The Altar Girl: A Prequel

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 sentiment 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?”

She stared at me with a blank expression. “That is the second time you’ve ever disappointed me.”

He was the love of her life. If he had survived, they would have been together, I thought. It had been inconsiderate and presumptuous of me to ask about him. I smiled sheepishly and tried to think of how to segue into the real purpose for my visit.

The dismay in her eyes yielded to a gentle smile. It was more than endearing, it was a provocation. You are the child I never had, she seemed to be saying. All the knowledge I have is yours for the taking, if only you’d treat me with respect. If only you’d be as honest and forthright with me as I shall be with you. All these things she expressed by merely looking at me. This was her gift. This was why she’d commanded my unswerving loyalty when I was a child even though I hated every minute of PLAST, and wished I’d been hanging out with friends like all the American girls, assuming I’d had friends in the first place.

“I think my godfather was murdered,” I said. “There was an entry in his diary on the day he was killed. The letters DP were written in bold ink. Do you know of anyone my godfather called by those initials? An American, a Ukrainian, a friend from a DP camp?”

She took a second to think about it. “No. Obviously there’s your former father-in-law if those were Ukrainian letters. I never heard him refer to anyone as a DP.”

“Would it be possible that was his nickname for a close friend from the DP camps?”

Mrs. Chimchak considered the possibility. “DPs were the lowest rung of society in post — World War II Europe. We were the Untermensch, the subhumans. Being called a DP was an insult. In my experience, certain types of men enjoy insulting each other. ‘Hey DP,’ or ‘You’re just a DP.’”

“You’re right. The closer some friendships, the more the men insult each other. I never thought of it that way before.”

“It’s just that… DP camps are a painful part of our past. Most people who suffered through the camps, they prefer not to talk about them. They started new lives here. They had children. Their children have had children. They don’t want their families exposed to what they went through.”

“That would explain why my father never talked about his life before he came to America, and, just today, my mother danced around the issue when I asked about it.”

“As I recall from the New Year’s Eve balls in the early days, back when the joy of being Americans exceeded all our cumulative sorrows, your mother was always a good dancer.”

“Will you talk to me about the camps?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything you’re willing to share, anything you’re not willing to share, that sort of thing.”

She smiled and nodded. This was more like it, she was saying. I knew I’d come to the right person. I reached for a cookie in celebration, dunked it in my tea, and ate half of it. Then I ate the rest, sat back, and listened.

She started with the salient facts. There were approximately two hundred fifty Displaced Persons camps in 1946. Most of them were located in Germany, a few in Austria, and one in Italy. The British administered approximately a hundred of them, while the Americans tended to most of the rest. Ukrainian refugees clung together.

“My camp was in the American Zone,” she said matter-of-factly. “The first thing we did was get acclimated. Then we went about the business of creating our own society within the camps to help us survive as a community. We formed schools. There were about seven thousand Ukrainian children in the American Zone. We had fifteen hundred teachers. The children were battle-tested. They were used to moving and leaving home on a moment’s notice. They were used to bombing and shelling. So it wasn’t that strange for them to work in a classroom without tables or chairs. Without chalk or a blackboard. The children learned while standing. They wrote in pencil on window sills and on the floor.”

She told me that the DPs created the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, and published a Ukrainian newspaper as well. A few men got jobs in military installations, in manufacturing plants, or as engineers with construction firms. But most sat around the camp speaking about hopelessness and dreaming of a better tomorrow. Meanwhile, a black market and barter system evolved.

“Cigarettes were the gold standards in the Schwarzmarkt,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “One pack bought you illegal entry into Berlin. Two packs got you some bread, potatoes, or meat from a German farmer. Twenty-five packs might have won you a German radio, and thirty bought you a bicycle.”

“Was my godfather a good scrounger?”

“He was the best. Anything you needed, you went through him. The second-hardest thing for him to acquire was fresh fruit and vegetables. Food was scarce but we got our hands on it. But the diet wasn’t varied, and we all looked gray and lifeless. That didn’t stop us from being productive. We organized a theatre. Uncensored productions without the watchful eye of the NKVD. What joy! We focused on our religion, too. Orthodox, Catholics. Most Catholic priests made it out of the USSR alive. In the camps, most people attended Mass every Sunday.”

She paused to sip her tea. Her hand trembled as she lifted her cup to her mouth. I hadn’t noticed any tremors beforehand, and was left wondering if this was an ailment or an indication of the emotional toll of recalling her past.

“Did my godfather develop any enemies back then? Something personal, that may have lingered for decades?”

Mrs. Chimchak laughed. It was a full, open-mouth laughter that showed her teeth. They were small, slightly stained, and ferocious looking. “Enemies? My God, child. It’s hard for you to understand, isn’t it? It seemed like we were the enemies of the entire outside world. But in the camps themselves? Please… You know what they say about Ukrainians. Put two in a room and you’ll get three political parties. Sure, there were politics. There were always politics. But we were too consumed with our survival to create grudges among one another.”

Something had struck a chord but I couldn’t place it. I took a few breaths and remembered.

“You said the second-hardest thing for him to acquire was fresh produce. What was the hardest thing for him to get?”

“That which could not be scrounged. Freedom. A destination. A new home for everyone who refused to go back to the old one.”

I nodded.

“That is what we lived for,” she said. “And we dreamed our dreams in a constant state of fear. The ghosts of concentration camps loomed large. There was residual fear from the war — the fighting — but mostly there was constant fear of repatriation. It was there, in the back of our minds, from the moment we arrived. But then the Americans and the British authorized the use of force to send DPs back to Ukraine toward the end of 1946. The stories of their violence spread and we knew things would only get worse.

“Violence? What kind of violence?”

“The British and American soldiers were given orders to herd people onto trains to send us back to Ukraine. When we refused, they hit us with their rifles. In our stomachs, our backs. They cracked foreheads open. They told us we were going back one way or another. They had orders.”

“And they beat DPs? Allied soldiers actually beat refugees?”

Mrs. Chimchak nodded solemnly. “There were two types of soldiers. The men from the European campaigns who’d fought the Germans were horrified. I watched battle-scarred veterans with tears in their eyes slugging DPs with their rifles. A black American doctor by the name of Washington. I will never forget him. I saw him leaning against a shed as they herded us on board crying uncontrollably. Tears rolling off his cheeks. You see, these were the same trains that had been used to bring survivors from the concentration camps back to civilization. Back to freedom.”

Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Her words sank in.

“Who was the second type of soldier?” I said.

“The new recruits. They had no wartime experience. They bonded with postwar German society, the people who hosted them, provided them services. To them we were DP scum and while there were exceptions, most of them didn’t shed any tears when they were ordered to use force for repatriation. The new American soldiers hated us as much as the locals did.”

I imagined an American soldier happily slugging a malnourished refugee to force him or her to board a train. A knot tightened in my stomach. I loathed the thought of any American having done anything evil, especially during the war when our country had helped liberate Europe. It was silly, naïve, and unrealistic, and I didn’t care. We were the lucky ones. We were Americans. We were supposed to stand for absolute good at all times.

Then the image took on a new dimension. Mrs. Chimchak entered the picture.

“You saw this Dr. Washington?” I said. “If you saw him, it means you were there. It means you were one of the DPs loaded onto the train. It means you were repatriated.”

She looked at me with her signature expression — sheer and utter inscrutability. I sat waiting for a segue to more personal revelations, but instead she smiled again. “I was very young, and very naïve.” She reached across the table and took my hand in both of hers. Donned an earnest expression, the kind I’d never seen her wear before. “Now… Your godfather was murdered. Let’s talk about how you’re going to find the killer.”