I watched a movie in “Technicolor.” The movies that Vater took us to were all about Hitler and how he was a hero. They were very serious and not interesting. Cinderella was nothing like that. It had songs and dances and happy things, even though the story was sad in parts. Cinderella’s bare bedroom in the big mansion at the beginning of the movie made my stomach flip. Did the bedrooms in Yates Castle look like this?

After the movie was over, the three of us walked home in the dark. Ivan had his arm around Marusia’s waist and I walked a few steps ahead of them, my hands shoved into the pockets of my winter coat. As we walked, I thought of the song that Cinderella sang, about a dream being a wish your heart makes. I had never thought of dreams like that before. Was my heart trying to tell me something in my dreams? It didn’t seem like a wish to me. It was more like a fear.

Marusia and Ivan sat in the kitchen together and chatted when we got home from the movies. I wanted to give them time with each other, so instead of sitting with them, I went up to my bedroom. I sat on my bed and looked at my beautiful room with new appreciation. I had an attic bedroom like Cinderella’s, but mine was cosy and warm. The lilac-painted walls made me feel safe and my wooden crate nightstand was simple, but it held my library books and my lamp. What more did I need? How lucky I was to be loved by Marusia and Ivan. I drew out a library book and hugged it to my chest …

Dark shadows dance on the scuffed white walls. Someone else’s fingernail scratches are etched around the glass doorknob and there are tiny splinters of wood fraying from the door itself. The one window is too high to peer out of so I grab onto the bars and try to hoist myself up. For a few trembling moments I look out at the dirt-trampled snow far below. My arms give out and I fall back down to the floor. Why am I a prisoner in this house?

My throat is raw from screaming and my fingernails are bloodied from scrabbling at the doorknob. I lie on the wooden floor and stare up at the bare lightbulb. I can hear nothing but my own gasping breaths. Then a thump-thumping of hard shoes just outside my door. Shuffling. A struggle. A child screams down the hallway. A door slams shut.

Another stolen child.

I pray for the door to open. I pray for a way to escape.

Hours or days pass and I hear something at my window. How can this be? I am on the second floor. Have I died and is it an angel tapping there? But then I realize that someone is throwing stones at the window. I get up off the floor and grip the window bars. With my bare feet flat against the wall, I climb up to the window like I’m climbing a mountain. I get my feet onto the ledge and hoist myself up.

A woman. Eyes swollen nearly shut from weeping. Head covered with a faded kerchief. She sees me through the window pane and waves frantically at first, but then realizes that I am not the child she is looking for. How many stolen children are in this place?

“Help me!” I scream. I pound on the window.

A soldier nudges her with his rifle.

From a room down the hallway, I hear a child cry, “Mama!” That child pounds on the window too.

Why can I hear the child scream and pound, but the woman cannot? She turns and scans the windows one last time and the soldier hits her in the face with his rifle, knocking her to her knees.

I hear the door open behind me. A woman dressed in white comes into the room and orders me away from the window, but I stay where I am. “Help!”

The nurse is beside me now and she wraps an arm around my waist. I kick and thrash. I feel a cold sting on my shoulder. Suddenly I feel weak. I cannot hold onto the bars any longer. I fall into the woman’s arms.

The library book slipped out of my hand and landed on my toe. I rubbed my eyes and looked around. I was standing in my own lilac bedroom in the house that Ivan built on Sheridan Street in Brantford. It was dark outside but my lamp was on. No bars on the window. The door open. I was safe. My heart felt like it would explode.

I didn’t want to be alone, so I got up and walked down the stairs. Marusia and Ivan were no longer in the kitchen drinking tea. I poked my head into their bedroom. Ivan was softly snoring and Marusia was sound asleep. We still had no living room furniture so I sat in the middle of the floor and stared out our front window.

My flashes of the past before this had been short. This one had been terrifyingly long. I struggled to remember more bits about the building … A rich person’s home in the city that had been transformed into something horrible. Tall white steps leading to an elegant entryway with a vaulted ceiling. Stairs on either side leading up up up. I remembered being carried like a sack of grain up those stairs. Being locked in a room. Others were locked in rooms beside me. What had I done to deserve this punishment? What happened before that … and what happened after? My mind was a blank.

A warm hand rested on my shoulder. It took me a few moments to realize I was back in the present. Marusia was kneeling at my side. “Nadia … Nadia … Are you all right?”

“I have remembered more.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, but instead tried to breathe slowly to calm down my heart. “I dreamt of being locked in a big house.”

“The German farmhouse?” Marusia asked.

“No,” I said. “This was a fancy house in the city.”

Marusia’s brow furrowed. “How old were you?”

“I don’t know … too short to see out the window.”

“So this is a memory from before you lived with the Germans … ” Marusia said, as much to herself as to me.

“Before I lived with the Germans? What does that mean?” I asked. I could feel her trembling beside me. I think she was weeping in the darkness but didn’t want me to know it.

“I have told you that you are not German,” she said. “That was not your birth family.”

If that family wasn’t my birth family, who were they? And who was my birth family?

I knew Marusia and Ivan were not my birth parents, but I knew they loved me. It felt right that the Germans weren’t my parents. Mutter never treated me the same as Eva. But how did I get there and who were my real parents? None of this made sense.

“Then who am I?”

Marusia shook her head. “I don’t know exactly who you are, but you are Ukrainian. I know that for a fact.”

“But — how can you know?”

“Small things that you did without knowing it,” she said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“The way you crossed yourself after a prayer,” she said. “And you would sing the kolysanka to yourself when you thought no one was listening.”

“I thought it was my secret song.”

“Yes,” said Marusia, hugging me. “I know you thought that. You also didn’t look like anyone else in that German family.”

I nodded in agreement.

“And you spoke German with a Ukrainian accent,” she said with a smile.

“I did?”

“Very much so.”

It was a jumble in my head, but I was comforted to know that those people weren’t my family. Every time a student at school would taunt me, calling me a Hitler girl or Nazi Nadia, I felt a tug of shame. I had met many kind Germans, both in Canada and during the war. I felt sorry for Mutter because she was always sad, but she was not kind to me. And Vater was almost a stranger. A cold, hard stranger. After the war, when I heard about the many evil things that Hitler had done, it made me feel ashamed of who I might be.

And that one big question still hung over me. Who am I?

I didn’t want to go back to my room and I was too shaken to be alone. Ivan only had a few more hours to sleep before it would be time for him to get up for work, so Marusia tiptoed back to the bedroom and got a blanket and pillows and we slept on the floor in the middle of the living room, hugging each other tightly.

I couldn’t get to sleep. I didn’t want to think about that house. I thought about Cinderella and how she could dream about what her heart wished for. As I drifted towards sleep again, a memory of another mother long ago appeared in my mind …

I sat on her warm lap in the dark with my arms around her waist and breathed in her faint scent of lilac. I did not want to let her go. She cooed the kolysanka in my ear. A warm tear splashed on my cheek. I looked up. Despite the darkness I saw tears on her face …

But who was she?

It was nearly time for Christmas holidays and a soft blanket of snow covered the streets and houses. I got out of the habit of going to Linda’s house. We were still friends, but the thought of being close to Yates Castle made me uncomfortable. Going to church wasn’t the same, either. The smell of incense no longer gave me comfort.

One day, after school and before Ivan or Marusia got home, I sat on my swing in the backyard and closed my eyes and tried very hard just to think of my past. So often, the memories would come to me unexpectedly. How I would love to be able to think of them on purpose so I could sort it all out. I could hear someone banging a hammer in the distance and the sound reminded me of mortar fire. Big soft snowflakes hit my head and shoulders. I closed my eyes and held my face to the sky. As each flake tickled my face, I tried to remember the past.

“Boo!”

I screamed and nearly fell off the swing.

“Hey, I really scared you,” Mychailo said. “You should see your face.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” I snapped at him. My heart was still pounding.

“Do you want to go to the park?” he asked.

“It’s too cold,” I said.

Mychailo rolled his eyes. “If the snow bothers you, why are you sitting out here on the swing getting snowed on?”

“Fine, let’s go to the park,” I said. Going to the park might be just the thing to clear my head. I wrote a note for Marusia and Ivan and propped it on top of the icebox.

We got to the park, but then Mychailo didn’t want to stop because there were some boys from the school horsing around with a toboggan.

“We can just walk around,” I told him. “Or maybe go to the library.”

We walked past our school, and the library, through Victoria Park and all the way to the market square without saying a word to each other. It wasn’t a market day so the square was empty. I gazed into store windows filled with toys and perfumes and other things for Christmas — there was so much choice.

Mychailo finally asked, “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” I answered.

“That’s not true,” he replied. “You’ve got a sad look on your face. Are you thinking about your old home?”

I looked up at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is pretty simple,” he said. “Don’t you ever think about the home you left behind?”

“It’s such a jumble,” I told him. “But I do think about it a lot.”

Mychailo must have had some similar experiences. He had lived in a camp just like us. He had lived through the war. But this was something that we never talked about. I wasn’t sure if it was because it was too painful for him, or if it was because his mind wouldn’t let him remember, like what happened to me.

“What do you remember about the war?” I asked him.

“Everything,” he said, kicking at a stone with the tip of his shoe. “Sometimes I wish I could forget.”

“Can you tell me what you remember?” I asked. “Maybe it will help me remember.”

“Smells, most of all,” he answered. “Gunpowder and rot and blood.”

Even as he said the words, my nose wrinkled at the memories.

“The nicest thing about Canada is that they don’t have those smells here.”

Mychailo was right. In Canada, everything smelled like it had just been washed.

We walked to the library in silence. Mychailo pulled open the heavy side door that led directly to the children’s department. As I stepped in I took a deep breath, savouring the scent of furniture polish, soap and books. Much better than the smell of war.

When I got back home, Marusia and Ivan were there, but I felt like being alone. I sat on my swing in the snow and thought about the smells that haunted Mychailo. So much of my past I had started to remember. I willed myself to think about my escape with Marusia, first remembering the parts that came easily to me, and then thinking about what happened next, starting with our last days before reaching the DP camp …

The train stopped. We huddled together on the flatcar with many other escapees. Rain poured down but one man took off his frayed greatcoat and tried to cover us all.

A jeep pulled up. Soviet soldiers piled out. There was a fight, gunshots, screams. Marusia gripped my hand as we and the other escapees scattered. We ran. Another gunshot. I felt a bullet whiz past my shoulder. We were the only ones not caught.

We ran and ran. My ribs ached but we kept on going until it was the blackest part of night, and we reached a deserted village. The Soviets had already been here. My nose wrinkled at the familiar stink of blood and smoke. Where once a house had stood, now there was just a hole in the ground — the remains of a root cellar. Marusia stumbled down first and then lifted me in.

I shivered with the cold and the wet — the dirty rag that had once been my pink dress did not keep me warm. How long Marusia and I huddled together in the rubble on the floor of the cellar I did not know. We tried to cover ourselves with leaves. Tried to sleep.

The next morning. I woke with a start when Marusia screamed and rolled on top of me. I could not get my breath, and pushed at her to get her off me, but she wouldn’t move. I heard a whoosh, then saw a pitchfork. It missed my head by an inch. Standing above us was a woman shrivelled and bent with age. She reached down to grab the handle of the pitchfork, but Marusia swung around and held onto the blades.

“Please don’t hurt us,” Marusia pleaded in German.

The woman blinked in surprise. “A woman and child!” she murmured. “I thought you were more Russian soldiers.”

“We have been running from them,” said Marusia.

“Are you Germans?”

“No,” said Marusia. “We are foreign workers.”

“Why don’t you go back with them?” the woman asked, pointing in the direction of the Soviets’ advance.

“They’re as bad as the Nazis,” said Marusia.

“Come on then,” said the woman, turning her back on us.

I helped Marusia to her feet. She gripped the handle of the pitchfork and we climbed out of the root cellar.

The old woman assumed our obedience and did not look back. Now that it was light, I could see the charred ruins of cottages lining the street. We followed her to what used to be the village square. All was rubble except for the corner of a church. The burnt wood and glass shards had been shoved to one side of the church floor. Within the protection of where the two remaining walls met, the floor was covered with a filthy bedsheet. On it lay a young woman slashed with blood and bruises. At first I thought she was dead, but then I noticed a slight movement of her face.

“My granddaughter survived,” said the old woman. “But just barely. I need you to watch her while I look for food.”

We stayed there for several days. The old woman shared with us the food she managed to scrounge. Marusia cleaned the granddaughter’s wounds and disinfected them with a tincture she made from leaves and stalks. When we left, the old woman pointed us in the direction of the nearest Displaced Person’s camp …

That night I dreamed the scent of manure and gunpowder, blood and dirt. And lilacs.