The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  She felt Sophie’s hard scrutiny. “You must have heard what happened at the train station,” Katya said.

  “That’s all we heard for days, until the mistress said not to keep jabbering about it. We’re not supposed to talk about anything that happens around here, either,” Sophie said with a touch of her old sullenness.

  “About the men who came looking for the Baptists?” Katya asked Sophie as Martha Wiebe entered the room, bringing a pan of bread from the bake kitchen.

  “Among other things.”

  She’d expected sympathy from Sophie, and hadn’t got it.

  “You were right, Martha, Katya has grown up. But she’s not wide enough to be a woman yet,” Sophie said and returned to her chore of chopping onions.

  Martha rolled the crusty loaves onto the table and began covering the bread with towels. From the far reaches of the house came the sounds of people moving about. Lydia practised minor scales in the parlour, allegro and forte. Katya heard women’s voices coming from the sewing room. As the ceiling in the kitchen creaked with footsteps, Sophie glanced up at it.

  “The girls still haven’t come downstairs yet,” she said.

  The sister cousins had come for Dietrich’s baptism on Pentecost Sunday. “They’re staying in a room as far from the stairs as it’s possible to get. Mary has been running so hard all morning. Before breakfast, yet. Carrying water for a bath, and then for their hair. Her face is terribly red already from so much lifting and carrying. Couldn’t those girls have bathed at home before they came? Poor Mary, she’s made to lift far more than she should,” Martha said, and then stiffened as footsteps approached in the hall. Moments later, Helena stood in the doorway.

  “We’ll talk in my room,” Helena said to Katya. She saw the woman’s tense jaw, her glasses turned to mirrors and impenetrable.

  Helena chose to live near the kitchen and servants rather than in one of the large bed-sitting rooms upstairs. Her room was a short distance down the hall, adjacent to the kitchen. A narrow room, with a single window that looked out at the west garden wall. A household account book lay open on the table, a pencil resting in its gutter, and, beside the book, a New Testament with different-coloured ribbon markers. Ivy plants still stood on the shelf above the window next to the empty birdcage.

  Sit, sit, Helena said, indicating a chair at a table as she pulled out one across from it and sat down, pushing the account book aside. Katya noticed that for all her neatness, the lace-trimmed collar fastened at her throat with a bronze pin, the metal combs keeping her greying hair smooth, Helena’s fingernails were chipped and stained. One was purple with an old injury, its nail flaking. The hands of a field worker, an outside woman, she thought. She didn’t know where to look, as Helena was without an apron and so didn’t seem completely clothed.

  “Now what did you want to talk to me about, Katya?” Helena asked. She eyed the testament almost hungrily, as though she couldn’t bear being so near the book without holding it.

  When Katya finished confessing to having thrown Lydia’s cup in the butter well, Helena sighed. She looked up at the strings of ivy trailing across the window. Sunlight brought out the silver in her pewter hair, making her appear younger, and soft. She plucked a handkerchief from a sleeve, took off her glasses, and began cleaning them. She sighed again as she hooked the glasses onto her ears and pushed them up the bridge of her nose.

  “You’re just like me. At least, we have something in common. That’s what I meant to say. We have something in common. No one is like another person. I shouldn’t have said that,” Helena said. “It must have been hard for you to carry this around for such a long time and not say anything.”

  Yes, Katya thought with gratitude, unprepared for Helena’s understanding.

  “The cup isn’t worth risking life and limb to get out of the well. What we should talk about is why you did it. And why, while everyone wondered where the cup stayed, you remained quiet. Yes?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Then Helena got up from the table, stepped onto a chair and took the birdcage down from the shelf.

  “You children were always so curious,” she said as she set the cage onto the table between them. “What was Schnurrbart-Len keeping this birdcage for?”

  Katya winced when she heard the woman use their nickname.

  Helena nodded. “I have ears.” She ran a finger lightly across the wisps of hair on her face. “I was about your age when it started to grow. Abram would say, ‘Lena, go and wash, you have dirt on your face.’ Jakob once said he didn’t want to go to church with me along. My father thrashed that idea out of him. My mother came with the scissors then, and she said if I wanted, I could cut it off. But I said no. I would just have to keep cutting it off, all my life. God gave it to me for a reason. He meant for me to learn how to take the slings and arrows of men.

  “Now I’ll tell you about the birdcage. I know you, along with all the other children, always wondered why I had such a cage, and no bird. Well, I’ll tell you.

  “We were on a vacation in Germany, Karlsbad, at the same inn where I stayed one summer before the war. Another Mennonite family was staying there and they had a girl, Susanna, whose last name I won’t say. Susanna was near to my age, the age you are now, and she was always puffed up because she had been to the inn before, and knew everything about it. She even knew the names of the swans swimming in a pond across from the inn. She could hardly keep from mentioning my face hair. Likely, she’d been told not to.

  “The innkeeper’s wife had recently got a bird, a green-and-blue bird that had a yellow head with a tuft at the back. She’d taught the bird to say ‘Good morning, children’ whenever anyone would come into the sitting room, where people visited before supper. She kept the bird there, and an aquarium. I had never seen such a bird before, and neither had Susanna. I hadn’t seen much of anything, as this was my first trip with Abram and Aganetha. It was Abram’s first trip, also. He took all of us to Karlsbad the year our father died. He had to wait for our papa to die before he could travel. Our father was a man who counted the number of potatoes we ate at a meal, and wrote it down. Just by walking across the yard, he knew if a chicken was missing. My mother had to ask his permission to butcher one for Sunday dinner. He refused to pay taxes for the Forstei, as he said he didn’t believe in the idea of paying men to work for someone else. Until a committee came from the volost and threatened to take his livestock. Then he believed. If a traveller stopped at our place wanting to water and rest their animals, he would charge them so-and-so much for each pail of water they drew, and so-and-so much for feed, and so much for the time the horses stood in the barn. That’s what kind of man my father was.

  “The innkeeper’s wife encouraged us to put our hand into the bird’s cage, and let the bird sit on it. Susanna was quick to show that she wasn’t backwards. Everyone was so taken, and made a large fuss when the bird – Tristan, the woman had named it – walked all the way up Susanna’s arm and onto her shoulder, and stroked her ear with its beak. The bird was kissing her, the innkeeper’s wife told us. He’d never done such a thing before.

  “Well, do you think that bird would come near me? When I put my hand in the cage, it went as far away from me as it could possibly go. Good morning, children, it said, but as soon as I came near, all I got was screeching. How this ate at me. I was old enough to marry, and there I was going around thinking, Please love me. Why won’t you love me like you love Susanna? I asked God to make the bird take to me. But with Susanna around, it never would, I knew.

  “One day I came into the sitting room, and no one was there. As I came near to the cage, the bird looked at me hard, but it didn’t screech. And so, very slowly, I put my hand in the cage. I made kissing sounds, like Susanna did. But would it sit on me? No, it would not. Instead, it bit me, and very hard. I saw that two windows near the cage were open. While I nursed my finger, I purposely left the cage door standing open. It was just as I thought. In a blink, that bird came out of the cage and flew
out the window. It was as though it had been waiting for such a moment. Immediately I was sorry for what I’d done.

  “I heard people coming. I ran back to my room and lay down, my heart going so hard I could hear it in my ears. I hoped, I thought, Lena, just stay put. If you stay put, then the time will somehow go back, and the bird will still be in its cage. But I was old enough to know what nonsense that was, and so I made myself go to the sitting room, to confess. I was sure that by then, the bird would have been missed, and I was ready to own up to what I had done.

  “But the bird hadn’t been missed. There were women in the room, Aganetha, too, and the cage door was standing open, just as I’d left it. No one had noticed the bird wasn’t there. I’m saved, I thought. I don’t have to speak up, because no one will suspect me. I sat and waited. Sure enough, when Susanna came into the room not much later, right away she noticed the bird hadn’t greeted her. Everyone jumped up and went running outside to look for it.

  “At supper that evening, we were all in the dining room, when the innkeeper’s wife said she wanted to make an announcement. She said that someone had let her bird loose. Whoever had let the bird out of its cage may as well have wrung its neck. The nights were cold already, and Tristan, who had come from Paraguay, wouldn’t last long outdoors.

  “Days later, when we were preparing to leave, the woman came to our carriage at the last moment with the birdcage. She wanted me to have it, she said. Why me, and not Susanna, who, when they couldn’t find the bird, had cried her eyes out? My brothers didn’t wonder, but I did. They only wondered if we had room for it, and encouraged me to throw it out along the way. But I knew why the woman had given the cage to me. She had given it to me as a punishment, a reminder that I had killed her bird.”

  From the kitchen came the sound of a pot lid clattering against the floor, the smell of sauerkraut soup and smoked sausages cooking. Helena cast an apprehensive look towards the hallway. The bowed metal ribs of the cage made a graceful flaring structure, through which Katya could see Helena’s linen blouse, its iridescent shell buttons moving with her breathing. The perch suspended from the domed ceiling, the nicks and gouges the bird’s beak and claws had made in its wooden rung must seem a taunt, Katya thought.

  Helena got up and put the cage back on the shelf, then stood beside the table leaning on her hands, gazing out the window. “So, you can see how you and I are alike,” she said. She smiled and fell into her thoughts, the muscles in her face working. A bird skimmed the surface of the yard, a jittery flutter and glide of dark wings, and then it swerved up and over the garden wall.

  “It doesn’t matter how old a person gets. Fear still keeps us quiet when we know that we should speak up,” she said softly.

  She turned back to Katya, becoming brisk and efficient. “Envy, that’s what made me do what I did. But you don’t have to say why you threw the cup in the well. God knows. No, there’s some other business that needs taking care of now. When I heard you wanted to come and see me, I thought, well, Tante Lena, maybe this is the right time for you to mend a hole in the fence.”

  Helena went to the apron hanging from its hook beside the door and rummaged in its pocket. Katya heard the tinkle of bells.

  “Hold open your hand,” Helena said.

  And there, lying in her palm, were the tiny brass bells Katya had lost so many years ago.

  “They made such a racket, I couldn’t hear myself think. I thought, one day I’ll give them back, when Katherine is old enough to understand.” Helena raised her hand as though she would touch Katya’s shoulder, and then turned away.

  Katya pocketed the bells, her hands trembling with shock and confusion. She remembered how she had retraced her steps over and over, had waited for spring, when the snow melted, to search once again. Helena’s intention to one day return the bells didn’t lessen the pain of a joy being snatched away. But she’d been a child making a racket and Helena an adult, and so she didn’t think now to question the fairness of Helena’s act, or to reason that they were now somehow even.

  Then all at once she knew she was being dismissed, and as much as she wanted to run from the room, she couldn’t leave things so disturbed. “I wanted to be the one to tell you, because you would know how much the cup had cost. I intend to pay for it.”

  “That was an expensive cup,” Helena said.

  “I will pay for it,” she said.

  “How is that?” Helena asked.

  From the kitchen came the sound of happy voices. Sophie called out in surprise, and Martha joined in. Katya thought she heard a third familiar voice. Greta? Was this possible?

  “With work.” Katya was desperate to leave.

  “Work? How much work? As I said, the cup was not cheap.”

  But the idea had already begun to take root, Katya realized as Helena fell into thought. She heard footsteps coming along the hall.

  “Well, yes, you should at least do that. I’ll make a list of chores,” Helena said.

  Katya left the room, almost colliding with Greta. Her sister’s scarf dropped to her shoulders, her dark wiry hair flying about her head, a vivacious face bright with windburn, home at last; their family, for a short time at least, was once again complete.

  “The Krahns said their conscience wouldn’t allow them to keep me away from home on my baptism. And at the same time, I’ll have a chance to get to know my new sister,” Greta said as they embraced.

  “Why did you run off?” Helena asked Katya from the doorway. She held a piece of paper. “You may as well begin paying for the cup now. We can use an extra pair of hands for our Pentecost company.” Her rust-coloured skirt swung around her narrow body as she turned and went back down the hall.

  She had begun the day’s list of chores that morning, and now, as the land turned dusky with twilight, she was in the summer kitchen rubbing shanks of lamb with fat and salt to prepare them for the oven. The buildings had turned pigeon grey in the fading light, gullies of shadows deepening between them. She was nearing the end of the first day of what would be a month of service.

  Faint waves of sound travelled through the moisture-laden air, young voices, the coachman’s children, she realized, out in the yard in their night clothing. Scampering, ghostlike creatures, the grainy air making them seem indistinct and fleeting, their nightshirts rippling about their legs as they played what looked to be a game of chase-the-goose. Likely they had been sent to relieve themselves behind the house before bed, and had forgotten to return. A light had come on in the kitchen of the Big House, but the windows in her own house were not yet lit with lamplight, the glass in the summer-room windows reflecting the twilight and becoming the colour of mercury.

  She would always prefer this time of day, a farmyard in another country bathed in the same light, the land broken here and there by a copse of burr oak, mist rising from a dugout pond as cattle came to drink. Her children coming, wanting to be held at sundown; a cup of tea sweetened with barley honey sipped in the quiet while sitting outside on benches at the back of an old farmhouse. The strong light of day sometimes defined too clearly the business of life, and the hard brilliance of the night sky made a person ache for things beyond their reach. The gloam of twilight softened hard edges, her thoughts about Helena, a woman whose strictness might well be concealing a person hungry for love.

  Her mother emerged from the house and came along the path to the summer kitchen. She stood at the screen door looking in, her apron a patch of white, but otherwise she was a silhouette, her features indiscernible.

  Moments later she said, “I didn’t think when we came here that it meant my children would become servants.” To herself, Katya knew, as when she spoke, she’d turned and looked at the Big House.

  Katya suddenly wanted to weep. She was chilled; the fire she’d lit when she’d opened up the summer kitchen had long ago gone out; the thought of being left behind tomorrow was almost more than she could bear.

  Her mother shivered and hugged herself against the cold, and Katya st
ifled the desire to cry. “You don’t have to do this, Katya. We could somehow find the money. I will not have you miss your own sister’s baptism.”

  “I’m doing this because I want to do this.”

  “If it’s your conscience saying so, then fine. Just be sure you aren’t wallowing in your feelings,” her mother said.

  Then they saw Katya’s father and Gerhard coming down the steps of the coachman’s house, the coachman and his son Yerik behind them. As they left the yard, the small children filed into the house.

  Katya’s mother went with her to the storage cellar, its roof a hump of earth overgrown with grass and wild asters. The coolness of the dank interior enveloped them as they went among the carcasses of chickens hanging from the ceiling. They put the shanks of lamb on a shelf. When they came up out of the darkness of the underground room, it seemed lighter outside than it had been, light enough for a walk in the garden, her mother suggested, to see what flowers they could find that might brighten the family room for Pentecost Sunday.

  Katya’s father and Gerhard had gone to the carriage house with the coachman and Yerik to make arrangements for their trip to church tomorrow, her mother said while they went among the flowers, her mother snipping stems with the scissors she’d brought with her. More than twenty people would be going in three carriages and the coach, washed, its brass and leather polished. Abram preferred to travel to church in the coach. “His back-loader coach hitched to six matching black stallions,” her mother said. “He likes to be noticed. Apparently when he came calling on Aganetha, he made the driver go at top speed from one end of Main Street to the other, then return and do it once again just in case someone hadn’t seen him.”