The Russlander (2 page)

“
Ja
, I'm listening,” Katya was quick to assure her tutor, and remembered not to rattle the bells that were strung through the laces on her boots and further annoy Helena Sudermann.

Katya's older sister, Margareta, was there, too. Greta, she was called. She and Lydia Sudermann, Abram's daughter, were joined at the head, and they sat now on the same chair, each with a behind cheek planted firmly on it. They had tied their braids together with a ribbon to demonstrate to Lydia's girl cousins, who were visiting over Christmas, just how close they were. The cousins were daughters of Jakob Sudermann who, like his brothers, came to Abram's estate at Christmas when an accounting of their various enterprises took place. Lydia and Greta had tied a braid together to remind the sister cousins that they were best friends, and the cousins were not to try and come between them. It was 1910; Katya Vogt was eight years old. Her sister Greta and Lydia Sudermann were eleven, Lydia the oldest by ten days: twins, one light and one dark.

“We're listening, also,” Greta and Lydia said, their eyes lifting from the pictures they had already begun to draw. Greta's eyes were the colour of hazelnut; Lydia's, a field of flax blooming beyond the meadow in summer.

“I generally pay attention when someone speaks. But usually that someone has something worthwhile to say,” Dietrich Sudermann intoned in his new voice, causing Katya's little brother, Gerhard, to chortle. Gerhard was as sturdy as the oak-plank table in the kitchen of the Big House. Like the table, the Big House, the workers' houses lining the roadside of the compound, like the barns, sheds, and equipment buildings, her brother Gerhard had been built to last. He shared a bench with Dietrich, who was home from school for the Christmas holiday, and whose presence made Gerhard act older than six years.

“I want you to think of an oasis,” Helena Sudermann said.

The odour of pipe smoke drifted into the room, and they heard a woman begin to cough. A door closed loudly, muting what had been a brood of women clucking.
Ja, ja. What do you think, Jakob says, even though Abram
– their conversation had spilled out into the hall outside the classroom all afternoon.

Beyond the window Katya could see the parade barn, and a boy, one of the coachman's sons, coming past the barn, leading a team of ponies hitched to the
kindersleigh
. White smoke streamed from the animals' nostrils and hung in a cloud for a moment before drifting away, and so she knew that while there was a wind, it wasn't a strong one, and so it shouldn't be too cold to go skating.

“Now, you all go on little trips, yes? With your papa, isn't that so?” Helena Sudermann was saying, hoping to snare their attention with questions.

“
Ja
, Papa took me along on a trip before Christmas. We went to Lubitskoye, and this is what came of it,” Katya said and swung her feet, making the bells on her boots tinkle.

“Of course we go on trips,” Dietrich said, the tone of his adolescent voice conveying to his spinster aunt that he wasn't going to be taken in by her questions. Besides, she knew very well that he went on trips. He had gone as far away as America, and could remember touring the Pillsbury flour mill in Minneapolis with his father.

“Yes, we do too. We go on trips, too,” Greta and Lydia said. They were like two bells; one person with two heads, Greta's being shiny black, and Lydia's white gold.

“
Ja, ja
. Everyone here around goes on little trips,” Helena conceded, relieved to have gained their attention. And the next time they went on a trip they were to be sure and notice how green the steppe was around the Mennonite villages in the colony of Yazykovo, in comparison to the land owned by Russians, proof of how God had blessed them.

They should notice how the glorious colours of spring burst forth so suddenly, and then from the month of June and throughout the summer, the sun scorched the land, an iron left standing on an ironing pad and turning it the drab colour of sand. However. A person needed only to travel a few
versts
in any direction from the Chortitza road, and they would soon notice that Mennonite land stayed green all year round, she went on to say to her overheated and lethargic charges as they sketched and coloured and waited for Sophie Karpenko to return from Ox Lake and announce, “The fire is lit, the skating hut will soon be warm. They can come now.”

“Wait a minute. When we came here for Christmas, we didn't see any such thing,” one of Lydia's cousins droned. She was drowsy-eyed, and her mouth hung open as though she didn't possess the energy to close it.

“We only saw snow,” her sister concluded in a tone that suggested she couldn't understand why that should be. The girl cousins wore identical wine-red velveteen dresses with scalloped linen collars which had become palettes stained with Christmas food and drink.

They only saw snow, Lydia whispered to Greta, who rolled her eyes, and they broke into giggling. They only saw snow, Katya said, and laughed, too, while the sister cousins made pickle faces. As if on cue Greta and Lydia stopped laughing. Monkey see, Lydia said, monkey do, Greta finished, although she'd never been anywhere near a zoo and seen the mimicking antics of such an animal.

Helena Sudermann ignored them as she went on to say that the fields owned by Mennonites were oases of green in a semi-arid Russian land. Half black, half chestnut soil; the same sun, snow, rain; but God had chosen to bless the Mennonite farmer, including her brother, Abram, owner of the estate of Privol'noye and the chairs they sat on, the pails of
lebkuchen
and
gruznikie
– honey cookies and peppermint cookies – they had consumed over Christmas, the cocoa milk they would later drink when they went skating. God blessed the
Mennonite farmer who prayed and gave credit, in godsholyname, amen. And that was what they had to be thankful for at Christmas, she concluded.

“Give credit?” Dietrich asked. He was the second youngest of Abram and Aganetha Sudermann's children, Lydia being the youngest. They had two older married sons living in Ekaterinoslav, and a daughter, Justina. Dietrich wasn't bothered that his hair covered his eyes. It came forward from the crown and at the sides, and when he was at home he was a blond sheepdog. But once he returned to the
Zentralschule
in the town of Chortitza, he wore his hair slicked back, a high-buttoned tunic belted at the waist. He resembled a well-to-do Russian, and not a Mennonite farmer's son. A
gutsbesitzer
's son.

“Who does the Mennonite farmer give credit to?” he now asked his aunt.

“To God, of course.”

“And at what interest does the Mennonite farmer give credit?” he asked, his eyes wide with a feigned innocence.

Helena's hand came up to hide her irritation, and to stroke a silky fringe of hair that grew above her lips and which she kept trimmed evenly with embroidery scissors. They sometimes called Helena “Moustache,”
Schnurrbart-Len
, when they thought she couldn't hear. She now pretended not to have heard Dietrich.

“What picture will you make, Katya?” Helena asked, having noticed that the girl's paper remained untouched.

“I don't know. It's so terribly hard,” she said with genuine anguish. She feared spoiling the sheet of paper, and at the same time, not being able to imagine what to draw, she feared betraying more than a weakness of her eyes.

“What have we been talking about so far?” Helena asked.

“Oases.”

“Being thankful for God's blessings, yes? God sent his son at Christmas, did he not? To save us. And so the greatest blessing of all is Christmas.”

“I would think Easter was the greatest,” Dietrich said.

“Well, yes. Easter. But Jesus had to come first, did he not? He had to be born as a man and live among us, isn't that so?”

“Being born wasn't as difficult for Jesus as being crucified, was it,” Dietrich countered.

“I'm sure that's so. But think of it. Knowing. Having to leave heaven, knowing what was in store for him. Having to leave his father,” Helena said, with strained patience.

“Yes, but when he was a baby, when he was born, he wouldn't remember that, would he? And so the actual birth, Christmas –” Dietrich, was not allowed to finish.

“That's not what I was talking about. I was talking about God's greatest blessing,” Helena said.

“Yes, but …”

While the aunt and nephew sparred, Katya thought of the recitation she was expected to deliver later that evening at the Christmas Tree, grateful when the word
manger
sparked her imagination, and she began to draw.

Now male voices rolled down the parquet hall floor from the front of the house as the Sudermann brothers ended their annual business meeting and Abram, no doubt, brought out a bottle of good Mennonite brandy to toast their decision. All right, then. So be it. Abram had likely concluded that this was the third year he'd prevailed on his overseer, Peter Vogt, to be patient. In all fairness, a promise had been made before God, and it should now come to pass. The youngest Sudermann brother, David, must have declined the ceremonial drink, choosing instead to go and find Katya's father and bring him the good news. He came to the classroom door and
stood for a moment looking in at them, a man the same age as her father, but his slight frame, and his face, untouched by the weather, made him appear younger.

From the kitchen came soft murmurs, bubbles of laughter as the servants, the Wiebe sisters, went about preparing the evening meal. The voices of small children rang out from an upstairs room where they played under the watchful eye of their
nianka
. They were the children of Jakob and David Sudermann. David's daughters had just come through whooping cough and were still pale to the point of being transparent. They had not been allowed to join in the play in the classroom, and for that, Katya was relieved, as they made her feel as though she were a gust of wind they had to protect themselves against.

She had decided to draw the scene of the nativity the Christ child in a manger beneath two palm trees. She would suspend the Bethlehem star between the trees, and the entire scene would happen on an oasis, and therefore she would set the manger on grass, and not desert sand. I was born on an oasis, she thought as she tucked her chin into her neck and licked salt from her skin.

Finally Sophie Karpenko appeared. “The hut is warm, and the ponies are hitched to the sleigh. They can come now,” she announced from the doorway of the classroom. She loosened her headscarf and shook it onto her shoulders, where it lay across her sheepskin coat, a splash of red colour, as red as her wind-chapped cheeks.

“Manya is waiting outside. She says her toothache is stronger,” Sophie said to Helena.

“Still?
Liebe
Greta, you're a good girl. Go and tell Mary to make some clove-wax for Manya,” Helena said.

Greta got up quickly, forgetting that she was still attached to Lydia.

“Ow, ow, ow. Let Sophie go and do it,” Lydia said hotly, and held onto her braid to keep it from being yanked from her head.

“I can tell Mary, it's easy enough,” Sophie said with a shrug.

“Did I say so? Did I say, Sophie go and tell Mary? No, I did not,” Helena said, but before she could finish, Dietrich finished for her.

“The gypsy queen is supposed to go,” he said.

“
Ja
, that's what I said. Greta should go,” Helena said, her voice rising in annoyance.

“Oy, oy. This is a story,” Sophie said as Greta and Lydia, their braids still tied together, manoeuvred their way across the room to the door. “Are you girls going to go skating like that?”

The bells fastened to the laces of Katya's boots jingled as she left the table, the sound making her think of muscular hares bouncing across a horse's path, their hind feet kicking up licks of snow. The bells said, I am coming, here I am, I am going. When she reached the hall she went off in one direction, while Dietrich nonchalantly strolled down the hall in the other, following the sound of a metronome and piano music coming from the parlour. Justina, playing a choppy rendition of the “Blue Danube Waltz,” and faster than it was meant to be.

“Don't worry. Greta's coming with toothache wax,” Katya consoled a forlorn-looking Manya, who stood shivering outside the back door, her jaw lopsided with a swelling.

She turned and went down the steps, savouring the bright clash of the bells as she followed a well-trodden path through the snow, going home before skating to make sure that her mother was there, her little sister Sara, and Johann the baby asleep in his cradle, as usual. The path home was one spoke in a giant wheel that circled the Big House, other paths leading off it across the compound. Smoke trailed above the roof of the summer kitchen and washhouse, the buildings blind to winter with their shutters fastened down tightly. The smoke came from the greenhouse chimney, she saw
now. The building's sloped glass roof and windows ran with water, and although she could only see the blurred shapes of two people moving among the greenery, she knew from the breadth of shoulders and tumble of auburn hair that her father was one of them. The other, a thin shaving of blond wood, was David Sudermann. Her father and David were inside Eden, where mist watered the earth, the flats of peat moss set out on tables in preparation for tomato seeding. The two men had been friends since their
Gymnasium
years, when her father studied Agriculture in a technical institute in Alexandrovsk, and David, Russian. Whenever David visited his brother's estate he'd spend most of his time with his old school friend rather than Abram.

“We live on an oasis,” she told them, even before the greenhouse door had closed behind her.

“
Hots-ducent!
An oasis, yet. So then where are the camels and fig trees?” her father said, his laughter vigorous and deep. She made two fists, and her father cupped them in his hands, her stiff arms vibrating with his happiness as he lifted her and set her onto the table that ran the length of the greenhouse. Then he stood back, crossed his arms, his teasing nature shining in his green eyes. “Go ahead, show Teacher Sudermann here what you can do. Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, Tsar of Moscow,” he said, challenging her to recite the names of the tsar.