The Altar Girl: A Prequel

CHAPTER 23

I tried to find my brother before returning to the motel. First I called Brasilia. A woman told me he wasn’t working, which I found strange. I assumed Friday night was a profitable night in the strip club business, and that an owner-operator would want to be present. When my call to his house rolled to the answering machine again, I decided to drive to Willimantic and see both places for myself. My drive was for naught. The lights were off in his house and no one answered the doorbell. Meanwhile, Brasilia overflowed with breasts, butts, and beer-guzzling revelers, but Marko wasn’t among the men maintaining order.

On Saturday morning I called my mother at 7:00 a.m. sharp. I had a personal rule not to call anyone before 8:00 a.m., but I’d long since passed the point of worrying about etiquette. Much to my shock, my mother welcomed the call. She’d been up all night baking paska—the special Easter bread — and babkas. Yes, she said, Marko had promised to be at the school hall behind the church for the blessing of the Easter baskets at 2:00 p.m. I told her I was coming over to her house and driving her to Hartford, and hung up before she could answer.

I got to within a mile of her house when I saw the white Honda parked discreetly beside a Dumpster at a twenty-four-hour food mart. It was one of the two modified cars I’d seen idling outside my godfather’s house. Then, after visiting my mother, I thought I’d spied it again as I’d raced up the entrance lane to the highway. The suspension had been lowered close to the ground, fiberglass skirts had been added to the body, and the wheels were black. I suppose there could have been a third such car in the Hartford area, but it would have been an incredible coincidence.

I could see two figures inside the car as I took my turn perpendicular to the corner where they were parked, but the windows were tinted and I couldn’t make out their faces or bodies. By the time I reached my mother’s house, I’d deduced that either Donnie Angel had multiple teams of men covering my likely destinations, or he knew where I was going this morning. The only way he could have known where I was going was if my mother had told them. No one else knew I was coming to pick her up. No one.

I was prepared for some verbal punishment for hanging up on her, but when I stepped inside she hugged me as though we were soul mates. For a brief moment, all my concerns vanished. The white Honda, Donnie Angel, my godfather’s death, Marko’s possible involvement in his business or murder, my job loss, and the personal dissatisfaction I had to overcome every morning to get out of bed. None of it mattered as my mother held me. Only when she let go did a voice of reason remind me she had to have had an ulterior motive for her most uncharacteristic display of affection.

“I’m so happy to see my beautiful daughter,” she said. “You know, my children are my pride and joy. I’m so thrilled you’ll both be with me at the blessing today. The entire community will see us as the family we are. The other women will be so jealous of me. Come in, my kitten, and help me arrange the basket.”

I realized her enthusiasm was a function of appearances. Or perhaps a combination of love and appearances. Yes, I thought. This sounded more logical. I understood it might have been a delusion, but I settled on it nonetheless. After all, it was the day before Easter.

We went to the kitchen.

“You said both of us will be joining you. Did Marko call? Did he call to confirm?”

“He told me a few weeks ago he’d be there today.”

“You mean he didn’t call to confirm?”

“Your brother’s a con artist, a bum, and a degenerate sinner, but he’s my son and I have no reason to doubt his word. You want some green tea?”

I shook my head. “So you didn’t call him.”

My mother looked at me as though I were an idiot. “Do I ever call my children? I don’t want to bother either of you. I don’t want to be one of those old women who’s a pain in their children’s butts. You think we should take all these colored eggs or leave the black one out?”

“You painted an Easter egg black?” I’d never heard of or seen such a thing.

She held it up. It was black as tar.

“My hairdresser has all the magazines,” she said. “Black is the new black, didn’t you know that? I’m just trying to bring fashion into the Easter basket. I thought you, Miss New York, would understand.”

Only the Black Widow would put a black egg in her Easter basket, I thought. “Of course, Mama. You’re right. Take the black egg. It works for you. But we’re going to leave my car and take your Buick, okay?”

Her face fell. “Why?”

“I’m low on gas. I didn’t have time to stop at a station, and I don’t want to take any chances. I know how you hate it when a car isn’t fully fueled and there’s a risk of running out.”

“Shame on you for not planning ahead. The one time your mother gets a chance to drive in a sexy car…” She bit her lip. “Pity. I would have looked so good in it pulling up to the church.”

It was a lie, of course. There was plenty of high-octane in the 911; I wanted to switch cars. I doubted it would be of much help. Even if I lost the boys in the white Honda, I was headed straight to the heart of the Uke community. I couldn’t have made myself more conspicuous. Still, the mere thought of being in another vehicle lowered my blood pressure. At least I was changing my routine a bit. At least I was doing something differently.

We arranged the breads, colored eggs, ham, sausage, a mixture of horseradish and beets, butter, cheese, and salt in a wicker basket decorated with an embroidered cloth. My mother spent no less than fifteen minutes rearranging the items until the presentation met with her approval. Afterward, we packed the car and I drove us to church.

I held my breath as I approached the food mart where I’d seen my followers, but the Honda was gone. It was also nowhere to be seen in the rearview mirror. I wondered if a second car would pick up my trail any moment, and if there were even more than two vehicles following me. Then I wondered if they knew my mother drove a Buick. Perhaps I was alone for the first time in days. Perhaps I’d actually lost them.

My mother may have liked the idea of sitting in a sports car, but she didn’t enjoy traveling at high speeds in any car. She scolded me twice and told me to slow down before I ever got on the highway. I apologized and reduced my speed. I needed her to be cooperative. I also wanted to ease into my intended topic of conversation but couldn’t figure out a way to do so quickly. I had no time for small talk.

“We were talking about the DP camps the other day,” I said. “Someone told me quite a few priests made it out of Ukraine during the war and ended up in the camps. I imagine Easter had special meaning back then. The resurrection of Christ, the Savior. It was probably a big deal in camp, wasn’t it?”

She glanced at me as though I was trying to poison her. “You’re going back there again? Give me a break. I thought I’d be sitting pretty in that little Porsche of yours. Like James Dean’s girlfriend. But no. You want to go cruising down memory lane in my old American jalopy instead.”

“That makes two of us. Wanting to cruise down memory lane.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re going to the blessing of the Easter baskets. Together. Where all your friends will see us, Mama. And remember us as a family growing up.” My mother was the world heavyweight champion of quid pro quo. I was certain she’d understand. “Was Easter a big deal in the DP camps?”

She turned away from me and looked out the window. I glanced in her direction and saw her fidgeting in her seat, her head bobbing sideways and making little circles the way it did when she was irritated, digesting bad news, or contemplating something serious. In this case, it was all of the above, I suspected.

She turned back toward the windshield. She leveled her voice and sounded eerily calm. “Of course it was important. I was just a child but the adults did everything they could to give us structure and keep our spirits up.” She talked about the day-to-day struggles and tedium for a minute. “Fear lingered in camp. From the war, from the Holocaust. And eventually, from the screenings.”

“The screenings?”

“The screenings were a time of terror.”

“What screenings?”

“We all felt the tension. Even the children. It hung in the air like a noose waiting to fall on anyone’s head. You just prayed it wasn’t your parents.”

“What screenings?”

“People weren’t simply allowed to enter the DP camps. They had to prove they were legitimate refugees. Everyone in camp was interviewed. The interviews took upwards of a year. The interviews were conducted in Russian, English, and German, regardless of whether the people being interviewed spoke any of those languages. It was chaotic. There wasn’t enough room for all of us. Of course, the Russian officials were NKVD. Their real mission wasn’t to help administer the camps. Their purpose was to persuade the Americans and British to reject as many people as possible. Anyone whose story didn’t check out — anyone who changed a date from a previous interview, any charge of collaboration with the Nazis — and the person would be thrown out of camp.”

“And then what happened to them?”

My mother fired a look of disapproval in my direction, as though with each question I was making her delve further into a topic she preferred to forget. “What do you think happened? Most of them ended up on trains going back to the Soviet Union.”

“But I thought forced repatriation lasted only for a short time. I was told Eisenhower and his generals put an end to it.”

“I didn’t say anyone forced them to get on the trains.”

“You mean they went voluntarily? Why? I thought that was the last place they wanted to go?”

“It was. But the NKVD rounded them up one by one. They kidnapped them off the streets if they had to, and then made them offers they couldn’t refuse.”

“What kind of offers?”

“Go back to the Motherland where you belong and the family you left behind will not be sent to a labor camp. Or murdered.”

“Extortion? The Americans and the British allowed that?”

“The Americans and the British didn’t understand the Russians. Plus they had their hands full managing the camps and trying to figure out where all the hard-core DPs would go. The ones who survived the screenings. The Americans and the British had no idea that SMERSH even existed.”

“Did you say SMERSH?”

“Vindictive men with a vindictive spirit.”

“I heard that name in a James Bond movie once. That was real? I assumed that was something Ian Fleming made up.”

“You did? Well, so much for your college education. Stalin thought of the name. Spetsyalnye Metody Razoblacheniya Shpyonov.” Special Methods of Spy Detection. “He created SMERSH to prevent the Gestapo from infiltrating the NKVD. In the camps, SMERSH used bribery, blackmail, and threats to repatriate as many DPs as possible to the Soviet Union. After the camps were disbanded in 1950, they stayed in Europe and became the foundation for the Soviets’ European spy network.”

“And the DPs that went back because they were threatened. What happened to them and their families?”

My mother snickered. I could tell it wasn’t directed at me. She was staring out the windshield remembering a scene from her past, or one that she’d imagined.

“The Soviet officers would gather around the trains that were leaving and make it look like a big party. They would clap and cheer and wish all the DPs a pleasant journey back home. But when the train crossed the border into Russia, all their bags would be seized and they would be greeted as traitors.”

I darted into the exit lane for Hartford. It was the same exit Father Yuri had taken last night in my car, but we were coming from the opposite direction. It occurred to me that ever since I’d started digging into my godfather’s death, I was increasingly discovering the truth to be the opposite of what I had thought it had been. In this case, my mother didn’t sound like my mother. She sounded lucid, logical, and authoritative. She sounded like someone else’s mother. That thought shook me to the bone.

“How do you know so much about this, Mama? I mean, I know you lived it and all, but you sound… You sound incredibly knowledgeable on the subject.”

My mother looked out the side window again. “What? Your mother isn’t the idiot you thought after all these years?”

We sat in silence for a minute as I negotiated some gridlock. I took a right onto Wethersfield Avenue and headed toward the church. I tried to connect what I’d learned to the DP entry in my godfather’s calendar.

“Did SMERSH or the NKVD ever try to turn one DP against another?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if they tried it, but I never heard of anything like that. Our community was our strength. It’s how we survived. Where is that coming from?”

“I found out my godfather was a bit of a scoundrel.” I remembered my brother’s assertion that my godfather had made sexual advances toward my mother. “Where business is concerned,” I quickly added. I didn’t want to embarrass her. “Do you think he could have discovered something about someone? Someone who was a DP but pretended he wasn’t, or someone who was a DP and hurt the community. Do you think he could have been blackmailing someone? I know it’s a stretch but it is possible.”

“That sounds like nonsense to me. I knew your godfather pretty well. He was a drunk and a pervert, but he was not a blackmailer. He wasn’t mentally strong enough for that sort of thing. Try to get a corner parking spot. I don’t want some fat Ukrainian kielbasa-lover swinging his door open and denting my vintage Buick.”

Until that moment, I’d assumed my godfather’s murder was related to his business. Now, for the first time, I realized that wasn’t necessarily the case. He might have been murdered as a function of his involvement in some other scheme. Something related to his experience in a World War II Displaced Persons camp.

The Uke school was located behind the church. I drove around the lot like a zombie, still dwelling on my mother’s revelations. All the parking spots were taken. Families marched toward the school hall in their Sunday best carrying Easter baskets. My mother became frantic that the school hall had filled up and there would be no vacant spots on the tables for her to place her basket. She told me to drop her off and go find a parking spot on the street quickly, but I was barely listening. I was focused on the image of the letters DP on my godfather’s calendar.

I pulled over. My mother got out of the car and removed the basket from the back seat. Then she stuck her head back in the passenger-side door.

“One ride. One conversation. Don’t ever ask me about the past again. I know what this is about. I know how your mind works. Trust your mother. You’re not going to get any satisfaction trying to find out what your father did and didn’t do before he came to America. So take my advice, and let it go.”

With that, she slammed the door shut and left me shell-shocked.

My father had died when I was thirteen. He’d never spoken to me about his life in Ukraine before he immigrated to America, and I’d been too scared and young to express any curiosity. I’d never thought about his past. Now, thanks to my mother, I had another mystery to solve.

I parked on the street along the sidewalk facing Colt’s Park, and hurried to the school hall. I climbed the stairs to the auditorium on the second floor. It teemed with people. There had to be hundreds of them. The cumulative noise of their conversations was deafening. I wedged my way through a group of men I’d never seen before in my life and caught a glimpse of one row of Easter baskets. They sat atop a series of rectangular tables that had been arranged along the perimeter of the basketball court. Families huddled beside their baskets waiting for the priest to arrive.

At first, I didn’t recognize anyone. Then I bumped into my former geography teacher from Ukrainian school. She gave me a quick hug and told me someone had saved a spot for my mother near center court. I spied my mother farther down the column of tables, smiling lovingly and in animated conversation with a broad-shouldered man. His head was obscured by a father of four, who was standing beside his wife. I knew immediately that the broad-shouldered man was Marko. A combination of excitement and dread filled me as I pushed my way toward them. I vowed not to let him out of my sight until he answered all my questions truthfully this time.

My mother was the first to see me. She smiled. Her children had accompanied her to the blessing of the Easter baskets. It was every mother’s dream, and it gave me some satisfaction to have helped fulfill it.

“Look who stopped by to say hello,” my mother said.

I stepped around the father of four but it wasn’t Marko’s face that I saw. Instead I looked straight into the smiling eyes of Donnie Angel.