The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  “And you know how highly regarded a soldier is,” Katya’s father said to Franz. “He’s held in such esteem that there are signs in civic parks warning Dogs and Soldiers Forbidden.” Katya heard the old energy in his voice, what was there when David used to visit.

  “I didn’t go to any parks,” Franz said lamely, by way of explanation.

  “A soldier who fails to greet a superior in the proper way will be made to feel the butt of a rifle. In the face,” David said. Meanwhile, Mennonite men drew lots to see who would go off to alternate service in forestry camps run by co-religionists instead of having to go into the army. And if he could prove a hardship would be created by his absence, or if there should be a need for teachers, physicians and mill bosses which he might fill, the man could well find providence at his elbow, and not have to go to forestry camp.

  “A well-placed payment of money can assure that a son will stay home,” David said.

  An awkward moment of silence followed, in which Franz Pauls tugged at the collar of his shirt. No, he hadn’t heard, he allowed. Then he sidestepped the issue and went on with what he did know, what he’d just experienced first-hand during his trip to the city.

  “Most of the students involved in the strike at the Institute of Geology were Decembrists, likely,” Franz said.

  “I take it that you’re in no danger of becoming caught up in any uprising,” David said jovially, and clapped a hand on the young man’s shoulder.

  Katya was glad to see the smile pulling at a corner of her father’s mouth. The tips of his boots were scuffed, and his trouser bottoms frayed. He hadn’t worn his best for the conference, and had chosen not to eat with the other men at the noon meal, but at their own table. He took Katya by the hand now, and adjusted his stride to match her own.

  “For sure, not. I know what I believe and stand for,” Franz said.

  “And what is that?” David asked. He had tipped his hat to the back of his head, opened his collar and rolled his shirt sleeves, and looked as though he had never hurried for anything or anyone in his entire life.

  The question startled Franz. “I stand for the monarchy, of course.” His voice trailed away, and then he added, “For what my father has taught me. As well as our church,” he said, as though for good measure.

  “Good, good. Of course. Pacifism,” David said. “By arriving late you missed out on a lively discussion on that very topic.”

  Her father laughed. “We all missed out on a lively discussion. I’d hardly call that brawl a discussion.”

  “How can a person be for the monarchy, and at the same time not be willing to stand up for the monarchy?” David asked. “I know, of course, we pray for them, yes?” he said, answering his own question. “We give money to their war efforts, grow food, and make a good profit along the way, I might add. We build podvods for them to haul their weapons and the wounded, as we did in the Crimea. The monarchy is of the kingdom of this earth, I understand that. And we’re about the business of the heavenly kingdom; at least, that’s what we profess. We’re only pilgrims on our way to our real home, aren’t we? Russian pilgrims who sing ‘God Save Our Tsar’ along with everyone else. It seems to me that, for pilgrims, some of us have become pretty set on staying here. We’ve acquired so many possessions along the way that there aren’t enough wagons and horses to carry all of them. We may as well own up to it and stop thinking of ourselves as being strangers travelling in a strange land as we make our way to our heavenly home. We’re here, but we keep saying we’re not. It’s a convenience, if you ask me.” He had stopped speaking to Franz, and seemed to be arguing with himself.

  In the following silence, Katya’s father released her hand. His eyelashes fluttered as he gazed at the back of David’s head. When her father’s patience was tried, he could speak with a bluntness. “No one is asking anyone to carry the millstone. If the weight of a person’s earthly possessions is felt so strongly, then why doesn’t a man just give away everything he owns, and make his load lighter? If a man’s conscience bothers him, he should just come out and say sp, and not paint everyone with the same brush so as not to confront his own feelings of guilt,” her father said.

  “I wish it were that simple.” David laughed, and Katya thought he’d somehow become smaller. He’d become a small man with a big hat tipped to the back of his head.

  “Behind every tree there’s a complication,” her father said, and Katya could tell that he wanted to say more, but there was Franz Pauls to consider, his neck poking out from his collar like a rooster’s, eyes opened wide, as he took it in.

  The silence was filled with the noisy tramping of feet, Gerhard breaking free of Nela’s sisterly grasp and running on ahead. Katya was caught by a stiffness in Franz’s voice as he asked, “So, Mr. Sudermann. May I ask then, what about you? Do you plan to take up a gun and fight for the fatherland if need be?”

  David Sudermann’s eyes followed his children running among the trees. “No, I do not. But I’m not going to cloak my decision in the high-minded language of religion. I’ll call it what it is. Cowardliness. And what’s more – you may as well know this, Peter,” he said. “If need be, I’ll use what influence my brothers have in order to keep from being sent to work on a Red Cross train or ship. As far away from disease and danger as possible. There you have it. My confession.”

  “If there should be a war, then I, for one, will be among the first to volunteer.” Franz’s voice was loud with self-importance. “I’ll willingly go wherever I’m sent and do what I’m given to do.”

  Katya’s father raised his eyebrows, but remained silent.

  “You, Peter, you should stay as close to home as possible,” David said.

  “Yes, of course. Someone would have to keep an eye out for Privol’noye.” Her father had spoken with an unaccustomed brittleness.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” David said quietly. “So then, Franz, as a true pacifist you wouldn’t protect your mother, say, or your sisters, if the need for it arose? Because if there’s a war it could spill right into our laps. We’d have to decide whether or not to resist.”

  “We’re here now,” her father said, quickly pointing out that Gerhard and David’s girls had already reached the site of the mausoleum.

  The hunters returned midway through the afternoon with their trophy, a badly mangled fox, and an inebriated Abram Sudermann. Abram’s brothers assisted him to the house as quickly and discreetly as possible, undressed him and put him in a nightshirt, and then must have propped him in his chair in front of the window in the study where he could watch the comings and goings, as, from time to time, he would call out. Aganetha indicated he was to be ignored. Yes, yes. See who’s going to come running, she muttered. The ministers and Ältester, anxious to pass on news to their congregations of there being a strong possibility of war, had left after the noon meal. Others left soon after the hunting party returned.

  Someone among the conference attendees was a thief, Helena grimly and privately reported to Aganetha, who quickly spread the news. Whoever had taken the six long-handled dessert spoons, a tray belonging to a sugar and cream set, a butter knife, must have done so early in the morning, Aganetha said. Martha had cleaned and counted the silverware last thing at night. When it looked as though they would be short of spoons for the noon meal that day, she went to get some of the less valuable pieces, and noticed that the silverware was missing. The thief must have entered the house while they were still sleeping.

  Katya’s mother wanted to know, had Katya seen anyone when she and Nela were cutting flowers in the garden early in the morning. They’d only seen Frieda Krahn going off into the garden after breakfast to retch into a bush. This was while they were arranging the flowers in pails of water, Katya told her. Then they had taken the pails and set them at the bases of the chestnut trees along the avenue. So much fuss over a few spoons, her mother said with a certain haughtiness Katya had not seen in her mother before.

  Her mother had been kept busy with the little
ones until several daughters of guests had come asking if they could watch the little ones for her, and so she was free now to join the women visiting together under the canopy. She had knotted her hair and fastened it on the top of her head, which made her neck seem longer, and her eyes larger. She was dressed better, more fashionably, than many of the women present, Katya realized as her mother went to join the women, her back straight and skirt swishing with the movement of her slender hips.

  After supper, lanterns were lit and hung from the canopy. The children, worn by the sun and play, lay curled on rugs beneath it or asleep in women’s laps. Dietrich and other young men had entertained them all day with games of horseshoe throw, tug-of-war and races, and now it was time for them to be bathed and tucked into camp cots and trundle beds. These were children of a chosen few who were staying another night. The sons and daughters of other estate owners, teachers, proprietors of stores, and, like Willy Krahn, owners of full farms.

  Katya had noticed differences between the gutsbesitzers – estate owners – and the others. The estate owners, like the Sudermann brothers, weren’t hunched and stiff looking, or overly friendly, either. Nor did they square shoulders before going across the yard. But the extent of the real differences between the estate owners and farmers would only become apparent years later when she would hear how one family’s Big House had frescoes on the ceiling of its hall, the work of an Italian painter. Another house, a bowling lane. Another was decorated in Victorian style, its salon furnished entirely with black lacquered furniture and gold velvet. Then there was the one with an arboretum on its second floor that held full-sized lemon trees and had an aquarium, alive with water plants and tropical fish, suspended from its glass ceiling.

  Can you describe the Privol’noye mansion, the young man would one day ask. She would say that the Privol’noye Big House was neither a mansion, nor was it palatial, as she’d heard someone describe it. It was a cumbersome-looking two-storey affair built in a combination of styles. Designed by Aganetha Sudermann, daughter of a half-farmer who had married into wealth. While travelling in European cities Aganetha had sketched whatever caught her unpractised eye, an entrance, a window, a parapet. It had been said by those who knew, by a teacher of art who had once brought his students on a trip to see their house, that it possessed a canal-house entrance, but a parapet along the east wall was neo-Renaissance. Its gables were decorated in Jugendstil, a more recent style and one picked up in newer Mennonite schools and institutes. It was a big house, she would tell him. With a front and back door. An addition on one side which they called the east wing. The house was made of stone. “Where they got the stones, I don’t know.”

  Faith Conferences, such as the one Abram held, had been opportunities for the offspring of people with the same size purses to meet, for marriages to be hatched, for cousins to marry cousins, half-sisters to marry half-brothers, as many children of the wealthy did in order to combine family fortunes. A Mennonite aristocracy, complete with albino offspring, children with bleeding and sight problems, those who were sickly and sometimes not altogether too bright.

  Willy Krahn’s wife had brought a bandura with her, and she came alive now as she plucked the instrument and sang in a sweet voice a ballad about the steppe. Gradually the men joined the women under the canopy in the field, everyone made weary by the heat of the day and giving into contentment as they reclined on rugs.

  The sun waned, and a coolness drifted in off the land. The sky was made to seem darker by the light of the lanterns hung along the perimeter of the canopy. Katya sat on a rug beside her mother’s chair, hugging her knees, Greta on the other side of it, her head resting against her mother’s thigh. Lydia sat on a cane chair at the edge of the canopy, her hair turned to silver in a halo of lantern light. Throughout the evening she had seemed restless, and kept trying out different chairs, or a space on the ground whenever someone got up and left. It was as though she were trying out who she wanted close by her. As though she were trying to become familiar with being farther away from Greta, until, at last, near the end of the evening, she was sitting apart from everyone, having inched her chair beyond the halo of light and into the semi-darkness, her leg crossed, a foot swinging.

  The murmur of voices, the men’s laughter as they teased their women and one another, making fun at their own expense, was like the sound of the bandura, like the soft plucking of a harp. And then Katya heard another kind of music, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the dusk beyond the lamplights, she saw a cart coming along the road, and what she’d heard was an accordion being played. As the cart drew near, Frieda Krahn broke off playing, and the lively accordion music took over.

  “It’s Sen’ka Pravda, that good-for-nothing louse,” someone said.

  “It’s Manya’s brother,” Helena exclaimed, and rose from her chair.

  A mongrel came up from a ditch and over to the donkey cart, barking timidly as several of the men left the canopy, and went over to the side of the road.

  Manya’s brother resembled an ordinary peasant fallen on bad times. He was deeply sunburned from living outdoors, and wore what looked like homespun clothing. His hair reached his shoulders, Katya noticed when he took off his cap and bowed.

  “May the devil ignore your oxen,” he called.

  “Simeon, what shakes you loose? And where did you get such a fine animal?” Willy Krahn called out.

  Simeon Pravda squinted to see who had called and, recognizing Willy, answered, “From the Wild One.”

  Willy climbed up the ditch and onto the road to admire the donkey. Pravda, being true to his name, had spoken the truth, he said. He recognized the donkey as having belonged to Bull-Headed Heinrichs, he called to them in German. Bull-Headed had become a horse dealer, among other things, he said.

  “A good little animal,” he complimented Pravda in Russian.

  “What brings you here?” one of the men asked.

  “The road, the donkey,” Pravda said, and laughed heartily. He set the accordion aside and went to get down from the cart. He swung his shoulders to move his body, and lowered himself to the ground. Katya saw that he was half the size of a grown man, that his legs were cut off at the thighs and he walked on the stumps.

  “Father, how about a few kopecks,” he asked Willy Krahn.

  “A man like you, with such a fine animal,” Willy scolded.

  Pravda shrugged dramatically, as if to say, Who knows how that happens, but his eyes in the meantime surveyed each of the men, appraising, sweeping across the people beneath the canopy, lighting on Helena Sudermann.

  “Manya said that if I should ever see you, I should tell you that she has done better than she’s doing right now,” he called. “And to also wish you God’s favour.” Then he took a bottle from his tunic and drank deeply from it, and raised it. “To freedom. It kills the pain.” He patted a thigh to indicate what he meant.

  “Where is Manya?” Helena called across the ditch. “We didn’t hear anything from her after she went away.”

  After she ran away, Katya thought.

  Pravda scowled and waved, as though in disgust. “Why don’t you go and see for yourself how Manya is, and her little German bastard. Be our guest,” he called to Helena, gesturing with his bottle towards the horizon, and the village of Lubitskoye. He returned to the cart and drove off, his dog loping behind.

  “Who was that?” one of the women asked when the men had returned.

  “Sen’ka Pravda,” Willy Krahn said. “Simeon Panteleimon Pravda.” The man had once been a miner in the Don coal basin.

  Another man said he’d heard Pravda had drunk too much vodka one day and, under its influence, tried to hitch a ride on a train and fell under its wheels. The storyteller and several of the men present had seen him before, in Ekaterinoslav. A woman, his mother more than likely, had used him for begging. She pulled him through the streets in a wagon, calling out for pity.

  “Domma-bädel,” someone said. Bowing and scraping, and laughing up his sleeve the whole time.
Helena’s expression discouraged questions anyone might have had about Manya, and although the light had long ago been too dim for needlework, she picked up her embroidery and bent over it.

  The field where they gathered beneath the canopy sizzled with insects, a sound which drew Katya’s attention to the steppe and far beyond, where the earth curved at the horizon. The sizzling made her think of the night her father buried the gold head beside the loaf of land. The insects spoke of lives that had already been lived; the invisible kingdom of believers her father often spoke about; the Baba stones whose shadowed features guided travellers across the faceless steppe. Under their lumpy stone bodies lay other bodies perhaps, of Turks, Tartars; a nomad who had been stopped by a lance, a fall from a horse.

  The time had come for sleep, someone suggested, and everyone agreed and got up at once. Katya was taken by Willy’s gentleness as he helped Frieda to her feet and offered her his arm. When Helena came near to them, Willy stopped her to ask if she might know of a girl who would come and stay at their place. He wanted Frieda to have help immediately, he said.

  Aganetha, overhearing him, came bustling over. “You don’t need to look far,” she said. She motioned towards Greta, who was collecting the pillows from the chairs, and gathering up glasses and half-emptied bottles of kvass and schnapps.

  “There’s Margareta. She’s old enough to start earning her way. Her mama and papa have a whole house full of little ones who will need a teacher. I’m sure Margareta would welcome the chance to help,” Aganetha said.

  “Mama,” Lydia said, the word a groan which Aganetha pointedly ignored. Katya saw the disbelief in her mother’s face, her agitation as what Aganetha said became clear. Greta pleaded silently for Auguste to intervene, but David’s wife appeared flustered, as though she didn’t understand what had transpired, or chose not to, and continued with packing her violin. Lydia quickly left, her bright hair and white shoulders moving swiftly away through the garden.