Stolen Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 rememberall 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 otherchildren 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.
    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 beennailed 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