The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  Her grandmother’s eyes darted from one thing to another, and her jaw began to work. She set aside the shirt she’d been mending as though she suddenly didn’t have the stomach for darning. Opa glanced at her sharply overtop his reading glasses, got up, and left the room.

  “I pray you’ll never know,” her grandmother said.

  “Franz Pauls asked if Lydia had been laid on the ground,” she said. Familiar faces looked up at her from the photographs spread across the table.

  “Oh, I see. Franz Pauls wants to know. He’s snooping around. He’s still trying to catch a big fish, and he wants to make sure that Lydia is good enough,” her grandmother said, her chest heaving with a sudden anger.

  “He asked me if Lydia had been laid on the ground, too. What did he mean by ‘too’? Did he mean Greta?” she asked. The Wiebe sisters, her mother? She didn’t ask.

  Her grandmother closed her eyes, and then cradled her forehead with her hands, motionless for moments. She got up and left the room then, and Katya heard the pantry door close behind her.

  She picked up a photograph, and held it to the light of the lamp. Greta, Lydia, Barbara and Mariechen Sudermann in their school uniforms, gathered around a pedestal and an open book. Greta’s chin was lifted, her gaze direct with a self-assurance that she had only just gained. The more Katya studied the photograph, the more difficult it became to picture the Greta she remembered, the tilt of her head just before she would ask a question, the light shining from her eyes.

  She was awakened in the night by the creak of footsteps as her grandfather went down the hall. She heard him pleading softly for her grandmother to come out of the pantry, and to bed. He returned to his room alone, a ghostly figure in a long nightshirt going past her open door with a heavy sigh. In the morning when she came into the family room her grandmother emerged from the pantry, haggard and pale, but whistling a hymn. Without glancing in her granddaughter’s direction, she stopped whistling to say, “There are some things we don’t talk about,” and went to the stove to set water to boil.

  In autumn the silkworms began to spin, their heads moving in patterns of figure eights as they threw off loops of silk, an iridescent stream flowing from their spinnerets, hardening like glass as it met the air and became the ribs of their sleeping chambers. Within two days the silkworms’ encasements were too thick for her to see the shadowy figures inside, the gradual and final shedding of their skins, the nutshell pupae emerging. While she knew it was necessary, she was reluctant to harvest the cocoons, set them into bake pans and into the oven to roast like seeds. It took her and her grandfather several days to soak the baked cocoons in pails of soapy water, to find where to begin to pick at a string, and unravel a mile of silk thread, leaving behind the shrivelled pupae, brown debris floating in the water.

  Throughout the late autumn, crickets chirped beneath the platforms of the houses and under the doormats. She heard the clap of beans in the watchman’s rattle as he came down the street and went past the house. The sound was meant to relay the message: I am here, all is well. Lo, I am with you. She might have taken up that thought and asked, Where was the night watchman when the knock came at our door? For her to question the existence of God was unthinkable. If she had been a man, calloused by the killing of beasts, the unforgiving hardness of the earth and heat of the sun, she might have thought to blame God for being uncaring, or asleep. She’d been born a female, been given a soft body and hands, born to be a helper, a representative on earth of God’s gentler side.

  n mid-November, her grandfather brought the news home, following a meeting at David Sudermann’s house, that armistice had been declared. A date when, years later, she would see a poppy pin on a lapel and realize why her body felt heavy, why the list of chores she had given herself to do that day would not be completed. A day that had brought cautious hope to the people around her, but that, to her, had little meaning.

  Her grandfather had attended a meeting for prayer and a discussion, mediated by Nela’s father, Ohm Siemens. When Katya went to hang Opa’s coat in a cupboard she saw the elderly Ohm Siemens across the street climbing down from his wagon and going over to the barn gate to open it. She saw Nela on the veranda step. She sensed that Nela was watching her as she had been watching Ohm Siemens; all of them watching and waiting for what would happen next.

  The time had come for meetings while they could still meet safely, as now that the armistice had been declared, the retreat of the Austrian and German armies would soon be complete, her grandfather said. “Did we think that they were going to stay here forever?” he asked himself aloud. Throughout the war they had denied being German sympathizers, and then had welcomed the Germans as long-lost relatives, a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed. He had brought the wooden box of letters and photographs into the family room with him and set it on the table. He wanted to write a letter to a cousin living in Manitoba, Canada, a relative who had left Russia with the Bergthal villagers over forty years ago. But he was too agitated, his shaking hands wouldn’t allow it, and so he asked Katya to write it in his stead.

  “Greetings to all my cousins and what other relations who may still remember my dear father with kindness. Many thanks for the photograph you sent. Sincere greetings, in love.

  “Now you are wondering, I’m sure, why it has taken me so long to answer your letter. You are correct in assuming that the turmoil of the past year has taken up most of our anxieties and thoughts. Our grandchildren continue to live with us as you surmised. How long we will be able to provide safety and comfort for them is a question that lies heavy on my heart. For this reason I am writing to ask you to pray for us.”

  Most of the German and Austrian troops had left the colonies in early autumn, and the remainder retreated before the first snowfall, a three-day blizzard which buffeted the house. It was as though the storm had swept their protectors away, leaving in its wake knee-deep waves of snow that looked solid, as if sculpted from marble, and made the streets impassable.

  Katya went outside and began shovelling a path across the barnyard. Her aunt Susa was due to deliver a third child, and she reasoned that the way to the house should be cleared. Her uncle Bernhard must have seen her, as he came now from his house with a shovel. The path they carved through the snow merged halfway across the yard, and he smiled, his eyes softening in appreciation. She stood on the cleared path leaning on her shovel, a slender and tall figure in dark grey, the snowbanks on either side of her as high as her thighs. A scarf covered her head and the bottom of her face, ice particles matting the wool around her mouth and nose. When she had played in winter with Greta and Lydia, they would sometimes inhale deeply and pinch their nostrils to see who could hold their breath the longest, a spurt of white frost coming from a mouth betraying the cheater. She learned that it was better not to cheat; it was better to be still, to think of something other than breathing.

  She leaned on the handle of the shovel, glad to have remembered a happy moment, realizing that she had stopped telling God that enough time had passed. The departed had played their trick long enough, and it was time they returned home. She followed her uncle Bernhard’s gaze to the slope of the valley where children were mounting a hill to go sliding, Sara and Njuta among them, their footholes in the snow holding blue shadows.

  “It’s good that the children still know how to laugh,” her uncle said. His words surprised her, as he had spoken to her as an equal. What he said was true. Everyone went out of their way to shield the children from fear and worry. Olga Penner’s parents had almost perished while journeying to Alexandrovsk during the blizzard in order to buy the Christmas toys and fare children would expect to see in their store before the holiday.

  All of winter the children spent hours sliding down the hill, and skating on a patch of ice Tina Funk’s husband kept cleared on the Chortitza creek. Katya watched them from a pantry window, a small window that had recently been set into the back wall of the house. Her grandmother had requested the window. She didn’t want to chanc
e being surprised by a stranger coming to the house through the backyard when she was working in the pantry. She wanted to be able to see the children at play.

  A table stood before the window, and one day Katya was at the table about to mix a batch of biscuits for their supper. She spooned fat from the jar and shook it onto the flour in the bowl. Beyond the window the children skated and slid on the creek, Sara, Njuta, and their cousins among them. They were dark stick figures set against the snowy creek bank, their arms and feet propelling them across the ice and away from the footbridge. They would round a curve of red willows and disappear from sight, moments later reappearing as they returned to the bridge to circle, and to warm themselves beside a bonfire that Funk, the train crossing guard, kept going beside the footbridge. That the man had found the necessary energy to do so had come as a surprise to everyone.

  She picked up a spoon that was so light, it almost flew from her hand. The utensil reminded her of the tin spoons which had been chained to the tables in the workers’ quarters in Privol’noye. She thought of her grandmother sitting on a chair in the family room, her feet hooked through its rungs to anchor herself to it, as though she were as inconsequential as the spoon and in danger of flying away.

  She heard a door opening at the front of the house, feet stamping on the mat, Nela calling, “Where are the children?”

  The children’s voices had come to Katya in fragments while they played on the creek, as had the chirping of sparrows clustered in a bush beyond the window. She saw the sparrows lift up from the bush and flitter away, heard a sharpness in Nela’s voice as she came through the hall calling, “Are the children outside?” She stood in the doorway of the pantry looking in at Katya, panting, her face constricted. “Papa said to warn you there are men, riders, coming towards the town.”

  Katya looked across the creek and saw that the children were gone. My biscuits, she thought, and then dropped the spoon. She raced down the hall, grabbing a cloak on the run, and out the back door, flinging the cloak about her shoulders as she ran across the yard towards the creek, Nela behind her. She neared the bridge and began to hear the sound of the riders, an echo skating along the ice, then turned and saw them coming down the hill into town, a horde of insects in an array of colours, on horseback, in tachankas, droschkes and farm wagons, light glancing off the riders’ bayonets and swords as they rode alongside the telegraph and telephone lines. She thought she would remember for as long as she lived that flash of wire, a silver arc as tension was suddenly released and the wires whipped up as if they too were blades, slashing at the air before coming down, one by one. This was a story she would tell her children, to keep from telling the other. Although she had been much too far away to be able to see, she knew how the wires had arced and flashed silver.

  The children must be hiding, she said breathlessly as Nela came up beside her on the bridge. She pointed to their footprints along the bank, going up into the willow bushes where the snow was deep. She saw her grandfather appear in the entrance of the barn door, his frantic gesturing that they should stay away. There was no movement among the willows, no indication that the children were there; the footprints, the scarred ice, the remains of the smouldering bonfire would look as though the children had finished playing, and all gone home. She reluctantly gave into Nela’s urging that they should hide under the bridge.

  She felt as though they had spent hours under the footbridge, but it must have been less than an hour, otherwise they would have been frostbitten. The sun hadn’t set when she saw her uncle Bernhard come running from the barn in his limping, uneven gait across the barnyard to his house. Moments later two men appeared with her grandfather at the barn door. Then the men, carrying guns, set off towards her uncle Bernhard and aunt Susa’s house. A window at the back of the house opened and Bernhard pushed himself through it and dropped to the ground. He ran across the frozen creek, up its bank and into the bushes.

  Soon after, the sun waned and the creek was cast in shadows that she and Nela crept through as they went to the children. When she called, their faces appeared above the willows. Njuta’s round face, and the cheeks of several other children, were streaked with wet.

  Within moments she saw someone hurrying along the creek towards them. Nela, recognizing the stooped figure of her father, went to meet him. They should come home now, he called, and Katya saw his relief and surprise to see so many of the town’s children with her as they came through the willows down to the creek.

  She couldn’t stop the children from running to the stout old man and clustering about him. He cautioned silence, and they grew silent. He touched their shoulders and heads as though counting and blessing them at the same time. He and Nela would lead the other children back into the village, taking a circuitous route to avoid Main Street, believing what later proved to be true, that the best they could do when their town was occupied was try to stay out of sight.

  Katya lay on the floor, Njuta curled into the curve of her body and Sara spooned into her back, both of them sleeping. In the bed across the room, her aunt Susa wept silently as the new baby nursed, and her two children slept on either side of her. A schlaf bench had been made up in the room for her grandparents, but although the night was almost ending, they were still playing host to the men who now occupied all the rooms of the house except for the one they were in, a small room beside the pantry.

  She lay rigid, listening. Gradually the men grew quieter; some were already asleep, judging from the sounds of snoring that came through the walls. She heard voices in the family room suddenly rising in an expletive, a demand, a taunt. All night there had been sounds of glass breaking as stores and houses were pillaged. Demands had been made for hot meals and music. The two men who had gone looking for her uncle had brought Dr. Warkentine to come and treat a man’s festering wound, and now as she thought of his visit, she remembered that he had once told her that she should try to pray.

  The Lord is my shepherd. Yea, though I walk, she breathed, while across the room her aunt’s muffled weeping shook the bed. She wondered what had happened to her uncle, and the other men who, now fearing reprisal for having demanded the return of their stolen goods, had fled. At daybreak the bandits could track the men by their footprints in the snow, and bring them to their leader for his judgment. She heard a thump against a wall and uneven footsteps in the hall approaching the door to their room, felt a welling of hot air when the door opened and someone stood in the doorway holding a lantern.

  “What are you keeping in here?” the man asked whoever was with him. His breathing was laboured as though from exertion, and drink.

  Katya knew by his voice it was Simeon Pravda. It must have been Pravda who Dr. Warkentine had come to treat. Their leader, Opa had said, without saying who he was. A festering leg, one of his stumps, she thought. Would he recognize her? she wondered, her bowels suddenly churning as she thought of the crate of china dishes hidden in the attic.

  “You said you wanted chicken. Well, the chicken is ready. I didn’t cook a meal for you to let it sit and get cold.” Her grandmother was the person who had come with him, Katya realized.

  “Little Mother, what are you hiding in here, eh?” Pravda asked.

  “Nothing. My grandchildren, my daughter-in-law. But if you don’t believe me, then go and see for yourself,” her grandmother said.

  Katya heard him grunt and suck air, like someone who had just experienced a jolt of pain. His stump, she thought. He lifted the lantern and flooded the room with light. She kept her eyes closed, her breathing still.

  “A nest of birds,” he said. “God bless them.” He laughed, and the light swung round towards the door, the room going dark as he went out into the hall, and the door closed behind him. The sound of his mirthless laughter hung in the room. She waited for as long as she could. She counted the minutes and held her breath as her intestines gurgled and ran with water. Then she got up and squatted over the chamber pot, remembering the grey light, the early-morning chill. The deep shadow
s lying between the summer kitchen and washhouse. That she had sensed bones creaking, a person concealed between the two buildings, watching as she had come by with her family. She remembered a light moving across a window in the women’s quarters beyond the parade barn.

  After the funeral she had tried to grab hold of what others had repeated, that if Abram had led the bandits to the strongbox buried in the garden instead of denying its existence, the outcome of that day might have been different. Now, with her heart racing and bowels rumbling, she closed her eyes and saw the silver cup in Pravda’s small puffy hands. The presence of the cup had wiped out the memory of the dessert spoons and the silver tray that had gone missing so long ago, and so she hadn’t yet wondered how these items had come to be in the well. She squatted over the chamber pot, fearing the men would hear the noises she was making, the small explosions coming from her body. She remembered Vera’s crooked painted mouth, a crow’s wing of black hair set against her brow, the glitter in her eyes when she’d said, There’s something in the well.

  Her grandparents came to bed without acknowledging that she was still awake, and Aunt Susa was weeping. They didn’t undress, nor had she. They had all gone to bed fully clothed. Her grandparents knelt beside the bench, their voices hives of whispers as they prayed.

  How she managed to fall asleep, she didn’t know. But she must have, as some time later she awakened to the sound of moaning, and for a moment she thought, Aunt Susa’s baby is about to be born, forgetting that the baby was already three months old and at its mother’s breast in the bed across the room. The sound was coming from another room, the moan of someone in pain. She saw that her grandmother was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed and listening.

  “It’s Kootzy,” her grandfather whispered.

  Moonlight shone through the slats of the shutters, casting bars of light across her grandmother’s white apron, her hands clasped in her lap. From somewhere in town a dog began to bark. “I know,” Oma said. “Warkentine said hot poultices. Brandy for the pain.”