The Russlander (17 page)

“Yes, she was showing off in the same way some people like to show off with their big fat stomachs,” Sophie said.

Abram came last of all, round and dark, rolling from side to side as he poked the ground with his walking stick. Then they all stood still and watched as a carriage turned in at the gate posts.

Sara whooped and took off on a run, but Katya hesitated. As the carriage emerged from the front of the Big House and came to a stop at the parade barn, she realized that Dietrich had brought Michael Orlov for
faspa
. The two young men doffed their caps and bowed dramatically, and the ensuing laughter somehow made the distance between them and Katya seem greater than it was. A small man dressed all in black got down from the carriage. She knew he was Konrad, the man they had once seen tending the fire when they'd looked through a window at the Orlov house. He scurried to unload Michael's camera equipment, a tripod and a scrim which Michael then directed him to set up near to the garden wall. The dwarfish man had been part-time tutor to the workers' children until Abram put a stop to it. He was also the Orlov's confectioner, whose only tasks in their household – other than making pastries, sweets, and cakes for special occasions – were burning incense on a shovel in the fireplace, and trimming and cleaning the lamps.

Katya joined Sara, who stood apart from the group, balancing on one foot as though, with this trick, she hoped to gain their attention. Konrad finished setting up the scrim and returned to the carriage, taking from it two chairs, which he set in front of the scrim. Then he
went to the carriage to fetch a cake, presenting it to Abram with a little bow and a flourish.

“
Abba
, Mama. Come and see what this man has brought for
faspa
,” Abram called loudly. Everyone went to admire Konrad's cake, Mary finally taking it from him and into the orchard, where she set it on the table.

“Oh ho! Look at this. Lots of money, cost lots of money,” Abram said as he shook his walking stick at the camera and scrim.

Michael Orlov began to arrange the Sudermanns for the photograph; Abram and Aganetha were to sit on the chairs, their children to gather around them. When the grouping was as he wanted it, Michael Orlov crouched behind the camera. He was about to take their picture when Dietrich suddenly broke away and looked around the yard. Michael groaned and raised his hands in mock impatience.

“What's the delay?” Abram called, twisting awkwardly in his chair to glare at his son.

“Where's Greta?” Dietrich asked Sara, who pointed to the orchard where Greta stood in the shadows, watching.

“Come and be in the picture,” Dietrich called.

“Yes, yes, Greta, come, hurry. Come be in the picture,” Lydia said. “What are you doing, hiding there? Don't be so suddenly shy.”

“All, or none at all,” Dietrich proclaimed, which Sara took to mean her and Katya as well, and she began tugging at Katya's hand. They should wait for Greta, Katya said. But for some reason Greta wouldn't come, and so Dietrich went to get her. Moments later they emerged through the garden gate, his arm wound about Greta's waist, and Justina glanced at her mother, at the sky, at her feet.

They were all looking at Greta and Dietrich, Katya and Sara obviously forgotten, and so Katya held Sara back, saying, “They just want grown-ups.”

“There's room for Greta beside me,” Lydia called.

“She can stand between us,” Dietrich said.

Aganetha Sudermann fussed with her skirt, her smile fading and her eyes half closing as she frowned.

“Stand wherever you want. Just stand still,” Michael Orlov said. His mock despair dissipated as he hunched over the camera.

In the photograph Dietrich would look tentative, and even though the round face of his boyhood had given way to that of a young man, had become angular, with a strong jaw and deep-set eyes, he would look too young to be in love. Katya would come to think that most people ventured into love far too soon, her own children, their children, and she would always be a little afraid for them, afraid that they would put so much trust in another at such a young age, risk failing, risk the injury of accidents. Love hadn't come to her until she was near to twenty-two, old for those times, almost of an age where marriage would likely not happen at all. In the photograph taken that day, Lydia had chosen to stand sideways to the camera; Justina leaned into her young husband, looking as though she would like to have his arm around her. Greta faced the camera squarely. Her white blouse, dark pinafore and vivid colouring were in high contrast to the other women, whose fairness and light-coloured clothing caused them to look faded in comparison.

She would later see the photograph published in a historical account of Mennonites in Russia, the young man who came with his machine, asking her to tell stories, bringing it with him. Beneath the photograph the names were given, except for Greta, whose identity was stated as “unknown.” Greta's vivid beauty returned to her across the time, and by then she had a word,
vivacious
, to describe her. She would tell him, regarding the unknown: That vivacious young woman was Greta Vogt, my dear sister. She would show him a photograph of Greta, Lydia, and the Sudermann sister cousins, students in their school uniforms grouped around a pedestal on which lay an open book. She'd once owned a photograph of herself at three years old sitting on that same pedestal in the photographer's atelier
in Rosenthal, taken during the time the Sudermanns had toured America. There was a blurred spot at the end of one of her chubby legs – she'd moved – and Greta had a fistful of her dress to keep her from rolling off the pedestal, she was so plump. She remembered a photograph she'd had of her parents on their wedding day, her mother wearing the traditional black dress, her father too thin, his beard spindly, his large hands splayed across his knees; remembered a group portrait of the Schroeder family where she was a child held in her father's arms. Photographs she had brought to the new country, and which were taken from her, one by one. By offspring of her children suddenly wanting to know their heritage, wanting to be more than Canadian-born fair-skinned people, potato eaters; some of them remaining Mennonites, others, not. They wanted to be more exotic, like the people they lived alongside in their modern world, a multitude of different peoples, tongues, and cultures. The photographs she had brought to Canada were proof that they were offspring of the oasis-dwellers who had lived within the country of tsars.

When Katya came into the orchard everyone was milling about the put-together tables, gawking and then moving away, impatient for Abram to take his place, impatient to stand with their hands folded against the chair backs and sing “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow.”

Konrad's cake was set at the centre of the table, a two-tiered confection covered in frothed cream and dotted with candied cherries. Katya recognized the cherries with a shock, remembering the cherry Vera had shared with her earlier in the day. She recalled her own spying through a window at the Orlov house, and she wondered if Vera had gone spying, too, and if she'd been so daring as to go inside.

She felt Greta's eyes on her, a message she didn't understand. Then Sara made the situation clear, as she went around the table
counting, and noted in a puzzled voice that there weren't enough plates.

Abram seated himself at the head of the table and hungrily eyed the cake, while Dietrich mentally counted the chairs and told his mother more were needed.

Katya saw the look which passed between Aganetha and Justina, a look that said they already knew about the lack of chairs.

“Martha, go and get more chairs and more settings,” Dietrich ordered.

“Yes, go and get more chairs so we can be one big happy family, as usual,” Justina said with crisp sarcasm.

“There are exactly as many as there need to be,” Aganetha said.

he equipment shed had been turned into a prayer hall, the doors standing open, a square of light framing a picture of a grooved path worn into the earth by wagon wheels, the stone fence meeting the gate posts at the avenue beyond, where Katya and Nela Siemens had set pails of flowers. This was the day of the Faith Conference, not yet noon, and already the heat inside the shed was sweltering. Katya's father and David Sudermann sat near to the open doors. Tables had been set up for tea beside the doors, and the inevitable five-pound sacks of sunflower seeds. Katya waited at the tea table, ready to pour for those who preferred heat as a means to cool down.

The trains were packed to overflowing with soldiers, Abram Sudermann reported on behalf of the delegation who'd gone to St. Petersburg to meet with a Mennonite member of the Duma. He gave the report standing at the front row of benches, his breath laboured and perspiration running down his face, which he kept swiping at with a balled-up handkerchief. Behind him, sitting on chairs, were six
ministers from nearby villages facing the congregation. The members of the delegation had been impatient for the formal part of the service to end, what had been a time of silent and spoken prayers, hymn singing, and greetings from each of the ministers, who now looked haggard and wrung out. During the service a woman was overcome by the heat and fainted, and the other women, grateful for the opportunity to escape the stifling air, had gone with her to the shade of the canopy, where they now visited with each other.

Earlier that morning, while a blue mist still hung in the gardens, Katya had gone to cut flowers. She had seen Nela watching from an upstairs window, and was surprised when, moments later, she joined her in the garden. As they crept among the beds in search of perfect blossoms, the cool morning air set them shivering. Nela's teeth were chattering, her hair still wound up in rag curls. A mouthwatering smell wafted across the compound from the summer kitchen, where pans of cherry and plum
plautz
cooled on tables. Pitchers of coffee were being kept warm for those who had arrived the previous night. Among them was the woman who had fainted during the service, a shy woman who tried to be inconspicuous in the way she tiptoed to the summer kitchen for breakfast. But no sooner had she gone inside than she came rushing out and into the garden, clutching her stomach.

Abram said the delegation had volunteered their first-class passage to the soldiers, and spent the entire trip in the heating compartments of two railway cars, taking turns sitting on the floor and on the stove, while the others stood back to back in a space that amounted to the width of a corridor, trying to see something of the countryside through grimy windows.

At every station, the train was met by wagons filled with soldiers waiting to board, their women and children with them, dwarfed by huge baskets of provisions. Imperial banners were to be seen in
more than the usual number, and priests holding aloft icons of Christ, St. Nicholas, and every possible saint. Bands played marches while church bells pealed incessantly. Women and children wailed whenever the train departed a station and, all together, it was almost too much for a person to bear.

As Abram related this, Willy Krahn, the man from Arbusovka whose wife had died of poisoning when the meat grinder fell on her foot, pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and blew his nose. Katya's mother had pointed him out during the service, a man slumped on the bench, chin on his chest as though asleep.

“It's the opinion of our Duma member that the possibility of war is very real,” Abram said. A silence descended in the equipment shed, all movement suspended.

“Once war is declared, the call for our men could come at any time,” he continued. The call would come for alternate service. To work in the forests and on the roads, with
zemstvos
and institutions such as the Red Cross. They would be required to work as
Sanitäters
on hospital trains and ships, in administration offices in Russian cities; so many men would have to leave the colonies and the influence of their own people.

“How many?” Willy Krahn called out.

“In all, there are about twelve thousand between the age of twenty and forty-five,” Abram said. “The mobilization of the reserves will take most of our Russian workers. Which is going to make it difficult for the harvest. And should our own be called? Getting the harvest in will be near to impossible. We'll have to hire women and children,” Abram said.

“I wanted to know how many to pray for,” Willy replied.

Abram seemed startled by this thought, and then continued with his report, saying that the delegation arrived in St. Petersburg somewhat the worse for wear. Their clothing was rumpled and
stained with coal dust. They were shocked by the sight of cannons, and boxes of ammunition stacked in the streets. And once again when the hotel manager came to them in the dining room and asked them to refrain from speaking German, saying he'd received complaints, and several lodgers threatened to leave. When they themselves left the hotel, a man spat at them and called them
Germanzi
. If there should be a war, and if that war were to go badly, then the old canard
Beat the Jew and save Russia
would no longer suffice to save the skins of those in power.