The Russlander (11 page)

They passed a lone man, a watchman going along a sidewalk shaking a rattle, and he tipped his hat to them as they went by. Lanterns hanging from lampposts were welcoming circles of light illuminating the
volost
building, a store, a pharmacy. She was relieved when at last she saw a light glowing in a window and knew it was her grandparents' house. As they came to a stop in front of the gate,
her oma Schroeder came running from the house and down the steps in her slippers.

“Where's that girl of mine?” her grandmother called, and a dog in a neighbouring yard began to bark.

Oma gathered their mother and baby Daniel in an embrace, then took Daniel and unwrapped him there in the street, anxious to see how much he'd grown since she'd come to attend his birth in winter. When Daniel awoke with a shiver and smiled, Oma shouted to a woman across the street who had come out to watch. “Look at this one. This one is just like Kornie's Wilhelm's Jasch. Kornie's Wilhelm's Jasch would give you such a smile even when he was wet and hungry,” her grandmother said.

They had all come to Rosenthal to fetch Greta at the end of the school year, as Lydia was not returning home but going off on holiday to the Azov Sea, and Greta was not allowed to travel alone. Abram had lent them the use of a
federwoage
, and its cushioned seats and strong springs made the trip seem shorter than usual.

“Welcome, welcome,” her grandfather sang out as he came through the garden. When Katya embraced him she felt his fingers press a coin into her palm. Greta came from the house behind him, anxious for a greeting, and when Katya hugged her, she realized her sister had grown. Gerhard, eager to prove his strength, rushed between the house and the carriage, carrying several bundles at once. He would have carried his sister Sara too, but for their uncle Bernhard, who came from his house at the back of their grandparents' yard and scooped Sara from his arms.

Within moments they were drinking tea and crunching
roll-kuchen
dripping with watermelon syrup, her grandmother hovering over the table refilling empty glasses, touching Katya's shoulder, Gerhard's head, in passing. Their grandfather's eyes went from one to another while he plied her father for news, how much land had he seeded, how many lambs and calves had been dropped this spring.
Greta came with towels and a large bucket of water; she wanted to wash Katya's and Gerhard's feet, as she had already done for Sara and her little brothers, who were now tucked in bed. Katya stood in the bucket up to her shins in soapy water, her feet warmed instantly, this nightly ritual of foot cleansing always making her feel that the day had been a good one, making her suddenly need to pee.

That night she lay awake between Sara and Greta, the excitement of having arrived still too strong to allow sleep. Her father, Uncle Bernhard, and her grandfather talked in the parlour over the heavy ticking of a Kroeger clock. She felt watched over by the portraits of Schroeder ancestors, men whose images were set in matching oval frames which hung on a wall beside the bed.

The portrait nearest to the door was the oldest, a painting of Wilhelm Schroeder, whose ancestors had suffered persecution in the seventeenth century. One of the Flanders Schroeders had a white-hot bolt pushed through his tongue for having publicly testified to his faith. The bolt had been passed on from one generation to the next, but where it was now, her opa couldn't say His family story was a common one; most Mennonite families had similar stories, an ancestor who had sung hymns while burning on a pyre, another who was thrown into a river to be drowned, a woman who was lashed to death by a whip, stories that had either been passed down from generation to generation, or recorded in a book of Mennonite martyrs.

The Schroeders eventually wound up in the Vistula Delta south of Danzig, in time to help drain the marshlands, where over half of them died of swamp fever. The place Wilhelm Schroeder lived was called Krebeswalde, south of Elbing. It was there that Plautdietsch, a language adopted from the Western Prussians, became the common language of Mennonites. The colonists lived behind the dikes and canals they laboured over, praying that the waterwheels they built would drain the fields in time for spring planting. Wilhelm left
Krebeswalde at a time when, out of fear and envy, the Mennonites' right to purchase land was being threatened. A man named George von Trappe came calling, sent by Catherine the Great to convince the Plautdietsch speakers to settle in Little Russia. Wilhelm was among the first to go. He was the one who had first told the story about giant men whose wide trousers were used for storing watermelons, which eventually was told to Katya's grandfather, who had passed it on to her.

Wilhelm Schroeder didn't look like an adventurer. He had a soft look. His eyes were turned away from the portrait painter as though he were shy, or didn't want to be thought proud. His beard was illuminated and made his face seem blurred round the edges, and his expression indecisive. Or perhaps here was a man whose kindness would prompt him to say the soup was tasty when the cook had forgotten to salt it.

The middle picture was a photograph of a man named Johann Schroeder, the son of Wilhelm. Unlike his father, Johann's features were crisp and clearly defined. He looked directly at the camera, appearing confident without being taken with himself. His small compressed mouth was set in such a way that implied a forced sternness, such as would be required of a teacher, which was what he'd been. He left Rosenthal for the Mariopol district north of the Azov Sea when there came a need for a teacher. The land in the new daughter colony, Bergthal, was fertile and promising. It also had a high outcrop of rock, which proved to be a valuable source of stone for the foundations of their house, and for object lessons in religion studies:
You are my rock and my fortress. A man builds upon a solid foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord
.

Bergthal was where Katya's grandfather had been born, he being the subject of the third portrait. Her opa had a similar softness as his grandfather, and a long, white, flowing beard. He was a young man in the 1870s, when most of the people in Bergthal, fearing their rights
were about to be taken away by the tsar, packed up and went to Canada. She'd heard the story often, that his father wanted to go to Canada too, but he had promised his wife's parents he wouldn't take their daughter far away. He never mentioned that he had extracted a similar promise from Katya's father. Then, soon after the villagers left Bergthal for Canada, the village burned down, and Opa's father returned to Rosenthal. He bought the farm of someone who also wanted to immigrate to Manitoba, a place where land had been designated for Mennonites on the east and west sides of a river. A river that often flooded, Opa had heard; a hard and frozen place, the soil was black, but the growing season shorter, so that winter wheat didn't produce nearly as well as it did in Russia. Opa's father had built the house at the front of the property, in the style of the houses in the Vistula, L-shaped, with the barn attached, and Katya's grandfather had inherited it, a house built to last more than a hundred years.

Whenever her grandfather told the stories behind the three portraits, Katya was reminded of a chapter in Genesis: And these are the generations of Noah … Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In church tomorrow she would come together with her even larger family and be made to stand still, to turn, to feel hands under her chin drawing her to face the inquisitor. This one looks like Tooth-Puller Jakob's daughter, a man known to yank out his own teeth when they offended him, sparing the expense of a dentist. They would ask if she had a way with her hands, as her namesake did, her father's mother who had died on a picture-taking day.

These are the generations of the Schroeders: Wilhelm, Johann, Gerhard, she recited, the last thought she had before drifting into sleep.

The towns of Rosenthal and Chortitza spread halfway up the sides of a valley, red and umber brick houses graced with trellises of ivy,
their shiny windowpanes mirrors reflecting light. Coal piles glistened in yards of factories, chimney stacks trailed smoke, a factory door was open and its dark interior alive with the chuffing sound of a machine building steam, a clatter and whirr of wheels and belts. In the town, when they walked down the street, men came over to their gates to greet her father, and she felt taller as she walked beside him, made so by his easy friendliness and people's apparent respect for him. She noticed, too, that after the initial greeting and talk, there came the usual sideways questions about Privol'noye, which her father dealt with in his usual way, evading, or pretending not to hear.

One day she and Gerhard went with their father on foot from Rosenthal to David Sudermann's house on New Row Street in Chortitza. The main street of Rosenthal merged with Chortitza's New and Old Row Streets, Old Row being a broad street paved with cobblestone, the oldest street in the oldest Mennonite settlement in Russia. The street became a carriage road, led to outlying villages such as Arbusovka, a settlement that once boasted a silkworm factory, until other countries began producing machine-spun silk. In the east, Old Row Street led to the town of Einlage, known for its wagon makers – such as Jakob Sudermann – and then across the Dnieper via the Einlage bridge, to the city of Alexandrovsk. Although the city was only an hour away, Katya had never been there. She had stood on the banks of the Dnieper watching the steamboat
Leonid
cross the river below the rapids, ploughing towards Alexandrovsk, a collection of buff-coloured buildings, a smudge of dark smoke staining the sky above them.

She knew they were near David Sudermann's house when she saw his three blond daughters playing on a veranda with other children. Their large flat eyes turned on her as she went by, and she felt David's daughters were questioning what right she had to be there. David Sudermann was expecting her father, had been watching for them, and now came to greet him, sprinting down the sidewalk
the last of the way. Her father grinned and readied himself to receive David's enthusiastic embrace, but Katya saw a distance in her father's eyes, a slight turning-away.

The windows in David Sudermann's summer room fronted New Row Street, a street busy with the coming and going of
podvodchiki
hauling goods from factories to railway-yards, and between the many villages in the colony of Chortitza, the colony named after the oldest town. For well onto an hour Katya was content to sit and watch the teamsters pass by the window while David and her father visited, their conversation an equal exchange of give and take until the subject turned to theology, and then David did most of the talking.

“If you ask me, the real reason why we hold onto our creed of non-resistance is because it gives us privileges other people don't have,” David said in reply to something her father had said.

“Some of us still believe we're to be messengers of peace,” her father said.

“Sure, yes. But messengers are supposed to deliver messages, are they not? Our wily ancestors agreed not to. They promised not to preach to the Orthodox. Why risk offending the hand that gave us such a generous start?” David said.

“A man's life is a message, for good and for bad. You know as much. So then, are you becoming an evangelical like your dear sister Helena?” her father asked, his smile a gentle teasing.

A chorus of voices arose in the street beyond the window, and their conversation broke off while a dozen or so boys went riding by on bicycles, with them several men, teachers, Katya supposed, and from the satchels they carried on their backs, she gathered they were on a school outing, a celebration, perhaps, to mark the end of the school year.

“Look at that. There's not a Russian among them,” David said. “In my class I've only got one, and one Jew. That's all we let in this year. I pity the poor Russian.”

Katya's father glanced at David sharply, his face working as though he had something he wanted to say, and then his features softened and he shrugged. “Yes, the poor Russian, what's to be done,” he said.

“Far be it from me to say we should preach to the Orthodox – the heathen, as my dear sister might put it,” David said, continuing where he had left off before the boys had come riding by. “That's not the point I wanted to make. Take a look at our privileges. Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality,” he said, ticking the three words off on his fingers. “That's the tsarist philosophy regarding the Russification of the people in the domain. That's what it boils down to, yes? All right, we pray for the monarch, and sing ‘God Save the Tsar,' and every now and then donate a sizable amount of shekels to one of their causes. Orthodoxy? We're free to worship how we please, as long as we don't proselytize. Nationality? Now that's a strange one. We're Russian Germans. Baltic Germans, some claim, which gives us pretty high status, don't you think? And our religious belief conveniently affords us the privilege to be consumed with our own interests, mostly financial. We have come to think that being separate from the world means we can ignore the plight of the people who are not of our kind.”

Her father was about to protest when Auguste Sudermann entered the room with a tray of tea and apple juice. David peered up at his wife, clearly irritated by the interruption.

How is your mother? Auguste asked, but Katya didn't know what to say. Should she say that her mother was tired often? That the new baby, Daniel, kept her awake most of the night with his fussing until Oma rubbed brandy into the soles of his feet? That Peter, whom Auguste had last seen as an infant, was now two years old, and Johann three? The little ones were almost more than her mother could keep up with in a day, but she refused to hire a girl as a nursemaid, even though most women did. Katya had told Auguste
her mother was fine, thank you, as she knew this was the answer the woman expected.

She couldn't tell Auguste that her mother's chin had grown sharper, that when a batch of bread didn't rise as high as usual, she blamed it on her children for having been too noisy. She blamed the weather for their quarrels, for their father's headaches, which had begun to seize him from time to time, ever since Abram had broken his promise. He would need to lie down in a darkened room with wet towels on his forehead. Her father didn't have a taste for bitterness. He never spoke again of how Abram had broken his promise. Outwardly he seemed to be the same person, so much so that for months on end Katya would forget what had happened until one day he would come home, pale-faced and clenching his teeth.