The Altar Girl: A Prequel

by Orest Stelmach

  With the help of the Americans, British, and French, more than four million refugees—two million of them Ukrainian—were returned to the USSR promptly. The remaining homeless—including two hundred fifty thousand Ukrainians—refused to return voluntarily. The Americans, British, and French set up camps in Austria and Germany where they were allowed to live while the world decided what to do with them. The refugees were called Displaced Persons, or DPs for short.

  The Soviets were obsessed with the repatriation of every single DP. Their fixation was rooted in two beliefs. First, they felt entitled to such a demand because of their disproportionate suffering during the war. Soviet fatalities totaled 20 million, compared with between 300,000 and 350,000 each for America and Britain. In fact, the average daily fatalities suffered in the USSR before 1943 exceeded the entire 130,000 deaths suffered by the Americans in three and a half years of war in Europe. The Soviet population shared Stalin’s bitterness. They felt their allies owed them a debt.

  The Soviets were also motivated by their insecurity over their ideology. If the Marxist state was utopia, every citizen should have wanted to return home. The presence of a dissenter would have suggested otherwise, and that was unacceptable. Hence, the Soviets deployed foreign missions to Western Europe to help with the repatriation. “The Motherland would not be a mother if she did not love all her family,” they said.

  The Americans, British, and French happily obliged the Soviets. Each country was dealing with its own postwar issues. None of the Allies wanted a refugee problem, but that’s exactly what they got. A British Zone military order proclaimed: “HMG do not recognize Ukrainian as a nationality. No recognition can be given to any Ukrainian organization or representation as such.” The Americans and the French agreed. Soldiers were ordered to use force to load refugees onto trains headed back to the Soviet Union.

  Ukrainian DPs promised that they would resist repatriation “by all means.” One community gathered in a church to celebrate the Holy Mass for the last time. Word spread that they were planning to commit mass suicide. When soldiers arrived to intervene, a farmer approached an officer and handed him his axe. He asked the soldier to cut off his head, that he would rather die from decapitation than be sent back to the Soviet Union. Others did commit suicide, including a twenty-four-year-old man who’d learned his sisters had voluntarily returned to the USSR and ended up in a Siberian work camp.

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff understood they were legally obligated to use force to repatriate the DPs, but they had little stomach for it. There was clearly a disagreement between the welcoming message being spread by the Soviet foreign missions and future life as the DPs saw it. What Eisenhower didn’t realize at the time was that the Soviet missions consisted primarily of agents from the NKVD, the predecessor of the notorious Soviet secret police, the KGB. And their agenda was altogether different from the one they advertised.

  As soon as Obon mentioned the NKVD and the KGB, I immediately became suspicious they somehow had a hand in my godfather’s death. Most Americans would have thought it was a silly idea, I knew, and yet I couldn’t help myself. If you grew up a first-generation Uke in the free world, you heard enough horror stories about spying, persecution, and murder to believe the disciples of those organizations were capable of killing anyone, any place, at any time.

  After my call with Obon, I met Roxy at a massive, crowded, and well-lit Stop & Shop parking lot. It was located five minutes from the Uke National Home in Wethersfield, the town that divided Rocky Hill from Hartford. I kept my eyes on the rearview mirror during the entire drive from Wendy’s. Once I spotted Roxy’s SUV, I circled around it and looked in all the vehicles surrounding it. She was the only one inside her car. All the other vehicles were empty.

  I parked beside her, climbed into the passenger seat of her SUV, and nearly suffocated from the stench of bacon, garlic, and sausage.

  “What the hell, Rox? It smells like Baczynsky’s Meat Market in here.” Baczynsky’s was a popular Ukrainian store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

  Roxy grinned. She cut a slice of Ukrainian bacon from a rectangular slab wrapped in onion paper with her pocketknife. The bacon was cured in salt and spices and commonly eaten raw. Unlike traditional bacon, Uke bacon had barely any trace of meat in it. It was almost one hundred percent fat, which is why it was called salo, the Ukrainian word for fat. I was never partial to the dish. I preferred to consume my fat in the form of dumplings. Roxy was eating hers with raw garlic. She was dipping the latter in salt, which she’d poured into a paper cup in her cup holder.

  “This is my reward for driving to New York and back,” she said.

  The blast of garlic breath from her mouth overpowered me. I struggled to breathe. It was worse than an elevator packed with men the morning after they’d gorged on Korean barbecue.

  “You absolutely reek,” I said. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. I thought you were working at the Uke National Home tonight, too?”

  “I am,” she said with glee. “This old-timer who plays bingo likes to put his hand on my ass and remind me he has no heirs. Like he’s going to put me in his will if he gets some, whatever that means at his age. I’m going to get up close and personal with him today. Ha!”

  “Remember you laughed just now when he tells you he likes your perfume.”

  Roxy stopped chewing and frowned. “Oh, shit. You think?”

  I managed a laugh under the circumstances. “No, I don’t think so. Garlic breath is like body fat. Men tolerate their own but don’t like it on their women.” I glanced in the back of the SUV and saw a dozen or more brown shopping bags. Inside, I spied rings of kielbasas, other sausages, and breads in the bags, along with jars of condiments and boxes of mysterious delicacies. The cooperative store at the Uke National Home stocked food from New York and sold it to the Hartford crowd for Easter. But first, someone had to drive to the City and buy it.

  “Since when do you do the run to New York?” I said. My father had made the runs to supplement his income—or lack thereof—when I was little. Our car would smell like deli counter for weeks.

  “Since the guy who used to do it had a car accident and lost his license.” She lifted the slab of bacon in my direction. “You want some of this, Diana?”

  I cringed.

  Roxy grinned. “It’s never too late to acquire a taste.”

  “Great. I believe in delayed gratification, though. I’m trying to save some orgasmic experiences for my golden years so I have something to look forward to.”

  Roxy cut another piece of salo. “Saving your orgasms is a mistake. You need to live in the moment.”

  “I’m glad you said that. Here’s what I’ve been living today.”

  I told her about my call with Obon. “Did your uncle ever talk to you about his experience in the DP camp?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t talk about those days. I mean he was a kid after the war. In his teens, right?”

  The DP camps had been filled with children, many of whom had been brought to Germany and Austria as slave labor for the Nazi regime. My parents had been among them.

  “He was a scrounger,” Roxy said. “That’s all I know. We watched that movie with Steve McQueen once. The one with him on the motorcycle with all those famous actors as prisoners of war.”

  “The Great Escape?”

  “Yeah. That’s the one. He told me he was like the James Garner character, only more handsome.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah. He wished.”

  A black sedan rolled by. A man with dark features stared right at us. He let his eyes linger, then looked away nonchalantly. He was either staring randomly or purposefully trying to appear uninterested. Roxy must have seen him and thought the same thing because she sat silently beside me, eyes glued to the tail of the Subaru. Two men with leather jackets got out and walked into a Chinese restaurant in the mall. There was no one e
lse in the car, and the men didn’t look over their shoulders in our direction.

  “Uh-oh,” Roxy said.

  My blood pressure spiked. I realized I must have missed something. “What?” I looked from the restaurant to the car and back to the Chinese place again. “I don’t see anything.”

  “No. Look up. At the sky.”

  I glanced above and beyond the strip mall. A colorless moon hung low in the shape of the blade of a sickle, reminiscent of the symbol of the Soviet Union.

  “It’s a Stalin moon,” Roxy said.

  It was one of the first things Mrs. Chimchak had taught us at PLAST camp: beware the night of a Stalin moon, for nothing good ever happened when the symbol of communist persecution hovered over the planet.

  We sat quietly for a moment. I wanted to get Roxy’s reactions to what Marko had told me about her uncle, but I didn’t want to offend her by suggesting he was a sleaze. In my experience as a forensic investment analyst, it’s best to persuade the other person to come to the desired conclusion by herself.

  “What kind of guy was your uncle?” I said.

  Roxy had started to wrap up her bacon. She gave me a quizzical look, as though saying I knew him as well as she had, and it was a stupid question.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t mean was he nice and religious and did he really care for you and all that. I mean, did he have integrity? Did you trust him?”

  Roxy shrugged. “Personally, I never had a problem with him. And my parents. I think they understood what kind of business he was in and it was just in his nature to, you know, exaggerate a bit. But there was never anything malicious about it.”

  “Exaggerate what? Can you give me an example?”

  “He was always buying and selling. Once he sold us a kitchen table he said was an antique made by some famous guy. Later when my father tried to sell it back to him, it turned out it was by the famous guy’s brother and it was worth half what he thought it was. But that’s how all those antique guys are, right?”

  “But I thought he had a good reputation. I thought he knew his stuff.”

  “He did know his stuff. And he did have a good reputation. But if you knew my uncle, you knew to take it with a grain of salt.” Roxy rolled down her window and tossed the rest of her salt onto the asphalt. “And if you didn’t know him, I’m sure he was no worse than all the other people in his line of work.”

  Roxy’s assessment was hardly a ringing endorsement, and disturbingly consistent with the shady picture Marko had painted.

  “You ever accompany him on any strange deliveries?” I said.

  Roxy twisted her body and stored the remainder of her bacon in one of the larger shopping bags behind her. “I never went with him on any deliveries. He was super secretive with all that stuff. I helped him with his groceries and with contractors for the house. You know, HVAC and plumbing, maintenance and repairs and the like. Why?”

  I told her about the midnight delivery in Avon, leaving out the part about Marko providing security. There was no need to mention his involvement.

  Roxy shook her head. “That’s really, really weird. He didn’t have a storefront because the overhead wasn’t worth it. He did most of his work through auctions, swap meets, and by referral. But I never heard of any midnight deliveries.”

  “So what do you have for me?” I said.

  Roxy started the car. “I got the name of his accountant. Gave her a call and confirmed she’s got his books.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “She?”

  Given Marko’s description of my godfather’s sexual tendencies, the revelation that his bookkeeper was a woman conjured more unholy visions.

  Roxy nodded. “It’s the Razor Blade.”

  My pulse picked up. She’d been my girl scout mentor. The mere mention of her name still electrified me. “Mrs. Chimchak?”

  Roxy nodded again.

  “She’s like . . . ninety.”

  “Yeah. Ninety going on sixty-five. I told her you’d be calling. When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Years. Decades. Last century.”

  “That ought to be quite the reunion then.”

  “Yeah.” I had no idea what to expect, whether she would hold my disappearance to New York against me or not. “Yeah it should be.”

  I confirmed Mrs. Chimchak’s address, thanked Roxy for the scoop, and returned to my car. Mrs. Chimchak lived in the south end of Hartford near the border of Wethersfield where I was parked. I wasn’t surprised she hadn’t moved to the suburbs even though there were more shootings in Hartford every year, and it seemed more dangerous than all the New York boroughs combined. But there was a consistency to the person who’d helped shape me into the woman I was today. I didn’t picture her moving because the environment around her changed. I envisioned her personal space remaining invulnerable regardless of the changes to her environment.

  I took a final look at the Subaru that had gotten our attention. The leather-clad boys must have ordered take-out because they were nowhere in sight.

  Then I drove my car to Mrs. Chimchak’s house along the dark streets of Hartford, my path illuminated the entire way by the Stalin moon.

  CHAPTER 19

  UNTIL NOW, MY search for clues about my godfather’s death had led me to two homes and a strip bar. All three belonged to current or former family: my ex-father-in-law, mother, and brother. Entering each place had filled me with increasing dread. Knocking on Mrs. Chimchak’s door should have been easier. After all, she wasn’t family. In theory, I couldn’t have offended her as much as my mother or brother or my deceased husband’s father, but I was certain I’d done so.

  I had lost contact with her. I had ceased to be an active participant in the Ukrainian-American community. As soon as I’d become an adult, I had left town and never looked back. I’d hated most of my childhood, all the mandatory Ukrainian extracurriculars. In that way, I knew I had disappointed Mrs. Chimchak. Hadn’t she told me I was her only hope? Hadn’t I abandoned her and shunned the ancestral heritage she loved above all else in this world, with the sole exception of the United States of America?

  She lived across the street from Goodwyn Park, among a row of houses from a bygone era. Small homes straight out of Monopoly with enough yard in front of the sidewalk for a couple of kids to play. One of the houses was immaculately painted, its grass pruned by a barber, the driveway recently sealed. I recognized it as soon as I saw it.

  A light deep inside the house cast a faint glow against sheer curtains in the living room facing the yard. I rang the doorbell, heart in throat yet again, and the door opened immediately, as though she’d been watching me from the moment I’d parked. Of course she had.

  Her body had shrunken an inch, her crew cut looked like used steel wool, and she didn’t hide the roadmap of lines in her face or forehead. But otherwise she looked the same. Despite the signs of aging, she didn’t appear to be a day over seventy. She demonstrated her memory by planting her palms on her cheeks as soon as she saw me. There was no hesitation, no sign of uncertainty. She recognized me right away, and based on the way her eyes lit up, she was overjoyed to see me. It was the welcome I’d longed to get from my mother, and it drained the anxiety from my body.

  “You’ve come home,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “I knew you’d come home.”

  She kissed me on both cheeks and gave me a shockingly firm hug. We went into the living room, which was more like a small study with old furniture. I couldn’t help but wonder if my godfather had furnished it with overpriced reproductions, or if there were a gem or two among her collection she’d bought half a century ago without knowing, and he’d tried to buy them from her on the cheap.

  “Look at you,” she said. “You look wonderful. All grown up and successful. You’re a tribute to your family and the community you grew up in. I’m so proud of you.”

  I like to think that I hold sentime
nt in the lowest regard, but I’m aware that I may be deceiving myself. The truth was that I wished I’d brought a digital photographer and recording specialist to preserve the moment forever. I imagined playing it at times when melancholy and depression gripped me, upon waking and going to sleep, or at any given moment on any given day.

  She went to the kitchen to make tea. The aroma of borsch and babka further enhanced my mood. Whereas my mother had been preparing food for suitors, Mrs. Chimchak was preparing food for Easter. I studied a series of framed photographs on the mantel above her fireplace. One of the photos caught my eye. Mrs. Chimchak, as an early teen, standing beside a strapping young man with smashing good looks. They weren’t smiling but there was a pride etched in their faces and a strength to their carriage. The photo was black-and-white. They were both dressed in drab clothes and posing in front of a bombed-out building.

  Mrs. Chimchak returned with a tray of tea and cookies in the shape and color of Ukrainian Easter eggs. We exchanged some small talk. Guilt gnawed at me as I perpetuated the lie that I still had a job. I quickly changed the subject, and asked her about the picture.

  “That was Stefan,” she said. “The love of my life.”

  I’d wondered why she hadn’t married. Just as I’d thought my godfather might have been gay, I’d assumed she might have been a lesbian, or more likely, someone who suppressed her sexual tendencies. Mrs. Chimchak certainly cast an asexual vibe, so to hear she’d had a love of any kind was a major revelation.

  “Was that picture taken before or after the war?” I said.

  She cast a stern look in my direction. “That may be the first time you’ve ever disappointed me.”

  I felt myself stiffen. I studied the picture again. Apparently, I was so nervous I was forgetting the obvious. “The building is bombed out. It couldn’t have been taken before the war. What happened to Stefan?”