The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Opa, hurry and make a fire. Won’t you please make a fire, make a fire, make a fire,” Peter, their song leader, obliged, Johann then adding his voice to the chant.

  “Ja, ja. You boys hold your horses in there. Opa’s going to make a fire yet,” her grandfather called.

  “Make-a-fire, make-a-fire, make-a-fire,” her brothers chanted, Gerhard adding his voice to theirs, sure-sounding and clear.

  Katya heard her grandfather go out into the kitchen, through a hall and into the barn, and her brothers stopped calling. Moments later there was a washing sound against the walls and floor as he returned with a bundle of weeds.

  There wasn’t an apron wide enough to conceal how high her mother’s stomach had risen, and so Katya had taken her place on the milking stool. She didn’t mind getting up before the others as it gave her time go roaming in her thoughts. Beyond the window, the barn cast its shadow across the snowy yard. A lantern moved through the darkness as her uncle Bernhard came from his house at the back of the property.

  While the image of the millstone had faded, the fear of not knowing if her name was written on it remained strong as she went into the family room, bits of dried weeds crunching underfoot. Opa knelt in front of the oven, raking ashes from its chamber.

  “You slept well?” he asked.

  “Yes, soundly.” Until the dream, she thought.

  “Then it should be a good day, snow or shine,” he said.

  She took her father’s barn jacket from a hook in the hall and went out into the equipment shed, following a path down its centre that was kept clear. At the end of the path the darkness gave way to sepia light shed by the lantern her uncle had hung near to the stalls. As she came into the barn, the air was warmer and moist, full with the sounds of lowing, a swish of tail and thump of hoof against the earthen floor.

  The outside barn door opened a crack, and her uncle Bernhard’s wife Susa slipped through it, bringing a bluster of icy wind that billowed up Katya’s skirt.

  “You should be glad you don’t have to go out in the cold first thing in the morning,” her aunt said as she closed the door behind her.

  Her aunt Susa came with more than the hump of early-morning discontent on her back. Her youngest child, Ernest, was huddled under her shawls, his hands folded against his mother’s neck. He wormed his way up through the layers of wool and peered at Katya, his eyes lighting with a grin.

  “Hello little Omtje,” she said to Ernest. “You don’t have Zhinka this morning?” she asked her aunt.

  Her aunt shrugged in resignation. A kerchief hid her red hair, which she was known for, with a complement of cinnamon freckles and eyes of amber.

  “Zhinka’s brothers came in the evening and took her home. Your uncle wanted to know why, but they wouldn’t say why. This time they couldn’t even bother to make up a story,” she said. She seemed about to say more, but for some reason decided not to.

  Whatever her aunt left unsaid would eventually come out, Katya knew. She took down her milking stool and went over to Reddish-Brown’s stall, a gentle slow-moving animal who lifted her head from the manger to greet her. Katya blew on her hands to warm them, and then went to work, the creaking and breathing barn punctuated by a tinny, syncopated music as the strings of milk hit the bottoms of the pails. She listened for the sound to soften, for whose music would be the first to change. Usually it was her aunt’s, but her son was a burden that made her slower this morning, and she kept adjusting him with a heavy sigh. A tabby cat leapt down from the loft and sauntered towards Katya, its tail hooked in a friendly greeting.

  She leaned her forehead into Reddish-Brown and closed her eyes, lulled by the animal’s warmth and the rhythmic sound of their milking. At Privol’noye, the outside women gave their favourite cows names that expressed their affection, such as Honey, Lovely, and Darling. Naming an animal after its colour seemed less than practical. It seemed to come from a lack of trying, and a lack of caring for the animal. The cat rubbed against her thigh and meowed, expecting to be offered a lick of foam skimmed from the pail.

  The boy poked his head out from his mother’s shawl and called for the cat, which went running over to him. His mother shifted him farther up her back and shooed the animal away. Katya knew she blamed it for her children’s frequent bouts of ringworm. A sleigh went by in the street beyond the barn, the sound of harness bells echoing intermittently as it passed by open spaces between buildings. The sleigh could be bringing the mail, Katya thought, and wondered if in the mailman’s sack there might be a letter from Greta. Greta had entertained them at Christmas with stories about Willy Krahn, who proved to be an unusual man. He sometimes painted pictures on the window curtains – geometric borders, flowers, an outdoor scene.

  “Your uncle Bernhard told the brothers that if they thought he was going to pay Zhinka more wages to get her back, they were in for a disappointment. Not with the way things are going. Those men were already halfway to the road when, this one, he comes back. The middle one. The one who used to go to school with the Koop boys. The boy the Koops took in and gave board to, in exchange for chores. He did so very well in school, until his father came and said it wasn’t right for his son to know more than him, and took him home. That one,” Susa said, forgetting that Katya hadn’t lived in Rosenthal all her life.

  “You may remember he was the one who got so angry when the Koops’ pup chased him and grabbed hold of the seat of his trousers, and tore a hole in them. He lit into the dog so hard that eventually it died. Mrs. Koop saw it happen, and that night, the baby she was carrying started to come. She had such a terrible and long time of it. The midwife said it hadn’t been good for her to have witnessed such a scene, and that was why the baby was born with a flat nose. Her nose got better, later. It got some bone, later on. But the girl’s nostrils are still fairly wide open, you can almost see right up into her head.

  “It was that boy who got so upset over his trousers being torn, he was the one who came back to the house and said to your uncle Bernhard, high and mighty, ‘We don’t want your money. Keep it, because one day soon, everything you own will belong to us,’ ” her aunt said, finishing the story she had begun earlier.

  Katya heard a noise and froze, her eyes locking with her aunt’s as they listened. There had been a recent episode of a man in the Second Colony who, one day, called across the yard in German for his hired man to come to the house for dinner. An informer reported him to the police as having said Long live the Kaiser. Without a trial, he’d been sent to Siberia.

  The barn door opened, and although it was unlikely to be anyone else but her uncle, she was still relieved to see him. She expected he would take up a shovel and begin cleaning out the stalls, but he went into the equipment shed instead.

  “What’s he up to now, I wonder?” her aunt said, switching to Russian.

  He returned draped with harnesses, and the news that Nela Siemens had seen him out in the yard and come over to tell him that Tante Anna was leaving that day. That she’d been invited to go and live with relatives in a village in the Second Colony. There were other people travelling to a village nearby Tante Anna’s destination and Nela had arranged for the spinster to travel on the train with them. Bernhard would take Tante Anna to the station.

  In autumn a government school inspector had padlocked and sealed the doors to the Zentralschule and the Mädchenschule without a warning or an explanation. With the boarding students gone, the days became too long and lonely for Tante Anna. Winter was taking its time ending, and the town looked dismal, dark tree branches set against a grey woollen sky, the street deeply rutted and icy, wooden sidewalks criss-crossed with the slushy footprints, mostly small ones of the children who had gone to school earlier.

  As Katya went through the orchard at the back of Siemens’ yard she saw a sandpit beyond the small house, a shallow bowl of land that, except for a trail of footprints across it, was a clean expanse of snow. The sound of someone chipping at ice came from a shed on Teacher Friesen’s yard, beyon
d the sandpit. She thought it was the teacher in the ice shed, and was startled to see the man, Trifon, emerge from the shed, carrying a chunk of ice which he dropped into a water barrel beside the door of the house.

  He clapped as though applauding his achievement, and when he returned to the ice shed, he saw her and stopped to stare. The man she had stumbled upon in the fields after harvest wore whatever warm clothing people gave him, and his jacket was too large, and hung on him like a blanket. She pitied rather than feared him. Where did he come across such a fancy scarf, people wondered about the yellow silk knotted at his neck. Town boys began to call him Dommajon Trifon, simpleton, because of his scarred face and the blackness of his confused eyes. When Trifon went back inside the shed, she searched the windows of Tante Anna’s little house, thinking the old woman would be watching for her, but the curtains were drawn and the house looked abandoned.

  She entered a front hall; to one side of it a door opened to what had been the boarding students’ room, used for storage now, trunks and crates piled at its centre. Hanging from the ceiling on hooks were bunches of dillweed, horseradish roots, and clumps of summer savory, their dried purple flowers looking like knots of embroidery.

  She entered Tante Anna’s room, and the old woman greeted her with a smile. She was perched on the edge of a rocking chair, wearing a Sunday haube and a black travelling coat buttoned to the neck. She looked as though she had been ready and waiting for hours, the way people who fear they’re a burden are apt to do. “I have something I want to tell you,” Tante Anna said and beckoned for her to come close. Katya greeted Tante Anna with a kiss, but she frowned and then shook her head in dismay. “Oh, that’s me. One minute I have something to say, and the next, I don’t.”

  Katya was surprised to see that Tante Anna’s bed was already stripped to its feather-mattress tick, and that the crimson bed-curtains, always such an onslaught of colour in the otherwise plain room, had been taken down, and lay folded across a table beside the bed. The oval mirror rested against a wall, giving her a reflection of her skirt and black-stockinged ankles. Leaning beside the mirror was the woman’s wall sampler with the saying Be not dismayed if sorrow enters; better days will follow.

  Tante Anna followed her gaze about the room and, seeing her attention come to rest on the wall sampler, she said, “I always went by that. But this time I’m not sure tomorrow will be better.”

  Her pessimism was surprising, as she was known to be a dear-heart, a person who usually turned disappointment to its bright side. The woman gave into the chair and rocked, having forgotten that she couldn’t remember what it was she wanted to tell Katya.

  “Now as I’m waiting for Nela to come and take me to the train, the time goes so slowly. And yet, where has seventy-nine years gone? I feel as though I’ve only just got started,” Tante Anna said in a small voice. She always held her eyes so wide open, as though she thought she might be seeing the world for the last time, as though she was constantly surprised to find herself aged, a wrinkled potato, her chin made shiny and raw from saliva, which she kept dabbing at with a hanky.

  Katya sat down on the bed to wait for Nela, thinking that the room held the odour of ammonia, and something else which she’d never been able to identify. She noticed a scrap of paper lying on top of the folded bed curtains, and the words The dream. The cheese written on it in the woman’s script.

  “Na ja. It comes down to this. Eleven children, and it comes down to Anna being left. Eleven little ones, and my mother never raised her voice against us. Not once. She was the soul of the family, and he must have been able to see it,” she said.

  “The tsar saw it,” Katya said to prompt the woman to tell her favourite story.

  “Ja, the tsar. That’s what he said to us at the end of his visit. He said, ‘The man is the brain of a family, the woman its soul.’ ” She was quoting a proverb Tsar Nicholas had bestowed on her mother the day he stopped by to visit while on his way to the Crimea.

  “I was only four years old, but I remember seeing in his face, his eyes especially, that he was a strong man. I was afraid to look straight at him. He came with so many others, and all of them, the brass buttons on their uniforms so highly polished, it was hard to look at them without blinking. Row upon row of gold braid and medals hanging from their chests, from this war, and that one. How many hours went into polishing those buttons and medals every day, I wonder? Of course, they themselves didn’t do the polishing.”

  Katya only half listened as Tante Anna began to tell her story of the day Tsar Nicholas came to visit. Perhaps Tante Anna had collected the herbs and hung them to dry in the unoccupied room. She wondered if she should take down a string of the parsnip and tuck it into the woman’s satchel. Come spring, Tante Anna might want to make a pot of postanacksupp, Katya thought as the woman went on to say that her father invited Tsar Nicholas to stay for dinner.

  Her mother hadn’t fussed, but served the tsar what she made for her own family: cottage-cheese varenyky with sour-cream gravy, fried ham and rye bread. Meanwhile, up and down the village street, in neighbouring gardens, the tsar’s entourage was being treated to similar meals. Tante Anna would recite the grace which her father had prayed, and then would come the moment when the tsar would present her mother with the gift of a diamond ring. But Tante Anna was only midway through telling the tale when she stopped. She put a finger to her lips and listened for a moment.

  “Some people think I’ve made up the story,” she said. “They think I might have overheard a similar story, and my old woman’s mind took it as being my own. That it’s a way for a woman who’s never married to make herself seem important.” As Tante Anna fell silent, Katya wondered if she was remembering the long-ago suitor Nela once alluded to. Someone she’d set her heart on, but who chose a younger sister instead.

  “Nanu, it’s coming to me now. Now I remember what I wanted to tell you. I had a dream about your papa,” Tante Anna said.

  Katya looked down at the scrap of paper and the words Tante Anna had written, The dream. The cheese. Obviously she’d written them to remind herself what she wanted to say, and had likely forgotten where she’d set the paper down.

  “Why I should dream about your papa, who I hardly know and have seldom seen, is strange. That’s likely why I remembered the dream when I woke up. Your papa was coming down a road past my childhood home. He had his hands in his pockets and was whistling such a happy tune. As he came near to me, he said, ‘Well, hello there, Anna Rempel. Isn’t life wonderful? It’s just as they say, life is like a bowl of cherries.’ I asked him where he was going in such a hurry, and he said, ‘At last, Anna, I’m going home.’ When I woke up, I said to myself, you must remember to tell this to Katya, as I know how much you’ve been missing your papa.”

  “Good,” she said, congratulating herself for having remembered what she wanted to say.

  She began to rummage through a satchel resting on the floor beside her chair, and took out a leather box. “Now come and see if my story is true, or not,” she said.

  She held a brown leather ring box in the palm of her hand, then she fumbled with its clasp and the lid sprang open to reveal an indentation in the ivory satin lining where a ring had once been.

  “I haven’t shown anyone for a long time. Not even the girls.” She pointed to the indentation. “My mother kept it locked away in a cupboard and would take it out when a visitor would sometimes ask to see it. But then my father sold the ring to buy more land. When she died, he gave the box to me.”

  There was the sound of footsteps outside on the snowy path as someone came towards the house, then the door opened and Nela called out from the hall. Tante Anna quickly closed the ring box and put it back into the satchel. “It’s for our eyes only,” she said conspiratorially as Nela stamped snow from her shoes before entering the room.

  “You haven’t left anything for me to do,” Nela said when she saw the stripped bed, the mirror and wall sampler leaning against a wall, a commode basin and pitcher on th
e floor beside the door.

  “There’s still something for you to do yet,” Tante Anna said. She pointed to the doorsill over Nela’s head.

  Nela understood, and dragged a chair to the door and climbed onto it. When she stepped down, her hands were filled with cubes wrapped in cheesecloth.

  The odour that Katya had always wondered about now filled the room. It was the smell of old cheese. As Nela put the cheese into the woman’s lap, Tante Anna selected a bundle for each of them; a parting gift, she said.

  Nela locked the door behind them and was about to cross the hall, close and lock the door of what had been the students’ room, but Tante Anna stopped her. She wanted one last look, she said. “I hope those girls remember what I told them when they came to say goodbye,” she said.

  “What did you tell them, Tante Anna?” Nela asked.

  “I told them about eating ice cream bought on the street,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper.

  Nela coloured. “I’m sure they’ll remember.” Bernhard was already at the gate, she said. Katya watched Nela go off down the path through the orchard, carrying the woman’s satchel, and was curious. Obviously Nela knew what Tante Anna was going to say.

  “I’ll tell you, also,” Tante Anna said, and took Katya by the arm. “You should know about this. Katya, if you’re ever in a city, and someone is selling ice cream on the street, be sure not to buy it. They make the ice cream they sell on the street from leftover milk. Milk that actresses have bathed in.”

  They went through the frozen orchard, Tante Anna leaning heavily on Katya’s arm. “Why would someone want to bathe in milk?” Katya asked.

  “I don’t know, Katya. But I do know that one day they’ll have to answer to God for it,” Tante Anna said. “I suppose we’ll all have things to answer for one day,” she added, her indignation evaporating.

  They stood on the platform at the train station waiting for Tante Anna’s travelling companions to arrive. Snow fell all around them, large flakes that felt good as they melted on Katya’s face. The woman’s gift of cheese was a pungent lump in her coat pocket, and she’d been relieved when they’d left the stifling heat of the waiting room, as people had begun to question the source of the odour. Her uncle had gone to talk to several men gathered in the railway-yard. Men who hoped to receive a delivery of coal, the supplies they ordered, but which seldom arrived.