The Russlander (14 page)

Johann turned in the circle of his father's arm, following the flight of the dragonflies, whose wings snapped as they fixed to glide, their legs crooked, becoming baskets to scoop insects from the air. Warblers chortled deep in their breasts as a harrier swept across the reed beds. The water was alive with darting lines, ripples and dimples of movement as the dragonflies' younger and still wingless cousins skated across the elastic surface, voraciously feeding.

Sara went over to a boat on the shore and began pulling fish flies from its hull. She'd snagged her dress on a nail and its hem trailed against the backs of her muddied legs, and she looked as untidy and rough as Vera had when Katya and Greta came upon her and Dmitri in the forest.

Her mother lay on a blanket, baby Daniel cradled at her side, a straw hat covering her face. Years later someone would tell Katya that her mother had been fond of hats. Even as a young girl she wore hats, and sometimes the hat was too large and the brim concealed her eyes, but always her grin was in place, displaying a fetching space between her front teeth. She was known to have a good singing voice, sweet and clear. To be swift and light on her feet. Katya's own clearest memories of her mother were of her cradling a baby on her arm in a tub, laughing as she trickled water from a cloth over its stomach, or sitting with her feet hooked
through the rungs of a chair as she took time to have
faspa
, gnawing on a piece of hard bun, dunking it in coffee to soften it, sometimes humming a tune, sometimes gazing across the room, lost in her thoughts. She remembered how the house was transformed to order and cleanliness under her touch. All these memories, but she would not be able to describe, more than anyone else could, what was in her mother's heart.

“What time is it getting to be?” her mother called from the blanket where she lay, a straw hat covering her face, and baby Daniel cradled at her side.

“Why don't you children see if you can tell what time it is from nature,” her father said. “Take a look around.”

“The sun?” Gerhard said, disappointed that their father's challenge would be such an easy one.

“The water,” her father said, and indicated Ox Lake, out beyond the parsnips and rushes, where the water lilies grew.

Sara jumped up and down to be able to see farther out. “There's nothing to see,” she complained.

As Greta turned sausages on the spit, grease dripped and sizzled, sending up a column of smoke and an appetite-rousing odour, which Katya suspected would travel as far away as Lubitskoye.

She went to help Sara look for a sign that would tell them the hour, but all she saw were water spiders and midges swarming above a rippling wake where a fish had just jumped.

“What about the water lilies, are the flowers opened or closed?” her father asked.

Earlier, they had gone rowing among the lily pads to admire their blossoms, yellow teacups set on green saucers. Now, the teacups were tapers standing on a green tapestry of shadow and light.

“They're closed,” Sara reported.

“Well then, it must be five o'clock,” her father said. He took out his pocket watch. “And so it is. They're right on time.”

“Here come the Wiebe sisters,” Greta called.

The women no doubt had smelled the sausages cooking and knew it was time for supper, Martha carrying her guitar on her back, Mary a basket, which more than likely was filled with something she had just baked.

“Look,” Sara shouted. There were little brown tubes among the lily pads, poking through the water and moving in circles.

“Six of them,” Gerhard said as their father came to them, Johann riding on his shoulders.

“Be still, listen. There's a mother hen nearby, can you hear her?” her father asked.

Katya heard the hollow sound of a hen calling from among the rushes.

“Come away, let's see what happens,” her father said, fiery-eyed with excitement.

They stood back from the shore, listening as the hen's call became a rapid clucking. The bobbing tubes proved to be beaks as, one by one, the hen's chicks bobbed to the surface among the lily pads. They shook beads of water from their backs and paddled in a line towards the mother hen, who was hidden among the striped shadows of the reeds.

Her father shook his head in silent amazement. He had heard of a kind of moor hen whose chicks would do this, but had never seen it for himself. Ox Lake, which had been formed when Abram's father dammed a small creek, attracted many different water fowl to the area, including storks that visited in early evening, picking their tentative and stiff-legged way through the reeds.

“We must have frightened the mother hen with our noise; she called to her chicks and they dove out of sight. When we moved away and stayed quiet, she told them that it was safe to come,” he explained.

The Wiebe sisters had arrived, their voices high and youthful sounding with the excitement of an unexpected holiday. Martha
scooped up Daniel, while Mary added the contents of the basket she'd brought to the food Katya's mother was spreading out on a cloth.

Katya's father lowered Johann to the ground and he ran off, yelling, Me too, me too, the dragonflies seemingly forgotten now that his brothers Daniel and Peter were garnering all the attention. Katya saw Sophie and Vera coming along the ridge clutching their skirts against tick burrs.

Sophie had braided Vera's hair, and had wound the plaits around her head, woven flowers and ribbons through it, which lifted and trailed out behind her as she came along the path. They were wearing holiday clothes, embroidered sateen blouses and skirts whose red fabric fell in soft folds from their slender waists. Sara went running to meet them and, after being introduced, took Vera by the hand and brought her over to the lake's shore.

When Katya greeted Vera, the girl's eyes slid briefly across her face, and went flat. Gerhard became awkward in Vera's presence and would not look at her directly, as though he needed time to decide if he should welcome her or not.

Just then the hen and chicks emerged from the reeds. Sara asked her father if she could show Vera what the chicks could do, oblivious to the girl's cold expression, the chill she gave off.

What did Sara have in mind, her father wanted to know. She would clap to make a noise, she said, and her father assented. Sara instructed Vera to watch what would happen, speaking awkwardly in Russian for her benefit. When the hen and her chicks had almost reached the edge of the lily pads, Sara clapped, and the mother called out. Instantly the chicks dove all at once, leaving behind a wake which the mother hurried away from, going swiftly back the way she had come, to disappear among the vegetation. Moments later, one by one, their beaks poked through the water, moving in circles as the submerged chicks paddled. Katya's father
stood watching, crossed his arms, his smile fading as he fell deep into thought.

Katya held her breath while the chicks stayed under the water waiting for their mother's call. She wondered how long they could do that, if eventually their tiny webbed feet might tire, if a fish might come to bother them. She was awed by nature, how marmots whistled an alert, cows on a pasture kept their young inside the herd, how the chicks waited for a signal.

She hadn't seen Vera go over to the wheelbarrow and pick up a piece of firewood, and was startled when it went flying across the water to land near the submerged chicks. “
Ach Mensch
,” Gerhard exclaimed in disgust, and like Sara and Katya, he stared at the spot where the tubes had been, and where a piece of wood now floated among the lily pads.

“Well, well. Now you see just how smart they are,” Katya's father said in Russian, and after a moment of silence. The chicks hadn't surfaced, but look, he said, although their beaks had momentarily disappeared, there they were, a little farther away, their tiny brown pipes bobbing and circling.

Katya had expected her father would say something against what Vera had done, and apparently Vera had too, as her expression had implied that she was strong enough to take whatever the consequence might be. But at his words she grew unsure and stepped away from him, glanced at Sophie, who was busy helping Katya's mother put out food and hadn't seen what had happened.

“Even though the chicks are likely frightened, they won't show themselves until their mother says so. I sometimes think animals are smarter than human beings. Come away now, let's let them be,” he said.

Her father offered Vera his hand, and after a moment of hesitation she took it. As they went to join the women, Vera sent her a
triumphant glance.
Haulftän
, Katya thought. Vera was a grudgebearer. After so many years she was still getting back at her for not agreeing to play with the spin top. She'd heard of people like that, but until now, she hadn't met one.

After supper, the water still and reflecting a bank of cumulus clouds that had risen as the sun began its descent, Katya's family began to sing, Martha accompanying them on her guitar. Vera had to go and help with the milking, Sophie reminded her, and as they headed back to the compound, the others grew silent, not wanting the day to end. They listened to the stillness and watched the zigzag flight of dragonflies among the wisps of smoke hanging above the lake, a stillness that stretched far across the land as far west as Poland, Katya thought, north to Moscow, and in the east, Arkadak, which was where the real Russian forests began.

Suddenly Gerhard disturbed the silence when he called attention to the Chortitza road, where two of Abram's Cossack guards were riding hard. The horses left the road, dipped down into a shallow ditch and across land, coming towards the lake. Katya's father rose and went to meet the men.

“What is it?” her mother asked when he returned, beginning to scatter the embers of their fire.

“They came from the west pastures,” he said.

“And so?” her mother prompted.

“They found several cows injured and had to destroy them,” he said. “Go and get water and finish this off,” he said to Gerhard.

“Injured? How?” her mother asked.

“Butchered,” he said, as quietly as he could.

“Who did so?” Gerhard demanded.

Her father turned on Gerhard in a sudden flare of heat. “Don't you use that bossy voice on me. A person gets to hear it often enough and shouldn't have to listen to it coming from his own son. Now go, take your brothers and get some water to put out the fire.”

Katya went with Gerhard and the little ones and, seeing that he was close to tears, touched his shoulder.

There is no herb for dying
, she wrote in her notebook that night. She'd got the saying from Martha Wiebe on the way home from their picnic, when she'd told them about a
Gutsbesitzer
who'd succumbed to tuberculosis after travelling to various spas in Europe in search of a cure. As she wrote, a minuscule paprika-coloured spider raced across the page in front of her pencil.

A spoon or two of brandy added to the rollkuchen batter improves its flavour
.

Brandy rubbed on the stomach and soles of a baby's feet eases its colic
.

Lilac tea for stomach ache
.

She was of the age to begin collecting recipes and household hints her mother and other women would pass on. But since she'd begun writing in the notebook, she had not been able to resist entering other, less useful, notes, such as the tip Sophie had given to her:
Throw a piece of bread in the well to keep the witch from going among the cattle
. She had written,
Papa and Mama are waiting for Abram to return. They want to know what he plans to do about Franz Pauls's leaving. Vera doesn't like me
. The line came unbidden, her hand penning the words without her having consciously thought them. As she looked at the sentence, she realized it was true. Vera didn't like her.

She lay in bed thinking of the black kite she'd seen at the picnic, gliding in sideways across osiers and purple loosestrife. An umber shadow passing over her in church in Rosenthal when the
Ältester
had read the Scripture:
Blessed are the pure in heart
. She thought of Lydia's silver cup and felt the stone of regret settle on her breastbone. She wished she had answered when someone called her name.
But she hadn't. Nor had she given into the heat of the sheepskin square against her thigh and recited a psalm,
For Thou art with me. Surely goodness and mercy
, until the urge to throw the cup into the well passed. When she closed her eyes she could see the dragonflies darting to and fro above the lake. Darning needles stitching the sky closed for night.

he awoke in the morning to the sound of rapping on the door downstairs. Greta was already up and gone, and her nightgown hung from a clothes hanger on the cupboard door as though floating in mid-air. Her scuffs sat pigeon-toed on the floor beneath it, and Katya stopped breathing remembering the moment on the footbridge in Rosenthal when she'd thought all had disappeared. Greta, lifted from the slippers and nightdress and taken to heaven. The murmur of her father's voice reached her, and then a woman's voice, and Gerhard's, and the rising fear that everyone had been taken to heaven evaporated. She went to the window and saw that Lydia had come home, she was hurrying along the path towards the house and Greta was coming to meet her, the two of them embracing. When she went downstairs, Mary Wiebe was standing in the doorway to the outer room.