The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  She heard movement in the room next to their room, the scraping of chair legs against the floor. A man clearing his throat, and Liese’s voice; for some reason their near presence made her anxious. She sorted through the bundle of clothing she had brought, and when she began to put them in the cupboard, Sara asked, “Are we going to live here now?”

  “Yes,” she said. But she didn’t know for how long.

  “It’s not right that we have to be here while Papa and Mama are in heaven doing nothing except being happy,” Sara said, and Katya was shocked at hearing her own earlier thoughts come from her little sister.

  She felt empty as she sat watching her sisters sleep, taking in their crooked fingers resting on a pillow, the sweep of their lashes against pale cheeks. People talked about heaven as though it were a country they had visited and returned from with stories of their adventures. Heaven: a city of shining houses, flowers made of glass, a fiery choir of angels suspended in clouds, the music indescribable. Heaven: a wooden room with rows and rows of narrow cots neatly made up, and everyone arriving being handed a broom and put to work. She wondered if the stories of heaven gleaned from dreams and fevers were wishes, ghostly birds in search of a home. She left her sisters and went to join Willy and Irma in the family room.

  Irma looked up from her mending and greeted Katya with a smile, and then nodded in the direction of the rocking chair in the corner. Willy stood at the table smoothing wrinkles from a cloth spread across it. A paint box lay open beside the cloth, and beside it stood a glass of water. The window curtains had been taken down, washed, and were now hanging on a line near the stove, Katya noted. Willy was about to decorate another pair. His step was springy as he went to a cupboard and took down a jar that held pencils and paintbrushes. He sat at the table, the cloth spread out before him, and Irma, with a smile pulling at her mouth, said, “Na, Willy. You’re sure you haven’t borrowed someone else’s pencil by mistake?”

  Willy grinned, and held up the pencil to show Irma that it was notched. “There’s only one rule in this house, Katherine,” he said, and winked. “Make sure the pencil you use is your own.”

  “And safety pins, also?” Katya asked, which brought laughter.

  “Ja, pins. I wonder how you could know? Needles, too. And thread,” Irma said.

  “And you’ll discover that she likes to pull backwards. She would argue against blue being blue. If you want blue to be blue, say it’s green,” Willy said.

  “She’s had a hard life,” Irma said in defence of Liese Peters.

  And she doesn’t want us to be here, Katya thought. She wanted to do something to help earn their keep. An idea had come to her while waiting for her sisters to fall asleep. “I could teach kindergarten,” she said. Three days a week, she went on to say in a rush. There must be other children like Erika, of kindergarten age.

  “Not many people could afford to pay,” Irma said.

  “Butter and eggs, whatever their parents could manage,” she said.

  “You’re welcome to try, if you like. See what happens,” Irma said, but she didn’t sound convinced. You don’t have to do it on our account, she went on to say. The miracle of the loaves and fishes happened over and over again. No matter how many people sat down at the table, they always went away fed, if not satisfied.

  “So when will you two marry, tell me?” Irma asked. She nodded in the direction of the room down the hall where Kornelius stayed.

  Katya’s expression was one of shock.

  “But you are engaged, yes?” Her eyes turned to her brother for help.

  Katya knew too well how rumours like that were spread. From church to church, from a wagon passing another wagon on a road. Before she could deny being engaged to Kornelius, Willy and Irma broke into soft laughter. “He told Willy the two of you were engaged,” Irma said.

  Katya felt a rush of emotions, tears; a hunger. “It’s not possible, and anyway he doesn’t go to church,” she said, and felt her face grow hot with embarrassment.

  “Ja, we know. People around here think they know all there is to know about Kornelius. But I’ve known him since he was a boy. He was always hot-tempered, but just as quick to be sorry for showing his temper. Sooner or later Kornelius will grow tired from being so angry. Wait and see. Anger is poor fuel to keep a man warm the way a man needs to be kept warm. Especially one who has already sat by the fire,” Willy said.

  ll through those first winter months in Arbusovka, I waited to hear that Pravda had died,” she told the young man. Ernest Unger was his name, he’d said, and while he insisted they might be related, she doubted it, as the Ungers were mostly from the Second Colony, and it wasn’t all that common that someone would marry across the river.

  “I didn’t pray that he would die, but I hoped he would. From cholera, gangrene. Or at the hand of one of his enemies. In the end he was being chased by the Reds; with him was Yerik, the coachman’s son, and Kolya. A wheel on their carriage broke, and they had to run for it, but of course Pravda, with his cut-off legs, couldn’t run. He begged them not to abandon him, but they said he had whipped them with his nagaika for the last time. Pravda knew what he would face when the Reds came, and so he shot himself dead. The story goes, when the Reds found him, they were so angry they cut him into pieces with their sabres.”

  The so-called anarchists with their black flags had slunk off, their tails between their legs. Many disappeared back into their families, shamed or unbowed; their leaders were hunted by the Red Army, Nestor Makhno eventually ending up living in exile in Paris.

  “I don’t know what happened to Yerik, but Kolya, I heard, found refuge with the Baptists,” she said. “Apparently he was converted and became a good Christian. And so I suppose one day I’ll see him in heaven.”

  She kept her voice even, but she saw Ernest Unger glance at her feet, which were resting on a hassock, at the way she’d begun to move a red-slippered foot rapidly back and forth. She made it be still. Then she told him that the slippers were from Indonesia, a gift from a granddaughter who had bought them at the Mennonite Self-Help store. When he didn’t reply, she thought to offer him a peppermint from a bowl sitting on the table beside her chair, but then decided not to, for he might take the tremble of her hand to mean more than the shakiness of old age.

  “Well, yes. My father used to say, one day we’ll be surprised to find out who all will be in heaven, just as we’ll be surprised to find out who isn’t,” she said moments later.

  She saw the faint hint of a smile rise in his narrow face – of agreement? She couldn’t tell. But more than likely, like her grandchildren, he was amused by her old-fashioned way of speaking.

  “That first winter in Arbusovka, all we heard about was the killings. After the Germans left, Makhno and his Little Fathers, Pravda included, went rampaging through the colonies, killing our people,” she said.

  “Two hundred souls in the colony of Zagradovka died in a single weekend. Thirty-seven in the village of Number Seven were herded into a church basement and blown to bits by grenades,” Ernest Unger said, breaking in suddenly, his voice strong and rising. “Rosenthal,” he said, “one thousand three hundred and fifty inhabitants, one thousand and ninety sick with typhoid. In Chortitza, another six hundred and sixty were stricken.” He ticked off the numbers on his fingers – wearing a school ring, she noticed, but not one that she recognized from her own children.

  He had been to the archives, she supposed, had read the stories which, in the end, all sounded the same, and which had made her own stomach rumble with gas, a taste on her tongue as though she’d just eaten blood sausage. He must have read her translations of the Sudermann diaries and letters, done so many years ago when her eyesight still permitted, when she was one of the few remaining Russländers in Winnipeg, it seemed, who could read German Gothic script.

  Across the room, a tiny wooden door on a clock opened, and a cuckoo bird sprang out. They waited in silence until the mechanical bird had stopped chirping. Ernest Unger rewound the audi
o tape in the machine, to record over the cuckoo-bird sounds, she thought. Then he pressed a button and the wheels began turning slowly once again, with, she noticed, a slight grinding sound. His wrists were chapped from the cold, and the cuffs of his plaid shirt looked worn. He seemed only half grown, not having completely filled in his skin yet, she thought. He was not well-off, she gathered this from the look of his cuffs, and likely he didn’t have a car, as when he’d arrived at her door, his pant legs were wet from the slushy snow, and he’d complained about how long it had taken him to reach Bethania because of the poor Sunday service of the metro transit.

  “Just what do you hope to get from my story?” she asked, and saw a brief flare of surprise in his face, that she would be one who would want to know something about him, too.

  Moments later, he said he had just come from Saskatchewan, where he had been doing the same thing, collecting stories which he intended to give to the Mennonite Heritage Centre. The stories of the Russländers, told in their own voices, for future generations to come and listen to. “It’s important they know what happened. All in all, disease and violence took nearly three thousand lives,” he said.

  Then he told her that he had once come across a Russian proverb, which was what had started him on his journey. “Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye,” he recited; “ignore the past and you’ll lose both of them.”

  She laughed, which sounded to her more like a sharp little bark than laughter. As if the past could be ignored. She listened every Saturday to news broadcasts from the Mennonite radio station. To the community news following the news, which included birthday announcements. Our best wishes go out to Mrs. Mary Klassen of Niverville, who reached her one-hundredth year on February 12; Mrs. Sara Neufeld of Mordon, who today is ninety-two years old; Mrs. Margaret Funk of Altona will celebrate her ninety-fifth birthday on February 27. Despite the hunger, disease and what they had gone through, the Russländer women lived to be very old. They had taken on the responsibility to live long lives, to remember, she believed, and so those who had not come through were resurrected to continue their lives – Well hello, Katya, there you are, coming to visit me again.

  “You have heard, I’m sure, about Eichenfeld-Dubovka,” Ernest Unger said. His father as a young boy had witnessed his own father being killed there, along with eighty-two people.

  Yes, she knew about Eichenfeld-Dubovka. Most of the men had been whisked quietly away, and their jugulars were severed before the women knew they were gone. A grandfather had been decapitated in the presence of his grandchildren. She had learned about Eichenfeld-Dubovka, and other atrocities, from the women she lived with. When there were no children, no men around to consider, they sometimes spoke with a bluntness that Plautdietsch afforded. A sentence coming out of the blue during a moment of conversation in the vestibule; chairs lined up on either side of the entrance and windows that looked out on a busy street, a street of tall city buildings; a square of grass enclosed by a perimeter of new trees, and in the centre of it, the brightly coloured tunnels and climbing structures of a playground. They fried her breasts in a frying pan. They did it to her with the barrel of a gun. A man was swinging from a tree by a leg, naked, with a walking cane hanging out of his rear. There was no point in telling Ernest Unger those kinds of things. The majority of the women kept the more vivid details to themselves. They were like her grandparents had been, they had no desire to draw pictures. God knew what had happened and, for them, that was enough.

  Soon after she came to Arbusovka, she learned of the death of Nela Siemens’s father. Ohm Siemens had used the occasion of his winter bath to divert the Makhnovite bandits, but instead they used it to place wagers on how long it would take for him to freeze to death. They’d put rifles across the hole in the ice and stood on them, pinning his shoulders while they counted the number of minutes it took for him to give up the ghost. She’d heard that in a village near to Nikolaifeld, Helena Sudermann and Franz Pauls and others had been conducting a religious service in a school when they were interrupted by Nestor Makhno and his men. The worshippers fled. But God did not intervene, and in spite of Helena Sudermann’s and Franz Pauls’s prayers, the shutters and doors were nailed closed, and the building set on fire. Helena Sudermann, Franz Pauls, and three lay preachers were burned alive. She remembered the day Kornelius came to tell them, how her joy at seeing him had evaporated, and her mind numbed into its old woodenness by the horrible news.

  Months later, her grandfather brought the news that she’d already learned from Kornelius. He also brought with him a bundle of spring and summer clothing and a sack of potatoes. He brought the recipe notebook, her mother’s hand mirror, and Sara’s doll. She and her sisters should remain in Arbusovka for a longer time, he said. The front sometimes passed through Rosenthal and Chortitza twice in a day. With it came the demands of the Red Army, the Whites, the Makhnovites, for food, shelter, and horses, paying for the items in the exchange of the day: lice and hunger. Fifteen soldiers had been killed by shelling from across the river, and were buried in a grave in the yard of the Teachers’ Seminary. He’d heard of such cruelty: Red soldiers nailing the epaulets of White officers to their shoulders. That the Whites sometimes buried their enemies alive. Three of their town boys had been challenged to denounce God or be thrown off the Einlage bridge. When they refused, two were thrown and drowned, and the other jumped, rather than be pushed, and saved himself.

  She watched her grandfather and uncle Bernhard go off down the road, and within moments they were obliterated by snowfall, as though a curtain had been drawn behind them. A curtain that gave her a feeling of safety, that a vast distance lay between the village of Arbusovka and the town of Rosenthal, and not just an hour’s ride.

  The following spring and summer she grew used to the stillness that radiated above the land like heat shimmer, a stillness punctuated by the twittering of tomtits nesting in a tree outside her window, a rooster’s solitary crowing as the town’s only street began to emerge from a grey light. The stillness had been interrupted several times by what sounded like thunder reverberating in the distant sky, a trail of smoke calling attention to that far border and the people who lived beyond it, her grandparents, her uncle and his wife who, in her mind, had become featureless, and as small as clothes pegs.

  One street divided the settlement; nothing in the village was far from Willy Krahn’s house: a small church, school, the village’s only store. She grew frustrated by the short distance she could walk up and down that single street, until Irma reminded her that the smallness of Arbusovka was a blessing. There was little to attract men intent on mayhem. There had been several instances of riders coming to Arbusovka, but after they and their horses were fed and watered, they quickly moved on to a village or town that offered more in the way of spoils.

  Near to the end of autumn, a woman whose family had travelled to visit relatives returned to Arbusovka with the news that many of the women in the towns of Rosenthal and Chortitza had been laid on the ground. Katya stood in the hallway, her body gone rigid with fear as she heard Liese tell Irma. The traveller and her companions had come upon wagons carrying the women, and girls as young as twelve. They were being taken to a doctor to be rid of disease and what was growing behind their aprons. Who they were, the woman couldn’t say, as they had covered their faces. She said the poor dears were being taken to a far-away place to prevent their terrible secret from being known. She also brought news of the typhus that had felled as many as a hundred people in the colony of Chortitza. Not long afterwards, the woman herself succumbed to spotted fever, and then there was a small outbreak of typhus in Arbusovka, which claimed several members of one family.

  Living with Willy Krahn and Irma, being surrounded on all sides by people in the house, was like wearing an extra coat or layer of fat. Katya felt removed from innuendo and rumour; she felt watched over and protected. Every day she sat down to meals with people who might, at any time, have broken out in a quarrel had it not been for Willy and Irm
a’s mitigation, and their sense of humour. One such Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1921, she entered the parlour where Irma was visiting with several other women, and knew from their expressions that Irma was about to say something amusing.

  “I heard a story recently about a woman who was worn out from having children,” Irma was saying. “And so the doctor thought it was time to have a talk to the husband. He was concerned for the wife’s health. Apparently her womb had fallen, and he couldn’t get her blood up,” she said.

  It was the word womb that had caught Katya’s attention. She’d come into the parlour to add water to a pan set on a windowsill, which held jars. The clay-coated jars were to become table centre-pieces, a project she and her kindergarten children had completed only the day before. She felt Liese’s eyes on her as she touched each of the cloth-wrapped jars, feeling them for moistness. She had begun to suspect that any reference to the affairs between men and women was directed at her. That the women could read her mind. When she was thinking about Kornelius, her body secreted an odour which they recognized. They knew about the strange constrictions, the sweet pain, the release.

  “Come and sit,” Willy’s daughter called, patting an empty chair beside her, and because Katya didn’t know how to refuse, she joined them.

  “I think I know which woman you’re talking about,” a neighbour woman said to Irma.

  The parlour where they sat was the only room not taken over by boarders. It was a large room with potted herbs, and now with jars wrapped in dampened cheesecloth lining the windowsills. A room with a wall clock whose minute hand was missing, and where Katya held her kindergarten class. The time was near to Easter, 1921, and she had taken her kindergarten children to a pit near a brickyard to gather clay, which they’d plastered onto the jars. She endured Liese Peters’s criticism when she explained the project: the seeds of grain gleaned from nooks and crannies in the barn would be pressed into the slip. The jars would be kept moist and the seeds would sprout and grow, and become a table decoration which the children would take home for Easter. A waste of time, and seeds, Liese had said.