The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  Without speaking, her uncle Bernhard strode off into the field, his scythe in motion, a giant cutting down a forest as the scythe cleared a broad path. Gerhard took up a ball of twine, ran to keep up with him.

  “Na, then, girl. You stay a good distance from my blade. I don’t want to have to think about you being too close behind me,” her grandfather warned. “Don’t try and make the bundles too large. They only come loose in the end.”

  She followed him into the field and went to work, listening to the rhythmic sweep of his scythe, watching his body pulling it through thick stalks without hesitation; a sweep, and a step forward, and another sweep. The seed-pods rattled loudly in a rift of sudden wind, and behind the wind came a shake of thunder. But she trusted what her grandfather said, that the rain would wait, and as she gathered the cut weeds into bundles and tied them, the air became thick with dust that stung the membranes of her nose.

  Since the decision had been made to move to Rosenthal so that they might be near to her father, she hadn’t yet visited with Lydia, who, during school months, stayed in Chortitza with her aunt Auguste on New Row Street, and the remainder of the time with her sister Justina in Berdiansk. Lydia lived a world away, in a language learned at the Girls’ School. Katya had seen her walking across the street with the students who boarded at the Siemenses’, heard them singing in harmony a song they had just learned in Music. Their classroom windows faced a courtyard, and at one end of the courtyard were the teachers’ residences and gardens where Katya had once been sent on an errand. She had smelled the bread baking in an outdoor oven, heard the girls’ voices as they conjugated Russian verbs in unison, imagined them struggling with geometry, algebra, and cross-stitch embroidery. If the day was a Monday, they’d study Religion, Russian reading and poetry, German reading, Arithmetic, and Music. The girls who went to the book circle had been Greta’s school friends, Lydia and the Sudermann cousins, who made her aware that the gap between them was more than a difference in age.

  She noticed that the light around her had changed, and that it had been a while since she’d last heard the sweep of her grandfather’s scythe. When she turned around, she saw that she had wandered from the cleared path, and the weeds she’d bundled were not to be seen. She was lost, suddenly, in a forest of weeds, not knowing which way to go. She heard a train whistle, its echo returning across the land. A train was arriving at the station on the outskirts of Chortitza, or departing, she thought, and as the whistle came again, she made her way through the weeds towards the sound. She battered at the thick dried stalks, her hands out before her to protect her face, until suddenly her hands met air, and there in a clearing on the ground before her lay a man.

  She must have startled him as much as his presence startled her, as he sat up quickly, looking as though he were in the wrong, and then he snatched up a jacket he’d been using as a pillow as though fearing she might steal it. A broad scar ran along one side of his nose and pulled up a corner of his mouth, revealing purple and swollen-looking gums.

  “Close the door, you booby,” he said. His voice came out full of breath and hollow-sounding. She wheeled around and went crashing through the weeds in the opposite direction, feeling the plants scratching her arms and not caring. She ran without thinking where she was going, only knowing that she had to get away. She stumbled into a ditch alongside the road. Beside the road in the distance stood the wagon, and she ran to it, climbed onto it, and onto its bench, from where she could see. Her uncle, her grandfather and brother were standing on a large burial mound, looking towards the cluster of buildings and sheds that was the train station. When she called, Gerhard turned and waved, motioning that she should come. She followed the path her uncle had cut through the weeds, which took her directly to them.

  They’d been watching the train come into the station on the edge of town, and a yard beyond the tracks where the teamsters were gathered with their horses and wagons. Dust rose from the road going into Chortitza, and what looked to be a grey banner moved along it. Soldiers, she realized. A black dog dodged among them; here and there metal glinted, a sabre, a gun.

  “They don’t have the heart to fight any more,” her grandfather said, his pale eyes looking beyond the scene, looking into his thoughts, she knew, as he shook his head and turned away. “That’s war. It takes the strong and leaves the old, like me. And those who return are maimed in one way or another.”

  As they came across the Kanserovka bridge, she saw the man she had stumbled across in the field, coming over the crest of the hill. His short bowed legs propelled him down the grade faster than his body wanted to go. Her grandfather said that he’d seen him before. The man went from door to door, looking for chores in return for food. He’d shown up in town one day, from where, no one knew. A stranger who didn’t have a place to lay his head, like so many others who came to town. He went by the name of Trifon.

  The thunderclouds had circled around the valley and emptied out far beyond the town, and Main Street was lit by twilight, pink light trimming rooftops and chimneys. People sat out on their platforms, verandas, and steps, and as their wagon passed by a yard, the pungent aroma of tobacco would sometimes come wafting across a garden amid laughter, and a woman’s voice as she called for her children to come inside.

  Later that evening she stood waiting at the gate for Nela, knowing that her grandmother and mother were at a window. She’d felt their satisfaction when she’d given in to their prodding to go with Nela to the book circle meeting.

  Nela’s house was set back from the street and on an incline, and the entire front of it was enclosed in a veranda whose walls were covered in clematis vines. Stone steps ascended through a garden that throughout the summer was tall with delphinium, monkshood and hollyhocks. It was one of the most beautiful houses and yards on the street. Behind the house stood an orchard, and beyond it, the small house where the Siemenses boarded Tante Anna and the students. She often watched the students coming and going in their school uniforms. Aganetha had stolen Greta’s dream, and without needing to ask why, Katya understood she herself would not attend Mädchenschule.

  Her day began with the appearance of the students coming through the Siemenses’ garden, looking bright-faced with anticipation as they went off to school amid the humming sound of cream separators, the slosh, kerplunk of butter churns, and she didn’t regret not being with them. She knew from having visited them that a china dish on a bureau held their combs, odd buttons, and safety pins; their shoes were lined up on a shelf in a wardrobe; three beds had been pushed together to make room for a long table and benches. One of the girls had lavender oil, which she’d purchased in the Crimea when her class went there on a spring outing. She gave Katya a dab to rub on her temples to experience the scent’s soothing qualities. She claimed the smell reminded her of Greek ruins she’d visited at Chersonesus, where Christ’s message had come ashore from Constantinople. The lavender reminded her of Lavadia, she said, where they had gone walking, hoping to come upon the tsarinas doing the same, in a park.

  Tante Anna, a spinster, occupied a smaller room in the two-room house where the students boarded. Katya had been there one evening, and learned that the students would pile onto the woman’s canopied bed and listen as she told them stories of the olden days, which they heard many times over. A mirror, whose frame was a carving of greyhounds bounding up to its centre, gave them their reflection as they reclined on the woman’s bed, and always under the soft and remote gaze of a young tsar and tsarina.

  Tante Anna’s presence in the house ensured that the students never became rambunctious, that they faithfully attended to their lessons before going to bed. But it was more that the girls attended to the elderly woman, Nela had said. Before they went to school they laid out the woman’s clothes and made sure she had an adequate supply of handkerchiefs, as she’d had a mild stroke which had left her with a drool. When, in the evening, Tante Anna finished telling them an old-time story, they lowered the curtains around her bed, rinsed out her
handkerchiefs and hung them to dry.

  Katya had seen this happen, she’d been invited to come and hear Tante Anna tell a favourite story, and had felt the girls’ reverence, their sincerity and earnestness. How dear the spinster was to them. Which made Katya think of Helena Sudermann, and her own sometimes less-than-favourable thoughts about the woman.

  A sparrow hawk followed her and Nela down the street, lighting in a tree beyond them and screeching as they went by. They came near to a crossroads, the boundary between Rosenthal and Chortitza. Had they gone west, they would’ve come to the Lazarett, the brown brick building where her father stayed. They went beyond the crossroads and passed by the Mädchenschule. The three-storey red-brick school towered over the street, its canal-house front upheld with arches and pillars in contrasting white brick.

  Auguste Sudermann came to meet them at the gate, and Katya was surprised by the heat of her arm against her own, as her narrow body didn’t suggest warmth. Both Auguste and Nela wore similar wire-rimmed glasses that gave them a studious look. Nela’s sharp nose and her thin hair made her look needy, newly-hatched and wingless. As they came up the steps, Katya heard a noise inside the house, and was surprised when Dietrich appeared in the doorway with one of Auguste’s girls straddling his shoulders.

  “Hello, Katherine Vogt. I’m Dee Dee the horse. And so I’m sorry, but I can’t stop to visit. Unless you have a carrot in your pocket, that is,” Dietrich said.

  “She doesn’t have anything in her pocket,” the girl shouted and thumped Dietrich’s chest with her heels to make him go.

  “Goodness, Tante Auguste, what are you raising here?” Dietrich asked. Then he whinnied and went galloping down the stairs and into the yard, the girl screaming with joy.

  “It’s like that every time he visits,” Auguste complained, shaking her head in mock dismay. Another of Auguste’s girls stood watching at the door as her sister and Dietrich went galloping down the street. A woman came to her gate to investigate the commotion, and began calling that Dietrich should go faster. What was he, a horse or a lazy camel? she called.

  “Me, me. My turn,” the girl at the door whimpered, her bottom lip quivering.

  Nela laughed and dashed up the steps and into the house. She scooped the girl into her arms and nuzzled her neck, while the child squirmed to be free.

  “Tien, Tien. No hugs for Nela? What’s poor Nela going to do for hugs if you don’t give them to her?” Nela asked as she set the child down.

  “You’ll have to get your own girl,” the child said and Auguste laughed, her eyes touching on her daughter with fondness, not seeing that Nela had turned away quickly, not seeing the hurt in her eyes.

  “Sasha will never get them settled for bed now,” Auguste chided as Dietrich returned from giving the first girl a ride, and swung her down from his shoulders.

  The book they would discuss that evening was a collection of essays by Ufer Hold, Quiet Women, Powerful Women. Katya shouldn’t be concerned about not having read it, Auguste said.

  But Katya had read the book, and had concluded after reading it that her moodiness was a weakness that needed to be overcome. She was someone who took herself too seriously. In her room, hanging above a washstand, was a calendar whose squares she coloured in according to her different moods: yellow for the days she felt like whistling, purple when she felt as though she was ploughing thigh-deep through water, blue for a sinking feeling she sometimes got in her stomach that something was about to go wrong.

  Another of Auguste’s girls came over to Dietrich and held up her arms. He obliged by swinging her onto his shoulders. “So Katya, how’s life treating you in the big town?” he asked.

  “It’s altogether different,” she told him.

  “Of course,” he said, and nodded as though what she’d said was significant and had started him off on a train of thought. “Tante Lena says the bustards have begun to venture across the road. It seems they’ve developed a taste for apples,” he continued cheerfully. “Who knows, maybe we’ll all be home again, soon.” His aunt Helena and the Wiebe sisters were looking forward to his parents returning. The Big House had been too quiet since the war.

  “It sounds as though you’ve gained an appreciation for Privol’noye,” Auguste said.

  Annoyance flickered in Dietrich’s face, which Auguste didn’t seem to notice.

  “When your father returns, I’m sure he’ll put a stop to the tent meetings,” Auguste said, more to herself than to Dietrich.

  “Not necessarily,” Dietrich said rather curtly. Then spots of colour rose in his narrow cheeks. “Not many people have been attending anyway,” he said, softening his tone.

  Helena had invited Baptist preachers to use the meadow at Privol’noye to set up their tent and all summer long they had been conducting religious services, Dietrich went on to explain to Katya.

  “Oh look, the girls are here,” he said, obviously relieved to see Lydia, the sister cousins, and Olga Penner coming through the gate, followed by another girl Katya hadn’t met.

  When Lydia saw Katya, her face worked with a variety of emotions, and then she collected herself and became Lydia the student, slightly aloof.

  “What have you heard from Greta?” Lydia asked when they embraced.

  “She’s joined a choir, and likes it very much,” Dietrich said, jumping in to answer the question himself. “We exchange letters often,” he said in reply to his aunt’s quizzical look. Then he left the room to give his niece the longed-for ride.

  “Everyone hears from Greta,” Lydia said, her tone implying that she didn’t.

  “Sometimes a person has to write letters in order to receive them,” Auguste said as she steered her daughter towards a doorway and called for a woman named Sasha to come and get the girl washed up for bed.

  “Margareta’s an example of a person who does whatever she’s called to do, and with a cheerfulness,” Auguste said. “Which is a good way to begin our discussion.”

  “Oh, are we going to go ahead with it?” Olga asked. She had gone over to a bookshelf and was scanning the titles. The other girl who arrived with them had been introduced to Katya as Agnes Friesen.

  “Yes, of course, would you rather we didn’t?” Auguste asked.

  “Well, I thought … because we have company …” Olga said.

  The girls exchanged glances, half-smiles of acknowledgement that more than likely Olga hadn’t, as usual, read the book.

  The discussion that followed didn’t seem to be a discussion but a rewording of the author’s essays, each of the girls struggling to find a different way to say the same thing, Katya not contributing, grateful that they seemed not to expect that she would. When they ran out of things to say, Auguste brought the discussion to a close with a quick summation, and then said it was time to remember a blessing they had experienced during the week. “Let’s go around the room and share something,” she said.

  From the way Auguste looked at her, Katya realized she was expected to contribute, and her face grew stiff. She knew she was thankful for her grandparents’ house, especially the large corner summer room whose windows let in the morning sun, and had a view of the street and Nela’s house. She watched the students arriving and leaving, Tante Anna working in the garden stooped and slow, enjoyed the symmetry of the white picket fences enclosing the houses and yards. The fences were a pleasant geometry of definition and division, she would come to think when enough time had passed and picket fences were no longer in style. Now, as the young women spoke, she was overcome by her rushing thoughts. What should she tell them?

  When it came time for Katya to speak she didn’t tell them that she liked the way the town of Chortitza began where Rosenthal left off, that she felt sheltered by the valley; its arms of rose bushes and trees made her patient to wait for the war to end, to be reunited as a family and returned to the steppe, where there was nothing between the eye and the horizon but a sea of grass. Instead, she told them she was blessed by her grandparents’ house, without explai
ning why, and knew they’d been puzzled and had likely attributed her vagueness to her young age.

  Nela’s old father came to get them, and Katya waited in the carriage with Nela while he stood at the gate talking with Dietrich. Ohm Siemens was a secretary at the Chortitza volost, and one of the church’s eight ministers. He was a cheerful man, and well liked. He was known to cut a hole in the ice on the creek in winter, strip to his combinations, and lower himself into it while singing “Gott ist die Liebe.” The stars are bright, yes? Nela said. She was blessed every day by nature, Nela had told the girls. The previous night she’d heard an owl hooting behind the little house, which had put her to sleep.

  As Katya rode home with Nela and her father, the moon lighting the hilltops, the roofs, the silver dome of the Orthodox church, she wondered if there would ever come a time when she didn’t feel disappointed in herself.

  he winter came early and all at once, the shortened days and the extreme cold keeping the little ones underfoot. Katya’s mother became too quick to scold, which bothered Katya’s grandfather, but he kept silent and began to spend more time in the barn. Her mother often seemed not to notice when there was work to be done, and increasingly Katya’s grandmother took over caring for the small children. It was February when Katya was awakened to the darkness of early morning, grateful for the sound of her grandfather’s coughing in the room next to the one she shared with Sara. The sound had pulled her out of a dream. She’d been in a courtyard, and standing before her was what looked to be a millstone. There were names engraved on the stone radiating out from its hub, and she’d heard a voice saying that if her name was on the stone, she would be allowed to enter heaven. She awoke damp with perspiration.

  Floorboards creaked as her grandfather got up and went across the room. When he took the lid off the chamber pot it clanked, just as it did when he set it back on. He made as much noise as possible, as it was a cue for Peter, their very own vorsänger, to call out from the boys’ room.