The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  She helped Greta strip the bed and soak the stains. “Yes, it happens to me, too,” Greta said, sensing Katya’s question. But she’d spoken in such a way to imply that was all she wanted to say.

  Then Lydia must bleed, too, Katya thought. The girls she had gone walking with in Rosenthal. Her mother. Helena. Mary and Martha Wiebe, Oma. All of them knowing the secret and, like her, going about their day with a wad of cloth between their legs, and she had never suspected. The bulky cloth was awkward, and she was afraid it made her bow-legged and was grateful for the length of her skirt.

  Later in the day a carriage came onto the compound with three men in it, looking for Abram. They were dressed in black Sunday frock coats and wore bowler hats, and she knew from their sombre demeanour that their visit was significant. When she went to the carriage house where Abram had gone with her father, she walked more slowly than she had ever walked, aware of the cloth chafing her skin, thinking that if she rushed, the pad would come apart, or give off an odour they might notice. Years later when her own daughters began the nuisance, she would explain what it meant, and not leave them wondering. She would give them pamphlets ordered from a company that sold the supplies they needed each month. She would remember her first time, remember the men who had come looking for Abram, and realize that the news they had brought to Privol’noye that day meant the everyday lives of the Mennonites in Russia were about to become extraordinary, and the extraordinary, commonplace.

  “People who know better than I seem to think there could be a war,” her father said at supper.

  Katya went around the table, stacking dishes into a pan while her mother struggled with little Peter, attempting to tip a spoonful of warm oil into his ear. Katya may have moved a step closer to becoming a woman, but life continued as though it hadn’t happened, and she was left wondering what the connection was between her discomfort and the description of a good wife in Scripture: She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands, she riseth also while it is yet night and giveth meat to her household.

  The Archduke Ferdinand had been killed in Sarajevo, her father announced. Meetings were held throughout the colonies, and Abram had been voted to represent the colony of Yazykovo and head a delegation, which would go to St. Petersburg within days, to determine whether the threat of war was real, and to remind their one member in the Duma of the colonists’ utmost loyalty.

  “A war? With who?” her mother asked now, her face reddened with frustration as Peter twisted and thrashed.

  “With Germany,” her father said, as though he was surprised that she’d had to ask.

  “But not a war with us,” her mother said. “Come and help,” she said to Katya.

  Katya held her little brother’s head while her mother put the oil in his ear, stuffed it with wool and released him to go running after his brothers.

  “Of course with us. One way or another, it means us,” her father said.

  Katya saw the fear in her mother’s face. “But not fighting,” she said, her eyes coming to rest on her sons as they went out the door to have a last hour of play.

  Her father shook his head.

  “Go and see where Greta and Dietrich are,” she said to Katya, a frown creasing the skin between her eyes.

  As Katya went across the meadow, Greta and Dietrich were standing near the edge of the forest, and when they saw her Dietrich beckoned, then set his finger to his lips. She followed them into the forest, going along the path towards the sound of an axe ringing. When they came near to the site of the mausoleum, Dietrich stopped suddenly. “Devil, I don’t want to see this,” he muttered, turned away, and went quickly down the path. Dmitri Karpenko, Sophie’s father, was cutting down a tree.

  With Dmitri was his daughter, Vera. Perspiration dripped off the end of his nose as the axe bit into a tree trunk. Vera turned, saw them, and tugged at her father’s trouser leg. Dmitri’s old grey face twisted in surprise, but as he realized Katya and Greta were alone, he spat into the palm of his hand and resumed hacking at the tree.

  “Go on, Vera. Go with the girls, and you’ll save me a trip,” Dmitri said between blows to the tree, his voice coming out in grunts.

  When Vera wouldn’t move, he set the axe aside and wiped his brow on his shirt sleeve. “What are you waiting for, you lump of goat manure? Go on. And remember, if you get into trouble over there, you’ll be in trouble at home. She’s starting work tomorrow,” he said to the air above Greta’s head, his explanation that they were to take Vera to Privol’noye.

  Vera went with them across the meadow and didn’t look back, seemingly unconcerned about her father’s gruff send-off.

  Dietrich stood waiting for them at the Chortitza road, looking troubled. He questioned the presence of Vera, whose eyes grew wary at the mention of her name. Dmitri, assistant to the gardener, had been at Privol’noye for as long as they could remember; the miniature farm he’d carved for them from wood one Christmas still occupied a corner of the vegetable garden – barns, a Mennonite wagon painted green with red trim, draft horses and cows. He was assistant to the gardener, but his skill with woodworking had been put to use in the building of storage chests and tables, which both Aganetha and Katya’s mother prized. Dmitri, despite his swearing, more than earned his pay, her father said. Dietrich puzzled aloud that he couldn’t understand why Dmitri would poach a tree. He spoke to Katya and Greta over Vera’s head in German, with an authority he hadn’t possessed before. They shouldn’t mention it to their father, he said. When his own father returned from St. Petersburg, he would decide when was the right time to tell him. Dmitri was too good a man to lose, he said.

  Somehow Sophie had known Vera was coming. And she waited for them beside the Big House, her face flushed and anxious. Just then Helena Sudermann emerged from the summer kitchen, stopping Vera in her tracks. Helena grimaced as she took in Vera’s dirt-smeared face and uncombed hair, the hem of her greasy tunic hanging loose on one side, the grime on her bare feet.

  Mary and Martha Wiebe had been watching at a kitchen window and now came round the side of the house, Martha wiping her hands across her apron.

  “What have we here, look Mary, a little girl, isn’t that so?” Martha said. Her eyes misted with sympathy over the scruffy look of Vera.

  “She can sleep with me,” Sophie said to Helena, sounding defensive.

  “We were just recently saying how nice it would be to have a little girl in our room,” Mary said, and Katya realized – and was certain Helena did too – that the Wiebe sisters and Sophie had already discussed where Vera should sleep.

  It was well known that the only Russians Abram would allow in the Big House were Sophie, and the furnace keeper, Kolya. Vera was being hired as an outside worker. She would milk the cows and work in the gardens, feed and butcher chickens, tend the lambs and calves. And she would take her meals and sleep with the half-dozen female workers in the women’s quarters.

  “Outside is outside,” Helena said, and then more softly, almost apologetic, “You know my brother’s rule.”

  Years later, Katya would tell her grandchildren how, in the late summer of 1914, a fever had spread like wildfire. Abram went with the delegation on a train to St. Petersburg, and Aganetha, feeling the need to be near men, took Helena and Dietrich to Ekaterinoslav to stay in the house of one of her married sons until Abram returned. During that time, the devil had been cast down onto the earth, Katya wanted to say to her grandchildren, but they were educated modern people and didn’t believe in the Evil One, and so she told them a fever for war had broken out.

  The train to St. Petersburg was packed to overflowing, she would say, as though she had been there and was not repeating what she’d heard. Soldiers rode on the tops of coaches and on the steps, hanging from the train for hours until others took their place. There had been such a high pitch of activity in St. Petersburg, carriages and motor vehicles going to and fro, crowds of people gathering at the Winter Palace, cannons and cases of ammunition lining the streets,
ready to be shipped should they be needed. At Privol’noye, a tension pervaded their lives. She remembered clearly there being a tension, as though rock plates in the earth were about to shift.

  Her father surprised them by announcing they would have a holiday, an afternoon picnicking beside Ox Lake. For him to take time off was unusual, but when they overcame their astonishment, her mother made them pack up a supper, fill a wheelbarrow with straw, some wood for a fire, a rug for sitting on, quickly, quickly, she said, before your father changes his mind. She was as excited as they were, her cheeks gone rosy for a change. Go and invite the Wiebe sisters to come join us at suppertime, she told Greta, and Sophie, too. Greta should leave washing up the dinner dishes for later, just clear the table and stack the dishes in a pan and put it out of sight under a bed.

  Then off they went, going single file, her father leading the way. They went along the elevated path that, each autumn, was blanketed with fresh straw which they were not to trample down, or else in winter the water would freeze in the pipes. The marmots had made the ground around the pipeline their home, and they stood at attention now and whistled as Katya and her family came walking along the ridge of earth covering the water pipe, the rodents so chubby that the fat hung from their little bodies, furry skirts covering their feet.

  When it came near the time for cooking supper, Gerhard built a fire and let it burn down, kicked aside the embers and then emptied his pockets of potatoes. The embers flared, the light reflecting in her father’s eyes as he sat on his haunches, an arm clamped around Johann’s middle lest the boy become too interested in the bonfire. But Johann’s attention was turned outward, to the edges of their picnic site, where dragonflies skimmed the tall grass and the surface of Ox Lake.

  Within days of being home from Mädchenschule, Greta had found her place in the household routine, busy now, her nimble fingers shiny with fat as she speared sausages and slid them onto a sharpened stick for Katya to place on the spit. Greta wore her hair parted at the centre, rolled up, and fastened with combs. But, as usual, spirals of hair had worked loose and rimmed her forehead, and she blew at them to clear her eyes as she worked. A good girl, Oma had said of Greta when they were about to leave for home, and had pinched her cheeks. The word good resounding in Katya’s mind, making her feel as though her shoes were in need of shining.

  Johann turned in the circle of his father’s arm, following the flight of the dragonflies, whose wings snapped as they fixed to glide, their legs crooked, becoming baskets to scoop insects from the air. Warblers chortled deep in their breasts as a harrier swept across the reed beds. The water was alive with darting lines, ripples and dimples of movement as the dragonflies’ younger and still wingless cousins skated across the elastic surface, voraciously feeding.

  Sara went over to a boat on the shore and began pulling fish flies from its hull. She’d snagged her dress on a nail and its hem trailed against the backs of her muddied legs, and she looked as untidy and rough as Vera had when Katya and Greta came upon her and Dmitri in the forest.

  Her mother lay on a blanket, baby Daniel cradled at her side, a straw hat covering her face. Years later someone would tell Katya that her mother had been fond of hats. Even as a young girl she wore hats, and sometimes the hat was too large and the brim concealed her eyes, but always her grin was in place, displaying a fetching space between her front teeth. She was known to have a good singing voice, sweet and clear. To be swift and light on her feet. Katya’s own clearest memories of her mother were of her cradling a baby on her arm in a tub, laughing as she trickled water from a cloth over its stomach, or sitting with her feet hooked through the rungs of a chair as she took time to have faspa, gnawing on a piece of hard bun, dunking it in coffee to soften it, sometimes humming a tune, sometimes gazing across the room, lost in her thoughts. She remembered how the house was transformed to order and cleanliness under her touch. All these memories, but she would not be able to describe, more than anyone else could, what was in her mother’s heart.

  “What time is it getting to be?” her mother called from the blanket where she lay, a straw hat covering her face, and baby Daniel cradled at her side.

  “Why don’t you children see if you can tell what time it is from nature,” her father said. “Take a look around.”

  “The sun?” Gerhard said, disappointed that their father’s challenge would be such an easy one.

  “The water,” her father said, and indicated Ox Lake, out beyond the parsnips and rushes, where the water lilies grew.

  Sara jumped up and down to be able to see farther out. “There’s nothing to see,” she complained.

  As Greta turned sausages on the spit, grease dripped and sizzled, sending up a column of smoke and an appetite-rousing odour, which Katya suspected would travel as far away as Lubitskoye.

  She went to help Sara look for a sign that would tell them the hour, but all she saw were water spiders and midges swarming above a rippling wake where a fish had just jumped.

  “What about the water lilies, are the flowers opened or closed?” her father asked.

  Earlier, they had gone rowing among the lily pads to admire their blossoms, yellow teacups set on green saucers. Now, the teacups were tapers standing on a green tapestry of shadow and light.

  “They’re closed,” Sara reported.

  “Well then, it must be five o’clock,” her father said. He took out his pocket watch. “And so it is. They’re right on time.”

  “Here come the Wiebe sisters,” Greta called.

  The women no doubt had smelled the sausages cooking and knew it was time for supper, Martha carrying her guitar on her back, Mary a basket, which more than likely was filled with something she had just baked.

  “Look,” Sara shouted. There were little brown tubes among the lily pads, poking through the water and moving in circles.

  “Six of them,” Gerhard said as their father came to them, Johann riding on his shoulders.

  “Be still, listen. There’s a mother hen nearby, can you hear her?” her father asked.

  Katya heard the hollow sound of a hen calling from among the rushes.

  “Come away, let’s see what happens,” her father said, fiery-eyed with excitement.

  They stood back from the shore, listening as the hen’s call became a rapid clucking. The bobbing tubes proved to be beaks as, one by one, the hen’s chicks bobbed to the surface among the lily pads. They shook beads of water from their backs and paddled in a line towards the mother hen, who was hidden among the striped shadows of the reeds.

  Her father shook his head in silent amazement. He had heard of a kind of moor hen whose chicks would do this, but had never seen it for himself. Ox Lake, which had been formed when Abram’s father dammed a small creek, attracted many different water fowl to the area, including storks that visited in early evening, picking their tentative and stiff-legged way through the reeds.

  “We must have frightened the mother hen with our noise; she called to her chicks and they dove out of sight. When we moved away and stayed quiet, she told them that it was safe to come,” he explained.

  The Wiebe sisters had arrived, their voices high and youthful sounding with the excitement of an unexpected holiday. Martha scooped up Daniel, while Mary added the contents of the basket she’d brought to the food Katya’s mother was spreading out on a cloth.

  Katya’s father lowered Johann to the ground and he ran off, yelling, Me too, me too, the dragonflies seemingly forgotten now that his brothers Daniel and Peter were garnering all the attention. Katya saw Sophie and Vera coming along the ridge clutching their skirts against tick burrs.

  Sophie had braided Vera’s hair, and had wound the plaits around her head, woven flowers and ribbons through it, which lifted and trailed out behind her as she came along the path. They were wearing holiday clothes, embroidered sateen blouses and skirts whose red fabric fell in soft folds from their slender waists. Sara went running to meet them and, after being introduced, took Vera by the hand and brought he
r over to the lake’s shore.

  When Katya greeted Vera, the girl’s eyes slid briefly across her face, and went flat. Gerhard became awkward in Vera’s presence and would not look at her directly, as though he needed time to decide if he should welcome her or not.

  Just then the hen and chicks emerged from the reeds. Sara asked her father if she could show Vera what the chicks could do, oblivious to the girl’s cold expression, the chill she gave off.

  What did Sara have in mind, her father wanted to know. She would clap to make a noise, she said, and her father assented. Sara instructed Vera to watch what would happen, speaking awkwardly in Russian for her benefit. When the hen and her chicks had almost reached the edge of the lily pads, Sara clapped, and the mother called out. Instantly the chicks dove all at once, leaving behind a wake which the mother hurried away from, going swiftly back the way she had come, to disappear among the vegetation. Moments later, one by one, their beaks poked through the water, moving in circles as the submerged chicks paddled. Katya’s father stood watching, crossed his arms, his smile fading as he fell deep into thought.

  Katya held her breath while the chicks stayed under the water waiting for their mother’s call. She wondered how long they could do that, if eventually their tiny webbed feet might tire, if a fish might come to bother them. She was awed by nature, how marmots whistled an alert, cows on a pasture kept their young inside the herd, how the chicks waited for a signal.

  She hadn’t seen Vera go over to the wheelbarrow and pick up a piece of firewood, and was startled when it went flying across the water to land near the submerged chicks. “Ach Mensch,” Gerhard exclaimed in disgust, and like Sara and Katya, he stared at the spot where the tubes had been, and where a piece of wood now floated among the lily pads.