The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Well, well. Now you see just how smart they are,” Katya’s father said in Russian, and after a moment of silence. The chicks hadn’t surfaced, but look, he said, although their beaks had momentarily disappeared, there they were, a little farther away, their tiny brown pipes bobbing and circling.

  Katya had expected her father would say something against what Vera had done, and apparently Vera had too, as her expression had implied that she was strong enough to take whatever the consequence might be. But at his words she grew unsure and stepped away from him, glanced at Sophie, who was busy helping Katya’s mother put out food and hadn’t seen what had happened.

  “Even though the chicks are likely frightened, they won’t show themselves until their mother says so. I sometimes think animals are smarter than human beings. Come away now, let’s let them be,” he said.

  Her father offered Vera his hand, and after a moment of hesitation she took it. As they went to join the women, Vera sent her a triumphant glance. Haulftän, Katya thought. Vera was a grudgebearer. After so many years she was still getting back at her for not agreeing to play with the spin top. She’d heard of people like that, but until now, she hadn’t met one.

  After supper, the water still and reflecting a bank of cumulus clouds that had risen as the sun began its descent, Katya’s family began to sing, Martha accompanying them on her guitar. Vera had to go and help with the milking, Sophie reminded her, and as they headed back to the compound, the others grew silent, not wanting the day to end. They listened to the stillness and watched the zigzag flight of dragonflies among the wisps of smoke hanging above the lake, a stillness that stretched far across the land as far west as Poland, Katya thought, north to Moscow, and in the east, Arkadak, which was where the real Russian forests began.

  Suddenly Gerhard disturbed the silence when he called attention to the Chortitza road, where two of Abram’s Cossack guards were riding hard. The horses left the road, dipped down into a shallow ditch and across land, coming towards the lake. Katya’s father rose and went to meet the men.

  “What is it?” her mother asked when he returned, beginning to scatter the embers of their fire.

  “They came from the west pastures,” he said.

  “And so?” her mother prompted.

  “They found several cows injured and had to destroy them,” he said. “Go and get water and finish this off,” he said to Gerhard.

  “Injured? How?” her mother asked.

  “Butchered,” he said, as quietly as he could.

  “Who did so?” Gerhard demanded.

  Her father turned on Gerhard in a sudden flare of heat. “Don’t you use that bossy voice on me. A person gets to hear it often enough and shouldn’t have to listen to it coming from his own son. Now go, take your brothers and get some water to put out the fire.”

  Katya went with Gerhard and the little ones and, seeing that he was close to tears, touched his shoulder.

  There is no herb for dying, she wrote in her notebook that night. She’d got the saying from Martha Wiebe on the way home from their picnic, when she’d told them about a Gutsbesitzer who’d succumbed to tuberculosis after travelling to various spas in Europe in search of a cure. As she wrote, a minuscule paprika-coloured spider raced across the page in front of her pencil.

  A spoon or two of brandy added to the rollkuchen batter improves its flavour.

  Brandy rubbed on the stomach and soles of a baby’s feet eases its colic.

  Lilac tea for stomach ache.

  She was of the age to begin collecting recipes and household hints her mother and other women would pass on. But since she’d begun writing in the notebook, she had not been able to resist entering other, less useful, notes, such as the tip Sophie had given to her: Throw a piece of bread in the well to keep the witch from going among the cattle. She had written, Papa and Mama are waiting for Abram to return. They want to know what he plans to do about Franz Pauls’s leaving. Vera doesn’t like me. The line came unbidden, her hand penning the words without her having consciously thought them. As she looked at the sentence, she realized it was true. Vera didn’t like her.

  She lay in bed thinking of the black kite she’d seen at the picnic, gliding in sideways across osiers and purple loosestrife. An umber shadow passing over her in church in Rosenthal when the Ältester had read the Scripture: Blessed are the pure in heart. She thought of Lydia’s silver cup and felt the stone of regret settle on her breastbone. She wished she had answered when someone called her name. But she hadn’t. Nor had she given into the heat of the sheepskin square against her thigh and recited a psalm, For Thou art with me. Surely goodness and mercy, until the urge to throw the cup into the well passed. When she closed her eyes she could see the dragonflies darting to and fro above the lake. Darning needles stitching the sky closed for night.

  he awoke in the morning to the sound of rapping on the door downstairs. Greta was already up and gone, and her nightgown hung from a clothes hanger on the cupboard door as though floating in mid-air. Her scuffs sat pigeon-toed on the floor beneath it, and Katya stopped breathing remembering the moment on the footbridge in Rosenthal when she’d thought all had disappeared. Greta, lifted from the slippers and nightdress and taken to heaven. The murmur of her father’s voice reached her, and then a woman’s voice, and Gerhard’s, and the rising fear that everyone had been taken to heaven evaporated. She went to the window and saw that Lydia had come home, she was hurrying along the path towards the house and Greta was coming to meet her, the two of them embracing. When she went downstairs, Mary Wiebe was standing in the doorway to the outer room.

  The Sudermann women and Dietrich had returned from Ekaterinoslav late in the night, bringing Lydia home with them, Mary said. Aganetha Sudermann wanted Peter Vogt to know there was going to be a Faith Conference at Privol’noye. When Mary said Faith Conference, she wrinkled her nose. They all knew how Abram brought together a select group of people to admire one of his recent acquisitions, a thresher, an Arabian stallion. Abram called his gatherings Faith Conferences, invited church elders and ministers, and set aside half a day for sermons.

  Staring at her feet and blushing slightly, Mary Wiebe delivered her message. She said she’d been sent to inform Katya’s father that within ten days near to a hundred people would attend Abram’s gathering, and he was to select three sheep for butchering.

  Mary returned to the Big House, and soon Katya saw there were wagons in the yard, covered with tarps. She learned that Aganetha had not only come home with news of the pending conference, but also with a contingent of painters, upholsterers, and furnishings. Abram had sent Aganetha a telegraph from St. Petersburg saying there should be a gathering of people so the delegation could deliver its report, and Aganetha had got it in her head to refurbish his office in time for that gathering.

  Throughout the following days Katya would see Vera doggedly plodding between the pig barns and dairy barns, her narrow face hooded by a red headscarf as though she wanted to restrict her vision to what lay in her immediate path. From a distance, the sight of Vera brought to mind an awkward fledgling, the skirts she wore either too long or too short, her shoulders sagging, and her step unsteady beneath the weight of a burden. Katya noticed Sophie’s affection towards Vera, the occasional acts of tenderness, a braid tidied, a pat on the rear in passing. Their quiet, almost secretive talks in the evenings when Sophie went to sit on the steps of the women’s quarters. Katya felt excluded, that Vera’s presence had changed Sophie. She missed Sophie’s attention as much as she did her stories, was put off by her preoccupation, how she was forever stopping what she was doing to gaze across the compound, saying God, God, hoping to catch sight of Vera, to place her, learn where she was, before continuing on her way.

  A pile of rubble grew in the yard as the renovations to Abram’s office proceeded. The workers’ wives would come to investigate, and salvage a bit of cloth, carpet that had been cut into strips, nails that they would straighten. So as to not cause them shame, Katya pretende
d not to notice them, and told this to her mother one evening as they sat together out on the steps shelling peas.

  “What do they have to be ashamed about? They’ll make good use of whatever they find,” her mother said.

  The great bustards sauntered slowly through the meadow beyond, their size and colour making them look like sheep grazing. They were shy birds, and hard to get close to. Greta and Dietrich came into sight along the road, Lydia behind them, and one of the great birds raised its head, all the others then doing the same. Birds of a feather, Katya thought, the saying taking on new meaning. The birds began to run, long, loping steps, their broad wings moving slowly and their bodies looking too heavy for flight. When the bustards took off, the three stopped to watch until the birds had flown out of sight beyond the forest. Then Dietrich linked his arm through Greta’s and drew her to his side as they resumed walking, Lydia staying back and looking on for a moment as the couple ambled along the roadside, their heads almost touching, their voices a quiet rising and falling.

  Katya watched her mother watch them, her pea-stained fingers moving in her lap as though shaping a ball of dough. Then Katya saw Greta go over to the roadside and begin to gather wildflowers, while Dietrich stood waiting, hands in his pockets as he gazed at the sunset, his face and hair turned red-gold. Lydia’s voice rose briefly, and then she turned and started walking back towards the avenue of chestnuts. Greta called after her, but Lydia kept on going, Dietrich and Greta watching her go.

  “Oh, why don’t those two come back already,” her mother muttered, suddenly active, scooping up unshelled peas and dumping them in Katya’s lap.

  Days later, the bustle of activity at the Big House had ceased. The rubble had been carted away and dumped behind a small Sudermann family cemetery near to the back of the estate. That evening, Katya went across the compound to the women’s quarters and sat on the step. Although there were no clouds, the air felt like rain. She knew Vera would soon arrive for supper. When Vera did come across the compound, it was with her usual plodding doggedness, as though eating supper were another chore she had yet to complete. The front of her grey dress was wet; she had likely washed up at the water pump. As Vera saw Katya, she stopped, annoyed at having been taken by surprise. Then she left the path, as if the women’s quarters hadn’t been her destination.

  “Vera, come. I would like us to be friends,” Katya called out in Russian.

  Vera slowed, then returned, pulling at her scarf so that it fell onto her shoulders, her chin lifted.

  “Sophie’s my friend, and we could be friends too, yes?” Katya felt herself blush with the insincerity of her words. She wanted Vera to like her, more than she wanted her for a friend. Vera stood at the bottom of the steps squinting up at her, and Katya knew she wouldn’t want to hold hands with her and go walking at the end of the day. Vera wasn’t Sophie. Vera looked like a sharp-eyed animal that would bite the fingers of a person offering it food.

  Vera swiped at her nose with the back of her hand, her scowl fixed as she came up the steps, and Katya smelled the day in her skirts, barn smells, the chicken coop, the rooting of pigs, felt Vera’s boot bump her elbow as Vera stepped around her and went inside.

  Katya thought about how, on days when the air was thin and clear, she could see the village of Lubitskoye rippling on the horizon beyond her house. She imagined the river Dnieper to the south, alive with light, its rapids thundering; she’d heard from Lydia, whose arms were freckled from her summer holiday spent there, about the Azov Sea, and the boats of fishermen hugging its shore. As she worked with Vera Karpenko in a field beside the orchard, scrubbing a canopy that was to be erected for the Faith Conference, she thought of St. Petersburg, the city Abram had gone to with the delegation, and since returned from in a gruff mood. A city that had been built on water, she’d been told. At a cost of thousands of lives. She thought of the places she had learned about in geography lessons so she wouldn’t think about being here, on her hands and knees scrubbing a mildewed canvas canopy with Vera, an outside worker who was so much more agile and quick than she was. She thought of mountain ranges on ocean floors, of floating ice seas, a circle of ice and snow capping and cupping the world, continents adrift on the earth’s desperately thin crust, North America, East India, where Helena Sudermann was bound to go, even though her four brothers were against it. Her knees grew raw from the canvas, and stung, while Vera, her skirt knotted about her thighs, made energetic little soap swirls with her brush.

  “Tell me what colour I’m thinking of,” Vera said suddenly.

  A game. As Vera rose to her knees and put aside her scrub brush, Katya vowed that this time, she wouldn’t decline to take part.

  “Blue?” she asked, as Vera’s skirt was blue.

  “Nyet,” Vera said.

  “Red?”

  Vera nodded and her face broadened with a grin, revealing a mouth of crooked teeth pitted with decay. She unwrapped a tiny bundle she’d taken from her pocket; inside it was a candied cherry. She bit it in two and offered Katya half.

  Katya hesitated, thinking of Vera’s spotted teeth, but knew she must accept the offering. As she chewed the sticky confection, the thought occurred, where had Vera got it?

  Their attention was taken as a droschke came along the road and approached the chestnut-lined avenue. Then Lydia emerged from the Big House, came down the steps, and stood waiting as her sister Justina and her husband arrived at Privol’noye, home for the upcoming party. Justina was dressed like a queen, as usual, and Katya watched as her husband helped her down, the skirts of a white dress flaring out around her as she hurried to embrace Lydia, and then they went up the steps to the vestibule where Aganetha and Abram stood waiting on the threshold.

  She could imagine Aganetha Sudermann was anxious for Justina to voice her approval of Abram’s new study. His gruff disposition had become even blacker when he’d learned of the slaughtering of six cows, and more so when he saw the refurbished room. Everyone on the estate became aware of his displeasure. He could be heard shouting at Aganetha. How was a man supposed to think in such a stink of turpentine and wallpaper paste? He hated the window drapery and door curtain. But eventually he stopped shouting to admire a lacquered cabinet built around the safe. He demanded that his chair and the gramophone be brought to the vine arbour, where a man could breathe. And so, late into the night, they were treated to the music of Caruso. A sobbing aria of Pagliacci, and then “Nessun Dorma,” played again and again, Enrico Caruso’s voice floating out and across the meadow where the great bustards had begun to flock; the birds not sleeping either, Katya’s father had said.

  A red plush sofa scattered with small cushions covered in the same fabric as the window drapery now stood where Abram’s work table had been. Matching plush chairs were arranged around an oval table of cherrywood. When Katya’s mother and father returned from a meeting with Abram, her mother said she didn’t know if the chairs were hard or soft. She supposed they were for looking at, as she hadn’t been invited to sit.

  Katya’s parents were relieved and then discomfited that Abram had, indeed, been thinking about the education of their children. He’d gone so far as to pray about the matter, and had received an answer. He would replace the tutor, Franz Pauls. But in return, the children should be made available to do chores. Her parents agreed, but when, hours later, a list of chores came sliding under the door, they were quietly astounded.

  Which was why Katya now found herself scrubbing a canopy with Vera, who was watching her, just as Katya had been watching Justina and Lydia.

  “You people. You think we’re no better than the oxen,” Vera said, and shifted her gaze to the Big House as the door closed behind the Sudermann family.

  Katya knew Vera had thrown out a line to see what she might catch, and yet the words stung. “I’m not one of them,” she said.

  “Then show me,” Vera said.

  Katya waited behind the cow barn for Vera to return from the chicken coop, where she had gone without explaining wh
y. A wire was strung between trees, and hanging from it were plucked and gutted chickens. There was a fire whose embers flared under a cauldron of water, and flies crawling over a plank table where the chickens had obviously been cleaned. Moments later Vera returned, struggling with a hen which she held to her side tightly to keep its wings from flapping. As she took the chicken to a tree stump, Katya understood what test Vera had in store.

  “You should know how meat gets into your soup,” Vera said.

  She knew how meat got into her soup. She’d often gone with the Wiebe sisters to the storage cellar to collect the family’s Sunday chicken, cooling on a hook along with all the other Sunday chickens. She had chanced upon the outside women butchering the hens, and been present on killing day, when the pigs went into the slaughtering shed squealing, and wound up hanging from the rafters, their bodies cracked open at the ribs.

  Vera stroked the chicken’s neck and its clucking grew less frantic. Then she pinched its beak and stretched its neck across the block. The mesmerized hen lay motionless, its eye turned to the sky.

  From the Big House came the sound of piano music; Katya recognized the piece, Liebestraum, which Lydia had taught herself to play, and more than likely wanted Justina to hear. Wedged in the ground beside the chopping stump was a hatchet which Vera pulled free.

  “You say you’re not like them,” Vera said, and motioned for Katya to take it.

  The piano music unfurled, distinct in its sound of longing; Katya imagined Lydia curled over the keys, minding its signature with her swaying body, nodding when it came time to turn a page of music – yes, now. Count the beats, the rests, watch how the notes go up and down on the page, Lydia would say, even if you can’t read, you can follow, turn now.

  “You are so like them. You sound like a bear but act like a mouse,” Vera said.