The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  Dear Lydia,

  They tell me that you were found wandering nearby Orlov’s place. Did you see what happened? After they killed your mother, who was next? And then who?

  Dear Lydia,

  Can you tell me how it came about that Njuta was found in your father’s office? She was blue with cold and her legs cut from crawling through broken glass.

  Dear Lydia,

  How are you?

  With the exception of David, who, being a teacher and not considered bourgeois, the Sudermann brothers had fled to Ekaterinoslav, and when the Bolsheviks took over that city, they had gone to Spat, taking Lydia, Dietrich, and Barbara with them. Katya had heard that Privol’noye was going to ruin, as were other estates, had heard of a gutsbesitzer in the Second Colony who’d been robbed of ninety-five shirts and forty-seven pairs of shoes. His bake kitchen had been raided, cakes gulped down on the run, along with rings of sausages children had first wound about their necks. While the estate of Privol’noye had been taken over by peasant families, others had been abandoned, disappeared entirely when houses and barns were dismantled brick by brick and carted away to become dwellings in the new Russian villages that were beginning to spring up around the countryside.

  She returned to Rosenthal on Main Street, once again counting her steps, how many it took for her to reach her grandparents’ house. When viewed from across the street, the Schroeder house looked small. Pots of African violets and gloxinia lined the windowsills, their blossoms magenta and pink jewels. Her grandmother was known to have a hand with gloxinia, and hers were always in bloom. She knew her grandmother would have mourned the loss of a gloxinia plant more than she had the bread pan, and the loss of her bed. On losing the bed, she had pronounced that it was better to have no beds at all, God would only bless them more. She had replaced the bed with a sleeping bench, its wood groaning loudly when they climbed onto its unforgiving hardness.

  A crisp wind tugged at Katya’s skirt, and she felt the bite of it at her ankles. She wouldn’t be able to tell her grandmother who’d been in the Penner store; when she’d gone by and looked in the window, what she’d seen was herself, shoulders bunched and arms slightly extended as though for balance, as though she expected to fall. A wagon went by in the street, going towards two dark figures, boys standing at the side of the road, watching the wagon approach. When she returned home she also would not be able to say who had called a greeting from the passing wagon. She remembered seeing a brown leather coat, a sheepskin hand rising.

  The wagon was approaching the two boys who waited at the side of the street for it to pass. Or so she thought, because no sooner was the wagon upon them, when first one and then the other dashed in front of it – Johann and Peter, two fists slamming her in the chest. The wagon didn’t hesitate in its forward movement; her brothers did not appear on the opposite side of the road, but had vanished. She realized water was seeping through her shoes, she was standing in a puddle of slush, holding her chest and gulping for air.

  Her feet crunched through frozen puddles as she approached the Kanserovka Creek and the community gardens beyond. She couldn’t say if the weather was fitting for the end of April, or not. If the greyness was what they’d always experienced this time of year, the snowbanks along the Kanserovka Creek caving in, chunks of snow pulled into the black water to become islands carried away by the spring current to the Dnieper. Already she had forgotten what to expect; the end of April in the New Style seemed the same as the old one had been.

  When she stepped inside a large room at the front of Dr. Warkentine’s house, she was aware of people seemingly piled up on the benches. A fetid odour billowed up and escaped out the door behind her, the odour of their unwashed bodies, illnesses and lethargy. Peasant children lay on the floor at their mothers’ feet; older ones crouched like wild animals about to spring at her. She couldn’t look at them directly, but she felt they regarded her with suspicion. Lensch Warkentine emerged from the pharmacy, the starched apron and skirt of her nurse’s uniform as stiff as paper. When she explained to the people in the waiting room that Katya was a friend who had come on a visit, and not a patient, their suspicion changed to malevolent glares as Katya followed the doctor’s wife into the pharmacy.

  She had come for her monthly supply of iron pills, but she was not to be given them outright this time. Lensch Warkentine said she couldn’t dispense the pills until Katya had seen either Dr. Hamm or her husband, agreed? She indicated that Katya should go sit on a stool beside a window and wait.

  The two closed doors on either side of the pharmacy led to the examination rooms. Katya heard Dr. Warkentine talking behind one of the doors, and a man’s halting reply, as though he were speaking with his mouth open. Eucalyptus oil burned in a metal dish which was suspended on chains above an alcohol burner that rested on a counter, its medicinal scent hardly dispelling the odour of the patients emanating from the waiting room. Lensch Warkentine and Auguste Sudermann were sisters, and the resemblance was strong in the woman’s small sinewy body; in her hair, which she wore in a topknot; in her economy of expression. She was as stiff as her starched uniform, some said, unbending in her opinions, which she dispensed as efficiently as she did the ointments and liquid medicines to the “people of darkness” in the outer waiting room beyond, with succinct instructions that they were not to eat the salves, or smear the liquids on their lesions and boils.

  As Katya waited, Lensch began to polish the glass doors of an almost empty wall cabinet behind the counter. She worked with a furious energy, her hand moving in quick tight circles as though she were angry. Like most women in the villages, Dr. Warkentine’s wife had come to depend on the labour of Russian servants to lighten her household load, and suddenly they were without help.

  Documents hung in frames on the wall beside the medicine cabinets, Dr. Warkentine’s degrees, one from a university in Kharkov and another from Berlin. There was also a photograph of students sitting at tables in a classroom, a younger Warkentine among them. An inscription that said this was at the Feodosia Gymnasium, Feodosia being the largest city near the village of Ogus-Tobe, where the doctor had grown up beside the Black Sea. The story was well known of how one day he had been snatched by soldiers from a Chortitza street and made to serve in the Japanese war. Eventually he’d been taken prisoner, and during the experience had become bald, which made his bushy eyebrows and walrus moustache seem even blacker.

  She hoped it would be him and not Dr. Hamm she would see, because Dr. Warkentine exuded a kindness; things had happened to him which he preferred not to talk about. On one of her monthly visits she’d seen Dr. Hamm, and had got bound up inside when he’d asked questions that had to do with the reason she required the iron tablets.

  She suddenly became aware of a whining sound coming from outside, and growing louder. She pushed aside the curtain, and saw a man beyond the fence gazing skyward. Lensch set her cloth on the counter and came over to her. All at once, people in the waiting room got up and fled out the door. She watched them over Lensch’s shoulder, the children running through the mud of the community gardens, followed by the adults, all of them struggling through the black pudding, going towards the reed beds along the Kanserovka Creek.

  She now saw what had frightened them, an airplane swooping low over Main Street, its wings tilting back and forth, looking as though they might brush against the treetops. As it passed overhead, its engine was like a hive of hornets, and then the sound flattened and gradually faded, and a quiet descended so that she could hear the hiss of the alcohol burner across the room. The people had stopped running now, and were turned towards the street as the silence was overtaken by a faint wash of sound that quickly grew louder. She saw metal flashing as a column of uniformed soldiers came riding, four abreast, their steel helmets bobbing. Behind them was a row of automobiles, the flag of Germany fluttering above gleaming fenders. Yet another momentous event was taking place. A treaty had been signed at Brest-Litovsk, and she would one day hear of it and of its far-rea
ching implications, remember that for a brief time life in the village had returned to near normal while she stood in the middle of the event, unmoved, the elongated spots of bleached sky hovering beyond the leafless trees more tangible than what was unfolding in the street.

  Dr. Warkentine emerged from the examination room, the muscles in his face working as he came to the window and put an arm about his wife’s shoulder; she had begun to weep. People were already hurrying to meet the German cavalry. Women still wearing their washday aprons, men in their barn overalls, came from yards, their children lining up along the street, Sara among them. Women had filled baskets with baking, and were offering it to the riders going by in the street. Others, like Lensch Warkentine, were weeping, aprons held to their faces. There was a noise behind them, and they turned to see the man Katya had heard in Dr. Warkentine’s office, standing in the doorway looking on in bewilderment.

  “Hans, come and see this – the Germans are here. I never thought I would say this, but I have to admit I’m glad to see them. Maybe those fellows will bring us some peace and order,” Dr. Warkentine said.

  The peasants hadn’t returned to the waiting room, but had trudged up the valley and gone out across the windswept plateau, going back to wherever it was they had come from, poor souls, Dr. Warkentine later said to Katya. She sat on a chair as he drew down the skin beneath her eye, exposing the tissues to look for signs of her anemia.

  “Are you still flowing as much?” he asked.

  “The same.” She wanted to tell him, they cut open the bedding, and feathers covered the ground like snow.

  “Can you describe how much?” he asked.

  No, she couldn’t. She was shy to admit to the heat of it, the sodden cloths that needed to be changed hourly. She was aware of Lensch hovering in the background, her stiffness intact, her face closed; listening, she knew.

  It was snowing. That’s what I at first thought. Then Greta said it was the bedding. It’s the bedding, Greta said. She had gone over and over the events of that early morning, and had realized that those had been her sister’s last words.

  He turned from her and went over to a basin, holding his hands over it, while Lensch trickled carbolic-smelling water from a jug over them.

  “Do you pray often?” he asked as he washed his hands.

  Did she ever pray? Did she pray, forgive them, as her oma had done? Did she pray, let me not harbour anger, or entertain thoughts of vengeance. Help me to love my enemy? She wondered if that was what lay behind Dr. Warkentine’s question. “No,” she said.

  As she got up to leave, he lifted her hand and wrapped her fingers around a bottle of iron pills. “Try to pray. One word, that’s all. Then next time, say two words, and so on, until your prayer is at least three minutes long. Sometimes prayer can be the best cure of all,” he said.

  When she returned along Main Street, she saw a wagon parked in front of her grandparents’ gate. She saw it intermittently, through the passing of other wagons and carriages going by, people hurrying off to Chortitza, where the German cavalry had gone.

  Sara came out of the Siemenses’ veranda, and Katya held her breath when she saw her crouch down, then propel herself through the air, jumping to the bottom of the steps. Only once had Sara asked, where are they? She’d looked up at the lip of the valley, and the dome of the Orthodox church, likely thinking of the cemetery lying beyond that church. They aren’t there, Oma explained. Even though they had seen her mother, father, and brothers all in a row in their wooden cradles, seen them being lowered into the ground, they were somewhere else, above, alive, and waiting for a glorious family reunion.

  Think of them as just being in another room, someone had said. Katya in one, and they in another. She thought of hearing the clank of a spoon against a bowl, a rustling of voices, on the other side of a wall. But the idea of them being in another room wasn’t a comforting thought. Eternal happiness and hymn-singing in the presence of God and the angels while the living grieved amounted to callous indifference.

  As Sara came through the Siemenses’ gate, she saw Katya and quickly pulled a scarf up onto her head. She had only just recovered from an ear infection, and knew better than to go outdoors without her ears protected against the wind. A scolding rose to Katya’s tongue as her sister came running to meet her, but as Sara took her hand and began to chatter, Katya forgave her for being who she was, brave and eager, a puppy on the end of a tether, pulling Katya off in several directions at once.

  Had she seen the Germans? Sara asked.

  Ja, she’d seen them.

  Weren’t their helmets funny looking? Ohm Siemens said that the Germans and Austrians would make the bandits bring back their cream separator. They would order them to return Opa and Oma’s bed, and the sofa, also. Young boys in the street had told her the Germans would whip the thieves and teach them a lesson not to steal, Sara said.

  As they came near to her grandparents’ house, Katya noticed that whoever the wagon belonged to had left his coat behind on its seat. Already the presence of the Germans made people feel safer, she thought. The brown leather coat looked familiar, and then she realized she’d seen it on the driver of the wagon that had gone by when she was on the way to the doctor’s house.

  Bull-Headed Heinrichs ducked as he came out the door of her grandparents’ house, as though he thought himself tall and not a middle-sized man, which was what he was. A strong and sturdy-limbed man, whose broad hands were freckled, his knuckles scuffed and enlarged. It was his long face, bristly with gold whiskers, that had presented itself to Katya as the slatted covering of their hole in the greenhouse was lifted. She remembered how the insides of her thighs had stung as her bladder emptied with relief to be looking in the eyes of a Mennonite face. Sunlight shot through the glass roof, obliterating the darkness and the fumes of the mouldering earth, and she, heard herself say Danke, danke, as he drew her up and out of the hole into clean air. She wept with the release of fear and held her stomach to contain her retching. As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw him up to his hips in the hole, gathering a sleeping Sara into his arms.

  Don’t thank me, Bull-Headed said, his voice clotted and strange-sounding as he stood before her, Sara held against his chest. She was thanking God, she said. Don’t thank anyone, he said, and as she looked across the yard he tried to block her view. She stepped around him and saw the Big House beyond, its shattered windows, a tattered strip of window curtain pulled through the shards of glass and trailing in a breeze. She saw the bodies of the dogs, their legs crooked as though they’d been struck down while on the run.

  There were people, men, standing in a huddle near the back door of the Big House. One of them left the group and stooped over a mound lying on the ground, lifted the blanket covering it, and let it fall. Then she saw all of them, the large and small mounds beneath blankets, lined in a row. She ran to the far wall of the greenhouse, pressing her hands against the glass, wanting to see if anything under the blankets would move. Then she was running between tables of flats and potted plants, knocking them to the floor in her panic to find the door to the potting shed and outside, the way she had come when she had known exactly where that door was, her hands undoing the latch in the dark while Sara stood panting. But now, in daylight, she couldn’t find it.

  You don’t want to go out there, Bull-Headed said. Sara began to wail, and Katya thought then that all of them might be gone. Her father the last to breathe, Bull-Headed would later tell her. Still alive when Bull-Headed had arrived at Privol’noye early that morning at Abram’s request to sell him draft horses. Then he’d found them. Katya’s father alive for long enough to say where she and Sara might be hiding, in a hole in the ground, but where it was, he hadn’t the breath to say. There’s a baby crying, she was inside the house, whose is it? Bull-Headed had asked Katya, and she knew then for certain that, of her family, only Njuta, Sara, and she had survived.

  Now, as Katya waited beside the gate for Bull-Headed Heinrichs to come down the stairs
of her grandparents’ house and out the gate, Sara let go of her hand, and stared after him as he climbed up onto his wagon, her eyes becoming glittering blue agates, remembering, Katya thought.

  When Katya came into the house, her grandparents were sitting on a bench in the parlour, silent, studying their hands, which rested in their laps. They looked up as she came past the door, and she knew immediately that Bull-Headed Heinrichs’s visit had something to do with her.

  That evening, she stood at a window peering through a veil of fog that had settled on the valley, thinking, This is the man who, twice now, has saved my life. Kornelius was his real name. Bull-Headed, he’d been called, because he refused to go to church following the death of his young wife. He’d asked her grandparents if he might come calling. What made him think Katya was the one for him, Opa had asked. Not everything needs an explanation, Kornelius said. Not everything, and not to everyone, her opa agreed. But your desire requires an explanation, as Katya is ours, and so we’re entitled to hear it. They wanted to hear that he’d reconciled his mind to God, but he refused to give them even the hope that he might do so in the future.

  There will be others, Oma had said to Katya, as if Katya had set her mind on Kornelius and was in need of consoling. And in any case, it was too soon after, there would be gossip. Streetlamps and lights in windows were yellow smears of colour barely illuminating the snow in the street and yards as she stood looking out through the fog, emotionless, thinking that the man wanted her for his wife. She did not remember what she’d felt the day Kornelius Heinrichs had smiled at her at the train station. She thought of him wanting to marry her, though she didn’t yet know what the act was that consummated a marriage.