“One of his own can do it,” Opa said.
“Yes,” Oma said. The bars of light seemed to move as her hands unclenched and her knees shifted as though she might turn and lie down on the sleeping bench beside him. She sighed, and then began to mutter. Scripture, or a prayer, the sound of s becoming sharp tiny hisses. She grew silent. “But do unto others,” she said, moments later.
“Na, Anna, don’t you go to him,” her grandfather said.
No, don’t go, Katya thought, her teeth clenched and jaw beginning to ache. Don’t dirty your hands by touching him.
Her grandmother went around the mattress on the floor, and Katya felt the air move against her face. The thought of her touching Pravda filled her with revulsion.
In the morning she told her grandfather that she wanted to leave and, surprisingly, he agreed that she should go. He sat on the edge of the sleeping bench, his long hands dangling between his knees, his face tinged yellow, and haggard. She shouldn’t stay in the same house as Pravda, but take her sisters and go away. How and where, he did not know, but he would try to make some arrangements. Sara and Njuta, their hair uncombed and clothing wrinkled, sat on the floor staring at the door as though they expected at any moment it might burst open. Their grandmother prepared breakfast for the men in the family room, her voice occasionally rising above theirs, surprisingly bright and cheerful sounding. They had become mice in a house of hungry cats, listening, eyes turning to the slightest sound, a voice rising in the street.
When Pravda and his men had eaten and gone outside, Katya took the opportunity to go to her room and gather up a bundle of clothing. Drawers were open and half-empty, and soiled clothing lay in heaps on the floor among broken bottles and the stubs of cigarettes, which had been ground into the floor. The room smelled of cow dung, unwashed hair and bodies, of vomit, she realized when she stepped into a sticky grey puddle near the wardrobe.
She went into the family room, where her grandparents were at the window, peering between the shutter slats. As at their house, as at all the houses across the street, the Siemenses’ window shutters were closed. And, like them, people stood behind their shutters watching the street where Pravda’s hooligans had gathered. Their Bat’ko sat in a troika which she recognized as having belonged to David Sudermann. The men were looking down the street and seemed to be waiting. Soon a wagon came in sight, and as it came nearer she recognized her uncle Bernhard, his dark beard matted with blood; David, his head bowed and wrists bound behind his back; and Olga’s father. The man driving the wagon was Kornelius Heinrichs, hatless, without a coat or jacket, his shirt bloodied.
Just then Ohm Siemens came from his house and down the steps, wearing nothing but boots with his winter underwear and a greatcoat draped across one shoulder. Nela and her mother stood at the door watching as he went down the steps to the gate, carrying an auger. He called out to Pravda and his men, and immediately gained their attention. Within moments, like children in a high state of excitement, they swarmed around Ohm Siemens and followed him down the street, all of them, turning at the crossroads leading to the Ghortitza creek, their prisoners on the wagon forgotten, and unguarded.
That was how she found herself on the wagon bench beside Kornelius Bull-Headed Heinrichs; once again he was exactly where she needed him to be, and would always be throughout their more than half a century together. Her grandfather urged him to go quickly, to take her and her sisters to Arbusovka and Willy Krahn. Kornelius waited only as long as it took for her grandmother to come from the house with blankets, one to cover his bleeding back, one for Sara and Njuta to hide under, and then they were gone.
They left Rosenthal then, a place which she would not see again for almost four years, and then she would barely recognize it. She would think of this day as being the final leave-taking, although in the near future she and her grandparents and her sisters would board a train and leave Russia forever. They would be among the first group to go, among seven hundred and twenty-three people gathered at the train station on June 22, 1923, the place where, years before, Kornelius had saved her from Trifon’s ice chisel. They would sing a hymn of parting, their voices swelling and rising above the town, a silence descending as the last note faded away, a silence in which they could hear the stirring of the wind in the trees, hear their memories of loved ones, buried in the cemetery beyond the Orthodox church, whose gravestones would soon be carted away to become the foundation stones of future houses.
While they took their leave of those who would follow in the months and years to come, and of those who would choose to remain, Kornelius packed their belongings in a boxcar hitched right behind the engine. When the train passed through the gates at the Latvian border, some people shouted hurrah and others wept for sadness, while Kornelius was busy scribbling figures on paper, rubles to dollars, determining how much farm equipment would cost in the new country.
They left Rosenthal, Kornelius driving the horses hard, and entered Chortitza along Old Row Street, the iron-banded runners scraping harshly where the cobblestones were bared of snow. The windows there were shuttered, too. No one came out to investigate their passing. Yards were empty and the town was motionless, as though, like the icicles hanging from the gutters, it was suspended in time. By then, the winter of 1918, the children had learned to hide at the sound of horses approaching, to get out of sight the moment anything unusual happened, and it became a game to them, an adventure, a chance to climb onto the roof of barns to keep watch, to huddle like mice in the grass and send word if strangers were coming. It became a diversion from their stomachs, which by then were often empty. They were hungry, yes, often. And later, more than hungry. She would say to her own children, and to their children, don’t you ever let me hear you say the word starving. Be careful how you use words. She was not ashamed to admit that she had once slapped the mouth of one of her boys when he said in a fit of anger that he would like to kill someone.
The silver dome of the Orthodox church had receded behind her, and the voices of the men rising from the creek where they had gathered around Ohm Siemens to cheer him on as he sang “Gott Ist Die Liebe.” He had been boring a hole in the ice for his winter bath, just as he had done every winter, an event that never failed to cause excitement and laughter. This time Pravda’s hooligans were excited, too.
God is love, He makes me safe, He loves me, too. Let me say it over again. God is love, Ohm Siemens had said, repeating the words of the song in Russian, likely hoping that its message would somehow change them. Not realizing that they had only said, Tell us once again, old father, what does your song mean? just to see how long his patience would last.
“hey’re half frozen,” Willy Krahn’s sister Irma said to the onlookers crowding around the doorway of the family room. Sara’s and Njuta’s hands and feet were like ice, she told them. She was the female version of her brother, a round-shouldered, soft-looking woman.
Blankets appeared, several pairs of thick socks were passed down the hall and into the room for Irma to put in the oven, and moments later, Katya and her sisters were ensconced in warmth.
“It’s cold, but not nearly as cold as it was yesterday,” a woman said. “I went to the store yesterday, and it was colder and no one made a fuss.”
She stood at the table, bent over a pot of steaming water, a towel draped over her head. When Katya first entered the family room, she had lifted the towel to peer at her and inform her that she had sinusitis. As Willy and another man came by the door carrying Kornelius between them, she asked, And what’s the matter with that one? When no one answered, the woman lowered the towel and bent over the pot, but not before Katya saw that the front of her dress was fastened from waist to neck with large safety pins. There soon won’t be enough chairs in this house, the woman had said moments later, loud enough for everyone to hear, and Katya sensed that the comment was directed at her.
The windows in the room fronted the street, and were misted with steam. Near to the windowsill the curtains were stuck to the
wet glass. A design had been painted on the curtains, and the moist windowpane had made the paint bleed and run. Katya sat holding Njuta, Sara pressed up against her on the bench at a long table in the centre of the room, waiting for Irma, who had gone to the stove to heat some milk. The large number of pots and pans, washboards and pitchers hanging on the walls made the room look to Katya almost like a store. Hooks held a clutter of pantry paraphernalia, egg beaters, rolling pins, flour sifters. She guessed that the items came from the households of the people who lived with Willy and his sister. Boarders, Irma called them when Katya expressed her surprise at the number of people who’d come to watch.
“And here’s our Erika,” Irma called from the stove as a curly-haired little girl with ruddy cheeks came into the room. “Erika, come and see, you now have a little sister,” Irma said, in this way telling Katya that she and her sisters were welcome to stay. Irma returned to them, bringing cups of milk and a spoon of honey for Erika to give to Njuta to lick, but Njuta had already fallen asleep in Katya’s lap.
Within moments her sisters were asleep in the bed Greta had slept in; in a room with a square table set before a window, where her sister must have sat to write letters. A groove was worn in its soft wood, and Katya rubbed the indentation, believing that oil from her sister’s fingers came off on her skin. The refugees had sat around the same table, the mother and children turning all at once to look at her. After she had rubbed the indentation in the wood and felt her fingertips becoming cool, tingling, as though peppermint oil were on her skin, she crawled under a quilt beside Sara and Njuta. She knew from an apron hooked onto the door, the soft, greying folds of a petticoat draped over a chair back, that someone had recently occupied the room.
Then, although it was only noon, she fell asleep instantly, waking only once during the long afternoon, when from across the hall came the sound of male voices. As the voices dimmed, she again sank into the heat of her sisters’ bodies, and sleep; the comforting thickness of the plaster walls surrounding her, the satisfying deepness of the window casements where geranium plants bloomed, their winter blossoms delicate flames burning at the ends of spindly stems. Stems that reached for the daylight seeping through the shutters, a light that faded to darkness while she slept.
The woman who’d had the towel over her head was Liese Peters, Katya learned at the supper table. Liese was the daughter of the man who had contributed the socks that were now warming her feet, a small man who sat beside Sara. When they had arrived at Willy’s house and Kornelius brought the wagon and horses to a halt, he had slumped over on the bench, and Sara grabbed the back of his shirt to keep him from falling. Papa, come and help me, Sara had cried out, her face dark with frustration. Katya noticed the paleness of Sara’s skin, the shadows under her eyes. Now, she seemed intent on watching Liese Peters, her angry appeal to their father to come and help apparently forgotten. Liese had changed her dress for a blouse and skirt, and wore a necklace of safety pins. She had stuck pencils into her hair on either side of her head. Katya feared Sara would ask about the strange necklace and the pencils, but she seemed mesmerized by the way the woman ate, her arms hugging the bowl, the necklace of pins clanking against its rim as spoonful after spoonful of soup disappeared into her mouth. Katherine, Sara, and Njuta Vogt, Irma had said by way of introduction when they’d gathered around the table for supper. From Rosenthal.
“From Privol’noye,” Katya said, and felt Liese study her as though she were trying to remember something.
“From the Abram Sudermanns,” Liese said moments later, as if to say, I should have known. Her statement had been a quiet declaration. Abram Sudermann’s overseer. Someone less than herself, Katya heard in the woman’s words.
There were two families living in Willy Krahn’s house besides Liese Peters and her father. There was Willy, his sister Irma, and rosy-cheeked Erika, who preferred the outdoors to the indoors, no matter the season. Even before she could walk, Willy told them at supper. In winter Frieda would put baby Erika in a box on a sleigh and cover it with a blanket, and there she would sleep for hours of an afternoon. When she was brought inside, her cheeks would be as red as –
Snow White apples, Katya thought.
“As beets,” Erika finished jubilantly.
“Ja, ja, those were the days,” Willy said. “We had some good days,” he said to himself as he rolled a piece of bread into a ball and dropped it into his soup.
A daughter from Willy’s first wife also lived in the house; Willy’s middle-aged daughter, her husband, and their son shared a room. The son was their youngest child, a lanky boy with pimples, whose shyness was so intense he kept his head down during the entire supper and slipped away before the meal was finished without anyone seeming to have noticed he was gone.
They had other sons, the husband said. One son had been taken by the Whites and was somewhere fighting with Wrangel in the Crimea.
“He’s driving a wagon,” his wife said, to clarify her husband’s account.
Their son had met and spoken to Wrangel. Once, when he’d had the chance, when the general was going by on a horse and he stood nearby, he called out to Wrangel, could he please speak? And Wrangel said, Go ahead, feel free to talk. Their son said to the general that if he had the power to rule, he would see to it that all the Jews were sent out of the country. He said that to assure the general of his loyalty, and was rewarded with a thousand-ruble note, and the compliment that he had the soul of a true Russian. Another son had the soul of a German, apparently, as he accepted an invitation to travel with the soldiers when, following amnesty, they retreated to Germany. Most of the men who had been conscripted, or had volunteered, like his son, preferred to wear their farmers’ clothing and not a uniform, and in this way, they would blend in with whatever army wanted to claim them next.
Kornelius Heinrichs had been taken to the room of Liese’s father and put to bed. The voice that had roused Katya when she’d been asleep had belonged to a doctor coming to tend to Kornelius’s back, which had been cut open to the bone by a whip, Irma told them. At that, their storytelling ended and everyone around the table grew quiet and introspective, Katya seeing in her mind Abram Sudermann’s shoulder bone laid bare, how white it was, how it shone.
The boarders in Willy’s house were people whose homes had been taken over by peasants and left in such a state that they were uninhabitable. As soon as the Germans and Austrians had left, Makhno’s men returned. They went from house to house until they ran out of houses to dirty and ruin, and then they went on to the next untouched village, sometimes fighting among themselves over who had more right to a certain house. Whoever had less in the old life, it seemed, was entitled to have more in the new one, Willy Krahn said.
“Yes, those with less brains and less industry. The vodka drinkers,” Liese Peters’s father said, tapping the side of his bowl with a spoon. His body curled inward, and he had a large swelling at his throat. Katya tried not to look at the swelling, how it moved when he talked, as though the pouch of skin held an egg.
Willy Krahn sat at the head of the table, his beard shining silver in the light of a lantern hanging above them, the skin of his plump hands and cheeks as pink as his scalp shining through his thinning hair.
When Liese finished eating her soup, she got up and went around the table peering into their bowls to see whose was empty, and could be cleared away. When she asked Irma how many potatoes she should peel for tomorrow, Katya heard the true question behind the words, which was, would Katya and her sisters be staying, and it was clear that she hoped that would not be the case.
After the meal, the men disappeared, Willy and his son-in-law to the barn to milk the cows and continue a game of chess. Katya expected that she would help milk the cows, but when she offered, Irma said, “There are only three cows, and little enough for the men to do in winter as it is.”
As Katya was about to leave the table, Liese came with a basin of potatoes and plunked it down in front of her. “Seeing as how you’re so anxi
ous to help,” Liese said.
Just as swiftly, Irma took the bowl away. “Don’t be so quick,” she scolded.
Katya knew from Liese’s abrupt movements as she scrubbed and then peeled the potatoes that she was fired up with resentment over her presence. The pencils the woman had stuck into her hair resembled insect antennae as she hunched over the bowl, and Sara kept glancing at them as she helped clear the table.
When they finished washing up, Irma set a ham bone to boil, and then measured flour into a bowl and set it aside to be leavened in the morning and pummelled into elastic loaves of dough that would be peppered with the leftover grounds of prips, or the potato peelings Liese would put through the meat grinder when she finished peeling them, Irma explained to Sara. Sara’s eyes went round with a question, which made Irma laugh. “Yes, Miss Big-Eyes. Potato peelings, beet skins, too. Carrot and apple peels. You’d be surprised what Tante Irma can put into bread and still make it taste good.”
By the time the clock in the parlour chimed the eighth hour, Willy’s boarders had gone to their rooms, and the house grew quiet. As Katya sat beside the bed waiting for her sisters to fall asleep, she thought of Kornelius, and realized that she stopped thinking of him as Bull-Headed. She liked the cracked skin of his knuckles, the broadness of the backs of his hands, the orange woolly hair in his ears. The door to his room was ajar, and when she’d gone past, she’d seen the heel of his foot sticking out from the blankets, its skin worn smooth and shining. The image was something new for her to think about. That, and his inert form, a hill of a man whose body would warm her own. She didn’t know where the thought came from, or why her feeling for him had changed from gratitude to desire. She recognized a longing to lie beside him, to curl around his hard body.
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