The Silence of Trees (14 page)

Mama Paraska and I left the field with a few other women from the work camp and found a dorm room large enough for us to share. She called us together and immediately took charge to ensure the safety of “her girls.”

“These men,” Mama Paraska said, walking back and forth, “are like pigs and dogs in heat, locked away for so long without women. It will not be safe for you, especially at night. So if you want to stay here with me, you follow my rules, and I will try to keep you safe.”

The work camps had been divided into male and female sections, closely monitored by guards and separated by barbed wire. Yet now that the war was over, danger and possibility lurked around every dark corner. Mama Paraska set down her rules: curfew at dusk, no walking alone with a man, no men back in the dorm, no smoking in the room, and–unless a girl was sick–everyone was required to dine together in the evening. If any of us broke any one of her rules, we would lose the privilege of staying in her dorm.

“This is going to be a crazy time, now that the war is over.” Mama Paraska shook her head. “My daughters, you must be careful. Men are worthless. And men in heat are dangerous. They fight or rape without a thought because they have been shamed and beaten. And broken. Beware the broken man who sings sweetly but punches after his caress. Remember, they are all lovers and poets before the first kiss.”

She looked each of us in the eye as she spoke, this tiny woman with her rosy cheeks who knew our deepest fears and desires.

There were eight of us then, but two girls left that night and didn’t come back. Mama Paraska shook her head and said only, “Pity, like the good Lord, I too must lose some sheep.”

To further ensure our well-being–physical and spiritual–Mama Paraska made arrangements with Father Petro Petrenko, an Orthodox priest whom she had met while in line waiting to record her name in the books. She had been leaning over the shoulder of the old man in front of her to hear how he answered his questions. Afterwards, she said it was because he looked so familiar. It turned out they came from neighboring villages near Kyiv.

I had been trembling and sweating as I stood in the registration line, trying to decide what to say, how to answer the soldiers’ questions. All the rumors I heard rushed through my mind: that the Americans were going to force us all to go home; that the Russians were having us sent to Siberia; that we would “disappear” en route to Ukraine and turn up in ditches; that Ukraine had been demolished in the War, and there were few people left alive. So many nightmares, and we had no way of knowing the truth.

Standing in line, I thought I saw Liliana, the vorozhka, in the distance, walking toward the barracks. She walked with that same sway of her hips, her long hair down around her waist. I stepped out of line and rushed over to her. I could smell berries and mint, her distinct smell. Of course she had survived; she was a warrior! I had so many questions to ask her. I reached out to touch her elbow, and Liliana turned around to look at me, her face thinner; her eyes still bright.

“You survived, farmer girl,” she said. “Now it’s time to start living.”

“Nadya!” A voice called and I looked back. Mama Paraska had been saving my place in line. “It’s your turn.”

I looked back toward Liliana, but she was gone. I hurried back to my place. When it came time for me to give my name, I lied. I gave Stephan’s last name as my own. Nadya Palyvoda. It was the same name I had given in Slovakia, before they took him away. I decided never again to use my father’s name. I wanted no connection made to my family. If any of them were still somehow alive, I wanted them to be safe. To have family alive in Germany could only mean one thing to the Russians: Treason.

After I wiped away traces of my past, Mama Paraska began working to convince Father Petrenko and his traveling companion, Brother Taras Moroz, to stay in the room beside ours to be on hand if there was any trouble. In return, she promised to embroider some vestments for Father for Sunday services. She impressed Father Petro with her spiritual pedigree, and in time the two of them grew to be good friends, spending endless Saturday afternoons arguing about the authorship of the Gospels and other spiritual mysteries.

Word of our little safe haven spread, and more Ukrainian girls sought refuge in Mama Paraska’s dorm. By the end of that first week, she was responsible for a dozen girls. But Mama was overjoyed, not overwhelmed. She was happiest when taking care of other people; and as for us, the motherless daughters, we craved someone to look out for us, to worry if we didn’t come home, to hold us when we wept. Given the choice between freedom or safety, we twelve chose safety. The war had already provided us with a lifetime of adventures.

One of the oldest girls, Natalia, had also come with us from the women’s barracks. She had been a poet and teacher; the only one of seven daughters to survive the war. Left for dead among her sisters’ corpses in the schoolyard, she had awoken to wild dogs gnawing on her fingers. Despite her own disfigurement—or maybe because of it—Natalia insisted that we “create beauty” around us and suggested that we find a name for our new home. We called our dorm “Nebo,” or Sky, and referred to each other as “the Star Sisters.”

Even though everyone ate together in the great dining hall, we were each responsible for preparing our own dinners. Eventually, the Red Cross came and relieved us of that chore, but in those first few weeks, we prepared our food outside in pots and garbage cans, using whatever we could find in the dirty abandoned kitchen. Because everyone was looking for supplies and utensils, people fought over ladles and knives. The Star Sisters worked together and took turns preparing meals. As a result, we survived better than many around us, thanks to Mama Paraska and Father Petro.

“The secret to peace is sharing meals,” Mama Paraska said before our first official camp dinner of mashed potatoes and spinach. “We will always gather together for the last meal of the day. With food, we feed our bodies. With family, we feed our spirits. And we are family.” Then Father Petrenko would bless our meal with a prayer of thanks.

After each meal, Father would stretch back, rub his belly, and say, “The bread of life, the bread of life.”

He became for us like a kindly grandfather, full of stories and advice. As time passed, he eventually performed marriages for nine Star Sisters and baptized several of our children.

If he was our new grandfather, his traveling companion, Brother Taras, was our godfather. In a camp filled with “heat-stricken pigs and dogs,” Brother Taras and his bright blue eyes, thick blonde curls and strong shoulders was for us an untouchable saint: someone whom we could confide in, dream about, and never fear. He called us his sisters and kissed our cheeks each morning. The first few weeks, he even slept outside our door to keep us safe and in doing so, forever endeared himself to us. Several times, when drunken admirers came searching for “their girls,” Brother Taras chased them away, risking stolen guns, dull knives and bloody fists. To us he was the gentlest of men, but to anyone who troubled us, he was our avenger. Many of the Star Sisters swore to name firstborn sons after him.

Together with Mama Paraska, Father Petro, Brother Taras and the Star Sisters, I had a family. It could not replace all I had lost, but I was safe and loved and cared for. Even the nightmares seemed less frightening, and for a while, even the ghosts seemed to be at peace.

But Mama Paraska never gave up hope that she would be reunited with her precious Andriy. Each morning as the sun rose, she and I would take a walk around the camp to the Wall of Words. An outside wall of the cafeteria, it had been transformed with messages and photos left by wives looking for husbands, sons looking for fathers, mothers looking for daughters. Refugees wrote their names and home villages with the hope that someone might find them with news, good or bad:

“This is my uncle, he was taken from the village of Tallinn. Is he alive?”

“Is there anyone here from Drohobych?”

“Here is my wife and son. I have not seen them in four years. Has anyone?”

Eventually these efforts would become more sophisticated as the camp put together a newspaper and began receiving radio broadcasts. But during those first few months, we had nothing but that wall. So we walked and read and hoped.

It was through the wall that Mama Paraska got word of her son’s whereabouts. I helped her write a letter and then asked a kind American soldier to send it for us. Together we waited; and as we waited, summer turned to fall, fall turned to winter, and then one glorious day, winter teased us with a taste of spring.

The unexpected February sun had set the snow aglow, and that radiance soaked into our skins, into our moods. After weeks of gray skies and icy winds, the midday rays breaking through the clouds brought a change to all our attitudes. Around me I heard hints of singing, humming, and whistling. The change was soft and subtle, like a whisper in a cathedral, but it was amazing because in the DP camps people were still grieving. Those who had lost loved ones or had lost hope put most of their energy into work and forgetting. Some chose to try and erase time with drinking, fighting, weeping, and empty embraces. Others buried the past in silence.

But this winter sun reminded us of spring, of hope, of things stirring somewhere deep beneath frozen soil, of things that could possibly still stir somewhere deep within our hearts.

That warm February night, the light still lingered in our spirits, and after dining, we remained in our seats in the dining hall. The air was heavy with sweat and cigarettes, onions and burnt butter. The floors were sticky with smeared potatoes and spilt coffee and beer. Hundreds of breaths, old and stale, young and fresh, were caught in half-open mouths, their lips on the verge of song.

Waiting.

Not wanting this brightness to somehow fade away with sleep.

We knew that in the morning, nothing would have changed. Greeted with the same gray skies, the same backdrop of dirty snow and ashen barracks, the same shadows of people, we would go about our work, afraid to get close to anyone. But that night, we found shreds of courage.

It began with a violin, a haunting melody that I recognized as the song I heard at the Gypsy camp, the night I had run off into the woods. I scanned the crowd for Liliana, but she was nowhere to be found. Soon other players joined in. Someone had a guitar, another a flute, and out of the silence came songs from home. A few older men and women wept through their words, words we all knew, some singing, some humming, a few clapping their hands. Several of the younger ones cleared an area in the corner and began to dance. Still others stared off into their memories.

“The guitar player keeps looking at you, Nadya,” said Nina, one of the Star Sisters. She nudged me again with her pudgy elbow, her irritation obvious, her voice melodramatic, as usual. “Look at him. If I had a man like that looking at me, you’d better believe that I’d look back at him.”

To annoy her further, I looked instead at her. She shook out her braid and tossed her long blond hair around her shoulders. Nina assumed that she and I were destined to be best friends because she had the bed to my right, so each night I was forced to listen to her rattle on and on about her unfortunate engagement and her plan for a better future.

Back in her small village outside of Kyiv, Nina Ochumelov had been promised to a scholar of religion, a handsome older man with a distinguished graying beard, a large house, and several of his own cows. But during one of Stalin’s purges, the scholar had been taken away, presumably sent to Siberia. He never returned, and Nina never found a replacement.

When the War reached Ukraine, Nina and her sisters were taken to be laborers in Germany. Her sisters both married German soldiers and left Nina alone to “toil in the factory” as she would say, each time throwing her hands over her head for emphasis.

Nina felt that God owed her either a rich or a handsome husband to make up for her misfortune. Because we were in the DP camps, she decided to settle for handsome.

“Nadya, if you don’t want him, can I have him?” Nina asked while pinching her round cheeks for color. I wasn’t sure how she managed to remain so plump; she ate the same as I did. Yet while I remained thin, her hips continued to soften. I knew she was friendly with some of the American soldiers stationed in camp, but I couldn’t imagine them giving up any of their food.

I finally turned to look at the man Nina was referring to. No sooner had I turned my head, then he caught my gaze and held it until I realized that I had stopped breathing. He smiled.

I looked back at Nina who was studying my face. She frowned and said, “So you do fancy him, hmm? Okay, fine. But his friend, the cute little blonde man with the long whiskers, he’s mine. Besides, I was never one to like musicians—“ She kept talking, but I turned back to the guitarist and watched him tune his strings. He started to play the chords for a slow, sad, love song. Glancing up at me, he smiled and began to sing.

I blushed when I realized his seduction: The careful way he stroked and plucked and caressed the guitar strings, while peering at me from the corners of his eyes. As if I was watching something private. As if he was performing only for me.

I suddenly felt as if my breath was pulled from me and a heavy sadness filled me instead. The loneliness of the melody caught in my throat and held my heart from beating. Then and only then did I truly understand the power of the Gypsy music I had heard on the wind. I had thought the music haunting and magical. It was, but it was so much more than that. A longing was echoed in the chords the guitarist played. It would forever echo in any song I heard from home, a rhythm like my mother’s heartbeat.