On the same day in late summer that Helena Sudermann returned home, the harvest workers arrived, all at once, over a hundred and fifty men. Katya was in the summer kitchen with the Wiebe sisters when they heard them coming down the road. They went to the stone fence to watch as the workers came four abreast, singing. They had just brought in the Orlov harvest, and were coming now to do the same at Privol’noye.
Their harmonious song rolled across the land as they streamed onto the compound along the service road, Little Russians, Tartars wearing astrakhan hats, Rumanians and Bulgarians. Men who would one day all look alike in grey army uniforms. Her father would sit next to such men on a bench in an inductee centre, but they would go to war carrying guns while her father would never even know the weight of a gun carried for shooting another human being. Instead, her father would wear the uniform of a Red Cross Sanitäter, and be trained as a nurse, and would know how to turn their bodies in a bed without causing needless pain, to change their bed linens and the dressings on their wounds.
The harvesters were met at the provision house by her father and Dmitri, the gardener’s assistant, who recorded the workers’ names and gave each one a mattress tick to fill at the straw pile, and a tin basin holding a rolled-up towel and a cube of soap. There were women among them, stubby and tanned, their faces lined and mouths chapped from the sun. They were field workers, and cooks whose cart was drawn by two lean cows and filled with bundles and pots and an icon which the women would set up on a shelf in their kitchen. When the workers had filled their ticks with straw, chosen their bunks, stowed what musical instruments they had brought with them, they formed a line again, this time at a shed, where Dmitri distributed tools.
In the days that followed, the men rolled a shed on wheels across a field, freeing the harvesting machine inside it. They dug an ash pit beside the harvester, and shovelled the wagonloads of coal until it towered in a glistening black mountain beside the machine. They sang as they unloaded barrels of water hauled from the lake. As Katya watched from her attic window, the oxen, looking like miniature wood carvings, went out into the fields at the break of day. They were hitched to cutters, whose blades carved a swathe through the gold carpet and threw it off in rows for the women to gather and tie into stooks. Throughout the days of the harvest the air in the compound was saturated with spicy cooking odours, the smell of straw firing the bake ovens, of freshly baked rye bread.
Katya’s father was gone from the house long before sunrise, and returned only after the sun had set. He became one of the workers, unrecognizable, his face caked with the dust of chafe, the shape of his body emerging in the creases and folds of his dusty clothing. She lay awake in the thick heat of the attic room beside Greta, listening for him to return, listening as the house stilled and the clock’s tick in the grossestube downstairs took over. During the day she watched over Sara and baby Johann, while Greta helped her mother harvest their own vegetable garden, the two of them picking it clean, hovering over the heat of a stove in the summer kitchen as they set jars of vegetables to cook in a boiler.
The day came when, for the last time, the women greased their hands and faces with fat to protect their already cracked and bleeding skin against the bite of wheat chafe and straw. At the end of the day when the harvester was shut down for the last time, the silence seemed deeper, and more complete. That evening the fires outside the workers’ quarters were smaller; the songs the men sang quavered with melancholy, sighs and longing.
In the morning the workers lined up at the provision house, bundles and instruments slung from their backs, waiting for Katya’s father to pay them.
When they left, he slept for half a day on a bench in the summer room, overcome finally by exhaustion and the silence in the compound beyond, lulled by the sound of baby Johann as he crawled about the floor. When he awoke, he hitched up his suspenders and went to see Abram. Today was the day he would talk to him about the land.
They were going to have a house in a village and land nearby where her father would go out and work with his own hired men, the village community pastures becoming home to their German red cows, watched over by a herder and shepherd dogs. Katya went through the rooms of the Big House looking to tell someone who did not already know, and found Mary and Martha Wiebe in the kitchen. The sisters were daughters of a drink-bump, a man who loved his brandy more than life, she’d heard, and they had been sent away to work at an early age to keep the family going. They were ordinary-looking women, Martha being heavy-set and brown-haired, Mary lighter-coloured and lighter of nature, too, more apt to laugh, while her sister looked for the dark side of things. Ja, ja, Katya, we know, the Wiebe sisters said, their soft sadness emanating from them like a night vapour.
She found Aganetha mending in the sewing room. Aganetha looked out overtop her glasses and her great bosom heaved when she sighed, and she said it would be terribly hard to get used to a new family living across the backyard. Someone else sleeping in the attic room, Katya thought, her room with its two views of the world.
Yes, I know you’re going away, but you won’t be going far, will you? Helena said. They would be nearby in the village of Franzfeld, or Hochfeld, perhaps, and Helena would often see them at church. The window in Helena’s bed-sitting room looked out across the yard to the west garden wall, the flower gardens beyond it, and the orchards. Patches of colour moved among the fruit trees, workers picking in the pear orchard. Above the window was a shelf holding ivy plants, and an old birdcage whose presence had gone unexplained. Whenever they asked, Helena pretended not to hear, or said that some things were private and would remain that way. She now said that Katya and her family would not be going as far away as she wanted to go. Since she had returned from Germany she was softer, would sometimes nod and smile to herself as though she nursed a pleasant secret.
Sophie was in the washhouse, having finished cooking up a batch of soap. She was the last to know that the next harvest Katya’s father brought in would be from his own land. Oy, Sophie said, my eyes will hurt not to see you. My heart will burn. My toes will curl up and fall off. Katya was grateful, and eager to help Sophie loosen the soap from the moulds, freeing the thick opaque slabs that always looked good enough to eat. And not only that, Sophie said, as though picking up on an argument she’d been having before Katya arrived. And not only that, now she had to wash the mattress ticks the workers had used, which were lying in a heap outside the door. Then she was expected to go and help Manya scrub the quarters, count the tin spoons fastened to the tables by chains, straighten the bent ones; she was being made to do the work of outside help. God, God, she muttered. She would need to fire up the stove in the bathhouse later to heat water, get rid of the tiny beasts that, no doubt, were living in the mattress ticks and wouldn’t miss the chance to hitch a ride on her clothing, a bite of her tender skin. Outside is outside, she said. Inside is in.
She went over to the door of the washhouse and pulled her headscarf free. Then she sucked in her breath and her hands flew up and covered her eyes. Katya came to the door and saw what it was Sophie didn’t want to see. There was Manya, carrying a bundle, running off down the Chortitza road. Oy, Sophie said, now my eyes really do hurt.
Photographs of the tsar and tsarina hung near the ceiling of Abram Sudermann’s office, and Katya felt watched as she waited for Dietrich to show her and Gerhard what the imperial seal on land documents looked like. Her father would come to own such a document, he said. A Wells Fargo safe sat under a table in the office; a vise was clamped to the table and held a half-finished carving of a horse; a bottle of peach schnapps stood near the vise, and a glass clouded with fingerprints. The room held the conflicting smells of newly carved wood and a heavy body odour emanating from a chair whose back and arms were stained with perspiration. A smaller chair sat across from it, and she wondered if that was where her father sat when, throughout the years, he had come for his meetings with Abram. If that was where he’d sat when he’d come to remind Abram that it was understood and
had been agreed. The time had arrived for the brothers to determine which parcel of their almost twenty thousand desiatini of land they would sell to him.
The office had two doors, and one was always closed. She knew from overhearing Aganetha’s complaints about having to go through her husband’s messy office at the start and end of every day that their bedroom lay beyond the closed door.
Abram’s office was in disarray; piles of magazines were stacked around his chair, which sat at an angle near two tall windows. Their sills were deeply grooved with burns the length and width of her finger. She imagined Abram in his chair at the window, watching for incompetence and sloth, for nekhai – don’t bother, it’s good enough – the prevailing attitude of a Russian worker, he said. When Abram had grown too heavy for horse riding, he conducted his business from the overstuffed armchair, her father explained, and relied on him to be where his eyes and ears couldn’t reach. Whoever would become Abram’s extra pair of hands now in place of her father, would live in her house?
Dietrich found the combination to the Wells Fargo safe in the toe of an old boot lying to one side of it, and she was relieved when at last, after much fiddling, the door opened, and Dietrich put the slip of paper back into its hiding place. Just then Lydia came down the hall and stood in the doorway, startling Dietrich, who then grinned sheepishly. You should have had someone keep watch, she said. You should start using your brains. You watch, he told her as he slid documents from a leather portfolio and began unfolding them. Katya went to look. The papers were stiff with age, and crackled. She peered over his shoulder with Gerhard, as awed by the sight of the official papers as her brother was. She touched the embossed double-headed eagle pressed into wax.
The document proved that his father had purchased the forest land from the Orlov family, Dietrich said. As he put the papers away, Katya turned back to the room and the shelves lining the wall above Abram’s workbench, which were littered with an assortment of cobbler’s tools, a bottle of horse liniment, a bronze statue of a bull. Scraps of papers were tacked to the edge of a shelf, lists of supplies to be bought, the names of horse dealers and grain handlers, Scripture verses to remind Abram that the meek would inherit the earth, to render unto God, and unto Caesar; Christ’s instruction on how to pray, in secret, and to begin, Our Father which art in heaven. She noticed the inevitable presence of a sack of roasted knacksot on a shelf, and beside it, a silver cup. A cup with two ear-shaped handles.
“That used to be yours,” she said to Lydia, surprised that she had remembered, and to find the cup in Abram’s study.
Lydia followed Katya’s gaze as she came over and took the cup down from the shelf. She held it up to the light in the window. The silver had tarnished, which accentuated the relief pattern of vine leaves rimming the bottom of the cup, and its engraved letters, LS.
“It made my teeth hurt when I drank from it,” Lydia said as she put the cup back onto the shelf.
Katya remembered the cup being pushed across a table towards her, how much cooler milk seemed to be when drunk from it. She remembered her tongue tracing the grooves of the engraved initials on its side.
“The best there is, Wells Fargo,” Dietrich said as the safe door closed with a thud, as if to remind Katya and Gerhard that he’d been to America, and how much he savoured the English words, Wells Fargo.
Just then the closed door across the room suddenly opened, startling them. Abram stood on the threshold scowling, his bushy grizzled beard almost covering his entire chest. His bare feet were puddles of flesh on the dark floorboards.
“We didn’t know you were there,” Dietrich said lamely.
He had already got up from the floor and moved away from the safe when his father surprised them. Now he went over to the table and touched the half-carved horse, as though to imply to his father that he had brought them to the office to admire this latest carving.
“That, I don’t question. Lydia, be useful. Come and help your papa, yes?” Abram said as he held up a pair of socks. Lydia hurried to comply, waited for her father to settle in his chair before lifting his feet onto a hassock.
“Go tell Mama to bring my boots,” Abram called after Dietrich as he made his hasty retreat.
While Lydia struggled to pull on and garter her father’s socks, he studied Katya and Gerhard, his eyes half shut. “What makes you happy these days?” he asked, his voice rumbling with phlegm.
“We – we – we -” Gerhard stuttered.
“What does he want to say?” Abram asked.
“We like to go exploring,” Katya said.
“It seems that everyone these days wants to go exploring,” Abram said, as if referring to her father’s desire to be his own man. He was going to do as promised. He was going to Ekaterinoslav, where he would meet with his brothers and discuss the sale of the land. Be still for the next few days, their mother had told them. Your father is anxious.
As she, her brother, and Lydia joined up with Greta at the rondel, horses whinnied in the carriage house, and then its doors flew open, letting out a team of chestnut bays hitched to a federwoage. The coachman sent the team galloping about the yard, testing the harnesses and hitches before he would drive to the front entrance and wait for Abram.
Everyone wants to go exploring, Abram had said, in such a way to imply he scorned such a desire. Forgetting that he’d taken his family to America during the time when Russia’s navy was being humiliated in the Strait of Tsushima. They’d toured a soap factory and the Pillsbury flour mill in Minneapolis. Travelled south on a train to see cotton fields, and ranch lands, and had eaten watermelons that were oblong and not round, and weren’t nearly as sweet as what they were used to.
Abram returned with an appreciation of the size of the Pillsbury mill, and its efficiency at moving grain and flour in and out on railway cars. He brought home the wide-brimmed Stetson hats worn by the cowboys, and as they had at the Christmas gathering, the brothers wore the hats when they met to report on their various business endeavours. The English, however, were ahead of the Americans when it came to steam engines, and so on the return trip, Abram had stopped in Ipswich, England, to visit the gentlemen at Namsons, Sims & Head, and purchased one of their engines for his brother’s flour mill in Ekaterinoslav.
It was years later that Katya learned the stories behind the Sudermanns’ long absence during the war with Japan. She and her sister had been sent away: her father left in charge of Privol’noye to fight off the Red Cock while the Sudermann brothers visited the royal palace in Berlin. From there they went off to America, where people gathered at a train station in Kansas expecting to find them wearing rags, while “the truth be known,” Aganetha had said, “we were dressed much better than they.” Katya and Greta had been sent to the safety of their grandparents’ village, Rosenthal, where Katya acquired a sweet tooth. She became so plump that even the rolls of fat on her legs had rolls, her father teased. And yet she returned with the notion that she’d grown smaller while she was away, and was relieved to see, once again, her reflection in her parents’ eyes.
Now, as they went through the orchard, they came upon fruit pickers, women and children, working up on ladders. “We’re going to explore the forest,” Gerhard called, his chest suddenly becoming barrel shaped. One of the women pickers beckoned for him to come over.
“Take some,” she said, indicating the sling of pears at her hip. Their journey would be more pleasant with a full stomach. As Gerhard scooped up a pear, she urged him to take several more.
“We could take them all, if we wanted. They’re our pears,” Lydia said.
“For sure, go ahead. Take all of them. Eat as many as your little stomach has room for, but you’ll fill your underpants tomorrow,” the woman said to Lydia. Then she laughed at her own humour, her face crinkling like a walnut.
The children around the fruit picker burst into laughter, their shaved heads bobbing. On the ground near the tree where she worked, a baby lay asleep on a shawl. The laughter had awakened the child,
and the woman’s attention was taken by its fussing, and she came down the ladder to tend to the infant.
They went across the meadow of wild thyme, grasshoppers clicking and springing up before their feet while Dietrich, mounted on his palomino, went riding down the road. Off to see Michael Orlov, Lydia said and pulled a face. Dietrich had become such a gadabout since he’d gone to Zentralschule. Her white-blond plaits were wound about her head, making her neck appear long and stemlike. She was either puffed up with excitement, or let down, and seldom in between. She had travelled to America and had seen more than her little eyes could take in. She had stretched her eyes, and now they needed to be filled with something new all the time, or she would put on a big lip, and sigh like an old woman who had known better days. Katya and Greta were dressed alike that day, in percale print smocks and wide white collars, black socks rolled to their ankles. Greta’s sandal strap had broken earlier in the day and flapped as she walked, completing her fly-away and loose look, a collar button undone and her collar askew, hair rising from her head like tendrils of dark smoke.
Katya watched her shadow travel alongside her, felt her breath jolting in her chest with each hard step, arms swinging with an enthusiasm she didn’t feel as her father began to sing, the sound coming from near the ox barns, his round baritone voice singing Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. Praise him, all creatures here below. Praise him above, ye heavenly host, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In summers past they had picnicked in the meadow but had never ventured into the forest, a dark band of trees that seemed to finger the land, as though the meadow was a tablecloth the forest would draw into its lap.
The Russlander Page 5
