Stolen Child (9 page)

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.