The Russlander

by Sandra Birdsell

  your sister, Lydia.

  Katya’s eyes swam with tears. She looked back at the town. What fences remained were grey from lack of paint, but sunlight glinted in all the windows, and the slate roof tiles held a sheen.

  “Devil,” Kornelius suddenly exclaimed, and Katya heard a soft thud as the cart lurched to a stop. She saw that the horse had stumbled and fallen to its knees. Kornelius jumped down from the cart and, gripping Katya around the waist, lifted her to the ground. He went over to the animal and stood for a moment looking at it, then whistled softly. A gust of wind swept over the crest of the hill, raining particles of dirt against the cart, against Katya’s body.

  He looked at her, a wry grin twisting his features as he straightened. “Well, well. This is bound to entertain people for years to come.” He laughed ruefully and pushed his cap to the back of his head. “Bull-Headed’s horse struck dead while taking him and his bride to their wedding. Can’t you just hear what will be made of this?” Then he pushed at the animal with his foot, toppling it onto its side. “She’s lasted longer than I ever thought she would. The horse was tired out, underfed; old age finally got her,” he said as he began to free the animal from its traces.

  Yes. Exhaustion, old age, she thought. The horse has died of those things, just as he said. But why now? Just then, a boy appeared at the crest of the hill, coming at a run, and then slowing to a walk when he saw the horse lying on its side in the middle of the road. He stood for a moment, his inquisitive eyes fixing on the animal, and then on them, and back again to the horse.

  Kornelius returned to her side, and they watched the child scoot past them and down the grade of the hill, arms pumping and feet raising puffs of dust in the powdery earth. Kornelius took out his pocket watch. “I wonder how long it’s going to take.” She began to shake as he put his hands on the small of her back and drew her to him.

  She let herself go, sank into his lean, hard body, her breasts flattening against his chest, felt his heat and smelled the sun, the wool in his jacket, a clean smell, she thought, while the hot wind buffeted them, and her skirt fluttered about the calves of his legs.

  The boy had now reached the first of the houses in town, and she saw him stop briefly in front of a gate before continuing on. A man emerged from the yard and stood with his legs astride as he looked up in their direction. He quickly returned to the yard and went into the house. Moments later he reappeared, a woman with him.

  Again, Kornelius glanced at his watch. “Maybe three minutes, if that,” he said, and tucked the watch back into the breast pocket of his jacket.

  Several other people came from a neighbouring house, and then a woman with a child in hand from a house across from it. The young boy had now begun to shout as he went through the town, a high voice calling out, and then its faint echo came from the other side of the valley, a valley made so much greener by distance, by the quavering waves of heat. The rose bushes spreading across the far slope, the clutch of houses sheltered by the leafy crowns of trees, were already being translated into the green paradise of future memories.

  People were hurrying down Main Street now, one passing another, and being overtaken again. As though a signal had been given, they began to run all at the same time, up the hill, the women coming first, and then their more energetic children breaking free and passing them. The men soon fell behind, several of them stumbling along the way; the stiff-legged gait of others was proof that when there was not enough food, they chose to go without. As the townspeople drew near, she could hear their panting, see that they had brought basins with them, and gunny sacks. One of the women she had been working with in the gardens carried a hacksaw. They came to a stop, a crowd of nearly twenty people, she guessed as they spread out in a single line, while still others were mounting the hill behind them. They stared at the horse lying on the road, its legs bent at the knees, wind riffling through its dusty mane.

  Kornelius released her and stepped between the crowd of people and the animal, crossing his arms over his chest. Everyone grew quiet and wary. A moment passed, and then one of the women made a move towards the horse, stopping suddenly when a woman raised her hand.

  “See here. Don’t you think it’s only right that the bride and groom should have the first choice of meat? Yes?” she said, when the other woman didn’t answer.

  “Ja, that’s so. That’s the way it usually goes,” another woman replied. “The bride and groom are served first,” she said, and handed Kornelius the butcher knife she was carrying.

  The woman who had first spoken smiled shyly at Katya. “Ja, ja, at the wedding the bride comes first, but not afterwards,” she said with a gaunt smile, and offered Kornelius the hacksaw. The women around her smiled faintly, and looked at one another, nodding in agreement, yes, that’s the way it was in life. Forever after, the men and children would come first.

  Kornelius looked at Katya and then back at the horse. Meat, she thought. The last time her grandparents and sisters had eaten meat was when he’d brought the hedgehog. Her mouth filled with saliva. She nodded and he went over to the horse, dropped to his haunches and began slicing into its front quarter. Moments later Katya heard the saw cutting through bone. Soon after, he walked towards her holding a chunk of meat away from his body, blood dripping from it onto the earth, and trickling across the bed of the cart as he set it down.

  Katya stood mesmerized as the crowd surged forward all at once, obliterating the animal from view. They began cutting it into pieces, their voices rising in excitement, a man advising on how best to free the entrails, what might be made of the animal’s hide. And there, wedged in among them, was a woman in faded black, her tattered shawl framing an angular face the colour of an old pearl. Katya saw the look of starvation in her face, the skin stretched tautly across her cheekbones, the terrible concentration that seemed to make her oblivious to those around her. Turned inward by the slow cold burning of her insides. Vera, she thought. This is Vera. Her breath rose, grew quick and shallow. How did you know the cup was in the butter well? she thought.

  “Vera,” she said.

  The woman’s eyes met Katya’s, briefly.

  “Vera,” Katya said, once again, and the woman’s grey eyebrows arched in a question. Njuta. How did Njuta come to be in Abram’s office? The woman stood up, holding a leg bone, her hands slick with blood. Strands of hair the colour of iron had escaped her headscarf and were trailing across her forehead. She was mistaken, this old woman couldn’t be Vera, Katya told herself, and felt Kornelius’s presence at her side, his arm slip around her waist.

  The woman turned, and with her spine stiff, she walked down the hill as slowly as the incline would allow her to go. Haulftän, Katya thought. Grudge-bearer. Walking as though she carried a chip on her shoulder. Katya’s legs began to tremble as she watched the woman descend the hill, as the woman became a small dark figure, and then, smaller still. She reached the first of the houses in the town below, came near to a hedge, and then, one, two, and three, she was out of sight forever.

  hen she had finished speaking her story into the tape machine, she felt as though she had been talking all day, when really Ernest Unger had been present for no more than two hours. He had photographs he’d taken on a recent trip to Ukraine, and began spreading them now across the hassock in front of her: the Schroeder house, a house that had been built in the design of the canal builders’ houses in the Vistula Delta. Although the picture had been taken nearly eighty years after she left Russia, the house looked the same. The Teachers’ Seminary had gained a statue of Lenin, his arm raised, and a finger indicating eleven o’clock, Ernest Unger said. Lenin was pointing out the time when the liquor stores would open for the day, his guide had dared to joke. The seminary itself had been divided into small rooms to house a kindergarten and nursery.

  Chortitza and Rosenthal had remained intact, he told her, just as many other of their villages remained whole all over Ukraine, the names of them changed first to Russian names, and then Ukrainian. The surviving
schools, houses, the factories had become monuments for the relatives of the original owners to visit on yearly pilgrimages, to make gravestone rubbings, uncover the name of a Mennonite brick maker on a doorstep. They came to pay homage to the stories their grandparents and parents had told them, and to refurbish the operating room in the Chortitza hospital with more modern equipment. In another village Mennonites had rebuilt an Orthodox church which had lapsed into ruin. They brought suitcases filled with antibiotics and aspirin, clothing, hard currency, and forgiveness.

  Ernest Unger had seen the tourists disembark from the tour bus at a field of sunflowers and go in search of the foundations of houses, the site of a well they’d been told about, others content just to stand beside the road in silence. They fixed such importance on the smallest of things, he said, a ladder nailed over a doorway of a falling-down barn, fall of meaning for a man who had once used it to climb up into the loft. The Mennonite tour had taken them near to the mighty Dneproges dam, and out in boats on the Dnieper to drift for moments over the place where the village of Einlage had been, submerged now since the building of the dam. Looking down through the water, they could see the roof of the church, a wavering dark behemoth, and what appeared to be a row of spires, but which were tree trunks marking out where the streets had been. Below the spires were rectangular shapes, the walls of houses, broken shells where water plants now grew from the river silt, a refuge for fish.

  “Completely covered over, flooded,” he said, and made a cutting motion with his hands. “Gone.”

  “Yes, I heard that,” she said.

  Flooded, but not drowned, she thought suddenly. Across the room in a bureau drawer was a chocolate box, and Lydia’s note inside it, along with a packet of letters tied with the frayed ribbon Lydia had used to fasten her wedding-gift parcel. And neither can the floods quench it, Katya thought, and saw herself floating on the river, looking into the depths. What she saw was her family lying there. They were all in a row in their wooden coffins, their heads bound, as though they were wearing turbans. Their throats banded too with the soft white cotton, because of injury. They looked tucked in, safe, she thought.

  In the drawer there was a photograph of her parents, Katya a babe in her father’s arms. A plump doughy child who had once gone to and fro, believing that she was strong enough to blow the world down. There was also a cluster of ceramic violets, a brooch Kornelius had given to her on the birth of their first child. By the grace of God, she and Kornelius had raised seven good children, and they, their own children, who were now raising their own. At the last count, seventy-three people had come from her and Kornelius’s union, healthy people, and no accidents or heartbreak had yet to touch them.

  “Yes, and so it goes,” she said.

  And then she told him that when their journey ended in Manitoba she was amazed at how similar the countryside was to the steppe. She had written this in a letter to Lydia, hoping to change her mind, hoping that while it was still possible, she would come to Canada. But this was not to be. What did Canada have to offer her, Lydia had asked, except pity, and she, like many Mennonite young women, like Sara, would likely end up working as a servant for a wealthy family until she had paid for her passage. At least she was doing some good where she was, caring for the orphans. Her letters grew less frequent as the years passed, and ceased altogether during the Second World War. Katya had heard a story that she had been among the Mennonites who fled with the German army at the end of the war, but had been captured and returned to Russia. She’d been exiled to Siberia where, during a particularly hard winter, she had died of starvation. Others said they’d heard that she had eventually married a Russian, and that her children were all Communists. Katya preferred to believe that Lydia did have children and grandchildren, even if they were Communist, because they, too, were God’s children, whether or not they wanted to be taken as such.

  “Close to our destination the train came to a stop to take on water,” she said, “and Kornelius and I got off to stretch our legs. A farming village lay far beyond, a settlement of about ten houses or so and, like us, the people there were mostly Mennonites, the conductor told us. Living there was our man, a man named Harder who had agreed to take us in for a year. The conductor said we should stay on the train until the next stop, which was a large town; it was more than likely Harder would be waiting for us there. Kornelius said he wanted to feel the land under his feet, and so my grandparents and sisters remained on the train while we began to walk. The sound of the wind in the grass was so loud that I had to shout to make myself heard.”

  As she was likely shouting now, even though, to her own ears, her voice seemed to come from a great distance. Which was to be expected, at her age, that her hearing would go, and eyesight dim. But not her mind, oh no, not yet, she still had all of her mind, and she could imagine herself now, swimming through the grass towards her new life, through the sound of the wind driving waves to a far-away shore. She was the wind, and she was the vibrating drone of insects. Like the gold face her father had once cupped in his hand and returned to the earth, she, too, was about to disappear into the past. But one day, someone will come. Someone will stop to take a pebble from a horse’s shoe, and discover her burial mound, her name, Katherine Vogt Heinrichs. Her name chiselled in a stone. Her gravestone will become a Baba stone, her features defined by shadows cast by the sun.

  The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of The Canada Council, The Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Regina Public Library, and McMaster University, during the writing of this work.

  The epigraph from “Requiem: Epigraph” on this page is taken from Poems of Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Reprinted by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agency, New York.

  Sandra Birdsell was born in Manitoba and, until recently, has spent most of her life in Winnipeg. Her first novel, The Missing Child (1989), won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, The Chrome Suite (1992), and her most recent collection of short fiction, The Two-Headed Calf (1997), were both shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Her two previous short story collections, Night Travellers and Ladies of the House, were reissued in 1987 as Agassiz Stories. Her most recent novel, The Russländer (2001), won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Book of the Year, and the Regina Book Award, and was a finalist for The Giller Prize.

  Sandra Birdsell’s fiction has been anthologized and has appeared in literary journals and Saturday Night magazine.

  She lives in Regina.