Tato put his arm around Mama’s heaving shoulders. “It’s not that simple. What do you expect? I march down to the state headquarters and demand their freedom? I would be arrested with them. I have seen it happen several times over. Nothing we do can bring them back.”
The activists had made it very clear that helping a kulak was a crime. People brave enough to try to fight back or help family and friends hide had been caught and deported right alongside the ones they’d tried to save.
Katya clenched her fists. “But what can they do to all of us? If we all stand up for our friends, for our family, together, then what can they do to our whole village?”
Tato grimaced. ”Don’t you see? They are already doing it to our whole village. How many empty houses are there? How many families deported? Would you chance me being arrested or shot to appease your need to do something? Or do you ask that I let my wife or daughters go and risk being arrested? I’m left with no choice here, Katya. You must see that!”
His words deflated her, and she drooped into the chair in front of the warm pich. She tried to imagine Tato powerless to protect his family. The thought terrified her, yet when she looked at the stoop in his shoulders and the dullness of his eyes, it seemed he already felt that way. Stalin’s plan to terrify the remaining Ukrainians into subservience so they would join his regime was working just as he’d hoped.
Mama dabbed at her eyes with her damp handkerchief. She went over to the eastern facing wall where she kept her holy icons and dropped to her knees in front of the images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mother holding the Holy Child. A white rushnyk cloth with two intricately embroidered red trees of life—one on each end—hung down either side of the pictures and framed the area where the family prayed. She lit the blessed candle, closed her eyes, and folded her hands.
Katya bit back an exasperated sigh. Praying wouldn’t do Sasha or the rest of her family any good now. She turned to her father. “We’re not going to sign up for the collective, are we?”
“We will do everything we can to avoid it,” Tato said, but his voice lacked its usual vigor.
As Katya lay with her back pressed against Alina’s in their tiny bed later that night, sleep eluded her. She couldn’t stop replaying the day’s events in her mind. Serhiy’s blood, Sasha’s screams, Aunt Oksana’s anguished cry. They were gone now, probably forever, and Katya had done nothing. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed the images to leave her brain, but it was useless. She reached under the pillow and pulled out the bundle of scrap papers she kept wrapped around the stub of an old pencil and, with only the moonlight that crept in through the window illuminating the page, began to write what she’d seen until her eyes grew heavy and sleep finally came.
The next day, she hurried through her morning chores of milking the cow, feeding the livestock, and gathering the eggs, then made her way across the snowy field separating her farm from Pavlo’s.
She found Pavlo outside, heading toward the barn, and fell into step with him. “Can we talk?”
Her cold hand twisted into his warm one, and he gave it a squeeze. “Of course.”
He led her inside and toward the horse stalls. They each grabbed a brush and, together, worked on grooming an old mare. Katya told him everything that had happened the day before, and he listened, his face growing darker with each word she spoke.
7
CASSIE
Illinois, May 2004
Silence engulfed the house. Bobby had been sleeping for an hour, and Birdie lay tucked in the bed Cassie had once snuggled into as a child.
“This is my new normal,” Cassie murmured to herself.
She opened the duffel bag with her clothes and toiletries and took a few minutes to hang up her shirts and put her other clothes in the dresser. Henry’s face grinned up at her from the family portrait she’d tucked in the bottom of the bag.
She set it on her nightstand and smiled, remembering how they’d laughed that day as the photographer had tried to put them in such awkward poses. The one in the frame had turned out to be the best shot, and Birdie’s little face wasn’t even looking at the camera. She stared adoringly up at her father.
How could she have imagined that two weeks later, their whole world would change when Henry took Birdie out for ice cream? She closed her eyes, remembering every word, every movement, like they were tattooed on her brain.
“I don’t know, it’s nearly bedtime,” Cassie had said, winking at Henry over Birdie’s head.
The little girl hopped off the bicycle and popped the kickstand out like she’d been doing it for years.