The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

Her father leaned forward and dangled his cap between his knees, breathing deeply, his mouth twisted to one side as though to prevent him from speaking.

  “Yes, it’s true,” he said at last, and tossed his cap across the platform. “Stolypin has been assassinated, which likely means the end to land reforms. Some people are breathing a little easier over that.” His voice held more than a touch of bitterness.

  “What other news?” her mother asked. When she put her hand on his arm, he drew away from her touch. She glanced at him with worry, at Katya, and began bouncing her knee. Katya felt the platform jiggle as she sat at the water-filled tub, her stomach gathering into knots.

  What other news? he repeated. Abram and Jakob had been elected to a committee which would plan a celebration to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. A pharmacy in Chortitza had been robbed twice. Workers in Isaac Sudermann’s factory in Ekaterinoslav had threatened to strike, but Isaac averted the strike by scattering coins about the factory yard.

  “And so?”

  “Do you need to ask?” The words were a fist against a table. Then his shoulders slumped and he buried his face in his hands, his fingers curling to grasp at his skull. “It’s not to be,” he said, the words muffled.

  “Not? Why not?” Her mother’s voice was accusing.

  “Because it’s not to be.” He left her side to pick up his cap and returned to the bench. “Because we couldn’t agree on the price. The brothers believed I should pay today’s prices for the land, not the price the land stood at when Abram and I made our agreement years ago, which was understood at the time. All except David wanted more. But when I reminded Abram, he said I was mistaken, he couldn’t remember agreeing to any such thing. It was not written down that the price would be the same, but it was understood. It was understood. Before God it was understood.” His voice had risen and then dropped, all his energy suddenly gone.

  “But how much more?” her mother asked.

  “Over three times more. Marie, it’s not to be, not now, likely, not ever.” The light in the doorway showed the sudden weariness on his face.

  Katya felt her mother’s deep sigh in her own chest. It was as though her mother had been holding her breath, had feared this disappointment might be in store. “I don’t know if I’ll ever want to forgive them,” she said.

  Katya’s anger rose with her mother’s bitter-sounding words. If she had had a stick, she would have hit something. The stairs, the railing. Blood-sucker, blood-sucker, she thought, repeating what she’d overheard in winter, without knowing the meaning behind it. She had taken the words to be an expression of anger, and now used them because she didn’t have any curse words of her own. She threw the scrub brush into the pail of water and her father started at the sound, seemed almost surprised to find her crouching on the platform.

  “Go and see where the others are keeping, Katya,” her mother said. Go and leave us alone, her eyes said.

  Her father’s feeble smile gnawed at her stomach as she went to the arbour, where light was shining out through the vines. As she stepped inside she saw that Dietrich, Lydia, and Greta were gone. They had left a lantern burning on a table and, beside the lantern, the scooped-out remains of an unripe watermelon, the tabletop scattered with its pale seeds. And there, on a bench, was Lydia’s silver cup she’d seen that morning in Abram’s office; Lydia must have decided to use it.

  The sight of the cup, which had been polished, made her suddenly furious at Lydia for having forgotten to take it in. A silver cup wasn’t something to be left out in the damp air. Nor should a lantern burn for no reason. The square of sheepskin lay folded in her apron pocket, but there was no need to clutch it and recite a psalm. Lydia’s voice came from the front of the Big House where she, Greta, and Dietrich were likely sitting on the edge of the fountain, trailing their feet in it.

  She snuffed the flame and took the cup with her as she left the arbour, intending to go to them and point out that they had wasted kerosene. She went along the path in a grainy darkness hearing her parents’ voices, their long silences taken over by the sound of rustling leaves of the acacia trees. Her father’s grief eclipsed any joy she might have had at the prospect of not having to leave the estate. The intent of Aganetha’s uncommon visit was now clear.

  She approached the summer kitchen and the butter well just beyond, its roof a silhouette in the faint remnant of light. She was going to go to the front of the house, point out to Lydia and the blond sheepdog that they had wasted fuel, that Lydia had left behind her cup, which, in the dampness, would become tarnished again. A waste of polish. But her parents’ hushed and hesitant voices, their sentences all turning up at the ends in a question, the sight of the Big House, its windows bold with light, diverted her from the path.

  Before she knew it, she had gone to the butter well. She stepped up onto a log which Greta stood on when she drew the butter box up from the depths. She set Lydia’s drinking cup on the brick wall enclosing the well and leaned over the wall, immediately feeling a chilly dampness emanating from the water below. The reflection of her head on the black surface blotted out what light there was from the moon.

  Then someone called her name. She would remember for the rest of her days that someone had called, and would hear the voice among other voices in a crowded restaurant, coming to her on a lake shore while she watched over grandchildren at play, the voice would travel across the water, clear and distinct, Katya. If only she had answered, Yes, I’m here. But she hadn’t. No, instead she had picked up Lydia’s cup and held it over that chasm of damp darkness, and thrown it in. She had willfully thrown Lydia’s cup into the butter well.

  hey arrived in Rosenthal during night, when it was too dark to see much of anything, certainly not the storks nesting on the Zentralschule, which Greta had written Katya she should be sure and look for. She would likely hear the clacking of the birds’ beaks before she saw them, Greta said. They had started out for Rosenthal in the morning, and had stopped only once, to eat and to rest the horses. Katya’s arms ached from holding her brother, Peter, on her lap. He’d been asleep for several hours and now she was clammy from his heat, her feet chilled from not being able to move. A light shone from a ridge of hills beyond the town, someone walking with a lantern, she thought, and when she pointed it out, her mother said it was the silver dome of an Orthodox church.

  They passed a lone man, a watchman going along a sidewalk shaking a rattle, and he tipped his hat to them as they went by. Lanterns hanging from lampposts were welcoming circles of light illuminating the volost building, a store, a pharmacy. She was relieved when at last she saw a light glowing in a window and knew it was her grandparents’ house. As they came to a stop in front of the gate, her oma Schroeder came running from the house and down the steps in her slippers.

  “Where’s that girl of mine?” her grandmother called, and a dog in a neighbouring yard began to bark.

  Oma gathered their mother and baby Daniel in an embrace, then took Daniel and unwrapped him there in the street, anxious to see how much he’d grown since she’d come to attend his birth in winter. When Daniel awoke with a shiver and smiled, Oma shouted to a woman across the street who had come out to watch. “Look at this one. This one is just like Kornie’s Wilhelm’s Jasch. Kornie’s Wilhelm’s Jasch would give you such a smile even when he was wet and hungry,” her grandmother said.

  They had all come to Rosenthal to fetch Greta at the end of the school year, as Lydia was not returning home but going off on holiday to the Azov Sea, and Greta was not allowed to travel alone. Abram had lent them the use of a federwoage, and its cushioned seats and strong springs made the trip seem shorter than usual.

  “Welcome, welcome,” her grandfather sang out as he came through the garden. When Katya embraced him she felt his fingers press a coin into her palm. Greta came from the house behind him, anxious for a greeting, and when Katya hugged her, she realized her sister had grown. Gerhard, eager to prove his strength, rushed between the house and
the carriage, carrying several bundles at once. He would have carried his sister Sara too, but for their uncle Bernhard, who came from his house at the back of their grandparents’ yard and scooped Sara from his arms.

  Within moments they were drinking tea and crunching roll-kuchen dripping with watermelon syrup, her grandmother hovering over the table refilling empty glasses, touching Katya’s shoulder, Gerhard’s head, in passing. Their grandfather’s eyes went from one to another while he plied her father for news, how much land had he seeded, how many lambs and calves had been dropped this spring. Greta came with towels and a large bucket of water; she wanted to wash Katya’s and Gerhard’s feet, as she had already done for Sara and her little brothers, who were now tucked in bed. Katya stood in the bucket up to her shins in soapy water, her feet warmed instantly, this nightly ritual of foot cleansing always making her feel that the day had been a good one, making her suddenly need to pee.

  That night she lay awake between Sara and Greta, the excitement of having arrived still too strong to allow sleep. Her father, Uncle Bernhard, and her grandfather talked in the parlour over the heavy ticking of a Kroeger clock. She felt watched over by the portraits of Schroeder ancestors, men whose images were set in matching oval frames which hung on a wall beside the bed.

  The portrait nearest to the door was the oldest, a painting of Wilhelm Schroeder, whose ancestors had suffered persecution in the seventeenth century. One of the Flanders Schroeders had a white-hot bolt pushed through his tongue for having publicly testified to his faith. The bolt had been passed on from one generation to the next, but where it was now, her opa couldn’t say His family story was a common one; most Mennonite families had similar stories, an ancestor who had sung hymns while burning on a pyre, another who was thrown into a river to be drowned, a woman who was lashed to death by a whip, stories that had either been passed down from generation to generation, or recorded in a book of Mennonite martyrs.

  The Schroeders eventually wound up in the Vistula Delta south of Danzig, in time to help drain the marshlands, where over half of them died of swamp fever. The place Wilhelm Schroeder lived was called Krebeswalde, south of Elbing. It was there that Plautdietsch, a language adopted from the Western Prussians, became the common language of Mennonites. The colonists lived behind the dikes and canals they laboured over, praying that the waterwheels they built would drain the fields in time for spring planting. Wilhelm left Krebeswalde at a time when, out of fear and envy, the Mennonites’ right to purchase land was being threatened. A man named George von Trappe came calling, sent by Catherine the Great to convince the Plautdietsch speakers to settle in Little Russia. Wilhelm was among the first to go. He was the one who had first told the story about giant men whose wide trousers were used for storing watermelons, which eventually was told to Katya’s grandfather, who had passed it on to her.

  Wilhelm Schroeder didn’t look like an adventurer. He had a soft look. His eyes were turned away from the portrait painter as though he were shy, or didn’t want to be thought proud. His beard was illuminated and made his face seem blurred round the edges, and his expression indecisive. Or perhaps here was a man whose kindness would prompt him to say the soup was tasty when the cook had forgotten to salt it.

  The middle picture was a photograph of a man named Johann Schroeder, the son of Wilhelm. Unlike his father, Johann’s features were crisp and clearly defined. He looked directly at the camera, appearing confident without being taken with himself. His small compressed mouth was set in such a way that implied a forced sternness, such as would be required of a teacher, which was what he’d been. He left Rosenthal for the Mariopol district north of the Azov Sea when there came a need for a teacher. The land in the new daughter colony, Bergthal, was fertile and promising. It also had a high outcrop of rock, which proved to be a valuable source of stone for the foundations of their house, and for object lessons in religion studies: You are my rock and my fortress. A man builds upon a solid foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord.

  Bergthal was where Katya’s grandfather had been born, he being the subject of the third portrait. Her opa had a similar softness as his grandfather, and a long, white, flowing beard. He was a young man in the 1870s, when most of the people in Bergthal, fearing their rights were about to be taken away by the tsar, packed up and went to Canada. She’d heard the story often, that his father wanted to go to Canada too, but he had promised his wife’s parents he wouldn’t take their daughter far away. He never mentioned that he had extracted a similar promise from Katya’s father. Then, soon after the villagers left Bergthal for Canada, the village burned down, and Opa’s father returned to Rosenthal. He bought the farm of someone who also wanted to immigrate to Manitoba, a place where land had been designated for Mennonites on the east and west sides of a river. A river that often flooded, Opa had heard; a hard and frozen place, the soil was black, but the growing season shorter, so that winter wheat didn’t produce nearly as well as it did in Russia. Opa’s father had built the house at the front of the property, in the style of the houses in the Vistula, L-shaped, with the barn attached, and Katya’s grandfather had inherited it, a house built to last more than a hundred years.

  Whenever her grandfather told the stories behind the three portraits, Katya was reminded of a chapter in Genesis: And these are the generations of Noah … Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In church tomorrow she would come together with her even larger family and be made to stand still, to turn, to feel hands under her chin drawing her to face the inquisitor. This one looks like Tooth-Puller Jakob’s daughter, a man known to yank out his own teeth when they offended him, sparing the expense of a dentist. They would ask if she had a way with her hands, as her namesake did, her father’s mother who had died on a picture-taking day.

  These are the generations of the Schroeders: Wilhelm, Johann, Gerhard, she recited, the last thought she had before drifting into sleep.

  The towns of Rosenthal and Chortitza spread halfway up the sides of a valley, red and umber brick houses graced with trellises of ivy, their shiny windowpanes mirrors reflecting light. Coal piles glistened in yards of factories, chimney stacks trailed smoke, a factory door was open and its dark interior alive with the chuffing sound of a machine building steam, a clatter and whirr of wheels and belts. In the town, when they walked down the street, men came over to their gates to greet her father, and she felt taller as she walked beside him, made so by his easy friendliness and people’s apparent respect for him. She noticed, too, that after the initial greeting and talk, there came the usual sideways questions about Privol’noye, which her father dealt with in his usual way, evading, or pretending not to hear.

  One day she and Gerhard went with their father on foot from Rosenthal to David Sudermann’s house on New Row Street in Chortitza. The main street of Rosenthal merged with Chortitza’s New and Old Row Streets, Old Row being a broad street paved with cobblestone, the oldest street in the oldest Mennonite settlement in Russia. The street became a carriage road, led to outlying villages such as Arbusovka, a settlement that once boasted a silkworm factory, until other countries began producing machine-spun silk. In the east, Old Row Street led to the town of Einlage, known for its wagon makers – such as Jakob Sudermann – and then across the Dnieper via the Einlage bridge, to the city of Alexandrovsk. Although the city was only an hour away, Katya had never been there. She had stood on the banks of the Dnieper watching the steamboat Leonid cross the river below the rapids, ploughing towards Alexandrovsk, a collection of buff-coloured buildings, a smudge of dark smoke staining the sky above them.

  She knew they were near David Sudermann’s house when she saw his three blond daughters playing on a veranda with other children. Their large flat eyes turned on her as she went by, and she felt David’s daughters were questioning what right she had to be there. David Sudermann was expecting her father, had been watching for them, and now came to greet him, sprinting down the sidewalk the last of the way. Her father grinned and readied himself to receive David’s enthusiasti
c embrace, but Katya saw a distance in her father’s eyes, a slight turning-away.

  The windows in David Sudermann’s summer room fronted New Row Street, a street busy with the coming and going of podvodchiki hauling goods from factories to railway-yards, and between the many villages in the colony of Chortitza, the colony named after the oldest town. For well onto an hour Katya was content to sit and watch the teamsters pass by the window while David and her father visited, their conversation an equal exchange of give and take until the subject turned to theology, and then David did most of the talking.

  “If you ask me, the real reason why we hold onto our creed of non-resistance is because it gives us privileges other people don’t have,” David said in reply to something her father had said.

  “Some of us still believe we’re to be messengers of peace,” her father said.

  “Sure, yes. But messengers are supposed to deliver messages, are they not? Our wily ancestors agreed not to. They promised not to preach to the Orthodox. Why risk offending the hand that gave us such a generous start?” David said.

  “A man’s life is a message, for good and for bad. You know as much. So then, are you becoming an evangelical like your dear sister Helena?” her father asked, his smile a gentle teasing.

  A chorus of voices arose in the street beyond the window, and their conversation broke off while a dozen or so boys went riding by on bicycles, with them several men, teachers, Katya supposed, and from the satchels they carried on their backs, she gathered they were on a school outing, a celebration, perhaps, to mark the end of the school year.

  “Look at that. There’s not a Russian among them,” David said. “In my class I’ve only got one, and one Jew. That’s all we let in this year. I pity the poor Russian.”

  Katya’s father glanced at David sharply, his face working as though he had something he wanted to say, and then his features softened and he shrugged. “Yes, the poor Russian, what’s to be done,” he said.