The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Far be it from me to say we should preach to the Orthodox – the heathen, as my dear sister might put it,” David said, continuing where he had left off before the boys had come riding by. “That’s not the point I wanted to make. Take a look at our privileges. Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality,” he said, ticking the three words off on his fingers. “That’s the tsarist philosophy regarding the Russification of the people in the domain. That’s what it boils down to, yes? All right, we pray for the monarch, and sing ‘God Save the Tsar,’ and every now and then donate a sizable amount of shekels to one of their causes. Orthodoxy? We’re free to worship how we please, as long as we don’t proselytize. Nationality? Now that’s a strange one. We’re Russian Germans. Baltic Germans, some claim, which gives us pretty high status, don’t you think? And our religious belief conveniently affords us the privilege to be consumed with our own interests, mostly financial. We have come to think that being separate from the world means we can ignore the plight of the people who are not of our kind.”

  Her father was about to protest when Auguste Sudermann entered the room with a tray of tea and apple juice. David peered up at his wife, clearly irritated by the interruption.

  How is your mother? Auguste asked, but Katya didn’t know what to say. Should she say that her mother was tired often? That the new baby, Daniel, kept her awake most of the night with his fussing until Oma rubbed brandy into the soles of his feet? That Peter, whom Auguste had last seen as an infant, was now two years old, and Johann three? The little ones were almost more than her mother could keep up with in a day, but she refused to hire a girl as a nursemaid, even though most women did. Katya had told Auguste her mother was fine, thank you, as she knew this was the answer the woman expected.

  She couldn’t tell Auguste that her mother’s chin had grown sharper, that when a batch of bread didn’t rise as high as usual, she blamed it on her children for having been too noisy. She blamed the weather for their quarrels, for their father’s headaches, which had begun to seize him from time to time, ever since Abram had broken his promise. He would need to lie down in a darkened room with wet towels on his forehead. Her father didn’t have a taste for bitterness. He never spoke again of how Abram had broken his promise. Outwardly he seemed to be the same person, so much so that for months on end Katya would forget what had happened until one day he would come home, pale-faced and clenching his teeth.

  Katya took a glass of juice from Auguste, who said that, since Greta began attending the Mädchenschule, she saw her often. And when would Katya enter the Girls’ School?

  When she told Auguste she would be attending the following autumn, the woman seemed surprised and said she had taken Katya to be younger. She’d brought a kaleidoscope for Gerhard to entertain himself with. She had also brought a book, an illustrated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and when she gave it to Katya, she did so with an apology for having remembered her as being younger.

  “If you ask me, we’re proud of our separateness. We’ve become architects of separateness,” David Sudermann said to her father, continuing the conversation when Auguste left the room. “Wherever our people have gone in this world, wherever we continue to go, we demand special privileges. And when those demands are met, it reaffirms how we view ourselves. We’re superior. Some even think we’re chosen. Don’t say that’s not a conceit.”

  “Some people died for our beliefs,” her father reminded him.

  “Yes, as recently as the seventeenth century,” David said with a sharp laugh.

  Whenever either of them spoke, Gerhard moved the kaleidoscope from one face to the other as though spying on them, experimenting, wanting to see the difference the shades of light would make, Katya knew. David sat near to the window, his features were fair, while her father’s were tanned by the sun.

  “Martyrdom’s a conceit too. I’ve come to think a person’s willingness to die for a belief is in itself a vanity,” David said.

  Her father smiled and shook his head. “If that’s so, then I pray you and I will never be guilty of committing such an act. Sometimes I think you enjoy making things more complicated than they need to be.”

  “Now there’s a man who keeps life simple,” David said. He drew aside the curtain as a grain wagon went by in the street, a lone man stooped over the reins. “Bull-Headed is the most uncomplicated person I know. He decides there is no God, and so there isn’t. No discussion. Nothing to ponder. That’s top-quality grain he’s taking to the mill. The wicked seem to prosper, too, and they get a good night’s sleep while they’re doing so, I might add.”

  “Are you sure that’s what the man thinks, or is that what people say he thinks?” her father asked.

  “Well, he still refuses to darken the door of the church.”

  “That’s another thing altogether.”

  David didn’t respond, but went over to a desk in the corner of the room and returned with a brief letter, which he gave to her father to read.

  When he finished reading, he returned it to David with a question in his eyes.

  “I was sure you didn’t know,” David said. “I could refuse to give him a recommendation, but that wouldn’t change the fact that he’s made up his mind to leave. I spoke to my dear brother about it, but it seems Abram isn’t inclined to replace Franz Pauls now that his children have outgrown the need for a tutor,” he said.

  The news made her father go quiet, his eyes coming to rest on Katya and Gerhard. “Nikolaifeld is too far for them to go to school. They’d have to board with someone; I can’t afford that. And there are still three more at home,” he said quietly.

  So Franz Pauls wanted to leave Privol’noye. She wasn’t surprised. Last spring when Justina Sudermann married, Franz Pauls wore a sour-pot face to the wedding and held back his good wishes, looking throughout all the celebrations as though he’d bitten into a pickle gone soft.

  “Look. Look who’s coming. The barashku,” David said as Greta, Lydia, and the sister cousins, Barbara and Mariechen Sudermann, came hurrying along the street. With them were two other students.

  Katya went to meet the girls as they came pounding up the steps looking self-conscious in their identical heavy capes, stiff white collars, black stockings and shoes. The day when her father learned that his dream of owning land would not come true, the Sudermann brothers scattered a few coins in his direction, in the way Isaac had done to avert a strike at his factory. They had volunteered to provide tuition for Greta and then Katya to attend the Mädchenschule in Chortitza.

  Lydia introduced Katya to the two students: Olga, whose father owned a store, and Nela Siemens, whom Katya had already met, as Nela lived just across the road from her grandparents in Rosenthal. She was a tall and bony young woman whose thin hair didn’t completely conceal her scalp. Katya was mesmerized the first time she’d discovered that Nela Siemens’s nose was so thin, sunlight shone through the tip of it. When Nela felt herself being scrutinized she smiled and said, “You look terribly nice today.”

  “So you’ve been out exploring with your papa, yes?” Barbara Sudermann asked Katya.

  “Yes,” she said because she wanted to be agreeable. But no, they hadn’t gone exploring. She and Gerhard had walked the two miles with her father from the Schroeder house in Rosenthal to David’s house in Chortitza, which, in her mind, wasn’t exploring. But when she was in town, her tongue became too stiff for detailed explanations.

  Auguste had been busy at needlework when they came into the family room, and she set it aside now and began filling glasses with grape juice from a pitcher resting on a side table. The girls brought their autograph books to show Auguste the verses and messages their friends had written bidding them, and the school year, farewell.

  Greta had changed. She seemed quieter and more self-assured. Katya noticed too that Auguste’s eyes would come to rest on Greta, and the woman paid careful attention whenever she spoke.

  Did Katya want to come with them for a walk around the town? Lydia asked. They would acquaint her with w
hat lay in store down the road.

  Her father stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at her and Greta as though measuring them against the other girls, and then feeling satisfied. He said he knew that the five-kopeck coin Opa gave Katya the night before was singeing the pocket of her apron and he gave his permission for her to go with Lydia and Greta and the other girls.

  As they walked, Lydia explained that they were going to a special store, not the one owned by Olga’s father, but a different store, owned by a Jew who sometimes had quite unusual things in comparison to what could be found in a Mennonite store. They passed through the spotted shade of Lombardy poplars, beneath the canopies of mulberry trees sprawling across fences, the air immediately copier there. Fruit and nut trees crowded platforms and verandas, their trunks sometimes painted white and shining starkly among shade gardens overgrown with ferns and wild strawberries.

  When they approached a machine shop, she saw workers standing out in a yard smoking, their faces blackened with coal. They were gathered around the grain wagon of the man David had pointed out to her father earlier, the man he’d called Bull-Headed. As they passed by, the man stood up in the wagon and doffed his cap, and she saw that he was young, that his straw-coloured hair lay like thick ropes, and touched his shoulders. He bowed as they went by, his hair sweeping forward and narrowing his face. “Girls, girls, and more girls,” he said in a lazy-sounding voice.

  The girls became stiff-legged and silent and looked down at their feet, except for Lydia, who squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Dommkopp,” she muttered, causing Greta to giggle. Then they began jostling one another, Olga bumping Greta with her hip and sending her lurching from the sidewalk into the street.

  “He’s nothing but a cheese-head, a pimple, a pig’s squeak,” they said one after another, while Nela remained silent, her cheeks flaring with colour.

  “They call him Bull-Headed,” Nela said. “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  “Oh, don’t be such an old nose,” Lydia said.

  Katya took it all in, feeling as though the girls had moved far away, were years ahead of her, and in an unfamiliar land that she didn’t think she would want to visit.

  A bell jangled above a doorway as they entered a small store, and a man came out from a room behind the counter, his eyeglasses pushed up onto his head. The shelf behind him was stacked with bolts of bright fabric, the casing filled with a display of the usual remedies and dry goods. She was disappointed to find that there wasn’t much that was different from a Mennonite store, after all.

  Then she saw a small purse with a chain. Among its embroidered flowers of glass beads were tiny mirrors reflecting light. Lydia waited near the door with the others as Greta pointed out a comb with a grosgrain bow. Nein, not that, she thought. What she wanted was the purse, with its delicate decoration of beaded flowers and mirrors, the brass chain looped against the dark wood on the display shelf. Her mouth filled with saliva, and her hands itched to feel the pebbly beads, the weight of the purse lying in her hand.

  “You’re such a turtle,” Lydia said.

  Her parents would not approve, she knew. The purse wasn’t something she could use for anything. She would keep it in a drawer and take it out now and then. As the man slid open the door of the showcase, she noticed a stack of notebooks on top of the counter, and reached for one.

  “That? That’s what you want?” Greta asked.

  No, not that, she thought. But they were waiting for her to decide, the man too, his stained fingers already hovering over the items in the case, demanding that she point to what she wanted.

  The notebook was an ordinary notebook, and when she opened it, she could smell a clean smell. She liked the cream-coloured paper lined faintly with black. What would she do with a beaded purse, except try not to treasure it too much?

  “I guess everyone has her own taste,” Lydia said.

  Yes, she did have her own taste. “I’ll take the notebook,” Katya said, and as she spoke the words, it suddenly became what she did want, and most of all.

  “I think you made a good choice,” Nela said to Katya as they continued on down the street.

  Soon they came to a quiet stream, next to which goats on tethers were grazing. Lydia pointed out a pair of swans that were coming into view round a small island in the centre of the stream. The girls went onto a footbridge and waited for the swans to reach them, stood in a row at its railing, looking down, their faces given back to them in the sepia-coloured water; the stream a shallow one, Katya noticed. Water plants swayed gently beneath the surface among stones the size of her fist. She held the notebook against her chest, fearing she might drop it, listened as children playing near the water called to one another, a fish, a fish, they had just seen a fish. A woman pushing a baby buggy hurried to them and stooped over the water to look.

  “I wish you would change your mind and come to the Azov Sea with us,” Olga said to Greta moments later, and Katya was surprised to learn that Greta had been invited.

  Greta smiled enigmatically and didn’t reply, and Nela for some reason sent Olga a dark look over Greta’s head. The swans glided towards them, seemingly without effort, as though drawn along by strings. But when the birds came near to the bridge, she saw the ripples radiating out around them, their paddling feet disturbing the water. The girls’ features wavered and came apart, the white circles of their faces disappearing.

  When she looked up, the children and woman were gone, Greta, Lydia, and the girls were not on the bridge, and for a moment the silence held her in place, and her legs began to tremble; it was as though everyone, the town itself, had vanished. The sound of laughter brought her back, and she saw that the girls had gone down to the bank of the stream on the other side of the footbridge. They were taking off their shoes and socks, and the swans were slowly drifting towards them.

  EKATERIN OSLAV April 22, 1914

  Dear Greta, our gypsy queen,

  Although I’m coming near to the end of the year it still seems strange that days can pass before I speak a word of German. If it weren’t for our exchange of letters, my Chortitza friends would have reason to call me verrusst. There is no danger I’ll ever be taken for Russian at the Gymnasium, however. Although my benchmate calls me Sudermannchenko, he’s also pleased to remind me on a daily basis what I am. He calls me poganiy niemets, and although he means it in fun, there are others who would agree with him behind my back. Poganiy, by the way, not only means dirty, but some Orthodox take it to mean heathen.

  Katchenko, the Cossack, continues to talk about nothing but his ancestry – when he’s not challenging everyone with his strength, that is. He reminds me so much of Papa’s Cossacks. Full of dash and high spirits, with a wonderful singing voice. The Moldavian also continues to borrow heavily from me, but what should I do? Even for his long hair, he’s a good friend. I suspect he spends much of what I lend him in cafés and taverns.

  In your previous letter you asked me to comment on your ambitious plans to attend the Teachers’ Seminary when you finish Mädchenschule. I don’t know what to say, as it came as a complete surprise. I didn’t realize you were thinking along this way. However, I wasn’t surprised to learn that my aunt Auguste is encouraging you to go, as she has written letters of recommendation for other girls in the past. The thought just came to me: Aren’t you at all afraid that people will start calling you a know-it-all – as they call my aunt Auguste, who so aptly serves the affairs of the Girls’ School, but can’t make a pot of edible soup (I’m sure you recognize my usual teasing when I say this). My first reaction was that if you should go on to the Seminary, well, Chortitza is rather far from Ekaterinoslav, and we wouldn’t get to visit very often, would we? While I’ve come to appreciate and look forward to your letters, they’ve made me realize how much more I’d sooner hear your voice. I am anxious to know what your parents decide.

  Last Sunday I was invited to the home of Millionaire Toews for a social evening. Everyone was in high spirits. We played
games and sang well into the hours and I’m afraid that I wasn’t in the best of condition for the gymnastics club the following day.

  Write to me soon. I always look forward to hearing what you girls are up to at the school. Rempel’s photograph of the four of you taken in his studio was overly romantic, I thought. But you stand out, as usual, as the brightest of all.

  Your dear friend,

  Dietrich Sudermannchenko

  ithin weeks of Katya’s returning home from Rosenthal, the weather turned as hot as summer and the tulips and irises flowered at the same time, a profusion of colour in the west garden happening all at once, not a gradual unfolding that made a person anticipate which beds would be the next to bloom. There was almost too much colour to take in, Katya thought as she went walking along the sand paths with Greta and Dietrich, the evening air still warm and saturated with the scent of lilacs. Dietrich had returned home shortly after they had, having completed his first year of Commerce Studies at a Gymnasium in Ekaterinoslav. She thought he had become puffed up and full of himself, and sounded much like his uncle David had during their recent visit in Chortitza. She didn’t care to listen, and didn’t mind when the two of them went on ahead where the white path curved round a grove of lilacs. But moments later when she rounded the curve, she was startled when a bough suddenly bent, and then swished back, stinging her face. Dietrich had twisted a cluster of pink lilacs from it, and was poking them into Greta’s hair.

  Katya awakened the following morning with a band of tightness in her abdomen, her tongue thick and tasting of metal. The air in their attic room was close and warm, and when she arose, the bedding held the shape of her body and rust-coloured spots of blood. It happens to all girls eventually, her mother explained when she demonstrated how Katya should fold the strips of cotton and pin them into place. She was not to worry about it but accept it for what it was, a nuisance to be endured. The washing and hanging of the banners of cotton must be done at night when the boys were asleep, and hung to dry on bushes behind the house. Her mother’s hushed tone didn’t suggest that Katya ought to be ashamed of the bleeding, but rather that it was a mystery, and one day she would understand. Katya guessed it had something to do with becoming a woman and having children, but what, and how, she couldn’t imagine.