The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  Nela Siemens and her mother had joined them for supper, the latter bringing an unsweetened rhubarb mooss, her grandmother dividing half a loaf of bread among them, black unsalted bread made with more clay powder than flour, and which stuck to Katya’s teeth and the roof of her mouth. She had been relieved at the appearance of Nela, whose soft heart had somehow remained soft, and seemed reinforced with a determination that was surprising.

  She had gone with Nela to the room across the hall where the school boarders had once stayed. Its windows were now covered with sacking and the walls hung with horse blankets and carpet to keep out the cold. She wanted to show her the clothes she was making, various items of baby apparel, which, Nela said, she had cut from old garments, and planned to sell at the market in Alexandrovsk. Clothing hung from lines strung across one end of the room.

  “And these? You’re not using this?” Katya said, tugging at a shirt which seemed like new. She thought of the man she had come upon, reduced to wearing his dead wife’s underslip.

  “No, no. That belongs to Dietrich,” Nela said.

  The damp blouses, pillow casings, towels and various pieces of undergarments and nightdresses pinned to the lines belonged to Dietrich Sudermann, his wife, and his sisters. It was their laundry, which Nela had scrubbed only that morning, she explained. She had taken on the chore of doing their wash and cleaning their house, she said. As though the house had always belonged to the Sudermanns, and not the Schroeders.

  “They’re not used to that kind of work. And I don’t mind doing what I can. A piece of ham now and then makes a lot of soup,” Nela had said when she saw Katya’s reaction.

  “So are the Sudermanns paying you rent for the house?” Katya asked her grandparents now. Her grandmother’s face disappeared into the darkness as she turned away from the light, while her grandfather looked down at his hands, folded across his stomach.

  “Ja ja. At first they did,” he said. “But now all their money is gone.”

  “Justina’s man is being kept in prison in Sevastopol. Their money went towards bribing the officials to keep him alive,” her grandmother said.

  “And Dietrich’s child isn’t well, either,” her grandfather added. “I suppose they have their own kind of troubles.”

  Some things remained the same, Katya thought. Dietrich and his sisters living in her grandparents’ house, and although their wealth was gone they were still exalted, so much so that people were expected, and willing, to give way to them.

  She stood and carried the pracher across the room to the cupboard. She lifted the light and saw a coat that had once been hers, and that would now fit Sara. Instinctively, she dug into the pocket’s flannel pouch, half expecting her hand would meet a soft, balled piece of sheepskin. The memory of it made her smile and want to weep. She went through the other clothing hanging there for something she could fashion into a child’s trousers, a tunic, a nightshirt, or a baby’s dress she might trim with a bit of old lace and embroidery, but there was little in the cupboard to choose from. She touched Greta’s baptism dress, and then lifted it from the cupboard and held the light up to it. The dress was yellowing but unstained; the satin ribbons and rosettes were still intact. Then she decided. She would cut it apart, wash the pieces and iron them, make two, perhaps three infant dresses and sell them at the thieves’ market.

  “Nanu, you haven’t said about yourself and Bull-Headed Heinrichs,” her grandmother said.

  Katya had known from her grandmother’s studying looks all evening that she had wanted to ask this question. She used the darkness now, the opportunity of Sara and Njuta being asleep, to at last speak it.

  Katya crossed the room, thinking of the sack of sugar Kornelius had given to Irma to sell, regretting that she hadn’t brought them something, a loaf of Irma’s famine-fare bread. As she set the pracher on the table, her grandparents’ faces emerged from the gloom, their eyes reflecting the flicker of amber light.

  “So you’ve heard, then, that Kornelius Heinrichs still wants to marry me,” she said moments later.

  “Ja, we heard,” her grandfather said. Then he smiled and shook his head in wonder. “Imagine, love in these times.”

  Yes, imagine. Love, she thought. If this ache to hear his voice was love, then, yes, she had come to love Kornelius.

  Her grandmother’s features had grown pinched and stern. “Yes, we heard, but I thought likely it was just gossip. Katya, you know that no minister would agree to marry you and Bull-Headed,” she said.

  “Kornelius,” Katya said.

  “And you know very well what your parents would have said about this,” her grandmother added with a note of finality.

  Her parents. She had come to think of them as stones worn smooth by the elements. Stones polished by a flow of water. She accepted that they had been where they were supposed to be in life, in a stream whose water had flowed over, around, and under them, and swept them away. There, at Privol’noye where her father had worked as an overseer on the Sudermann estate during a time of contentment. When a house cat could sleep for hours undisturbed in a bureau drawer.

  “Yes.” She knew what they would say, but while they had taught her who she was and what she’d been born into, they had also led her to expect that they would always be near to answer for her.

  The next morning her grandmother brought out what remained of the loaf of bread and tore it into three pieces. She set the chunks of bread on plates and slid the plates across the table in front of them. Then she turned away from the questions forming in Sara’s and Njuta’s eyes.

  “Eat it slowly,” Katya told her sisters, believing that her grandmother would open the shutters and let the sunlight warm the room, but she went over to the bed where Katya’s grandfather lay facing the wall and, fully clothed, climbed in beside him. Going back to bed to conserve energy. Because hunger made her cold, constantly.

  Katya’s sisters had already devoured their bread, and now they looked at her as though expecting there would be something more. She divided her portion in half and gave it to them. Somehow, from somewhere, she would need to find more, or the money to buy it. She left the room and went out into the hall without knowing what she would do, and seeing that the door to the other room was open, she stepped into it.

  Her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, and the clothing hanging from two lines at the far end of the room emerged like ghostly apparitions. Nela had worn her knuckles raw scrubbing for the Sudermanns and counted herself fortunate to be rewarded with a piece of ham for soup. Well, she, Katya, couldn’t wait for such rewards. She strode across the room and yanked a shirt from the line, an underslip pinned beside it, and then a pillow casing, a towel. She went down one line and up the other one, wooden pegs flying across the floor as she tore free a nightshirt, a blouse, piece after piece of clothing. Clothing which she took with her back to her grandparents’ room.

  When she opened the shutters, sunlight streamed across the floor on which she had spread the apparel. Her sisters looked on in amazement as she carefully cut the clothing into pieces, her grandmother pacing and wringing her hands, no doubt expecting that at any moment lightning would strike the chimney, the roof would come crashing down.

  The next day, she stood beside the table in the family room of what had been her grandparents’ house while Dietrich paced back and forth, his brow furrowed. She had been summoned by Justina to explain her action, and she had done so, strengthened by Lydia’s absence, believing that she hadn’t wanted to be part of her family’s tribunal. For a long moment there was a silence, during which she observed Justina sitting at the table, staring at the scraps of material scattered across it. Dietrich went over to a bookshelf and ran his hand along it as though feeling the grain of its wood, or inspecting it for dust. Dietrich the Dust Inspector, she thought. The Dietrich she had known was almost unrecognizable behind an affected, officious manner of speaking, his shoulders squared and his back straight.

  When her eyes met Justina’s, she was surprised to se
e her look away.

  “We understand. Of course you want to help your grandparents,” Justina said, the unspoken word however reverberating in the air between them.

  She thought of how Justina had become so much like Aganetha. She had inherited her mother’s manner of plucking at her skirt, her way of speaking, and she had inherited her mother’s girth too, a body that had begun to rise around its frame of bones. Justina hadn’t been blessed with children, and so there was no accounting for the flesh welling up around the wide gold band on her finger, the swelling of her stomach and hips.

  “Everyone is in the same position. What if we all resorted to such means?” Barbara said as she bustled into the room.

  They were waiting for her to apologize. To say that she realized the error of her act. From the summer room came the loud ticking of a wall clock – her grandparents’? she wondered. The summer room, which offered its view of Main Street, Rosenthal, and the changing world beyond. Where she had seen children caught in the orchard by Ohm Siemens just as they were about to help themselves to his pears, and then were made to stand in a row and recite a poem while Ohm clapped out the beat of their choral presentation. Students going to and from school, their navy wool capes undone, the crimson lining flashing as the young women bounded down the steps and over to the gate. And she had seen the podvodchiki going to the train station, their wagons stacked with cannons and shell casings, which had been tooled in the factory of a pacifist. Teams of horses arriving from Jakob Sudermann’s factory in Einlage, drawing a chain of wagons to be shipped for use at the front.

  She would not apologize. That the first would be last and the last first in the kingdom of heaven seemed a hollow promise when her grandparents had to stay in bed to conserve energy because they were starving.

  “Katherine, you’re not alone. There are many like you and your grandparents,” Dietrich said, speaking softly, as though what he wanted to say was meant for her ears only. “Somehow the money to emigrate will be found. Already in the United States, and Canada too, our people are responding. We won’t be left behind. If need be,” he added, chin lifted, voice raised, “I will put your names on our applications.”

  She heard Barbara’s sharp intake of breath, saw the quick glance she sent to Justina. Justina went over to Dietrich and put her hand on his arm. He turned away from her questioning gaze. “Papa would have done the same,” he muttered. And Katya, seeing this, wondered if it would really come to pass, or if Dietrich would, once again, go against his heart and do what he was told to do. The three of them now looked at her.

  They had expected her to apologize, and she hadn’t. Now they anticipated gratefulness, tears of joy, perhaps. Justina might be moved by such a display, Barbara gratified. Canada, a word on a map, a place to escape to, providing her grandparents would be able to sell their house and what furniture hadn’t already been sold. She didn’t know anything at the time about Canada except the little she had learned from the letters her grandparents received from distant relatives in Manitoba. Letters complaining about too much or too little rain, about infestations of grasshoppers, about their children being forced to learn English in school.

  Their attention was drawn towards the window at the sound of hoofbeats. The appearance of a horse in those days was infrequent, and worthy of notice. She heard the rattling of wooden planks, the grind of ironed-banded wheels against the road, and then she saw Kornelius. He’s changed, she thought. His hair is shorter. Kornelius stood up before the horse had stopped moving. There goes an uncomplicated man, David Sudermann had said. Someone who says there is no God, and so there isn’t one. Her father’s question – Is that what he says, or is that what people say about him? – had gone unanswered.

  Then the horse came to a halt, and Kornelius leapt down from the cart and strode up to the gate. Kornelius, bringing a gift, she would discover – a hedgehog that he had snared on the way and skinned – and the joyous news that Irma’s prayers had been answered: Willy Krahn had been set free.

  Each day, throughout the spring, she thought she saw Kornelius in every man who came walking down the street. Remembered the moment in the orchard when she had said yes, she would marry him. Then closed her eyes and accepted his kiss. He then told her of his desire to go to Canada, that he would take her there, take her sisters and grandparents too, if they wished to go. Her grandmother’s opposition had been dampened by his generosity, and she now remained silent whenever Katya mentioned his name. Her grandfather had placed his hand on Katya’s head, saying that, above all, he knew Kornelius to be an honest man, and gave her his blessing.

  The next time Kornelius returned to Rosenthal, it was in the heat of the dry summer that followed, land turned as hard as stone from the lack of rain, and from the sucking thirst of hot winds. She had expected him, as he had sent a message with Willy Krahn: A Lutheran minister in a village near to Arbusovka had agreed to marry them, and he would come for her within a week. When Willy delivered the message, and a small sack of rye flour, his happiness for her and Kornelius was evident in his beaming, round face. Sara and Njuta looked on solemnly, their eyes moving from Katya to their grandmother, who, upon hearing the news, shook her head.

  Katya listened for Kornelius’s arrival in the middle of the night, heard the constant swish of wind in the trees along the street, her eyes itching with dryness as she stared into the darkness, mouth dry too, its skin chapped and rough. When she put her hand against her lips, she thought, this is what he felt with his mouth when he kissed me, and she couldn’t tell whether her lips or fingertips were tingling. The sensation passed between them, and then she was feeling it in her breasts, and then there. Stop, she told herself, you will soon know. And although Kornelius wouldn’t come for her during the night, she imagined she heard the faint rumble of wheels against the earth, but it proved to be a distant roll of thunder as, once again, rain clouds skirted around the valley and emptied far out on the scorched steppe.

  During the week, while she waited, she believed that the women watched her as she went past their houses, believed that they, too, were holding their breath and waiting. Nela, perhaps, had spoken for them when she had said, At last, Katya. At last some happiness, yes? I wish you and Kornelius all of God’s best.

  When Kornelius came for her it was in his cart, pulled by his worn-out horse, and not in the old custom, with a team of matched horses, the groom wearing black serge and a white shirt, a passenger in his own flower-garlanded federwoage. The way he had likely come calling for his first wife on their wedding day. Her Kornelius wore the only clothes he had, a twill jacket and patched trousers, and with a belief that their union had been ordained.

  When he arrived, Katya was in the community garden with other women. They had gone there to weed and irrigate what vegetables had managed to survive. She was washing dust from her ankles in the Kanserovka Creek, which, now, in the heat of summer, was just a narrow ribbon of water. He brought his horse to a stop, stood up and shielded his eyes against the sun as he tried to find her among the women, who had by now gone silent.

  Kornelius waited for her beside the cart as she struggled to slip her wet feet into her shoes, not taking the time to tie the laces, the soles of her feet squeaking inside the shoes as she hurried to meet him. When she approached, he held out a package tied with a frayed red ribbon.

  “Lydia Sudermann said I should give this to you,” he said in answer to her questioning look. Lydia had seen him coming down the street and hailed him over. “She said she’d been saving this to give to you herself.” Then she had asked him to wait and went back into the house. Nela Siemens had come over to her gate and told him where he would find Katya, and before Lydia had returned with the parcel, Sara and Njuta appeared from the back of the Siemenses’ yard and told him the same thing. “It must be hard to get lost here,” he said, with a sharp bit of laughter. “Big eyes, your sisters,” he said. “Both of them.”

  The parcel was light and soft, and the paper crackled as Kornelius helped her cl
imb up into the cart. He then stood for a moment, the muscles in his face working. “For sure, your sisters would like to come with us,” he said. “And you would like that too, yes?”

  But it wasn’t possible, she knew. The distance they needed to go meant that they would have to stay overnight with the Lutheran pastor and his family before returning the following day. Her sisters would soon have her back, as she and Kornelius had agreed she would remain in Rosenthal and he in Arbusovka after they married, until the time came for them to leave Russia.

  They went away from the community gardens, towards the outskirts of the town, where the road wound up the hill to the ridge of the plateau and beyond. Katya felt as if the women in the garden were still watching, felt the heat of Kornelius’s thigh against her own. I don’t know him, she thought, and she never would come to know him, not unless they began to talk. They had barely passed more than a few sentences between them. Sitting by his side, she grew tense, daring to glance at him only now and then, and at the horse, its mangy tail switching flies from its hindquarters. She looked down at the parcel on her lap, at the knot of the ribbon bow, then pulled it loose. The brown paper began to unfold and she spread it open. Lydia had given her a green cashmere dress, to be married in, she supposed. Tucked into its bodice were a pair of silk stockings, along with a note, which she opened and quickly read.

  Dear Katya,

  I found this verse in the Song of Solomon, and I thought it could fit any occasion, and especially yours today.

  “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”

  Love prevails, yes? And it can never be taken from us. We have that promise.

  In the name of our Father who has saved us, and keeps us strong,