Stolen Child
Authors: Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Child
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
In memory of Lidia
Chapter One: 1950 – Coming to Canada
Chapter Two: Is Brantford Home?
Chapter Fifteen: Inspector Sutton
1950 – Coming to Canada
The woman who said she was my mother was so ill on the ship from Europe that she wore a sickness bag around her neck almost the whole time. The man I called father had come over a year before us. He had worked in different places in Canada, looking for one that could be our home. He wrote to us that he’d settled on Brantford, Ontario, because of the trees and the two Ukrainian churches. And a foundry that gave him a job — which meant that we could eat.
Because Marusia was so sick on the ship, she spent most of her time down below. I do not like to feel closed in, so I let her sleep in peace. I was left with lots of time on my own, and I didn’t mind. I would run up the stairs to the top deck and lean over the railing, watching the water churn far, far below me. Once, I climbed over the railing and sat on the edge, dangling my legs over the open water and relishing the cool clean air. I was there less than a minute when a deckhand snatched me by the
waist and lifted me to safety. He yelled at me in a language that wasn’t Ukrainian or Yiddish or German or Russian. It wasn’t English either. I suppose he told me that I was crazy to be doing such a thing. It didn’t feel crazy. I was finally alone and out in the open, if only for a moment. It felt like freedom.
When the ship landed at the Port of Halifax, I followed Marusia down the gangplank. I had gotten so used to the rolling of the sea that when my feet touched Canadian soil, I thought it was moving. I had to hold onto a post to stop from falling. Marusia was unsteady on her feet too. She was carrying the suitcase and couldn’t reach the post, so I grabbed her hand and steadied her, then we walked to the end of the long, snaking line of immigrants.
At the front of the line stood men in uniform, who interviewed every newcomer. That scared me speechless. What would they ask me about? What could I say?
Marusia squeezed my hand reassuringly. “Remember to call me Mama.”
When it was our turn, the officer looked at our documents, then bent down until he was eye level with me. His craggy face was kind, but the uniform terrified me. He said in Ukrainian, “Welcome to Canada, Nadia. Are you glad to be here?”
I don’t like to lie, so I didn’t answer, but just stared at him through my tears. I was glad to finally be out of that terrible Displaced Persons’ camp we had been in for five years. In some ways, I was glad to be in Canada because it was so far away from my other life. But there were things about my earlier life that I still yearned for.
The immigration officer tugged on one of my pigtails
and then stood up. I listened as he asked Marusia questions about where we came from before the war, and what we did during it. I always noticed how easily Marusia lied.
The officer asked to see the train tickets that the United Nations people had given us. Marusia held them up, not wanting to let them go, but he snatched them from her and examined them carefully. Only when he seemed satisfied did he stamp our papers and hand the tickets and our papers back. Marusia folded them with trembling hands and shoved them through the buttons of her carefully ironed blouse and into her bra. The man gave her some paper money. “That’s five Canadian dollars. For food,” he said.
The port was thick with other people who had lost their homelands in the war, just like us. Vendors competed with each other, trying to sell us food. They shouted things like “milk,” “apples” and “bread.” Marusia had tried to learn some English in the DP camp, and so had I, so we could understand some of the words.
Marusia wanted to buy meat sandwiches and a bottle of milk, but she didn’t know the word for sandwich. When she finally got a vendor to understand her, he wanted too much money. We needed to be careful so our money would last. I was hungry and thirsty and thought I would die of heat. But at least we were safe.
“I think that is a food store,” I said, pointing to a building with a pyramid of tin cans displayed in the window. The door of the building opened and a man walked out. He carried what looked like a loaf of bread.
“Let us try,” said Marusia, pushing me towards the store.
When we opened the door, it was even hotter inside than outside. A rosy-faced man with a barrel belly and a shiny hairless head grinned at us.
“Food … ?” said Marusia in English, holding the five-dollar bill up for the man to see.
“Not much left,” said the man in English, gesturing with his hands to help us understand.
We looked around the store. He was right. The cans arranged in a pyramid had pictures of different vegetables on them. There were sacks of flour and rice. But no buns or cheeses or sausage or anything that could be eaten without preparation.
“Bread?” asked Marusia.
The storekeeper shook his head sadly.
We were about to leave when the man’s face brightened. He crooked his finger and we followed him to the back corner of the store. As he opened up a giant box, a
whoosh
of lovely icy air enveloped us. He pulled out what looked like a large white cardboard brick. “Ice cream,” he said, grinning.
“I scream?” Marusia asked, puzzled.
“No, no,” the man said.
I was as confused as Marusia. What did this screaming thing have to do with bread?
The man grabbed the cardboard brick and took it to the front counter. He frowned in concentration as he shuffled through a box under his cash register. Smiling, he held up two flat wooden spoons. “Now you’ll see,” he said, peeling back a paper layer from the cold brick. A vanilla scent swirled towards us.
“Ice,” said the man. Then, “Cream.” He took one of the
wooden spoons and dragged it across the surface of the brick. A cold ball formed. He poised it on the spoon and held it to my mouth. “Taste,” he said.
I clamped my mouth shut.
“I will try,” said Marusia in her careful English. The man held the spoon to her opened mouth and dropped in the cold ball as if he were feeding a bird. Her eyes widened with shock. I was so glad that I hadn’t tried it first. But then she grinned. “Good!” she said.
She rolled a bit onto the other spoon and gave it to me. I touched the strange food with the tip of my tongue. It reminded me of a snowball. I put the entire spoonful into my mouth and shivered at the shock of cold creamy sweetness. It wasn’t just the wonderful taste, but the sensation of cold on a hot sticky day. It was heavenly.
“Five dollars,” said the storekeeper.
Marusia blanched. A whole five dollars for this strange new food? She shook her head.
“You eat; you buy,” he said sternly.
Marusia reluctantly held up our five-dollar bill. “But this is all we have.”
The shopkeeper grabbed it from her fingers.
“Please,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.
The shopkeeper gave us a pitying stare. He reached into his till and took out a one-dollar bill. Marusia took it.
We walked out of the store, Marusia clutching our precious ice cream to her chest. We were barely halfway down the block when she cried, “Oh no. Look!”
Her blouse was covered with thick white liquid. “Hold this,” she said, shoving the container into my hands. She reached through her buttons to her bra and took out our
precious immigration papers and our train tickets. A corner of one form was wet and a portion of the official stamp was now illegible. The train tickets were damp but not damaged. She waved them in the air, drying them. Meanwhile I stood there, watching our four-dollars’ worth of ice cream melt in the heat. She gingerly re-folded the immigration papers and train tickets and shoved them beneath the waistband of her skirt.
“Let us sit there,” she said, clutching my elbow to direct me over to a park bench. The minute we sat down she handed me a wooden spoon. We slurped the ice cream as quickly as we could. By the time we were finished, our hands and faces were sticky, but I didn’t care. That ice cream was the best thing I had tasted in a very long time. We cleaned ourselves off at a public fountain, but Marusia’s blouse no longer looked freshly ironed.
I don’t remember all that happened over the next few days. We managed to find our way to the train station. I knew we were travelling west and I remember switching trains in Quebec City. We stopped long enough in Montreal to find a food store. We only had that one-dollar bill. The ice cream had been such a costly treat!
One of the other immigrants travelling on the train suggested that we buy something called Wonder Bread. “It’s cheap,” she said. “You could buy three loaves with your dollar.”
So we went into a grocery store and asked the red-lipsticked cashier where we would find Wonder Bread. “Down the aisle,” she said in a bored voice, pointing with a long red fingernail. An entire shelf was filled with fluffy white loaves wrapped in colourful waxed paper. Marusia
took two. We didn’t dare buy anything to drink, and besides, there was a water fountain outside. The cashier gave us several coins in change.
When we got back onto the train, Marusia opened up one of the bread packages and drew out a couple of slices for each of us. It looked like perfect white bread, with a soft golden crust. I held it to my face and breathed in. It had no smell. I took a bite. It had no taste. I looked at Marusia. She was chewing slowly, with a puzzled expression on her face. “I wonder why they call this bread,” she asked. Then she chuckled sadly. “Wonder Bread.”
I felt like crying. Would this be the only kind of bread we could eat in Canada?
Marusia patted my hand. “I’ll bake some real bread when we get to our new home.”
With the motion of the train, and my hunger staved off with Wonder Bread, I drifted off to sleep, dreaming of real bread.
Our train chugged through Ottawa, then we switched trains in Toronto. I was amazed that Marusia could keep it all straight, but each time the train stopped, she would show our tickets to the conductor to make sure we were going in the right direction. These trains were enclosed, with soft chairs and big windows — nothing like the flatcars in Germany. I stared out the window as the cities flashed by, surprised that there were no bombed-out buildings, no burnt-down cities. Had the war not travelled across the ocean? I guess it was not a world war after all.
By the time the train pulled into Brantford, we had eaten the two loaves of Wonder Bread and I was truly sick of it. At the Brantford train station, I could see Ivan — the man I
am supposed to call Father — waiting outside the station for us. His face was freshly shaved and his hair was combed back and still wet. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of a carefully pressed pair of worn grey pants.
When we stepped off the train, his face broke into a grin. We were just steps away from the train when he wrapped his arms around Marusia and gave her a loud kiss — right in front of everyone.
I tried to pretend I didn’t know them, but then he caught me up in his arms and hugged me close. I tried to push him away, but he held on tight. “You are safe, Nadia,” he whispered. “We will not let anyone harm you ever again.”
I would not hug him back, but instead went limp. I didn’t want more of a scene.
Ivan grabbed Marusia’s battered old suitcase and put it in the trunk of his big black car. I had no luggage — my few items of clothing had fit easily into Marusia’s suitcase. We got into the car, just as if we were a real family. I had not been in a car for a very long time. I settled into the back seat, enveloped in the scent of leather and gasoline …
A large black car driven by a man in uniform …
“Nadia, open your window a little and let the breeze cool you,” Marusia said. Then, turning back to Ivan in the front, “Did you buy this car, Ivashko?”
“No,” he replied. “It belongs to my boss. He loaned it to me today so you could have a grand arrival to our new home.”
Marusia’s eyes crinkled with pleasure and she brushed her husband’s cheek with her fingertips. “That was so very thoughtful of him,” she said. “It reminds me of when we got married.”
I remembered that too. They got married in the DP camp. Not right inside the camp, but in a little Austrian church outside it. The Austrian priest let a Ukrainian priest from the camp do the service. Afterwards, we had all taken a taxi back to the camp. That car had been small and old, the leather seats cracked with age.
I settled down for a long ride, but within minutes Ivan turned down a street of mostly older looking brick houses. I noticed some smaller wooden houses built in between. He pulled up in front of one of these. It looked like it had just been built.
“You bought a house, Ivashko?” Marusia asked with surprise.
“I bought some land, Marusia,” he answered. “I am building a house.”
Marusia and Ivan got out of the car but I stayed sitting in the back seat. What was the matter with me? All this time, I had wanted the journey to be over. Yearning to be home. But was this really my home?
Ivan opened the back door of the car and held out his hand to me. “Nadia,” he said. “I made a swing for you in the backyard.”
Twelve-year-olds are too old for swings, I know that, but I smiled anyway. It was the thought that counted: Ivan tried so hard. I stepped out of the car. Ivan retrieved Marusia’s suitcase from the trunk and the three of us walked to the front door.
Ivan opened the door and set the suitcase inside. He turned to Marusia with a grin on his face, picked her up as if she were a child and carried her through the door. “What are you doing?” she cried. “Put me down!”
“It is a Canadian custom,” said Ivan. “It is supposed to bring good luck.”
He set her down on the floor just inside and I followed them in, thankful that he didn’t carry me over the threshold as well.
On the outside the house looked finished, but inside, only wooden boards — Ivan said they were called studs — stood where walls should have been. The floor was plain sanded wood like you would see in a good barn. There was no furniture.
“Let me take my two girls on a tour of their new home,” said Ivan, grabbing each of us by the hand and grinning with excitement. Marusia tried to paint a smile on her face, but her eyes showed the same confusion that I felt.
“This is our living room,” he said. Still holding onto our hands, he walked us through an open doorway. “And this is the bedroom.”