The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  There was a clearing deep inside the forest, beyond the path, filled with mottled light. Two columns stood in the clearing, a set of steps leading up to a platform on which they stood, Corinthian columns, their stone rough and porous looking, and tinged halfway up with moss. High above, the leafy crowns of linden trees swayed in a gusting wind, opening up holes of light, the light warming the air where Katya had stepped from the path; like Greta, her mouth hung open as she gaped.

  The forest had once been a park with formal gardens and an orchard, and the mausoleum had held the remains of members of the Orlov family, Lydia said. Its crypt had been moved to a cemetery in Odessa long before her father had bought the land. A growth of weeds marked the cracks in the steps, weeds that were all of the same height, as though they’d been shorn with cutters. Dried leaves had been swept into piles along the perimeter of the clearing. Beyond the clearing were dead and falling-down apple trees, the giant lindens, all of them planted years ago by the Orlovs.

  Katya sat with the others on the steps, feeling the chill of stone, listening as a carriage went by on the Chortitza road. Abram, on his way to Ekaterinoslav. A dog barked in the distance as the carriage passed, and was joined by another, their voices rising and falling away.

  She thought of her father singing “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow,” thankful in advance for his piece of land; his back young-man straight, as though he were wearing a new pair of shoes and trying not to notice. She thought of the stone they’d come upon near the entrance to the forest, a large smooth stone the colour of wet sheepskin. Around Privol’noye the stones the plough turned up were small, about the size of sugar melons. She’d heard of large stones far out on the steppe, as large as the one near the entrance into the forest, stone people with sledgehammer jaws, their hands holding up their protruding stomachs. Baba stones.

  Her grandfather had told her about the Baba stones, about a storekeeper in one of the colonies who’d brought in such a stone from the land, and put it outside his store for the elderly to lean on when they used the mud-scraper. He’d also told her about a time when there hadn’t been as many trees. No Lombardy poplars, no slender women waltzing along town and village streets, no acacia, mulberry, chestnut, and walnut trees, all of which had been planted by Mennonites.

  They, the first Mennonite settlers, had come to an almost treeless land, and spent their first winter of 1789 in the north, at Dubrovno, a Potemkin estate. They believed they would farm near to Berislav, where the soil was a rich loam, and not as arid as that where they eventually wound up. The oldest villages in the Chortitza Colony, Chortitza and Rosenthal, were surrounded by a plateau of sandy soil, and grew up among hills and ravines, and among the giants who populated them. Giants who carried watermelons around in their wide trouser legs. Trousers that were made with enough fabric to sail a ship. What a comical sight those giant men must have been, swinging their legs as they walked, and the melons rolling around inside their trousers. But those men in the wide pantaloons had the last laugh. When the settlers went to the dock on the Dnieper to claim their trunks, they found them to be either half-empty, or emptied and refilled with melons.

  “I spy,” Gerhard said as the sound of the dogs’ baying grew louder; a pack of hounds seemed to be nearing the forest. He made binoculars of his hands and scanned the treetops.

  “Something blue that is the sky, yes?” Lydia said.

  “I spy something that is red,” Gerhard said and pointed to a piece of fabric snagged onto the lower branches of a tree.

  Gerhard brought the piece of cloth to them. Lydia recognized her own embroidery, a chain of yellow daisies, the scarf the usual birthday gift given to the women workers, made by Aganetha from leftover scraps.

  Abram Sudermann’s forest wasn’t really a forest, but three desiatini of overgrown parkland that he’d purchased, thinking it would be an inviting place for his family to spend a late Sunday afternoon. Just as Katya hadn’t known about the presence of the mausoleum, she hadn’t known that occasionally a gypsy caravan would camp there. That the sounds she sometimes heard weren’t the witch Baba Yaga banging her pestle against the mortar, but tree poachers axing down trees in the night, which they left lying to infuriate Abram with the evidence of their thievery and waste. She didn’t know that women went into the ruined garden to meet their working men in its gloam and shadows. She would be surprised to discover that people who had never been to Privol’noye would know such things, that the stories would travel wide and far and into the future.

  She didn’t know what Helena Sudermann knew, that Abram would sometimes follow a woman into the forest. His aging legs and girth no longer allowed for a chase, and so he was known to wheedle, and threaten, and to offer a ruble. She would remember finding the headscarf and imagine Abram had followed Manya into the forest and come upon her sitting on the steps of the mausoleum, her skirts up about her thighs to cool herself, and had taken it to be an invitation.

  Lydia suddenly came to life. What they should do was play hide-and-seek, she said, and began to pace out the boundaries for their game. They wouldn’t go any farther than the mausoleum, a gooseberry bush, a particular birch whose bark was scoured and peeling. Then she put her forehead against a column, and began to count.

  Katya saw a fallen tree and ran to it, Gerhard behind her, the two of them dropping onto their stomachs on the ground beside it, while Greta ran first in one direction, and then another, as Lydia counted. And then her voice seemed to come from a greater distance than the pillars, but Katya didn’t dare lift her head to see if Lydia had moved. A magpie settled in a tree beside her hiding place and began screeching, as if to boss them away, and then the sound of dogs barking grew louder, while Lydia’s voice grew faint.

  “Ready,” Greta called out from where she’d at last settled.

  Katya could no longer hear Lydia counting. A second magpie joined the one in the tree above her, and their scolding became intense. Then the baying of dogs suddenly grew closer, and the magpies flew away, a flitter of white and black darting among the trees. Gerhard sucked air and slapped his arm. Mensch, he said. The ants were stinging. Moments later they heard the snap of twigs and rustle of underbrush as Greta emerged from her hiding place.

  Katya and Gerhard approached the steps where Greta sat, looking down-hearted. White fluff clung to her dark hair, seeds that had hitched a ride, and Gerhard pulled them out and blew them off the palm of his hand. This wasn’t the first time Lydia had played a trick on them. Lydia, pretending to be surprised when they found her in the Big House playing the piano, asking, What? Were you still hiding? The sound of the dogs grew faint again, and a silence moved in. The air around the mausoleum smelled like a closet of mice, Katya thought. The stillness made her feel she was being watched. They began to hear a mewing sound, like a cat.

  They crept back along the path through wild rhubarb and fern, the sound growing louder, the mewing turning into an angry cry that rose to a howl. Greta stood still on the path, and then she suddenly hugged herself. “Oh no,” she said. There, lying on a shawl near the rock at the entrance to the forest, was a baby, its fists beating the air. Lydia had stolen the fruit picker’s baby.

  They began to hear the woman call, her voice on edge, and rising above the baying of the dogs. “My Ivanoushka, poor Ivanoushka, Mother’s coming,” she called as she came running through the meadow.

  Katya braced herself against the woman’s anger, as she thought it was the woman who was now scuttling through the underbrush towards them, and not a small animal on the run from the dogs. She heard the boom of a gun, and the air reverberated with the sound, and the sudden ferocious noise of the dogs, the woman’s cries. Greta scooped the baby up, and then hunters, Dietrich, the elder Orlov and his son Michael came crashing into the underbrush in search of a rabbit they were sure they had killed.

  Katya went across country with her father and Greta. Grass swept against the wagon bed, its wheels banging against a corrugation of furrows, jolting the air from h
er chest. Then the mares found their stride, pricked their ears as killdeers cried out while racing across the sky. The ride grew less unpredictable, the bumps even and quick, making her bones chatter. Her father’s sharp knees jutted out from the bench, his hands clenching the reins and resting on his thighs, his knuckles white, and she knew he was still angry. They would need to apologize to the fruit-picker woman for taking her baby, he’d said.

  “Na, girls, what’s to be done with you?” He ended the silence which had come between them since he’d turned the horses from the road for open country. Katya knew he didn’t expect an answer.

  The sun travelled alongside the wagon, a fiery apricot about ready to drop into a yellow sea of grass. Her father turned his face to it for a moment, its warmth at sundown a caress, its slanted light making the curvature of the earth more apparent, making a person realize how the earth was a sphere that rotated as it moved through the heavens, the miracle being that, somehow, they didn’t fall off. She often wondered if the earth might one day become too heavy to float, because each year plants grew and died, leaves fell, people died too and became dirt, which all added to the weight of the world. Her father’s eyes became slits and his sun-browned face wrinkled, giving her a picture, she thought, of what he might look like when he grew old.

  He turned away from the sun and lifted his hands from his thighs, allowed slack in the reins, and the whiteness of his knuckles began to fade. He said he thought he’d made it clear, long ago, that they were not to borrow any more babies.

  Whether or not they improved the babies was beside the point, he had told them. A bath in a basin of water in the summer kitchen and a set of clothes which Lydia would smuggle from the Big House weren’t improvements that the baby’s parents necessarily appreciated. A child feeling lost and wanting its mother wasn’t comforted by their cuddling, their songs and chanted nursery rhymes, or a curl stiffened with spit to stand up on top of the baby’s head. Jump, billy goat Jump, over the garden fence, here comes an old gypsy to pull your beard. They gave up teaching babies, then, for teaching Sophie; Greta and Lydia coached her to learn the German Christmas carol she had recited so well that Christmas. They had not taken a baby in years.

  “Unless you’re a parent, you can’t understand how a mother feels to find her baby gone,” her father said.

  “But it wasn’t us. It wasn’t us who took the baby,” Greta said in a burst, her voice betraying how close she was to crying.

  “Birds of a feather,” her father said, meaning that they, being with Lydia, became guilty of her action.

  They were going across country to Lubitskoye, a village they travelled through when they went to church in Nikolaifeld, a Russian village of thatch-roof cottages and small gardens set behind wattle fences lining a single dusty street. Katya wondered now if the women she had seen working in the gardens blamed her father for the high cost of kerosene and matches.

  When they reached the outskirts of Lubitskoye, a cottage suddenly appeared. Children of varying ages sat on their haunches near to its door, playing a throwing game with pig-knuckle bones. Katya had seen the children of the workers on the estate play this game. When they saw the wagon, they gathered up their bones and drew together, becoming silent and watchful. Her father drove the team onto the yard, a piece of earth marked by its flattened grass, and scattered a flock of russet-coloured chickens. Several more children came running from the back of the cottage, followed by a man who must be their father, she thought. The man took off his cap and she saw it was Dmitri Karpenko, Sophie’s father and the gardener’s assistant.

  Her father got down from the wagon and went over to Dmitri, and the children, seeing that their father knew him, gathered around the two men as they stood talking. Then a girl who looked to be Katya’s age left the others and came over to the wagon, where she stood and stared at Katya. Cat’s eyes, which were hard to turn away from. Sophie’s eyes.

  When Greta climbed down from the wagon the girl’s gaze shifted to her, the girl watching her every movement as though she’d never seen anyone get down from a wagon before. Just then a yellow dog came loping round a corner of the house raising a hullabaloo, running towards Greta, who stopped to let the animal come to her, extending her palm to its inquiring nose. The dog wagged its tail and Greta scratched it behind the ears before joining her father. She had a way with animals and with people, Katya thought. Strangers smiled when they looked at Greta. Gypsy Queen, Dietrich called her, because of her brown eyes and wavy dark hair.

  “You there, hello. I’m Vera,” the girl beside the wagon said in Russian. Katya turned to meet Vera’s intense stare, her hand opening to reveal a spin top. Vera was inviting her to come down from the wagon and Katya hesitated; the yard was carpeted with chalky curlicues of chicken dirt which would stick to her shoes, and she would drag it into the house when she got home.

  “Nyet,” she said.

  Vera’s features twisted with a frown and she ran off, went scooting round the side of the house, startling the chickens, their useless wings flapping and raising dust.

  Dmitri called in the direction of the house, and its door opened. The fruit-picker woman emerged, her baby cradled in the crook of her arms.

  “You have something to say, don’t you,” Katya’s father said in Low German, reminding her of their mission, and then, in Russian, repeated what he’d said to the woman, who dipped her head and smiled shyly, beckoning to Katya that she should come inside.

  The odours of the Karpenko house clung to her clothing, the black fumes of kerosene, tobacco drying in the rafters and the dankness of its earth floor. The yellow dog had parked itself under the table and whenever Katya moved it growled, which made the children laugh. They sat on benches along the walls, the bigger ones holding little ones on their knees, their eyes constantly on her as though she were a strange creature. The girl, Vera, wasn’t among them. Now and then someone rapped on a window, the door, which brought more laughter. Vera had stayed outside, and when Katya thought of Vera’s frown, the way she had gone running off when Katya refused to come down from the wagon and play, she concluded that Vera was making fun of her.

  Dmitri’s wife lost her shyness and spoke to them in Russian, asked them how many sisters and brothers they had, and their names, and they replied in Russian, which they studied in school, but which, except for talking Russian to Sophie, they seldom had the opportunity to practise. Unlike their father, who spoke Russian most of his working day. An old oma perched on the stove, the baby’s cradle suspended from the ceiling above it.

  That Sophie’s home was such a damp and smelly place grew large in Katya’s mind as they rode away from it. They were not returning to Privol’noye, as she’d expected they would, but going away from it. She was surprised, but neither she nor Greta asked why. Dmitri’s wife had served them sweet tea and hard-boiled eggs after they had apologized to her for the worry they had caused, even though they had not caused it. Never mind, the woman had said, her face becoming young when she smiled. She likely knew who was responsible for making her worry. But their apology had not eased the moodiness Katya had felt gathering in her father for weeks. He sat now with back too straight, eyes fixed above the horses’ heads, and unswerving. Moths fluttered about the lanterns hanging on each side of the wagon, keeping up with them as they travelled towards a thin rim of watery light on the horizon.

  “Ja, ja, you’re just going to have to wait and see,” her father said suddenly, and then, realizing he had spoken aloud, he grinned at them, looking sheepish, his shoulders relaxing into a slouch. He reached behind him in the wagon for woollen shawls, which he dropped into Greta’s lap and hers. As Katya huddled into her shawl, its scent brought to mind the bright clean rooms of her house, and she thought of Sophie, sleeping on a bench, or the floor, along with all the others, including a goat and pig in winter.

  “Open your hand,” her father said to Greta as he fished about in the pocket on the bib of his overall. He dropped an object the size of a thimble into it. G
reta held it near to the lantern’s light, and Katya saw the glint of gold. Greta gave the object to Katya, a tiny head of a woman, a sharp-featured woman whose hair was braided and hung in loops at the sides of a crown.

  “I found it over there,” her father said. He pointed to a dark loaf of land where the ground dipped into a gully overgrown with stunted trees and shrubs, and then headed towards it. When they had come as close to the mound as the growth would allow, he stopped the team. The silence filled with chirping crickets, a vibrating hum of insects, a hum that seemed to come from beneath the earth.

  “I was kneeling one day to take a stone from a horse’s shoe, and I saw something shining on the ground. There it was,” her father said. “I thought this would be a good chance to bring it back.”

  He took a lantern and went round to the back of the wagon for a spade. He chopped at the hard earth again and again, but failed to break it. Then he tried cutting through the grass with the spade, stepping on it with his whole weight, finally throwing the spade aside, and gathering the long grass in his arms, grunting as he wrestled the roots from the ground. Almost brought to cursing, Katya thought as her father began to dig furiously, the earth flying from his shovel.

  He held up his hand to receive the figure and she gave it to him, its presence lingering in the heat it left on her skin as he went to the shallow hole he’d dug and put the figure gently down, covering it with earth.

  When they got back onto the wagon, the night closed in and the lanterns seemed to eat up the darkness, but when she turned, she saw the darkness behind them, a black smudge hanging above the trail.

  They came near to the sprawl of buildings that made up Privol’noye, the rhythmic clop of the horses’ hooves along the road growing faster as the animals anticipated the gates and horse barns beyond.