Stolen Girl

by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

  “Can you come to my house on Saturday?” asked Linda. “Mom said you could stay even if the game takes all day.”

  Marusia and Ivan agreed. Linda’s mother suggested I come early on Saturday morning and she invited me to stay for lunch.

  Ivan was doing some yard work at the Ukrainian church, so he walked me to Linda’s house, and we decided that once I was finished, I would walk over to the church to meet him and we’d head home together.

  When I got to Linda’s, it was just before nine. Mrs. Henhawk was in the kitchen making applesauce.

  “Linda will be down in a minute,” she said. She offered me an apple, but I had just eaten breakfast. “Take a seat beside George.” She pointed to the chair next to her husband. “He won’t bite.”

  I sat down and Mr. Henhawk lowered his newspaper, caught my eye, and gave me a wink. He seemed as friendly as Mrs. Henhawk was.

  I must have let a fly into the house when I came in through the back door. It kept buzzing around my head. I waved it away but it kept coming back. Suddenly, I felt the whack of a newspaper against the side of my head.

  I blinked once and then again. Why would Mr. Henhawk hit me like that? I barely heard what he was saying to me now …

  “Don’t stuff yourself, Eva,” Mutter is saying as she tries to pull the plate away, but Eva grabs it with two hands and pulls it back.

  “They’re my favorite, Mutti, and you know it,” says Eva, cutting off a giant portion of apple-filled Eierkuchen and shoving it into her mouth. A chunk of apple falls out and lands on the table. She picks it up and pops it back into her mouth.

  “If only that one would eat half as much as you.” Mutter looks at me. “If the führer hears we’ve starved his little darling, it will be the end of us.”

  I look at the plate in front of me and pick up my knife and fork. I cut one bite and hold a piece of Eierkuchen to my mouth, but the greasy smell of it makes me feel sick. I think of the women and children with the yellow stars. How can I eat this when it seems they have nothing? I push the plate away.

  Mutter slaps me hard across the face.

  “Nadia, are you all right?”

  Mr. Henhawk’s voice pulled me back to the present. I was standing by the table in the Henhawk kitchen, a chair upended beside me. I lifted my hand to my cheek. I could almost feel the tingle of that long ago slap from Mutter.

  “I’m fine,” I told him.

  But I didn’t feel fine. These scenes from the past made me queasy and confused.

  Linda appeared in the kitchen doorway holding the Monopoly box. “Nadia, you don’t look so good.”

  The kitchen was humid, with an overwhelming smell of apples. I felt like I was going to be sick. “Would you mind if we played outside instead?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said Linda. She set the Monopoly box on the kitchen table. “We’ll be outside, okay?” she said to her parents.

  “Stay in the neighborhood,” said Mr. Henhawk.

  I gulped in fresh air as we stepped out to Linda’s narrow, overgrown backyard.

  “Let’s go to the park,” she said.

  I didn’t know that there was a park. I walked beside Linda as she stayed on her own side of Usher Street and headed west. As we got farther from where she lived, I noticed that the houses seemed to get shabbier. Usher curved into Rushton Street and I spotted a fancy wrought-iron gate almost hidden by bushes. It looked like something from a storybook. Was I dreaming, or was this real? I went up to touch the gate.

  “Come this way and I’ll show you something better,” said Linda, grabbing my hand.

  So it was real.

  We walked around the curve. Through the bushes I could see that the gate was attached to a long fancy fence, also almost completely hidden by leaves. But all at once there was a break in the bushes. I was so shocked by what I saw that I grabbed Linda’s shoulder to steady myself. A rundown mansion on top of a hill. It seemed out of time and place, like something from a dream—or a nightmare. It felt a little sinister, with paint peeling from the latticework and ragged curtains hanging limp inside shattered windows.

  “That’s Yates Castle,” said Linda. “I don’t think anyone lives there anymore, except maybe hobos.”

  Something about the vast abandoned mansion tugged at my memory, but why? It looked nothing like the large, well-kept farmhouse I had lived in with Eva and Mutter and Vater. And there was no building like this in the DP camp, of course. Hot bile rose up in my throat and I doubled over, gagging.

  “Nadia, are you all right?” asked Linda.

  I took a few heaving breaths and tried to calm myself. After a couple of minutes I was able to stand up straight again. “I’m … fine,” I managed.

  “What’s wrong? Does the house scare you?” she asked.

  I couldn’t answer.

  “Does it remind you of something during the war?”

  “It must,” I told her. “But I don’t know what.”

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand again. “Let’s get away from here.”

  As we walked past the mansion—or castle or haunted house, whatever it was—I couldn’t tear my eyes from it. It was awful and beautiful at the same time …

  I am being carried, kicking, screaming, up white-painted steps. “Baba! Baba! I want my baba!” I am put in a room all by myself. I try to open the door but it’s locked. I pound until my knuckles bleed but no one answers.

  Linda was saying my name, but I ran down the block, pulling her with me. I had no idea where I was going but I had to get away from that house.

  “Slow down!” she cried, tugging on my hand. “I’ve got a stitch in my side.”

  When I stopped running, I realized that I was huffing for breath and covered in sweat. I felt Linda’s hand take mine and she led me up a pathway through the trees. We stepped out onto tidy grass on a hill. It was open and airy and not scary at all. It was hard to believe that such a nice park was hidden from anyone strolling down Usher Street.

  She led me to the middle of the open space and we both flopped onto the grass. For long minutes, we lay there side by side, watching the clouds and not saying a word.

  Then Linda asked, “What did Yates Castle remind you of?”

  A feeling of dread came over me. I sat up and looked at Linda. I had confided some things about my other past to her already. I longed to talk to her about those scenes that would flash into my mind. But would she understand? More important, would she tell anyone else? Mychailo had warned me about talking to Canadians. But Linda was my best friend, after all. I had to tell her something.

  “All I remember is being locked up in a fancy house,” I said. “That, and how frightened I was.”

  “Who would have locked you up?” she asked, a puzzled expression on her face.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it your parents?”

  “No!” It was hard to even think of Marusia or Ivan doing anything like that to me.

  I didn’t say anything more, so Linda dropped the subject. We played a few games, like I Spy, and finding shapes in clouds, and then she said we should go to the church to find Ivan. “After the scare you’ve had, I’m sure you want to go home.”

  I looked at Linda with new appreciation. What a kind friend she was.

  “Do we have to go past that house again?” I asked her.

  “We don’t have to,” she said. She pointed up the hill. “That’s Terrace Hill Street. We can go up that way to your church.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind us not playing Monopoly?”

  “Nadia,” said Linda. “Of course I don’t mind. We can always play another day.”

  Once we got up the incline to Terrace Hill Street, we had a beautiful view of the train station and beyond. You could see almost all the way to my house, yet the castle was hidden by trees.

  As we walked down Terrace Hill Street, I was surprised at how close the Ukrainian church was, and I was disturbed to realize that Yates Castle and the church were actually back to back
. In fact, along the side of the church and extending down to the castle was a set of steps and a carriage road. My heart tightened. That little church had been one of the few places I had felt truly safe, but now that I realized how close it was to that creepy house, I wondered if the church would ever feel like a safe place again.

  Ivan was raking the leaves off the lawn in front of the church. I noticed that Mychailo was helping his father plant a row of shrubs along the church walkway. When we got there, Ivan looked at me with surprise. “You’ve finished your game already?”

  “We’re not finished, but …” I looked to Linda.

  She caught my eye and nodded. “We got bored,” she said, shrugging. “We’ll play another day.”

  Ivan looked at the pile of leaves he had raked up and then gazed at the rest of the lawn. “I won’t be finished here for at least another hour.”

  “I could help you,” I said

  “So could I,” said Linda. “Do you have any more rakes?”

  I looked at her and smiled in thanks.

  Ivan grinned. “It won’t take long at all with three of us working.”

  When we were finished with the yard work, Ivan took my hand and began to walk toward those dreaded steps that led down to Usher Street alongside Yates Castle.

  “This is a quick way to Linda’s,” he said. “And I want to show you an interesting house.”

  Ivan knew about it! Of course he did. He had been doing yard work at the church. How could he miss seeing a castle behind the church? I was just surprised that I had never noticed it through the trees before.

  I didn’t budge from my spot on the sidewalk. “That place scares me.”

  Ivan’s forehead crinkled in surprise. He looked at me, then at Linda. She shrugged her shoulders. “So you don’t want to go down that way?” he asked.

  “No.”

  We walked down Terrace Hill Street and then to Main and dropped Linda back home.

  Once it was just the two of us walking home, Ivan asked, “Does that big old house remind you of something?”

  I nodded.

  “The German house in the country?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go look at it with me?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Ivan. “Because it’s an interesting place and I thought you’d enjoy seeing it up close.”

  I shivered at the thought of it.

  “It was built in the eighteen hundreds by the man who owned the railroads,” he said. “He wanted it to look like—”

  I squeezed Ivan’s hand so hard that he looked at me and stopped talking mid-sentence.

  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 theater 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 home, 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 theater. A line 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 theater 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 center. I snuggled into my chair and leaned way back so I could see the whole giant screen above me.

  Cinderella started with 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 storybook. 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 cozy 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 light bulb. 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 windowpane 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 w
ith 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 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?”