The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  Her parents had heard stories of Abram’s courting of Aganetha, his showy arrival that scattered the chickens and ducks, brought the village children on the run. There was no understanding his choice of bride, Aganetha, daughter of a half-farmer who had caught his eye at a funeral. She was known to burst into giggles whenever anyone looked at her. A person only had to say, Hello Aganetha, and she was caught in a fit of giggling, red-faced and bent over clutching her stomach.

  Aganetha was nothing more than a backward girl from backward people whose manners in church offended others, her mother said. They talked during prayers, the men using coarse language and telling crude stories in the churchyard. Aganetha’s people were the kind who would fill their pockets with their hosts’ baking, and who never knew when to go home, staying on and on waiting to be invited for supper.

  Her mother straightened, cradled a bundle of daffodils against her breasts, their pollen streaking her apron bib with gold dust. “She thinks she’s become a silk purse,” she said softly, her tiny smile implying that she thought otherwise.

  As they went towards the garden gate, Katya thought of her mother’s self-knowing smile, the way she now walked, swinging her shoulders slightly, her chin lifted, her step sure. With a haughtiness Katya had once seen before, a self-possessed assurance. She thought she might be seeing her mother as she might have been when she’d been Greta’s age, when Katya’s father had begun to notice her.

  Helena Sudermann was coming towards the garden now, no doubt for a moment of quiet prayer.

  “Here,” her mother said suddenly, and thrust the daffodils into Katya’s arms. She went on ahead to meet Helena, her arms swinging, as though this were a moment she’d been looking for. Katya’s mother drew near to Helena, who waited on the path, her shoulders becoming hunched and face jutting forward. Katya heard the low murmur of her mother’s voice, a sentence uttered, and then another, her voice growing stronger as she continued to speak, her hands raised at her sides and chopping the air, Helena attempting to interrupt, and being cut off. Helena rose to her full height and stepped back, Katya’s mother advancing. Then there was silence while the women looked at each other, Helena then turning away and going back to the house.

  When Katya joined her mother, she saw that her eyes were shining, and her chest heaved. As they fell into step, Katya asked her what she had said.

  “Never mind. It’s said, and that’s that. And what’s more, you’ll be going to church with us tomorrow.”

  Dampness shaped the smoke pouring from the outside oven, a white column set against the early morning sky. Katya hurried with her family across the compound to the carriage house where Abram’s coach and three carriages stood waiting to take them to church in Nikolaifeld. The land beyond the perimeter of the stone fence seemed to be a well of darkness, the birds and insects waiting for the first hint of sunrise to begin sculpting the fields with sound. The lanterns on the vehicles bathed the gathering of people in a warm light, the Sudermann brothers and their puffy-faced wives, the sister cousins, the Wiebe sisters who huddled together. The young people would travel in one droschke, Abram said, Mary and Martha in the smallest one. Go, Katya’s mother said as Greta joined Dietrich, Lydia, and the sister cousins waiting beside the carriage. Yerik, their driver, was already in place and looking half asleep. You’re a young person, no? her mother said. Sara would help her with the little ones. What’s keeping Helena, Abram came over and asked Martha gruffly.

  Helena, when she at last appeared, stood on the top step for moments, outlined by light shining from the doorway. While she must have known that her oldest brother percolated with impatience, she took her time, standing, to gaze down the avenue, then descended the steps with slow deliberation. Helena ignored her brothers and their wives, went past them where they had come together beside the coach, the women bulky and stolid-looking in fur coats and hats. She went over to the smallest droschke, and the Wiebe sisters, then motioned to the driver that he should take her bags, in this way telling everyone that she would not be riding in the coach with her brothers.

  Once the convoy got underway their voices seemed to overcome the darkness that pooled in the fields beyond the road. The road’s surface was sticky from an overnight drizzle, and the animals’ hooves made pleasant sucking sounds.

  Throughout the following hour, a mist was gradually drawn off by the rising sun, the land appeared, and streaks of magenta emerged in the sky. A rim of fiery liquid simmered on the horizon, and then the sun appeared all at once. Lanterns were extinguished, scarves and hats removed. Greta and Dietrich were seated across from Katya side by side, their arms touching. Dietrich plucked at Greta’s cape, and while she didn’t look at him, it was obvious her smile was meant for him. Lydia sat on the other side of Dietrich, turned away from him and looking out across the land as though wishing she were somewhere else. When Greta took off her coat in church everyone would see how beautiful she had become, Katya thought. For the baptism, Frieda Krahn had helped Greta sew a dress of fine sateen, a dress that even Katya’s brothers couldn’t help but admire, were struck silent by when Greta tried it on. A white dress, a narrow ribbon banding its hem, flounced sleeves trimmed with satin rosettes. Her mother had worried that the dress would draw attention, that they would be accused of trying to stand in the same light as the Sudermanns. Greta’s dark eyelashes fluttered, her eyes turned aside as her mother fussed with the shirred yoke, pressing it flat, her hands crossing the soft swell of Greta’s breasts. Greta had become a ruby, a virtuous woman, she had become so aloof and secretive, and for a moment Katya wanted to smack her. She would never possess such a fine dress; she didn’t think she would ever want to be as self-satisfied as Greta. Their Gypsy Queen, she thought, her eyes suddenly brimming.

  Soon they were near to Lubitskoye, and as they drew closer, the green dome of a church appeared through the trees, and then houses that nested behind wattle fences. Abram’s coach travelled ahead, and was already midway through the village as their carriage was entering. A church bell began to toll, but although the bell called the people to prayers, the street lay empty.

  Ahead of them, a silver-haired man came out of his yard carrying a hoe, and went to the side of the road and stood there. Several other men followed. Their movements seemed disjointed and odd; they flailed their arms, a cap was doffed, and jammed back on again. They all went off in different directions. Then as suddenly as they’d dispersed, they returned to the side of the road.

  Dietrich muttered under his breath, “I see the neighbours are up to their eyebrows in the spirit of Pentecost.”

  Abram’s coach slowed, and stopped when it came alongside the men, who all at once marched single-file across the road, as though, someone had given them a command. They stood now in front of Abram’s coach, legs spread and arms crossed against their chests.

  “Yerik, go and see what’s happening,” Dietrich told their young driver, and although he seemed reluctant to do so, he climbed down from the carriage, and slouched off down the road.

  Just then someone else came through the gate of the same yard, a man sitting on a wheeled platform, which he propelled over to the side of the road with his hands.

  “Simeon Pravda, up to his usual tricks,” Dietrich said. He attempted to sound nonchalant, to convey that Pravda was nothing more than a bothersome and unruly child, but Katya heard an edge in his voice.

  As Simeon called out, Abram’s head emerged from a coach window; Katya recognized Simeon’s effusive, sing-song greeting as belonging to the beggar she had seen years ago at Privol’noye.

  Yerik stopped in his tracks, and when it appeared he had no intention of going any farther, Dietrich left the carriage. When he met up with Yerik, he, too, did not venture any further.

  Abram’s voice grew loud in a familiar tone, one Katya knew was meant to convey that he was the boss. The driver of the droschke behind them had climbed down and as Katya’s father came walking along the road, he joined him. “What is it?” Helena called, but her fa
ther didn’t stop to answer. As he approached the carriage, his eyes found Katya’s, and he nodded. He said they should act normal, try not to appear worried or frightened, and then he walked to Abram’s coach.

  By then, Jakob and Isaac Sudermann had got out of the coach, and as they were about to go round it, they were encircled by the men, who began shouting and cursing at them. The brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, meeting the flow of the men’s abuse with silence, refusing to reply to their taunts.

  The sister cousins were stricken with fear, their faces mottled as they held back tears, while Lydia seemed unmoved, as though she thought the commotion wasn’t worth the effort to turn and have a look at. Katya’s father stood outside the stormy circle, arms crossed over his chest. He must have spoken, as moments later one of the men, and then all of them, noticed he was there. In all the time he’d been overseer, he’d had occasion to hire many men from Lubitskoye, and they knew him to be fair, her mother had said, and both the village and Abram prospered because of it. When her father finished talking to the men, an agreement seemed to have been reached, as they dispersed and went back to the side of the road, and to Simeon Pravda. Now they were laughing and needing to lean into each other in order to stay upright. Her father returned to the convoy with the other driver, meeting up with Dietrich and Yerik along the way.

  “They want money,” Dietrich explained, as he got back into the carriage. “They won’t let us to pass through the village unless we pay them. The beggars are demanding a ruble for each droschke – five for the coach.”

  Lydia snorted. “They should have asked for a hundred and made themselves feel even more important. It doesn’t make any difference, because Papa would never pay.”

  They were going to go around the village, Dietrich said.

  “Fine,” Lydia said. “As if my body isn’t sore enough already.”

  As Yerik waited for the carriages behind them to turn on the road, he sat chuckling. Dietrich wanted to know what could possibly be amusing him, and Yerik told them what Katya’s father had said. Comrades, you have the right to demand money from us, and we, being as equal as you, have the right to refuse to pay it. I know you will recognize the wisdom that every man is free to do as he chooses.

  Yerik blew his nose between his fingers and wiped them on the seat of his trousers. “I never heard such a thing.”

  “But will they allow us to go across the fields?” Mariechen, one of the sister cousins, asked.

  “It’s Papa’s land. They’re not so ignorant as to stop us from crossing our own land,” Lydia said.

  “So, Yerik. As a free man, what do you choose to do now?” Dietrich called, his voice suddenly jovial, trying not to show he was relieved the incident had passed. The men had returned to the yard and crowded around Pravda; a bottle passed between them.

  “I freely choose to follow the other carriages,” he said.

  What they had just experienced was only one incident of many similar incidents, and most of them sparked by Simeon Pravda, Dietrich told them matter-of-factly as they left the village and the road to cross a shallow ditch and go out into a cultivated field. Katya wasn’t taken in by his casual manner. She saw that his eyes moved constantly, as though wary that at any moment someone might come riding. They went away from Lubitskoye, and then parallel to it, until the village was a distant smudge on the land. Then their droschke rejoined the road, Abram’s coach passing them, once more in the lead, and they continued on their way to Nikolaifeld. Moments later she could see their church in the distance, its grey masonry and white arched windows, an abrupt presence on the flat and greening land.

  Children sitting on the church wall, the prized vantage point from which to view the arrival of families, grew silent and stiff as Abram’s coach approached the gates. The coach passed through, and the children swivelled round to watch it circle the yard beyond, coming to a standstill beside the coach of another estate owner. When Katya entered the walled churchyard, it was as though a storm had passed, the memory of what had happened only a faint rumbling of thunder in the far distance. People were gathered in clusters, visiting, turning to watch their arrival, Abram’s black stallions already being unhitched, the animals snorting, heads lifted as they scented the other horses in their stalls. Yerik drove the team to the back of the yard, where a sea of wagons and carriages spread out from the perimeter of the church wall.

  As Katya joined up with her family, Sara was begging to be allowed to sit among the girls of her age, but today being Greta’s baptism, they would stay together, her mother said, just as Sara’s brothers would remain with their father on the men’s side of the church. Katya searched among the groups of visiting women for a girl she used to sit with in church, and found her among the young women gathered near the women’s entrance. She noticed suddenly that in comparison to women of the same age in the towns of Rosenthal and Chortitza, they were dressed plainly, and were more subdued. The girl nodded shyly as Katya greeted her, her shyness blunt and unappealing.

  Katya sat between her mother and Greta, her baby sister Ann asleep in her mother’s arms. Somehow a chickadee had got into the church, and the dry scurrying of its feathers against a window stirred the children, who craned their necks, bobbed up and down to try to find the source of the unaccustomed sound. A bird, a bird, a bird, they began to whisper, as though they had never before seen an ordinary chickadee. No bright bead of sound preceded the telltale dee-dee; instead, the bird’s chirp became shrill and frantic as it battered at the window. Katya wished one of the men would show it the way to an open door. But then it gave up, darted through the air above them, and up to a ceiling beam, whereupon it perched, and gradually the children grew quiet too, their attention, Katya’s attention drawn to the front of the church as the names of the baptism candidates were called out. Greta shed her felt cape and draped it across Sara’s lap, her dress suddenly looking almost too glorious, which Greta seemed to feel too as she stepped into the aisle, her elbows tight against her sides, hands clenched against her stomach, cheeks flaring.

  Each of the baptism candidates was questioned by the elders and gave a short and often hurried testimony of their faith, then came forward to receive a sprinkling of water on their head. But Katya’s attention was drawn to the chickadee, a soft pouch of feathers set against the oiled timber. Its presence seemed uncanny and she thought of Helena’s empty birdcage, and looked around for Helena in the church. She found her sitting several benches behind, and to the right, her angular face framed by her black bonnet, the fringe of hair under her nose a straight line as she stared at the back of the woman’s head in front of her, her expression calm, but unreadable.

  After the service, the newly baptised, who were now members of the Gemeinde of the Nikolaifeld church, stayed to visit with each other in the churchyard, and so Katya was to return home with her parents. Her father guided the horses among the people who had come to church on foot, some calling out that her parents shouldn’t be slow to visit, even though they knew that because of her father’s responsibilities, they weren’t free to visit. All of a sudden they saw Helena Sudermann going past in a carriage with people they didn’t recognize. As the wagon came abreast, Helena turned to them, nodded and smiled, a rather sad smile, Katya thought. And she thought that perhaps Helena was conveying to her mother that she bore no hard feelings for whatever had passed between them the previous evening.

  “Where’s Tante Lena going?” Sara asked the question that was on Katya’s tongue.

  “She’s going with the Baptists,” her mother said without explaining further. As though Helena joining another religious group was something that happened every Sunday.

  GRUZNIKIE

  Greta gave me this recipe, which she got from Frieda Krahn from Arbusovka, who got it from her oma Hildebrandt of Neuendorf. Frieda Krahn’s oma baked these Gruznikie to hand out to Russians who came calling at Christmas. When Oma Hildebrandt passed the recipe to Frieda, she advised her that if she was still in bed when callers came,
to let them come in anyhow, strangers or not. And if they sang a blessing, to give them a few extra Gruznikie.

  1 1/2 glasses, sugar

  3 small or 2 large eggs

  peppermint oil to taste (about 5 to 6 drops from the 15-kopeck bottle at Penner’s store. The smaller bottle doesn’t drip the same)

  2 glasses sweet or sour cream

  1 glass hot water

  3 kopecks’ worth ammonia

  Mix ammonia in hot water. Add enough flour to make a not too soft dough (it has to stick a little to the fingers when you touch it, but not overly much).

  Katya copied the recipe for gruznikie in her notebook on that Pentecost Sunday afternoon as she sat out on the platform, and her parents and young brothers napped. She watched Greta and Sara go walking along the road, their arms outstretched and teetering as they followed narrow ruts. She saw Abram and his brothers come from the Big House and go to the barns. Their dark trousers and shirts made them three black-and-white men, Jakob’s hair the colour of mahogany and setting him apart, as did Abram’s girth. Abram supported himself on two walking-sticks now, his face scarlet after a short journey across the yard. She thought how comical he looked whenever he talked to anyone. He’d go over to whatever was nearby, a fence, wagon, table, and put the object between himself and the person. He’d rest his arms on it, and lay his chin on his arms, his legs crossed and his body on such a tilt that he appeared in danger of falling onto his stomach. In this way he presented only his huge goat head and shoulders to the listener, most likely thinking that the pounds of lard hanging from his body were invisible. She smiled inwardly at the thought as the three Sudermann men were swallowed up by the dim interior of the horse barn.