The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  “What the devil,” her father said. The presence of light in Abram’s office brought him out of his slouch. He urged the horses into a gallop, but as they came near to the service road he slowed the team, as though needing time to think. Then they went past the service road and turned at the avenue of chestnuts towards the house, the wagon wheels throwing off sparks against the cobblestone drive. There was movement at a window in Abram’s office, a shadow, and moments later light spilled out from the vestibule door and onto the steps as Abram came outside.

  The wagon came to a standstill beside the rondel, whose clipped symmetrical hedges appeared to have been carved from stone. At the centre of the rondel was a fountain, made up of tiers of bowl-shaped marble, cascading water, which meant that the master of the house was home. In the dusky light, the water looked like silvery banners of silk. When Abram went away Aganetha had the gardener turn off the fountain to save on water, not believing what the gardener had told her, that the same water was used over and over, and except for a bit of evaporation caused by sun and wind, the birds coming to drink, no water was lost.

  Greta climbed down from the wagon and hurried away, going to look for Dietrich and Lydia, Katya knew, while her father reached for her and swung her to the ground, saying, Hup! as he did so, becoming suddenly filled with energy, swinging her so hard that her legs and skirts went flying, and she felt giddy when her feet met the ground.

  “Go tell Mama where I’ve stayed,” he said without turning, as he went to meet Abram, following him up the steps and disappearing into the vestibule.

  She went along the side of the Big House and saw that Helena Sudermann’s room was lit, saw Helena beyond the window at a table and the Wiebe sisters with her, listening as Helena read to them. Greta had already disappeared into the shadows of the west garden, wanting to find Lydia and Dietrich in the vine arbour where they had begun to go since the evenings had grown cool. A rustle of cloth came from beside the back door, Sophie on a bench, brushing her hair.

  “Hsst. You there, come here,” Sophie called in a whisper.

  “I can’t. I’m supposed to tell Mama where my papa is,” Katya said.

  “She already knows,” Sophie said. She had seen Aganetha Sudermann going over to Katya’s house. It was unusual for Aganetha to visit her mother, and the news made Katya want to rush home, but Sophie drew her into her lap.

  Sophie’s chin poked into Katya’s shoulder as they watched lights moving in the orchard; the harvest was over, and the seasonal workers free to glean grain on the fields, fruit in the orchard, as they were now doing. They were free to pick through the gardens for potatoes and other vegetables the diggers’ forks had missed. They had the right to some of the produce of their labour, what wheat there might be lying on a field, scraps of fat from the fall killing, the feet of butchered chickens. The gardener had set out paper sacks of flower seeds in the greenhouse and the workers were encouraged to take what they wanted to brighten their own yards, a sapling to provide a legacy of shade for their children, to break the wind and snow, a swaying green crown to rest the eye, weary of the flat bleakness of the steppe. They weren’t free, however, to roam about the pastures, where villagers drove their cows to graze until Abram fenced the pasture lands and hired several Cossacks to ride the steppe, both day and night. And they weren’t free to help themselves to the timber growing in Abram Sudermann’s forest, although some of them protested that they had the right to do so, and to prove their point would drag a felled tree out onto the meadow and light it on fire.

  “So you didn’t come and tell me about your trip to the forest,” Sophie said with mock petulance. “Next time you ask for a story, I’ll think twice. Guns going off, you girls could have been mistaken for a rabbit. And my baby brother, too. I heard all about it from my father.”

  “We didn’t do it. We didn’t take your brother,” Katya said.

  “Good thing, or I would have bitten off your ear.” Sophie laughed and nibbled at Katya’s earlobe, her breath warm and smelling of garlic and onions.

  “And you didn’t tell me about this, either,” Sophie continued, pulling the headscarf from her apron pocket. Lydia had brought it to her, she said.

  “When you were on the road, did you see Manya anywhere along the way?” Sophie asked. “This is her headscarf.”

  Katya looked across the yard at the women’s quarters, where the windows were always the first to go dark. The women would be up and about before daybreak, when she would sometimes hear the clink of their milk pails, a faint rising din of the cows bawling for relief as the women entered the barns.

  “I don’t think she’s going to come back,” Sophie said. “She’s a Pravda, and most of them have no pride. They’re known to kiss the hand of a person who kicks them around. But that’s not Manya.”

  Katya thought of Sophie’s cottage, its one crowded room, the dirt floor, and that Manya likely came from a similar place. “But why would Manya want to leave?”

  “If I were God, I’d be able to tell you,” Sophie said.

  With Manya gone, Sophie wouldn’t have anyone of her age and kind to meet with at the bathhouse on Sundays and complain to about the knotholes, which, although they were frequently stuffed with sod, were always unplugged. Sophie would have no one to grumble with about aching muscles, that her ears were full up from listening to Helena, who sometimes acted as though she had a ram in her skirt. Let her chew on her own moustache, not mine, Katya had overheard Sophie saying to Manya. Sophie would plug the knotholes, bathe, and say nothing, except she would tell the other outside women that Manya had been complaining about there being a fox prowling about their quarters, a fox that had followed her into the forest.

  One by one the lights left the orchard. Horses whinnied in a field beyond the fruit trees, and wagon trusses began to jingle. The peasants would likely sleep on straw beside the road, as once the harvest was over, the doors on the seasonal workers’ quarters were padlocked. The sky was clear and bright with stars and a quarter moon whose light was strong. Look how the darkness is made less dark by the moon’s reflection on the water in the rain barrel, how everything, even a spider’s web, is turned to silver by its light.

  “Do you believe in God?” Katya asked Sophie. She was thinking of the Red Corner in the one-room cottage where Sophie had lived. She was thinking of its saint-picture, the candles placed before it, thou shalt not worship idols or any graven image.

  “What kind of question are you asking? Of course. Everyone believes in God.”

  “And God’s son in the New Testament?”

  “Oh, that book. Helena reads it to them every night,” Sophie said with a scornful snort. “It’s better not to believe in that book. When the priests come round with their Pope sacks, they expect you to give them twice as much. For the son, and for the ghost. If you only believe in God, then they don’t come as often,” she said.

  “Sophie, it’s time Katya went home, and for you to come inside,” Helena said from the doorway.

  Sophie started, and released Katya from her lap.

  “Yes, Mistress, I’m coming,” she said.

  Sophie hesitated before going into the house, and turned to Katya. “When you were at my house, did you see my sister Vera?”

  “Ja.” And she was rough-looking and too bold.

  “I miss that little suslik so much, sometimes my stomach hurts,” Sophie said. She sighed deeply and the screen door closed with a gentle clap.

  Katya was drawn through the dark gulf between the lit windows of the Big House, towards a warm glow of lamplight in the open doorway and windows of her own house. Acacia trees, their crowns the breadth of the roof, were guardians leaning over, listening, she thought, to her mother and Aganetha’s visiting outside on the platform.

  “You’d think that woman would have had more sense than to buy meat from a Russian,” Aganetha Sudermann was saying as Katya came up the steps.

  Her mother had dragged their one good chair from the parlour outside, and Aganeth
a sat in it, overflowed the chair on all sides, her plump arms resting on the shelf of her bosom, while Katya’s mother sat on a bench leaning against the house.

  “So, Katherine, you had a nice trip with your papa, yes?” Aganetha said to acknowledge her presence.

  Before Katya could answer, Aganetha turned to Katya’s mother, who leaned against the house, her face patterned with diamond shapes of light and shadows cast by lamplight through a trellis beside the door, her hands folded across her lap as though not itching to scrub the cucumbers afloat in the washtub at her feet. Katya realized that Aganetha’s visit had not been expected.

  “She was grinding meat in the summer kitchen,” Katya’s mother said to remind Aganetha where she’d left off in the story. She glanced at the tub of water, a scrub brush floating on its surface, then across the yard at the Big House, her eyes coming to rest on Katya’s face and asking, Do you have any idea why your father is taking so long?

  “Yes, she was grinding meat in the summer kitchen, and she called across the yard to one of her help, who was carrying the milk too carelessly and slopping it over the sides of the pail. I was telling your mama about a Mrs. Krahn. Mrs. Willy Krahn from Arbusovka,” Aganetha said to Katya. “She passed away, and her funeral is on Saturday. The woman had bought a butchered lamb from a Russian who came knocking at her door. When she was grinding the meat and calling out to the girl who was slopping the milk, the meat grinder came loose and fell. It landed on her foot and split open her big toe. The meat was bad, and so she was poisoned,” Aganetha said.

  I’m so hungry for company, Katya’s mother often said. Sometimes she sang a ditty about a bird that came carrying a letter in its beak. A letter from a mother in Rosenthal. The tips of her mother’s shoes barely touched the platform as she sat on the bench, which made her look like a child. She motioned to Katya that she should take up scrubbing the cucumbers.

  Katya cleaned the cucumbers, hearing Lydia and Greta’s voices rise from the arbour in the west garden, and then the sound of a mandolin as Dietrich began to play. A balalaika took up the song, its music coming from the field beyond the orchard where the light of the gleaners’ bonfire glimmered through the trees. A man began singing – Odnozvuchno zvenit kalakol’chik – his voice, honey sweetening the night. A door closed, and moments later Franz Pauls came across the yard, drawn by the magnet of song through the garden gate and the orchard, singing in his thin tenor voice as he went into the field to join the workers at their fire. A breeze wafted across the compound from the outer edges of their oasis, flipping the leaves of the acacia guardians behind her house, bringing with it the smell of manure which had been spread on the fields. When enough time had passed, and an ocean distanced her from the place where she had been born, she would recall this moment as proof that she had once lived in paradise.

  Aganetha sighed. “I’ll be so glad when Lydia goes off to Mädchenschule. There’s just not enough for that girl to do out here. She’s too old to be playing with babies. When our Justina went, we saw such a difference,” she said.

  Just after Dietrich came home in spring, Justina returned from the Girls’ School, but left to holiday in Simferopol in the middle of summer. It seemed that once her children got an appetite for travel they wouldn’t stay put. The same thing had happened with her married sons, Aganetha said.

  Katya had been relieved when Justina went away. She tried to avoid Justina, whose mouth uttered sweetness while her eyes said something else.

  “Yes, soon Lydia will go off to the Mädchenschule,” Katya’s mother said as a spark of laughter rose from the gazebo. “I wish Greta were able to go, too.”

  “Well,” Aganetha Sudermann said, and appeared as though she wanted to say more but was restraining herself.

  “Mrs. Krahn’s kitchen girl went out and collected herbs to make a poultice for her injured toe,” Aganetha said, taking up the story again. “She also came back with mushrooms. Frau Krahn fed those mushrooms to the pigs later on. She didn’t want to cause hurt feelings, and so, when the girl’s back was turned, she hobbled barefoot to the pigpen and threw the mushrooms to the sows. By then, her toe was too swollen for a shoe, but she wasn’t worried about it. The next morning, however, it had become worse. She had a black streak going up the inside of her calf. When she started to feel dizzy, Willy Krahn sent one of his men to Chortitza for the doctor. By the time Dr. Warkentine came, she was sweating so much they had to change her bedding on the hour. Not even a week later, she was dead,” Aganetha said.

  Katya set a cucumber on top of a pile in a basket and it started a slide. Cucumbers tumbled down and rolled across the platform.

  Aganetha nudged a cucumber with the toe of her shoe. “Some people call this clean?” she said.

  Katya’s mother bristled, and then swallowed whatever was on her tongue.

  “All I can say is, that’s what happens when you buy meat from a Russian who comes knocking at the door,” Aganetha said.

  “It’s more than likely germs got into the wound from the pigsty,” her mother said. Her voice trailed off as though she regretted having spoken.

  Katya’s mother stood up and massaged a spot near her lower back, her eyes drawn to the Big House. As her mother stretched, Aganetha stared at her stomach long and hard, her eyes veering away when her mother noticed and blushed.

  “Dr. Warkentine said the meat was spoiled. The woman handled the meat when she was grinding it, and then she handled her injured foot. That’s how the poison must have got in,” Aganetha said.

  “Yes, that’s likely what happened,” her mother said, as though wanting to drop the topic. “Will Abram be home for a while now, or will he be off on business again?” she asked.

  “He’s going to Simferopol soon to get Justina and take her back to school,” Aganetha said.

  “Then we won’t get to see her before she goes.”

  “I thought it was best Abram took her right to school. Keep her away from Mr. Cow-Eyes,” Aganetha said cryptically, and then, in a whisper, “From Mr. New-Riding-Breeches. Mr. Trying-to-Grow-a-Moustache.”

  “Mr. Rained-on-Rooster,” Katya’s mother said, and for a moment the two women laughed as though they were girls sitting on a step, trying to outdo one another. Katya stopped scrubbing, amazed to think that her mother would say such a thing, that she would hear her own opinion of Franz Pauls coming from her. The kitchen door at the Big House opened and Helena emerged. Her long white apron glowed as she went along a stone path and into the gardens where she had begun to go at the end of a day to say her prayers. She wanted to be close to nature, and to make sure that the garden paths had been raked.

  “East India, yet,” Aganetha muttered as they watched the woman disappear into the shadows.

  Her mother’s face closed, and she remained silent.

  They heard the horses and wagon before they saw them emerge from the half-circle drive at the front of the Big House, her father going with the team to the wagon house.

  Aganetha put her hands on her knees in preparation to leave, as though this action would somehow assist her in heaving her bulk up from the chair. “Do you know what Mrs. Krahn’s last words to her family were?” she asked as she got up and shook creases from her skirt. A smile strayed across her face.

  “No, I don’t,” Katya’s mother said, surprised the conversation had turned back to this.

  “She told them to be sure and scrub the meat grinder before they put it away.”

  Her mother stifled a burst of laughter, the tension relieved as Katya’s father came across the compound.

  “You may remember what the woman was like,” Aganetha continued. “She was always, Do this, do that. But I suppose she had to be. Willy isn’t known to be overly energetic. I’m sure it won’t be long before he finds someone else. Those kind always do.”

  “Yes, some poor young girl who needs a place to go. Someone who doesn’t have much say in the matter,” her mother said.

  “Never mind that.” Aganetha’s voice became soft. �
��I came over here because I wanted to say something.”

  As Katya’s father drew nearer, she saw Aganetha’s quick nervous glance in his direction. She knew his presence had stopped Aganetha from finishing what she’d wanted to say to her mother, and wondered why. If she had been older and more experienced in the ways of women’s talk, she would have known that Aganetha had something on her mind that made her feel guilty.

  “The prime minister has been killed. Stolypin. I think that’s who Abram said it was. He was shot,” Aganetha said.

  “How could that have happened?” her mother exclaimed.

  “In Kiev. In the opera house. And in the presence of the tsar, too. Had Chaliapin been singing? Of course, Abram couldn’t say. I wondered, though, because I once read in the Odessaer Zietung that Chaliapin had agreed to sing in Kiev,” she said, the sentence trailing off as she realized how foolish she sounded. There she was going on about an opera singer she had once heard sing and was eager to remind people of at any appropriate gathering, when the prime minister had been assassinated. A man whose name she couldn’t remember.

  A name that would come back to Katya when, years later, she saw a photograph in a book, a dacha wall blown to bits, timber tossed about a yard like sticks of kindling, Stolypin’s summer home bombed during a first attempt on his life. She would read somewhere that the death of the prime minister in the opera house had ended what chance there’d been to turn aside the runaway horses of revolution, and would remember that a woman in Arbusovka had died when a meat grinder fell on her foot.

  “What I really came to say is, I’m sorry,” Aganetha said, and fled as quickly as her jiggling girth would allow.

  As Katya’s father came up the steps, her mother rose to greet him. “I heard about the prime minister. Is that what brought Abram back so soon?”

  “Well, yes. He came with news,” her father said, his eyes flaring with a sudden hardness, and his jaw working.

  “Peta, tell me.” Her mother took his arm and led him to the bench.