The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  She awoke to the darkness of early morning, the sound of pounding on the door downstairs, Greta already awake, halfway across the room. The coachman and his son hadn’t returned from taking Dietrich and Barbara to Ekaterinoslav the previous evening as expected, and her father had worried – this was what came to her mind as she followed Greta down the ladder. She thought, something has happened to the coachman and his son, there’s been an accident, and she began to pray. Her father had already left the house with one of two men who came for him. The other man stayed behind. When she entered the outer room, her brothers were already there, in their night clothing, lined up against the oven wall. Her mother stood in front of the open door holding the baby, Ann, and Katya could see her father going across the compound with a man, heard the voices of other men, and saw a wagon standing beside the Big House. Then there was a glow of light just beyond the open door, a man smoking. His shoulders were so broad that at first she thought he must be Kolya, and was going to call him to come inside, but something stopped her.

  She would remember her mother’s bare feet against the splintered floorboards, her toes crooking to grip the floor as she rocked Ann, who slept. They were all in their nightclothes, her brothers in their long nightshirts that were so white they gleamed in the semi-darkness as the boys pressed their backs to the oven tiles for warmth. She went to close the door and her mother spoke for the first time, her eyes hollow-looking in the light cast by a lantern on the table, its wick turned low. The man outside had said to leave it open. Why? She didn’t know. I just don’t know, they wouldn’t say why your father should go, either, just that he should go, and that the one out there should stay.

  “Are we supposed to stand here freezing?” Greta said. When she left the room, the man outside on the platform came over to the door and watched until she returned. She had gone through the rooms gathering up shawls, coats, and sweaters. She draped a garment around their mother’s shoulders, tucking it about the sleeping Ann, or Njuta, as her brothers had named their newest sister; and as the clock chimed the hour in the parlour, Greta went to each of her brothers doing the same, draping them with sweaters, with shawls, the melancholic sound of the clock’s chimes like a benediction. Her mother went over to the window and looked out, still rocking.

  Katya put on the shawl Greta gave her, and the clock stopped chiming; the fifth hour, she thought, grateful for the warmth of the woolly garment as she stood to one side of the open door, the cold air scuttling around her ankles and up her nightgown to her knees. She wondered if Greta was asking the same question as she was: why had the man been told to stay? She looked out across the yard. The stars and moonlight had faded and the sky was beginning to lighten, so perhaps the clock had marked the sixth hour and not the fifth; she couldn’t be sure. The sky was cloudless and so why then was it snowing? What looked like snow funnelled out from the upstairs windows of the Big House and billowed across the yard. There were men out there, grey figures threading among wagons that stood on the compound near to the Big House. She felt the warmth and softness of Greta’s breasts against her arm as her sister leaned into her to look out at the yard.

  “It’s bedding. Those are feathers,” Greta said.

  “Ja, that’s what it looks like to me. They’re spoiling the bedding,” her mother said.

  “Who is?” Gerhard’s loud question made the man on the platform shift and adjust his cap. Then he left the platform and went over to the gate, and she thought he would leave, but moments later he returned, his cigarette butt dropping to the ground, its glow ground out under his heel as he muttered to himself.

  Her mother must have forgotten about the little ones when she’d spoken, as she turned to them and said softly, “It’s not important. Your papa will tell you about it when he comes.”

  Thieves breaking in, moths and rust corrupting; Katya thought of the Scripture warning against putting too much store in earthly treasures when she saw the feathers swirling in the air. Pillow feathers, down feathers from quilts and mattresses, Lydia’s dowry likely taken from trunks in an upstairs storage room, cut open and emptied to the wind.

  The man outside swore suddenly and once again went to the gate as though wanting to join the others. He came pounding back up the steps to the doorway, breathing heavily. They should follow him, he said.

  She went across the yard with her sisters and brothers to the Big House, their mother hurrying them along. Katya was certain her father had taken the time to pull on trousers before answering the door. She didn’t know why this had become so important to her. She didn’t want him to be out there like they were, in their night clothing. The dark had dissolved to shadows that were set against the sides of buildings, the summer kitchen and washhouse, and she sensed bones creaking, sinew humming, that someone might be standing in the shadows between the two buildings, watching as they came by.

  She remembered seeing a light flickering across a window in the women’s quarters beyond the parade barn, and thinking that although the outside women were awake and moving about, they hadn’t gone to do the milking, judging from the lowing and bellowing coming from the cow barn. When she would go over and over this moment, she would realize there had been sounds, the cows, the voices of the men; she had seen a light in the women’s quarters. But then, it was as though she was seeing the world from underwater, voices and movements muted and slow. A man came across the compound from the generator house, suddenly becoming a huge bird about to lift off from the ground as a gust of wind filled a cape he wore and flung it out and around him. As she came closer, she recognized the gold cape as the velvet tablecloth which covered the dining-room table in the Big House. The same gust of wind wrapped her nightgown around her body, and for the first time she felt the cold go through her.

  Her father stood beside the wagon fully clothed, she was relieved to discover, and on the wagon was a man reclining in an armchair. Even before they arrived, the man’s long hair told her he must be the half-man from Lubitskoye, Simeon Pravda. She saw he was surrounded by furniture, the oval cherrywood table from Abram’s study, his plush sofa and sagging armchair; his smokestand lay across the arms of another chair. There were other wagons also piled with furniture, and she vaguely recognized the plank table from the bake kitchen, a washstand, a bureau.

  Her father saw them coming, his concern quickly masked, and he gave his attention to Pravda. The men moved between the house and the wagons as though they were in a race, throwing what they had brought onto the piles of furniture, and hurrying back inside, the man who had led them across the yard quickly joining them. Pravda talked to her father rapidly, gesticulating with a small whip, pointing out the men whose families, he had decided, would move into the Big House once they were finished rummaging through it. The house was large enough for as many as five families, Pravda told her father. Dmitri’s family would be given two rooms, it was only right, he said, and for the first time Katya wondered, where were the Sudermanns? Lights shone in all the windows but there was no sign of them.

  “Will you also live there?” her father asked.

  “Me? No, perhaps I’ll live over there,” Pravda said, and with his whip, pointed to their house.

  “Live where you please,” her father said.

  When Pravda talked, he rolled his head from side to side. His hair, brilliant with grease, had feathers stuck to it, a corona of white fluff that was being tugged and riffled by a breeze.

  “He looks like a chicken,” Sara whispered, and clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a nervous giggle.

  Her comment caught the attention of Pravda. “Are these your children? Why are they here?” he asked, frowned, and looked about the yard. When he saw the man who had brought them, he shouted at him in Ukrainian and received a string of curses in reply. “Please forgive him,” Pravda said to her mother in a contrite voice.

  This was how they should call him, he said: Little Father, Father Pravda, Bat’ko Pravda. They would see much of him now. Her mother’s question, Peta, wha
t is it? had been stilled by a look from the Little Father. It was for him to ask questions, he said.

  “Yes, all these children are mine,” her father said, after he had explained to them who Pravda was, and how they were to address him. Simeon Panteleimon Pravda was a patriot, an anarchist. He was a bandit, his voice told them.

  They were his basket of apples, her father said. Four daughters and four sons, one of whom was almost a man, could work as hard as a man. At the mention of himself, Gerhard covered his lap with his hands to conceal his member, stiff and poking against his nightshirt.

  “The Queen of Heaven has blessed you,” Pravda said. Katya felt his eyes pass across her, saw that when he looked at Greta, his eyes stayed on her for moments before going on to the others. Greta was looking away, hard, at the Big House, at the lit-up windows. What had happened to the Sudermanns, the Wiebe sisters?

  “Now you’ve met them, and now they’re going home and back to bed,” her father said.

  “You’re afraid for them,” Pravda said. “You don’t need to fear,” he said when her father didn’t reply.

  “I’m sure that’s true. I believe you,” her father said, and folded his hands across his chest.

  “Then why not let them stay? They may learn something useful,” Pravda said, his eyes once again coming to rest on Greta.

  The locksmith’s house where Sophie and Kolya had a room was dark, which she’d noticed when they’d come across the compound, and she had wondered where Sophie might be. She hadn’t recognized any of the men, except for Dmitri. She saw his grave and grey old face as he stood, back to the garden wall, cap held to his chest, as they’d gone by, a quick nod in their direction. When the man had told them to come with him, they had all scrambled for their shoes, which were lined in a row beside the door. Her mother had for some reason stepped into a pair of their father’s boots, and Katya had thought, well, he must be wearing his scuffs then, and hoped he had taken the time to pull on socks.

  The boots her mother wore had clomped against the ground, her gait childlike, made more awkward by the lolling tongues of the boots’ and trailing laces. “‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.” Katya thought of the hymn they’d sung the night before. She and her sisters and brothers walked behind the man and smelled the pig manure caked on his rubber boots and trouser legs. Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er They reached the wagon, stood grouped together beside the horses. “Are these your children?” the man called Bat’ko Pravda had asked her father.

  She saw Vera come from the garden toolshed now, followed by Kolya. Vera was wearing a black leather coat which flapped about the tops of her high leather boots as she moved through a swirl of feather snow.

  Pravda’s eyes followed Vera and Kolya now too, as the two of them, Kolya carrying a spade, went off into the east gardens.

  He then turned to Katya’s father. “Do you own a gun?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course I have a gun,” her father said.

  Pravda nodded approvingly and then leaned down and spat over the wagon wheel. “It’s good you said so, because I know you do have one. You said the truth, that is good. But tell the truth now, would you use it against me?” he asked.

  “Why do you ask this question?”

  “Because I’ve heard all about what you people believe,” Pravda said.

  “Well, so, then you know the answer. But why would I use a gun when I have nothing to fear?” he added, his eyes looking at him steadily. “You said so yourself.”

  Pravda laughed, and Katya saw her father send her mother a look meant to reassure, and her mother’s little nod in return. She rocked the sleeping baby, her eyes riveted to her husband’s face, while little Peter clung to her leg, his face turned sideways against her thigh.

  Katya could describe Pravda in every detail, this man who, despite his leather tunic and the two pistols stuck into his wide belt, still looked like a common beggar. Feathers lifted from his shoulders and drifted away across the yard.

  “So you think it’s wrong for us to do this,” Pravda said. He was a man baiting a dog, waving a stick and wanting it to jump and latch on.

  “That is not for me to say,” her father said.

  “But you must have an opinion. You think something, isn’t that right?” Pravda said.

  “Yes, I do. I think that whatever you want, you’ll take. I have not tried to stop you,” he said.

  “And what if I should take what belongs to you?” Pravda asked.

  “I will help you carry it,” her father said.

  Pravda laughed again, and her father, who had been so rigidly planted in one spot, relaxed and shifted his shoulders. By reasoning with Pravda, he was preventing anger from erupting all around them, and she felt his wisdom, a light shining out from his body, and they, her mother, sisters, and brothers were bathed in his light. He stepped closer to the wagon and rested a hand against its side, looking like a man who had stopped another to talk about the weather.

  Beyond him she saw two buff-coloured heaps lying on the ground, the dogs, Nicholas and Alexandra, she realized, lying dead in a patchwork of muddied footprints and bloodied snow.

  “Papa,” she said quietly, and pointed.

  “Be still, my girl,” he said.

  She was sorry that she’d pointed, as Daniel and Johann, when they saw the dogs, began to whimper. Greta went over to her brothers, drew their bodies into her own.

  They all turned at the sound of glass breaking, as the kitchen windows shattered, one after the other. Men had gone down to the cellar and were coming up with jars of food. They were throwing the jars out the windows, and as a mound of pickled beets, crab-apples, cucumbers, pears, grew higher among the broken glass, Katya’s stomach turned, and there was a strange metallic taste on her tongue. She didn’t know yet that they had urinated in the flour and sugar bins in the bake kitchen, its shelves emptied and food scattered and trampled underfoot.

  Each time a jar smashed, her father winced. “I must say something,” he said to Pravda.

  “Bat’ko Pravda will always be willing to listen,” Pravda said.

  “You asked me if I thought what you were doing was wrong. I have to say this, here, is wrong. Take the food, but don’t spoil it. You could eat well this winter,” he said.

  “We could eat cow dung this winter if we wanted to, and it would be our business. We’re in charge now. It’s not for anyone to tell us what to do,” Pravda said.

  Katya saw fear rise in her father’s face, which suddenly made him look haggard. He stared at Pravda as though seeing him for the first time. The man was not what he’d taken him to be – simple, part fool, a posturing beggar – but someone to be feared. Then her father turned and looked at her, and she understood his message, and took Sara in hand to show him that she had. Her scalp began to tighten, and sounds suddenly became sharper. She heard glass breaking inside the house, a burst of maniacal laughter. She didn’t know if she could move. Her father’s eyes then sought out Greta, but she was again turned towards the Big House.

  “Greta.” He’d spoken through his teeth, but fiercely, the sound instantly catching her attention.

  Greta nodded almost imperceptibly, the grey light washing all colour from her face; all of them shades of grey and darkness, like people in a photograph. Greta clasped Daniel and Johann more tightly against her body. Katya saw the tips of the boots her mother was wearing sticking out from under her nightdress, its hem trembling.

  “They say you’re a good man, is that so?” Pravda indicated with his whip to the workers’ quarters.

  “God knows whether I am or not,” her father said.

  “They have no reason to say it, and so it must be true. Why don’t you choose something from the wagons? Go ahead, working for King Turd, there must be something. Take, choose, whatever you want, you can have,” he said. “Why not take that?” He pointed with the whip to Abram’s sofa at the back of the wagon, the gramophone resting on its cushions, a lacquered box of playe
r discs beside it.

  “I have all I need,” her father said, his eyes taking them in, his sons, his daughters, his wife with a child in her arms.

  “Yes, you have your little apples,” Pravda said.

  “Let them go home now. Their mother will make a meal. I would be happy if you would come and be our guest. She’s a fine cook,” her father said, his voice even.

  His invitation went unanswered, as several men came round from the front of the house, struggling beneath the weight and bulk of Lydia’s piano. One of them slipped on the snow-covered grass and, losing his grip, dropped the piano to the ground, its strings vibrating in a thrum of sound.

  Now Katya saw Vera was coming back from the garden, coming through the arched gate, her black coat shining, and behind her was Kolya. She carried what looked to be a strongbox, and when Pravda saw it, he shouted at a man inside the house who was standing at a broken kitchen window to go and tell the others to come.

  The man wearing the table covering came from the front of the house, wandered over to the piano, and began fingering its keys. He poked up and down the scale until Pravda shouted for him to leave it be. Feathers swirled up and around the feet of the men as they walked, carried up and away by a sudden gust of wind, over the wall, vanishing into daylight, mixing with what snow remained on the fields. Where patches of snow had melted, the burned vegetation spotted the land. Someone might come by on the road. They would see the wagons, the commotion in the yard. Orlov might hear the cows complaining and send someone to investigate.