The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  “That would be the P.P. Janzen family you’re talking about,” Liese Peters said now, without missing a twist or loop of her crochet yarn and hook.

  “It’s more than likely Mary Dyck,” Willy’s daughter said.

  “The Janzen’s fifteen children outdo the Dycks’ by three,” Liese said.

  “Yes, but don’t forget, the Janzens’ fifteen come from two wives,” the neighbour woman pointed out.

  Katya had two of the Janzen children attending her kindergarten. Listless and white-faced children whose worried eyes often betrayed their hunger. Children whose eyes she’d had to bathe to soften a crust of mucus; she then boiled the cloths to prevent the infection from spreading to others. They always arrived early, knowing that a cup of soup awaited them. Soup she made with water, dill, a tablespoon of fat and a few egg noodles to give the children some nourishment. Famine fare, she would later call the soup when she began to add dandelions and strips of calf hide to it. Her kindergarten had not become a source of income for her, as she’d hoped, but rather a place for the children to come expecting to be fed a piece of bread, a single wafer of apple doled out from a bag of dried apples.

  “It doesn’t matter who the woman is. Tante Irma was going to tell us a joke,” Willy’s daughter reminded them.

  “Yes, let her say it. We can use a laugh, too,” the neighbour said when the sound of merriment rose outside where Willy and several men, Kornelius Heinrichs among them, were talking together on the platform.

  “The doctor came to talk to the husband. He told him that his wife shouldn’t have any more children, as her health was too poor. ‘Well, what am I supposed to do about it?’ the husband asked. The doctor suggested that the husband should start sleeping in the barn. ‘Oh,’ said the wife. ‘Do you think that would work? If so, then I should sleep in the barn, too,”’ Irma said.

  Their laughter filled the room while Katya stared at her hands in her lap, and felt herself blush.

  When last week she’d gone to the barn in search of stray kernels of grain for the kindergarten project, she hadn’t known Kornelius had come looking for Willy. She couldn’t understand how she missed seeing his cart on the barnyard, the single emaciated nag hitched to it. Where once he’d had a barn filled with riding horses, this sway-backed mare was his one remaining animal. She heard someone step up behind her, turned, and found herself being held in his arms.

  “Oh Katya, I have such a need for you,” he said. She thought her ribs would crack as he squeezed her suddenly and hard. Then he released her.

  It happened so quickly she might have blamed her imagination, if it weren’t for his odour and heat lingering as he turned and went towards the open doors and the sunlit barnyard. Daylight framed his body, accentuated the slight bow of his legs, his stiff-legged way of walking. Once he stepped from the barn into the light, he would disappear.

  “I haven’t thanked you for bringing us here,” she said. “It’s true, what my opa said. God put you in the right place at the right moment. Twice now,” she added, after a pause.

  Did he ever ask himself why that hadn’t been the case when his wife met the hooligans on the road? She had heard about Kornelius’s part-Arabian horse which he rode at top speed across open fields. He carried a pole, a hammer tied to the end of it, yelling at the top of his voice as he chased a rabbit down and killed it.

  He turned to face her, and for moments they looked at each other, her words hanging in the space between them.

  “People can read into things what they want. If you believe what your grandfather said, then thank God, and not me,” he said.

  “They say … I’ve heard it said that you blame God for what happened to your wife. That it’s the reason why you don’t go to church,” she said.

  “I don’t go to church because there are enough hypocrites occupying the benches as it is,” he said.

  A longing drew her to him, across the distance towards the light beyond the open door. When they stood face to face, she still felt the impression of his body against her own.

  “If I blamed anyone, I blamed myself for being alive. But that was long ago. I don’t any longer. Not since the day I saw you at the train station. I had said to myself, Kornelius, you need something to hope for. And when I saw you, I thought, there it is. Don’t lose it.”

  She felt the heat of tears, his hand come to rest on her shoulder, his bristly cheek, and then his mouth brushing against her own.

  “It’s not your fault that you’re alive, and they’re not. Put the blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of evil men,” he had said.

  “Someone here doesn’t care for your joke,” Liese said to Irma.

  Katya felt the women’s careful scrutiny, and was relieved when their conversation went off in another direction.

  A wild woman had been seen running about the countryside, the neighbour woman told them, repeating what they’d already heard.

  She had been seen among cows put out to pasture early one morning, on her hands and knees eating dandelions. A group of boys were out playing at dusk, and kicked a ball into the churchyard. When they climbed the wall to get it, they came upon the woman at the water pump. Her face was terrible to look at, scratched and streaked with dirt. When she spat at them, they threw stones at her, and she in turn flung liquid at them from a cup, which caused two of the boys to immediately become drowsy.

  “Those were P.P. Janzen boys. Liars, all of them. And if you ask me, they’re always half asleep,” Liese said. Her chain of safety pins had grown, a double loop that now reached her waist.

  Katya had heard the story about the wild woman from Sara, who brought it home from the Dorfschule. She’d heard Kornelius telling Willy he’d seen the woman early one morning sneaking out of his barn, where he suspected she’d spent the night. People were saying that the woman was from Moscow, or Leningrad. That she was a distant relative of the Romanovs. She had come on the train along with the bagmen, and the thousands of beggars who believed the streets in the villages were paved with butter and liverwurst. Kornelius had laughed at his own joke, the sound of his laughter a note hanging in the air above the yard, holding her breathless, her knees quaking.

  “Katherine is preparing for baptism,” Willy’s daughter said when they’d exhausted the topic of the wild woman.

  “Good,” the neighbour woman said and nodded, and Katya wasn’t sure whether she meant it was good that she would publicly proclaim her faith and become a member of the church, or good because they recognized the feelings rising in her body, and baptism prepared the way for marriage.

  If she’d grown up in a village she would have attended choir festivals and travelled to other villages and caught the attention of a man, not for what she’d said, but for how little she had spoken. He would have noticed her preference for dark colours, how neatly her apron was patched, and assume that she would look after his interests well. And after enquiries were made about the man’s family, within a week or two, they’d be married and sharing a bed. And then what? She didn’t exactly know, as she had neither mother nor older married sister to tell her, but when she pondered over it, the sweet clear pain came in waves.

  “What is the church of God?” Irma asked, looking up from the catechism book to peer at Katya overtop her rimless glasses. She had come to Katya’s room later that evening to drill her in the questions she would need to answer to be baptised. If you like, we can do it, Irma said. And although they usually did not study on Sunday, Katya invited Irma to stay, her intuition telling her that there was another reason for her visit.

  “Those who believe in Jesus Christ,” she replied.

  “Who are to be baptised?”

  “Those who believe in him.”

  “What should the believer’s conduct in his daily walk and life be?”

  “We should love one another.”

  “Our enemies also?” Irma asked.

  When Katya’s grandmother had gone to attend to Pravda’s ulcerated stump that night, she had been show
ing love for the enemy. Katya knew she wouldn’t be able to do the same; that instead she waited for news of the man’s death.

  “There is no reason for you to worry. You know the answers,” Irma said and closed the catechism book, not realizing – or choosing to ignore – that Katya hadn’t responded to the last question.

  Yes, she knew the answers. But if she stood before the congregation and said that she would bless and do good to those who hated her, she would become one of those hypocrites Kornelius had referred to.

  “You weren’t … you didn’t like the little story I told this afternoon? Am I right?” Irma asked.

  When Katya didn’t reply, Irma tapped her knee with the book and said, “Maybe you didn’t find it funny because you didn’t understand.”

  Katya confessed she hadn’t understood entirely.

  “But you were honest enough not to pretend that you had,” Irma said. “Look here. I’m going to show you something.”

  She put the book on the table and made a fist of her large hand and set it on her knee. Then she spread open two fingers. “These are a woman’s legs.”

  Then she extended the index finger of her other hand. “This is what a man has between his legs,” she said, and wiggled it.

  Yes, his stick, Katya thought, and suppressed a smile. Her little brothers, pointing their sticks at the pee-pot.

  Then Irma slid her index finger between the spread fingers. “He moves it around inside the woman, and by and by, honey comes out of it. The honey stays inside the woman. The honey mixes with seeds you carry, here,” she said, and poked Katya in the abdomen.

  “And that’s how children are made. So you see, if the woman had gone and joined her man to sleep in the barn, well, it still would have happened. It takes two people to make a baby,” she said. “A man and a woman. His honey, her seeds.”

  For shame, Katya thought, and felt herself blushing. So then, in spite of love and tender feelings, it was just like horses, like pigs, goats. She’d always been told, we’re not animals.

  “Sometimes he groans and moans, and sometimes he says, ‘I love you.’ But usually he’s too busy to think. While the woman? The woman says, Come on in. And along the way some of us begin to want to do it as much as he does,” Irma said, as she got up. “Even though it could mean having another child, and the woman is already worn out from child-bearing. That’s what the real joke was. The woman was playing with the doctor at being simple. She didn’t want to stop sleeping with her husband.”

  Kornelius, putting himself inside her. The heat of her face had spread throughout her body and her stomach tingled with it. For shame, she had thought, but at the same time, the idea of it gave her pleasure. If she got up to see Irma to the door she would betray herself, the sudden dampness at her underarms, its pungent odour.

  “Don’t be afraid to ask,” Irma said as she left the room.

  Katya stood at the window looking out and saw that Sara was coming down the street. With her wind-burned cheeks, and darkening hair, she was beginning to resemble Greta. She noticed the buttons on her sister’s dress were strained, that her breasts were forming. At twelve, she thought in amazement and fear, and wondered about the rusty-looking spots she had come across in their bed linen now and again, when it hadn’t been her time for it. The time would come too soon when she would need to explain to Sara. The street and yards were sprinkled with the petals of apple and cherry blossoms; ridges of what looked like pink snow had gathered against the edges of sidewalks, and in the fenced corners of freshly tilled gardens. She remembered a time when she was acutely aware of nature unfolding around her, its daily drama played out in the changing sky, the air in the garden hanging with mist, shimmering with heat. She remembered the acacia trees in bloom at Privol’noye, how the roof would be covered with their petals; a wind carrying a curtain of white rain across the steppes, as far away as Lubitskoye.

  She’d been Sara’s age when she’d written: “His Majesty King Winter is upon us and has covered the world outside my little attic window in a cloak of ermine. Soft as fur from a distance, light as feathers when I walk through it, and if I should ever see a diamond, the stone would not shine as brightly as the diamonds found in deep winter snow. The jewels King Winter sometimes sprinkles onto the earth to make up for the cruel cold. Cruel winter cold, Lydia used to say when it was winter. Cruel heat, she said in the summer. Cruel weather that, when I sometimes run between the Big House and home, makes my chest hurt from the cold, my feet burn with its heat.”

  She ran her finger across Lydia’s name now as if to draw her essence from the ink. She remembered Lydia at Justina’s wedding, a mauve taper set on a tapestry of grass beside the west garden wall. Lydia in a dress the colour of lilacs. Lydia standing at a piano one grey morning with feathers drifting in the air around her. What are you making, Lydia? What are you making with your life, Katya wondered. Then she wrote:

  APRIL 1921 FAMINE FARE

  Given to me by Irma.

  When mixing bread, substitute half the flour for clay. Use beet water, skins, and the leftover grounds from prips if you have it. Milled thistle seed can also be used in place of some of the flour.

  Liese P. is a headache to do without.

  Tomorrow I will plant some beans and potatoes.

  Still no rain.

  he following morning Katya went along the broad main street of Arbusovka, thinking that the sudden absence of bloom on the fruit trees made it seem as though spring had taken a step backwards. Sara pulled the wagon, and Njuta rode inside it, cuddling Sara’s doll, which had become her doll now, against her neck. They would go out to Willy Krahn’s land, a strip of earth he’d ploughed in autumn and allocated for his boarders’ use, should they have anything to plant come spring. The wagon wheels ground against stones and cinders, setting her teeth on edge. A solemn young boy sat on a step, his watchful eyes made large by the gauntness of his face. He was hungry, she knew by his stillness, from the way his attention remained fixed on the wagon, and the bowl Njuta cradled between her legs. As they passed by the gate, he got up abruptly and went into the house without greeting them, the door closing behind him with a decisive clap.

  In the street beyond she saw women gathered in the yard of the village store, Liese Peters among them. They all looked to be the same age. They were all old, she thought, even though she had discovered Liese was not much older than she was. Hunger had turned the women into babushka gossips. Their pinched and suspicious-looking pusses were set off by the dark headscarves they constantly wore because they were chilled from lack of food, because they didn’t have the energy to fix their hair. She hadn’t looked in her mother’s hand mirror lately, or she would have known that her hair had thinned, too. Her skin was dry, and she had the same lines puckering her mouth.

  “Where are you going?” a woman called out from the store yard. All the women, their expressions careful, swivelled their heads to watch Katya and her sisters approach.

  “We’re going to plant beans and potatoes,” Sara called out. Then Njuta held up the doll. “Look. My baby has a new dress,” she said, a declaration from a child who had learned to trust that the women around her were always benevolent, and interested in her world.

  Katya was aware that Liese had come over to the gate with another woman, both of them craning their necks to peer into the bowl between Njuta’s legs that held chunks of seed potatoes, and beans swollen from an overnight soaking.

  “You won’t get much from that, even if it should rain,” the woman with Liese said.

  “One can always hope,” Katya said, knowing that the woman was suggesting she would be better served eating the seed potatoes and beans than sticking them in the parched earth.

  “Ja, ja. We can hope for snow in July too,” the woman said. There was a craftiness in her, a sharpness that said she was looking out for herself.

  “Look here, Njuta, why don’t you show me your dolly’s new dress,” Liese Peters said. She had come out of the gate and was marching towa
rds the wagon, and for a moment Katya thought she meant to snatch the bowl from between Njuta’s legs. That like the young boy, the sarcastic woman, she coveted the potatoes and beans, and wasn’t really interested in the doll.

  She was aware from Sara’s expression that something was wrong, even before Liese had taken the doll from Njuta, flipped it over, and pointed triumphantly to a safety pin fastening the dress closed at the back.

  “Well, well,” Liese said and expelled her breath as though she had been holding it for a long time. She unfastened the pin, and dropped the doll into Njuta’s outstretched hands. Her hands shook as she added the safety pin to her necklace, and then turned her angry gaze on Sara. “I had a feeling it was you.

  “What will you do about this?” Liese asked, turning her attention from Sara to Katya.

  “We didn’t have any hooks. Or a spare button,” Sara said.

  “That’s neither here nor there,” Katya said, speaking what was expected of her, while her heart remained detached. “You must apologize.” She was aware that the women standing in the yard had come to the gate to watch.

  “I’m sorry,” Sara said.

  Which was a lie, Katya knew from Sara’s defiant pout, but she was relieved to hear it.

  “People who steal should be punished,” Liese called after them as they went down the street.

  For borrowing a safety pin, she should punish a child for that? For throwing a cup into a butter well? She had turned back without thinking, she was striding towards the woman, going faster and faster, her breath rising, her arms swinging and body pulsing with heat. She had been punished with a neverending silence; with a void every time she had asked for a voice; had turned back to a room expecting to find her mother at the table, a brother going out a door. She had been punished with memories that came unbidden, such as a time spent sponging and ironing her brothers’ trousers when they’d come back from Ox Lake, the heat and damp cloth releasing the mushroom scent of Gerhard; Johann, a wet-animal smell; Peter, the earth after a lightning storm; Daniel. Daniel still too young for wandering, and attached to the immediate yard, and his mother’s skirts. All of them having the smell of motion, arms and legs churning through a day, the heat of ideas and plans. She’d been told she had been fortunate to have been spared images that would stay with her forever, but her imagination was hers forever, and it gave her pictures that snatched away her breath.