The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  She heard an inside door slam in the Big House, Abram’s voice rise in anger. Moments later she saw Kolya again, this time coming from the front of the house; behind him was Abram leaning heavily into Aganetha for support, and several men coming with Lydia, and the Wiebe sisters, who walked stooped and slow, clutching one another. Abram’s nose was off-kilter, his nostrils black with clotted blood; rivulets of blood ran over his mouth and into his beard. They came near, and her father turned to Abram, his hand raised then lowered as if to say, Go slowly, be quiet. But when Abram saw Vera, he began to shout. She should go and milk the cows. She should go immediately, and tell the others to do likewise. What was he paying them for? he demanded, as though the men who had gathered around him were not carrying guns, revolvers tucked into their tunic fronts and belts, others with their nagaikas, such as the small whip Pravda played with constantly, or sabres hanging at their sides. Abram’s voice was bubbly and nasal, and his Russian at the best of times was almost unintelligible.

  “Abram Abramovitch asks that the women go milk the cows,” her father repeated. “If you like, let me send my girls. They can do it.” The animals’ moans rose in waves and broke apart in hoarse screeches as they bawled for relief.

  “King Turd wants his cows tended to, does he? Well, my men are happy to carry out his wishes. Go and look after them,” Pravda said to two men.

  The Wiebe sisters, who had begun to weep when they’d come upon the battered dogs and the broken glass and food, continued to sob. Lydia went to her father, whose nightshirt was spattered with blood. She was the only one who was fully clothed, her hair freed of its combs and flowing across her shoulders.

  When the first shot came from the cow barn, Katya’s whole body began to shake. She hadn’t understood that Pravda meant the men were to shoot the cows. The sound reverberated in the loft, and then came another shot, followed quickly by another, the horses in the horse barns beginning to whinny. Njuta awoke and began to fuss; their mother jostled her and made shushing noises.

  Abram sputtered, his massive head quivering as he stared at the barn in disbelief. Then he tore himself away from Aganetha, spreading his legs as he stood upright, his mountain of flesh jiggling beneath his nightshirt. The men around him moved back and fell silent.

  They were all swine, they were pieces of dog dirt, snakes, sons of the devil, sons of immoral women, Abram shouted in Low German, and what more he called them, Katya would not say. Then, as if put off-balance by the velocity of his own swearing, he slipped and fell backwards, his body thudding against the ground. Aganetha cried out and was about to go to him, but Kolya pushed her aside and went to stand over Abram as he struggled to rise to his knees, his lard swaying, hanging close to the ground. His nightshirt rode up, exposing the shame of his enormous buttocks, and Kolya laughed.

  Lydia muttered something, and looked as though she would say more, but Kolya turned and glared at her and she fell silent. Abram grunted and wheezed, his nose bubbling with blood, and the man draped in velvet cloth took it off and threw it over his exposed flanks.

  Kolya cursed and tore the covering off of him. Another man approached and, with the butt of his gun, prodded Abram between the legs, causing laughter, a release of whatever fear and awe they might have still had for him. One after the other they touched Abram with a toe of a boot, in his belly, his flanks, his ribs; another with a sabre, pricking the skin of his neck, tentative nudges that ended when Pravda called for them to bring Abram to the wagon. The strongbox Vera had given to Pravda lay open on his lap.

  “You said there was nothing. You said the girl wasn’t telling the truth,” Pravda said to Abram. He lifted out a blue leather case, and took out a silver tiara.

  Katya recognized the tiara; she had seen it on Aganetha’s head in a family photograph taken on the day of their silver wedding anniversary. A picture that she would see lying on the floor in the parlour, its convex glass smashed and ground underfoot, obliterating the image of Aganetha and the silver tiara that glinted out from her pewter crown of braids. There was a silence now, and moments later, the two men who had been sent to shoot the cows came towards them, their guns at their sides.

  “There are other things hidden. Look in the well,” Vera said to Pravda.

  Abram protested this wasn’t so. They wouldn’t find anything in the well.

  “In what they call the butter well,” Vera said, and pointed to it.

  “Yes, yes. I know. Once again, the girl is lying,” Pravda said to the now subdued Abram, who stood swaying back and forth beside Katya’s father at the wagon.

  When Pravda sent several men to search the well, Abram lifted his hands to indicate the futility of it.

  But there was something in the well, Katya knew, and Vera seemed to know it too, as her eyes became hard beads of light shining across the distance between them. There is something in the well, Vera’s eyes told her. Yes, she thought, there is something there, but how can Vera know that?

  They stood frozen in place, Njuta beginning to cry now, and, desperate to quiet her, their mother rocked her harder and harder, shushing, jiggling, appealing to their father with frightened eyes.

  “Who here can make music?” Pravda asked, and gestured at the piano.

  Her father’s eyes found Lydia, and then it seemed as though an idea had come to him. “Why not play something for us,” he said to Lydia; and, turning towards Pravda, “she plays well.”

  Lydia stood with an arm about her mother’s shoulders, and Aganetha, whose lips had been moving with silent prayer, whimpered, “Don’t leave me.”

  “Come now, Aganetha, a little music is good for the soul, yes?” Katya’s father said with a false lightness, which Lydia seemed to understand. “Something everyone will enjoy,” he called after her as she walked slowly over to the piano and stood before it, hands splayed above the keys. Her hands then descended, and the melody of a Russian folk song rose up and carried across the yard, drawing the men who had not gone to the well over to the piano, and they stood around it, their blunt faces softening with pleasure at the sound of a favourite song rising from beneath Lydia’s touch. They began to sing, first one, and then the others took up the song, their voices harmonizing naturally, full with longing. Pravda gripped the arm of the chair, his head rolling from side to side.

  The men who had gone to the well returned, the trousers of the smallest one among them soaked to the knees. He began emptying his pockets. Three long-handled dessert spoons fell to the ground, one after the other, then a small silver tray, and finally, Lydia’s two-eared cup. Abram backed away from the objects lying on the ground, shaking his head in disbelief. Katya could almost feel the weight of the cup in her hand. Her teeth began to chatter; she wanted to hold her jaw to make it stop, but she couldn’t move.

  Pravda took the cup as it was handed to him, spat on it, and rubbed it against his sleeve. His face opened in a smile of triumph as he lifted it and turned its engraved initials out for all to see.

  It was then that Kolya swung the shovel, silencing Abram’s sputtering with a blow to the side of his head. As Abram fell, the men descended on him, and Katya heard the solid thud of their fists and feet pounding his body. Someone cried out, Aganetha, or one of the Wiebe sisters, a high-pitched sound that came from the back of a throat, becoming a scream as the first sabre slashed through Abram’s nightshirt, parting the flesh of his shoulder. Katya saw how white and shiny was his bone.

  Sara was yanking her hand, but Katya couldn’t move. The sounds burst forth, Sara’s whine of fear, her father’s sharp gasp as he moved towards them now and was stopped suddenly by a rifle butt rammed against his chest. Greta, silent while she backed away from the men, their sabres hacking and fists and boots pounding at Abram. Daniel and Johann whimpering, turning their faces into her stomach, still clinging to her nightdress. She was inching them away from the sight of blood splattering pant legs, from the sound of Aganetha’s sobbing, which became a shriek as one of the men struck her with an axe. Gerhard bolted away
from their mother’s side, gone suddenly from sight. Greta kept inching away, as if hoping she might back into a deep shadow with her brothers and disappear, until one of the little ones stumbled and fell against her, sending her sprawling to the ground.

  “Schnell,” her father shouted as he pushed the man’s gun aside, his fists tight and shaking in the air beside his head, his features swollen and contorted. Hurry, hurry, he screamed at them. She saw his mouth shape the words, saw Greta rise to her knees, saw someone come up behind her and force her back down. “Oh God, God in heaven,” her mother cried out, while Katya felt the ground moving beneath her feet as she began to run, Sara before her pulling her along. She saw Lydia, across the yard at the piano, begin to run at the same time.

  When she finished telling the story that day, she ended it by saying, After they killed Abram they thought they had to keep on killing until no one was left. They didn’t want to leave a witness. They didn’t know that the times were such that they could kill without fear of punishment. They hadn’t known yet that they could have chosen who to shoot and hack to death and who to leave standing.

  Well, yes. Na ja. And so they killed them all, she said, and noticed that the young man’s hand had begun to shake, that he had to turn off his machine and go over to the window for a moment and look out at the parking lot, where cars were beginning to arrive for the Sunday-afternoon visiting. Children were emerging from the vehicles with their parents, were being urged to button up against the cold, promised a trip to somewhere more interesting afterwards. Had they remembered to bring nail clippers, yet? Oma likes to have her nails just so, filed and shining with clear nail polish. How had she got to be so vain?

  III

  SURELY GOODNESS AND MERCY

  And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove!

  for then would I fly away and be at rest.

  – PSALM 55:6

  he had wanted to run farther than the hole in a greenhouse floor, to run away from her thoughts, from waking each morning to the absence of voices; escape to another country. But that wasn’t possible, not yet. In any case, escape where, and to what, she didn’t have the will to imagine. She hadn’t known that men of influence were beginning to sound out the possibilities for a mass migration to Canada, the United States, Mexico, and South America. Perhaps it was just as well that she hadn’t known. Because she would have held her breath, waited too long for her life to begin. By the time she left, a rigor mortis might have set in. She had no choice except to go on breathing, and she wound up escaping into the heart of a man who always seemed to be there when she needed him.

  She had wanted to go away, she would tell the earnest young interviewer, who was accustomed to a warmer winter than what was experienced in Manitoba, judging from the way he was dressed. But she couldn’t go away, and so for a time she went away in her mind from the place of the accident. Yes, that’s what it was, an accident. When she grew old, she came to understand that life was a series of accidents. Since she’d come to live at Bethania, she’d heard of other people’s accidents, told to her by the onlookers, and survivors such as she was, people who, like her, had come to end their days in identical cubicle-sized rooms of a personal-care home. Rooms with a single window; rooms about the size of one where a doctor might instruct, Put your feet into the stirrups, here, and here. Where a doctor once told her – a Mennonite with a self-satisfied smile, offspring of one of the wealthy ones, a man so satisfied with his own plain face that she was always relieved to see the back of him when he went out the door – he had said: The uterus, yes, there it is. The cause of most of the world’s problems. He would leave her shaking because she’d been enraged, and so intensely.

  All right, then. She would come to need personal care, and to live among other survivors of that time in Russia, women mostly, who had stories to tell, but no words to tell them. Just as their recipes had lacked concise instructions and measures, their Plautdietsch language lacked the necessary words to give shape to the colours, describe the nuances, the interior shadows of their stories. Perhaps they would have been better off trying to sing them, a hymn with stanzas and a rousing chorus to inflame the heart with a desire to be better at things. Better at loving, at being, or, at least, better at doing. In their time, the road to eternity had been crowded with everyday things, chickens, children and men that required constant tending, the earth in the garden crying out to be subdued, and so they were used to singing hymns to remind them that heaven was their ultimate goal, and joy was the best vehicle to get them from here to there.

  The people she would come to live with near the end of her life were octogenarians and older, several within grasp of their hundredth year, as she was. Doddering people who were half the size they’d once been, could not see the numbers on the telephone, or work the button on the elevator. Some of them slobbered when they ate, their dentures caked with bits of food while they told nonsensical stories such as the one about a child who had been born without a bone in her nose because her mother had looked upon the cruel beating of a dog. Who would give credence to their stories?

  The tall young man would smile sadly when she said it was an accident. Something that happens without being expected, which could mean almost everything that came to a person in life. But perhaps there was no such thing as an accident, for a person could easily make a list of known causes, point fingers, find fault and intention for every small and large misfortune. One cause would lead to another and another, and finally come down to this: If only God hadn’t created Adam and Eve, then such-and-such would not have happened.

  Six months following the massacre of her family she was still faraway, the word far-away coming from Nela Siemens. She’s not here yet. She’s far-away and doesn’t have much to say, which is to be expected, Nela told a neighbour who stopped at her gate to enquire.

  She’s far-away, Katya heard Nela say on an afternoon when the windowpanes in the house buzzed with a concussion of sound, the Soviets having dynamited a section of the Einlage bridge while fleeing the city of Alexandrovsk. The Bolsheviks had captured Kharkov, Kiev, and Ekaterinoslav, and now they were retreating, blowing up the bridge behind them. Petrograd was now Leningrad. Kerensky had been replaced by the Bolsheviks. The Old Style calendar had given way to the New Style, the Julian; and as with all the other changes, it was as if something had passed away while she’d been asleep and something had arrived, without it making much difference to what she was thinking or feeling. She was far-away, which was to be expected; that she would endure was prayed for, and also expected. She had lifted up her mother’s hand mirror to see what a far-away expression was, and for a fleeting moment caught herself unaware, a stranger looking at a stranger.

  “It’s time to lengthen your clothes,” her grandmother said one morning soon after Katya had heard Nela say she was far-away. She had returned from walking Sara to school to find Tina Funk in her grandmother’s kitchen. Her grandmother had made the announcement as though she were saying that something had passed, and something had arrived. That it was time to lengthen Katya’s skirts, and get on with being alive.

  “A girl from Neuenburg ran away with a Russian bricklayer,” Tina Funk said. She had finished unpacking her supplies, fabric ends of various materials and colours, and seated herself at the table. Now the real purpose of her visit, gossip, could begin. She was a middle-aged bespectacled woman who lived across the backyard from them, across the Chortitza creek.

  “A Kasdorf girl. Green-Thursday Kasdorf’s daughter. You remember he was given the Green Thursday twice for working on a Sunday. His daughter, just like him, is rebellious. What you plant, you harvest,” Tina said. “Show me the skirts.”

  “Everyone knows about the girl,” her grandmother said, pointing out that the news was old news, and Tina shouldn’t bother embellishing.

  “You look good,” Tina Funk said to Katya as she sorted through the skirts Oma had draped across her knees, and apparently didn’t expect a reply, as she went on to say, “Your oma is right,
there’s not much to let down.” Her voice had become less animated, and she didn’t look directly at Katya, which was what many people did, turned their heads as though not wanting to breathe the same air, as though she might have something contagious.

  “Your grandfather took Njuta along to the barn to give us a moment,” Oma said to Katya, as she’d seen the girl was puzzled by the sight of the empty high chair.

  “False hems won’t do,” Tina Funk said.

  “I’ve already considered that,” Oma said. What they should consider was adding a band of fabric and concealing the seam with trim. She rummaged through the woman’s basket and came up with packages of trim, which she spread almost lovingly across the table and stepped back to admire.

  “Na, ja,” Oma said and turned away from the table, the pleasure in her eyes fading. What would it look like, so fancy, and so soon after. She anticipated gossip.

  Well then, what she could do was make a tape of the same material, the seamstress said. She could cut a strip of fabric on the bias, and although it was time-consuming work, she could make such a tape, use invisible stitching, and from a distance the seam would resemble a tuck. And what about the petticoats, would Mrs. Schroeder be wanting to lengthen them, too?

  “No, no, not the petticoats,” Oma said. There were still some petticoats from Greta yet, which should be put to good use.

  Katya knew her grandmother’s words were meant for her. She was referring to Katya’s refusal to wear Greta’s clothes. Greta’s blouses and skirts, the dress she had worn the day she was baptised, her undervests, waists, and petticoats lay in a bureau drawer, still holding her scent, a scent which was released bit by bit each time Katya opened the drawer. Wearing the clothing would mean washing it, would mean the scent would disappear.