The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  Tina Funk went on to say that ordinarily she would be only too glad to take on the work of lengthening the clothing. As it was, she would not charge Mrs. Schroeder the full price for the supplies. She’d like to be able to do more, however, she said, and fell silent.

  “No, no, Katya can do it,” her grandmother declared vehemently. Katya should do it. She must do it, her tone implied. “She’s very good with her hands,” she added in a gentler tone, to soften what had sounded like peevishness.

  “Even so, I’d like to be able to contribute something. But it’s just not possible right now,” the seamstress said, and sighed deeply.

  Katya knew the woman wanted to be asked why it wasn’t possible. Her grandmother more than likely knew the answer, she realized as Oma got up from the table and rushed to the stove, returning with a pitcher of steaming prips. Then, with an impatient wave of her hand, she sent Katya to the pantry for a plate of buns and a saucer of thinly sliced cheese, which had been prepared earlier.

  “Nanu. So,” Oma said firmly as Katya returned with the food, and she knew that her grandmother intended to change the topic of conversation entirely. They were going to have a small bite to eat now, rather than later, Oma said. Otherwise they might be interrupted by Opa bringing Njuta back. They would say grace, yes? and then Tina should say what news she had of her daughter living so far away in the new Arkadak Colony.

  “There’s very little to tell,” Tina said.

  Katya could see that Tina Funk wasn’t pleased with the change of conversation, and so she asked, “Why isn’t it possible for you to hem my skirts?”

  She was overwhelmed with sewing now, the seamstress said, eagerly taking up the invitation to explain. Her work had fallen off terribly much, almost to nothing, but now she had more sewing than she could handle. She had been occupied with nothing else all winter, and the work was not from our own, either, she told Oma, lowering her voice.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Oma said. Her shoulders dropped in a slouch as she surveyed the saucer of cheese, the plate of buns, as though regretting this courtesy.

  She didn’t like going close to them, Tina Funk confided. She didn’t like taking their measurements. She made her sewing student do it. “She has to learn,” she said defensively as Oma shook her head in disapproval that she would make a young unmarried girl take the measurements of men.

  Oma glanced at Katya across the table, as if hoping that what the seamstress said had somehow passed her by. Everyone in Rosenthal knew everyone else’s business, who the seamstress was sewing for, that the rebellious girl had eloped with a Russian bricklayer, just as everyone now likely knew that Katya’s skirts required lengthening.

  And everyone knew Tina Funk’s new customers were men, men of a certain kind, Makhnovites, who took their name from their leader who had formed a new party, a union of peasants. They had undermined the authority of Kerensky’s community committees, and were now challenging the authority of the Soviet councils and the Ukrainian nationalists. They called themselves anarchists, a word most of them had likely never heard, Katya’s grandfather had said, until a man called Nestor Makhno was freed from Butyrki prison, and returned to his village of Gulyai-Polye to become a big fish in a little pond. Within months, Makhno, a pimply-faced dandy, had attracted a large following, as he accomplished more quickly what the community committees had been set up to do and what the Bolsheviks were promising. What they had accomplished so far was robbery, her grandfather said.

  They demanded that inventories be drawn up, herded Russian families into villages to squat on land owned by Mennonites, designated which rooms in a house they should occupy. The Schroeders.’ sixty-five desiatini of land amounted to no more than wormwood and thistles under their new plan, and would fare just as badly under the Soviet plan as under Makhno’s union of peasants.

  Like others in Rosenthal, her uncle Wilhelm had schemed ways to avoid the redistribution of their possessions, “redistribution” being the name given for robbery. He made a bargain with several less well-to-do Mennonites. These families, who had fewer than the number of livestock allowed, agreed to add his animals to their inventories in exchange for money to purchase the necessary fodder and for the use of the animals and their produce, until life returned to normal. He also took in a widow with six children, just as David Sudermann in Chortitza had done – the same widow. The men registered the woman and children as living under their roof. Cornelia Fast Wiebe became Nela Fast on Wilhelm’s account; Cornelia Wiebe on David Sudermann’s. Meanwhile the widow continued to live with her six children in a tidy small house near to the bazaar grounds in Rosenthal. But should it become necessary that she move in with one of them, a house crowded with their own was more endurable than a house filled with strangers, who would make demands and threaten reprisals if the wind didn’t blow from the right direction. We’re the true workers, her uncle would say to justify his actions. The German and Mennonite colonists had worked the country up to where it was today with their sweat, their bodies sometimes broken, and by the grace of God. They had been made stewards of the land, and a good steward had to scheme and bargain, or risk losing what God had put into his charge.

  The seamstress Funk said that, so far, her son had always been home when the Makhnovites came to the house with their bundles of velvet cloth, wanting her to make jackets for them. But what would she do if one day they came when he wasn’t home?

  “Has he come?” Katya’s grandmother whispered, her hand involuntarily flying up to her throat. When she realized she had done it, she quickly straightened the collar of her dress as though that had been her intention.

  “No, not him. Not Kootzy.” Tina lowered her voice as she spoke the code name for Pravda, “Kootzy” a reference to his shortened legs. She then went on to say that if a certain man should come, wanting her to sew for him, she’d tell him her machine wasn’t working. Which would be the truth, because if she didn’t work, the machine wasn’t working, was it? She would send him and his men to a seamstress in Chortitza who was almost as good as she was. Or they could find their own. But she doubted that their own could work with such fabric, or make the patterns up out of their heads, which, she added, was what she’d had to do.

  “Do they ever think to pay?” her grandmother asked, caught up by the woman’s story and by her own sense of curiosity. There had been speculation about whether or not this was the case.

  The bandits always travelled with their banker, Tina Funk said, a man designated to carry the money bags, which he tied to his saddle, grain sacks bulging with kerenkii and chervontsy, and the tsar’s rubles. Her customers made a show of saying they recognized the value of her labour, Tina Funk said. In the bandits’ opinion what she did was honest work. But then they paid her mostly in the tsar’s rubles, she said, which were next to being worthless, and so she wasn’t sure if this meant she was being paid or not. At least, not in the currency everyone preferred now – a window glazed in exchange for butter, a pair of trousers sewn for a load of ice hauled from the river. What did those ruffians have to offer other than stolen notes? Wherever they went, a dirty tail followed them, women and children, cows, goats and dogs. Sometimes the women and children rode the cows and hitched them to carts, butchering them when their stomachs rumbled. When the cows and goats dwindled, the ruffians came knocking at the door. The last time they came to her house, they went off with a dozen chickens and a fur coat she had been repairing for Tobacco-Chewing Klassen.

  To demonstrate that they were for the people, the so-called anarchists made a show of scattering a few notes and coins in a street when they left a village. Katya and her grandparents had seen this in Rosenthal. This was after the anarchists had gone from house to house, comparing the contents of one against their inventories, extorting contributions, kontributsia, they’d say, whether or not they had found a discrepancy. Like most of the people in Rosenthal and Chortitza, her grandparents and uncle had been called upon to make the necessary contributions, and so had reason to dread t
he sound of unexpected footsteps on the stairs, a family shuffling across the platform, the ensuing rap on the door. It did no good to keep the shutters closed and hope they’d go on by, as a person risked being reported to the nearest Makhno Little Father, a sometimes self-appointed leader of a hundred or so men, such as Simeon Pravda had become.

  If a knock on the door was ignored, the black flag would soon appear, fluttering from a troika or an automobile, or a carriage with a machine gun mounted on the back. The anarchists came riding through town at a gallop, the men in their nightmarish garb, satin capes and silk top hats stolen from a Jew’s haberdashery; hats which, as they rode, they held fast to keep from flying away. Some of the men wore Gymnasium uniforms, preferring those whose crests identified them as law students and engineers, their chests criss-crossed with bandoliers of ammunition, and grenades hanging from wide leather belts. Those who claimed to have status wore the prized jackets of scarlet, blue, or gold velvet that had been made by Tina Funk and other Mennonite seamstresses. Velvet cloth that had once covered a dining-room table or draped a window was fashioned by the seamstresses into tuzhurka jackets in the French style, which, to the bandits, reflected their high status.

  Peasant families had knocked twice on her grandparents’ door. A crowd standing on the platform one wintry day peering into the house, the children among them – some with lips bubbling with cold sores, others with eyelids thick with festering sties – inching through the door, soon wandering about the room, pulling open drawers, fingering the lace doily covering the sewing machine. What are you doing, Sara was bold enough to ask a girl the first time the beggars came calling. Poshariu, the girl replied. Rummaging, she said, parroting what she’d heard others say. Sara should mind her own business, or she would tell her name to Makhno, who would come and cut off her ears and tongue. That day, her grandmother gave the beggars a set of agateware pans and a new crock. On the way to the door, they helped themselves to various cooking utensils and an enamelled dipper. As soon as the door closed behind them, her grandmother put a dent in a remaining dipper to make it less appealing and wired it to the handle of the water pail. Then she took her china dishes from the cupboard and hid them in the attic.

  The second time the beggars came straggling up the sidewalk, her grandmother saw them coming and sent Katya with Sara to the attic to wait for them to leave. Katya cleared frost from the window, welcoming the bite of cold against her fist, the meltwater trickling down her arm a brief respite from a constant numbness. Then she set her eye against the cleared glass and looked out at the village, ignoring Sara’s whispered pleas to let her have a look, while downstairs objects were fondled and pilfered. Her grandfather’s low voice beat against the attic floor as he followed the intruders through the house, her grandmother’s voice sharp. Katya would see later that they dared to venture as far as the bedrooms at the back of the house. They had opened the door of the washstand in her grandparents’ room, taken out the chamber pot to see what might be hidden behind it. They’d gone through Katya’s and Sara’s bureau drawers and stuffed their sleeves, Oma said, with bloomers, collars, and Greta’s undervests. They tore open bundles of dried roses in the drawers, thinking there was other than scent inside them. They went into the summer room, with its large corner windows, where Katya had left her mother’s hand mirror lying out on the windowsill. But her grandmother had rushed in before them, quickly hiding the mirror between pillows before they could see it.

  She saw that in the village, the streets and yards were empty; roof tiles pressed through melting snow, and smoke lifted from chimneys all across the village, drifted through the clear sky and up the side of the snow-covered valley, where tree branches knit their stark winter patterns. She took in the grey-and-white landscape, the empty street marked with footprints, heard the heavy, dimmed voices of the thieves in the downstairs rooms, and felt the emptiness around her vibrating. She’d been told what a blessing it was that she’d run and hidden, and been spared sights that would have stayed with her for life. But it was her father, mother, Greta and brothers who were hiding, she thought. She could see where they had been, in the perfect footprints in the snow, the smoke rising from chimneys. They could choose to come out from wherever they were hiding, if only they wanted to. Their silence seemed a back turned against her, a door remaining closed, elongated colourless spots of sun-bleached sky that followed her wherever she went.

  The beggars came that day prepared to take more than they could carry, she realized when wagons and carts began filling the empty street. The wagons followed them to houses they’d entered, waiting for them to emerge carrying a table, a butter churn, a washing machine. At the Siemenses’ house, three men struggled beneath the weight of a cream separator. Moments later she recognized her grandparents’ sofa, their bed, still made up with its blankets, on a wagon going down the street.

  The thieves had also taken her grandmother’s bread-kneading pan, a wide two-handled shallow tin pan that Oma later saw out in the yard of a brick factory, lying on the urine-sprayed snow. It was being used to feed dogs, she said. They could afford to give food to dogs, yet, she said indignantly. But the next time she went looking for it at the brickyard, it was gone. Days later, she saw it again. She saw her bread-kneading pan come flying down a snowbank on the other side of the Chortitza creek, a small child riding inside it. It wouldn’t hurt as much if the pan was being used for its intended purpose, she said. Her grandmother could forgive murderers, but she grieved and nursed grudges against waste and thievery.

  “Go and get a stool and stand on it so we can measure,” her grandmother said even before the seamstress finished drinking the glass of prips and eating the bun which she tore apart bit by bit, as though to make it last longer. “There’s been enough talk to cause nightmares already.”

  As Katya stood on the stool, the women knelt on the floor, her grandmother scampering about on her hands and knees, as agile and quick as Njuta. Tina Funk calculated the number of inches the skirt needed to be lengthened in order to touch the tops of Katya’s shoes, if that was the length Mrs. Schroeder thought the skirts should be. Yes, yes, that’s what I think. Not above the ankle, Oma said. Not from this house. She didn’t care if others were wearing their skirts that short.

  Katya smiled inwardly, thinking that while her grandmother went about the day whistling hymns, and would sooner find something good rather than bad to say about a person, she judged women by the length of their skirts, and only one length was proper. Most of her growth must have happened when she was at Privol’noye, where not as much attention had been paid to the length of a skirt. But her new slenderness, the evidence of it in the buttons she’d moved on the waist of her petticoat and skirts, had come about, she knew, since she’d come to Rosenthal. She could feel her hip bones now, plates that she set her splayed fingers across as she stood on the stool.

  When, later that day, Katya went about the village on errands, she was aware of her new height, and walked as though her centre of gravity had shifted, with the cautionary gait of a person about to venture across a patch of ice. She went up Main Street into Chortitza, counting the number of steps it took her to reach the volost offices, and turned there onto Hospital Street, going up to the post office, to collect the mail for her grandparents. A bell tinkled above the door when she entered what was the front room of a house belonging to a Little Russian family, one of few who had always resided in Chortitza. A chair creaked in a closet-sized room off the main room, which housed a telephone central operated by Valentina, the postmaster’s daughter. As the young woman tilted her chair to see who had come in, her face appeared in the doorway.

  Her grandmother commented that in the past Valentina would at least have made a show of going behind the wicket to peer into the appropriate letter slot, pretending that she hadn’t already snooped to see who had received mail, and from whom. But now, apparently, the postmaster’s daughter no longer bothered with pretense. It’s as though they suddenly think they’re better than us, her
grandmother said to explain the change of attitudes of the few non-Mennonites who lived in the two villages.

  She knew her grandmother would be disappointed that there hadn’t been any mail, but she was relieved. She didn’t want to receive yet another letter from Franz Pauls. Soon after the massacre at Privol’noye, he began to write to her, her former tutor assuming a brotherly role that she found offensive, as if he could even come near to filling in one of the spaces. His letters came to her from the Red Cross train, where he’d seen more than he could remember, he’d written to her, his tone world-wise and condescending. Then his train received orders to go to Warsaw to collect the wounded, and he obeyed his instincts when it stopped at a remote station to take on water. All day he had seen columns of infantry, children and women going in the opposite direction. Something told him the train would likely meet more than the wounded in Warsaw, and so he joined a soldier-nurse who had ostensibly stepped out onto the platform for a cigarette. He and the other man began to talk, and arrived at the same conclusion. They traded their uniforms for rags and joined the stream of people going east. Now his letters came to her from a village in the colony of Ignatyevo, where he had gone to join Helena Sudermann and the Baptists in their mission to evangelize the enemy. His letters became pious-sounding and full of reports of conversions and baptisms, the lost becoming found.

  Sometimes she found herself hoping for a letter from Lydia, though she had no real expectation of receiving one. More and more she’d begun to wonder about her, and over the weeks had composed several letters, which she’d never sent.

  Dear Lydia,

  While I was in the hole in the ground the darkness was like coal and it was as though I had disappeared. I hugged Sara, but didn’t feel anything, not her body, or mine. However, I did feel the cold air seeping through the straw, and in this way I knew I was in the hole and alive. I listened for sounds that would tell me what was happening outside, but it was as though that world had ceased to be. The dampness and darkness were overwhelming but I didn’t want to be discovered because I feared the moment when the cover would be drawn aside, and I would see my father or the face of a murderer.