Stolen Child Read online

  “Yes,” I said. “I am learning to speak English.”

  Miss MacIntosh nodded with approval. “When you’ve finished your snack, you two can play in the backyard for a bit if you like.”

  I didn’t know whether I wanted to play with Mychailo. What I longed to do was to go back into Miss MacIntosh’s living room and look at her books.

  Mychailo gulped down his milk and looked at me. “Let’s go,” he said in English, pointing to the back door.

  Miss MacIntosh’s swing was just like mine, but the wood was darker and more worn. Did she swing on this herself? How funny it would be to see a grown woman on a swing!

  She was standing at the back door, watching us, so Mychailo said in careful English, “Nadia, sit, and I will push you.”

  Miss MacIntosh nodded in approval, then went back inside.

  I sat down on the swing and pumped with my legs a little to get the rhythm going, and then Mychailo pushed so hard that it took my breath away. “Be gentle,” I said in Ukrainian.

  “You’ll never learn if you keep speaking Ukrainian!” said Mychailo, in a voice that mimicked Miss MacIntosh.

  “You are hurting me.”

  Either he didn’t understand my English or he didn’t care. Each time the swing brought me close to him, he pushed hard on my back. The swing went so high that I was afraid it would loop around and get tangled in the branches of the tree. Yet with each push, I felt the wind in my face and the freedom of flying in the air. “STOP!”

  “If that’s what you want,” said Mychailo, stepping away from the swing. He plopped down on the lawn and combed the grass with his fingers, ignoring me completely.

  I stretched out my feet and dragged them along the ground to slow the swing down, but it was going so fast that I lost one shoe. I panicked and jumped, landing flat on my face in the lawn.

  “You are so stupid,” said Mychailo. He continued to comb through the blades of grass while I dusted myself off.

  The back door opened and Miss MacIntosh stood there. “Lesson time in ten minutes,” she said.

  I flopped down on the grass beside Mychailo. “Are you getting English lessons too?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I come here every afternoon.”

  “But your English is already good,” I said.

  “My parents like me to come, and Miss MacIntosh is a nice lady, so I don’t mind. And she makes good cookies.”

  I mulled this over. Did it mean that I would be coming here every day as well? If I learned quickly, would I only have to come in the afternoons? I also didn’t know how I felt about spending so much time with Mychailo.

  “Where did you live before the war?” asked Mychailo.

  His question took me by surprise. “In … in … Zolochiv.”

  Mychailo rolled his eyes. “You are such a bad liar.”

  He was right. I was lying. But what he didn’t realize was that I had lived a lie for so long that I couldn’t remember where I had really come from. The lying had come naturally at the camp. If I hadn’t done it then, they would have taken me away from Marusia. But something strange had begun to happen since coming to Canada. I was beginning to have flashes from the past, like the ones today, but they were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t fit.

  “What makes you think I’m lying?” I asked.

  “You have a funny accent,” he said. “My parents were born in Zolochiv. Ivan is from Zolochiv. But you are definitely from somewhere else.”

  It scared me to think that this boy knew more about my past than I did. “Was Ivan … I mean … my father … a friend of your parents?” I asked.

  “My father was in the underground with Ivan,” said Mychailo. “They fought the Nazis together.”

  He said nothing more for a while, but instead concentrated on raking the grass with his hands. “That’s what you remind me of,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “With that hair of yours and those eyes? A Nazi.”

  And then without a glance at me, he stood up and walked into the house.

  Chapter Four

  Am I a Nazi?

  I felt strange spending the rest of the afternoon with Mychailo after his Nazi remark. It got me wondering though. At the DP camp, most people could speak many languages, but no one sounded quite like me. When we first arrived, some people had commented that I didn’t sound like my mother and we didn’t look like each other, but Marusia would always hush them.

  Miss MacIntosh had Mychailo do Composition at the kitchen table and she continued to go through the word book with me. I was glad that he wasn’t working right beside me.

  Whenever we paused, I would glance up at the photograph of the soldier on Miss MacIntosh’s mantle. Once, she followed my gaze and sighed. “I was going to marry him,” she said. “He died in France, fighting the Nazis.”

  What did Miss MacIntosh think of me? With my blond hair and blue eyes and funny way of talking, did she think I was a Nazi too? That I was responsible for her fiancé’s death? My throat choked with tears.

  Marusia thought it would be good for me to remember all that I could about the time before we met. She always insisted that I had nothing to feel guilty about. I tried to remember, but all that came to me were bits and pieces. Nothing that made sense. It was all so confusing. I looked up at this kind lady, Miss MacIntosh, and said, “I am sorry he died.”

  Even though the war hadn’t come to Canada, her fiancé had gone to the war. I guess this is why it was called a world war.

  The afternoon sped by. I was so caught up in learning the new words that when there was a tapping on the front door, I jumped in surprise. When Miss MacIntosh opened the door, there stood Marusia, looking sad and tired.

  Miss MacIntosh let me take the word book home so that Marusia and Ivan and I could all practise our English together. I slipped my hand into Marusia’s and gave it a squeeze as we walked down the street. She looked at me, startled. Her eyes filled with tears, but she smiled. “I will find a job,” she said. “Don’t you worry.”

  That made me smile. For as long as I could remember, all I did was live day by day. It meant that I didn’t worry. But it also meant that I had stopped hoping.

  As we walked down the street hand in hand, Marusia looked at me. “What is the matter, Nadia?” she asked.

  I didn’t say anything for a bit. We had been through this all before, but then I blurted out, “I’m a Nazi, aren’t I?”

  Marusia stopped walking. She turned and looked me in the eye. “No, Sonechko, you are not a Nazi.”

  “Am I German?”

  Marusia shook her head.

  “Then why do I look like a Nazi?” I asked. “The other children in the DP camp didn’t look like me and they didn’t sound like me. Mychailo sounds different than me. You sound different from me.”

  Marusia’s eyes filled with tears. “Has Mychailo said something to you?”

  I don’t like to snitch and I don’t like to lie. “He and I don’t sound the same.”

  “You are not a Nazi and you are not German,” she said firmly.

  “But I remember the place that you stole me from!” I said.

  Marusia put one hand on her hip and pointed a finger at me. “Have I ever treated you unkindly?”

  “No.”

  “Have I treated you like anything less than I would if you were my own flesh?”

  “No.”

  “Then trust me when I tell you that I never stole you and you are not a Nazi.”

  She reached out to grab my hand but I held it behind my back. I was furious with her, although I didn’t quite know why. We walked the rest of the way home in silence.

  When we got to our house, we saw a truck filled with sheets of plywood parked in front of it. Two men that I recognized from the night before — one of them Mychailo’s father — were unloading wood from the back of the truck. A third man was holding our front door open.

  “Come on, let’s see what they’re doing!” I said to Marusia.<
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  We followed the men into the living room. I blinked in surprise. Just yesterday, this space was nothing more than bare wooden frames, but now plywood sheets had been nailed over the framework, making it an enclosed room. I stepped into the bedroom. Ivan had taken his shirt off and his back glistened with sweat. He was kneeling in the corner, carefully hammering in small nails along one side of a piece of plywood that another man held in place. Three walls of the bedroom were already covered.

  Before the walls went up, the house had seemed open and airy and free. I wish it could have stayed like that. But I breathed in deeply the scent of fresh sawdust and pasted a smile onto my face for Ivan.

  He looked up when he heard us step in. “Here are my girls,” he said, grinning.

  “You are such a fast builder!” said Marusia.

  “I wanted to have the walls up before you got to Brantford,” said Ivan. “But I’ve been working overtime the past few weeks and the days got away from me.” He gestured towards the other men. “What would I do without my good friends?”

  “You all must be hungry,” said Marusia. “We shall make you something to eat.”

  The sound of nails echoed through the kitchen as I helped Marusia put something quick together. Once the men had eaten and finished up their work, they left, promising to be back the next day.

  Ivan and Marusia sat on the cinder-block step, sipping mugs of tea after everyone had left. I sat on my swing and listened to their conversation.

  “When do you sleep, Ivashko?” Marusia asked, brushing his forehead with her fingertips. “You barely closed your eyes last night before it was time for you to get up.”

  “I will sleep once the house is finished,” said Ivan.

  “Can you take a rest now?” asked Marusia. “Why don’t you lie down on the mattress?”

  “It’s still light out,” he protested. “I can get some more work done on the house.”

  “Come.” Marusia took his hand. “We’ll lie down for a few minutes together. Just to rest our eyes.”

  I wanted to give them some time on their own. After all, they hadn’t been married for very long, and they had been apart for a year. I got up from the swing and headed towards the front yard.

  “Where are you going?” called Marusia.

  “Exploring,” I called back, trying hard to look happy.

  “Stay in the neighbourhood,” she said. “And come home before it gets dark.”

  I smiled to myself at that. Did Marusia really think I would go very far? I sat on the front steps for a while and looked up and down the street. Maybe I would just sit here for an hour. I could hear children playing in the distance and a car or two passed. Once, a man wearing a suit and carrying a lunch box walked by. He tipped his hat to me and smiled, so I smiled back. That small gesture made me feel safer, I don’t know why. Maybe this new life we had invented would be all right.

  Mychailo had said that Central School was down the street from me. It couldn’t be very far. I took a deep breath and stood up. I am a Canadian girl now, I told myself. And Canadian girls walk down the street by themselves without fear.

  I forced myself to walk away from the house and down the street. I felt a little bit scared to be doing this, but I was proud of myself too. And the soft breeze on my face felt good. I walked past Miss MacIntosh’s house until I got to George Street and then I saw what had to be the school: a huge old yellow brick building two and a half storeys high, with a circular driveway in the front and a huge lawn.

  There weren’t many buildings this big left standing in Germany. It felt eerily safe to be walking in this unfamiliar area all by myself. There were no bombs, no men in uniform, no burnt-out buildings, no barbed wire.

  I walked up to one of the windows and peered in. It was a classroom with rows of desks and various posters pinned to the wall. This one had a portrait of King George above the chalkboard — I recognized it from some of the coins I’d seen.

  Which rulers had been on the walls of my other classrooms? I drew a blank. I sat down in the grass and leaned against the wall of the school. It wasn’t time to go home yet. Perhaps I could walk just a bit farther? Three blocks away was a beautiful park, a church, and some rich looking buildings across the road.

  The building beside the church caught my eye. It had four marble pillars and a set of white steps leading up to fancy double doors on the second floor. I walked up the steps and stood on my toes so I could peer through the glass. I could see a marble entranceway, and beyond that, a room lined with books. How I longed to touch those books. To smell them …

  “It’s the library,” said a familiar voice behind me.

  “Why did you creep up on me like that?” I said, turning to face Mychailo.

  He had a silly look on his face. “I didn’t,” he said. “You just didn’t hear me.”

  I tried to stare him down, but then noticed that he was holding a thick book.

  “Did you get that from in there?” I asked.

  “It is a library,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “How much did it cost?”

  “It’s free for me to read,” he said. “As long as I return it.”

  “Who gets to use the library?” I asked.

  “Anyone,” he said. “You just have to fill out a form and they give you a library card. Then you can take out books as often as you want, as long as you return them after you’ve read them.”

  “Who decides what books you can read?”

  “It’s not like that in Canada,” said Mychailo. “You can read any book in the children’s department, as long as you have a library card.”

  “Can I go in now?”

  “It just closed,” he said. “But do you want to go tomorrow after our class with Miss MacIntosh?”

  I was beginning to warm to Mychailo. He could be rough and rude, but that could be said of any boy. This one liked books.

  Chapter Five

  Eva

  I would have liked to sleep outside under the stars again, but angry clouds had formed in the sky just as the sun was setting. We swept up the sawdust, and Ivan dragged one mattress out to the middle of the living room.

  “It’s almost like you’re outside,” said Marusia. “This is a big room. And if you need us, we’re right in there.” She pointed to the bedroom. The look in her eyes told me that she was exhausted, and I knew that Ivan was even more tired, so I smiled and said that I would be fine. I took Miss MacIntosh’s word book to bed with me and looked at the pictures and tried to sound out the words until it got dark.

  The rain pounding on the rooftop muffled out the sound of the frogs — or maybe frogs sleep inside during the rain too? The rain was comforting, but the distant grumbling of thunder reminded me of gunfire.

  The windows were bare, so when a car passed, strange shapes played across the walls. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing deeply and hoped I would fall asleep quickly.

  I am snuggled under a down comforter, surrounded by people who love me. I hear pounding on my door. I try to snuggle in and hide behind the others, but they’ve melted away. I am alone. More pounding at the door. A child’s voice asking me to open up. Who is that child, and why does her voice terrify me?

  I sat up with a jolt. Where was I? A frog chirped. I looked around in the darkness and saw moonlight coming in through the window. Rain still pounded on the rooftop. I was in Ivan’s house in Brantford. This room had no furniture and smelled of freshly sanded wood. I was safe here. I wrapped my arms around my legs and rocked myself back and forth. I felt like screaming but I didn’t know why. I closed my eyes and chanted the kolysanka under my breath.

  Who was the girl I had dreamt of? I did not want to go back to sleep and I did not want to wake up Ivan and Marusia, so I tiptoed into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. I sat down at the table and watched the raindrops on the kitchen window. I wanted to remember that time. If I could figure out the puzzle, maybe the nightmares would go away. Marusia said I had nothing to be
ashamed of. But how could she know that for sure? I stared out the window again, still thinking of that girl …

  I am in the bedroom with the high ceiling. Raindrops trickle outside pink-curtained windows and I see the beginning of daylight peeking around the edges. There is a tap-tapping on the door.

  It flies open and Eva bounds in. “Sister, you should be up by now!” She scrambles up onto my bed. “Wear your new pink dress,” she says. “Then we’ll match.”

  I watch her chubby feet as she slides off the bed and skips out the door. No one looking at us together would ever think that we match, even if we are both dressed in pink. I stay in bed for a moment longer. Why do I not feel safe in this room? It is all a girl could hope for, with its pink ruffled curtains and soft four-poster bed. A wooden box in the corner brims with stuffed toys. On the wall across from the bed is a high shelf holding a row of perfectly blond, blue-eyed dolls — all gifts from Vater. I do not like them.

  As I get out of bed, one foot lands on the sharp corner of a book. I bend down and pick it up: Der Giftpiltz — The Poisonous Mushroom. Another gift from Vater that I do not like. It slips out of my hands and crashes back to the floor. I brush the wrinkles out of my nightgown and walk barefoot to the bathroom. The air is damp and the mirror is covered with steam. Mutter must have just got up herself. She is probably waiting in the dining room for Eva and me.

  I grab my toothbrush, smear it with dental paste and give my teeth a quick brushing. I splash water on my face, making sure to dampen my soap bar so it looks like I used it, and then dry off with the pink towel that is stitched with GH, just like my other towels.

  A crack of thunder jolted me out of the past. For just a second, the kitchen was daylight-bright from lightning. The scene in my mind was still so vivid that I could almost feel the grit of dental paste on my tongue. I took a slow sip from the glass of water on the table in front of me and tried to remember more, but the moment had passed. Was that girl — Eva — my sister? Why did I not love her?

  There was nothing in that memory that was frightening, so why did it scare me so? And what did GH stand for? I did not want to go back to sleep, so I stayed sitting at the table and watched the rain and more lightning through the kitchen window. I had enough food and fine clothing back then. I had Mutter and Vater and Eva. Why was I not happy?