The Russlander (21 page)

She'd heard that Franz Pauls was a bookkeeper in a Red Cross administration office on train number 159, a train that went to the front to collect the severely wounded and bring them back to the interior. There were thirteen Mennonite
Sanitäters
assigned to number 159, most of them from the colony of Chortitza. Franz Pauls's letters to his parents would one day be published in a Mennonite journal along with other men's letters, memoirs, a record of their non-military service in the Great War. He would describe the administration coach where he worked, its desks bolted to the floor. A pharmacy coach separated the administration coach from the surgery, and so the fumes of ether and the sound of bones being sawed didn't reach him, but the odour of blood did. It seemed to have permeated all the coaches on the Red Cross train, even where he slept. He received first-hand the accounts of the soldier's wounds and their suffering. His being able to smell blood everywhere was his imagination playing tricks, they told him, as they, too, smelled blood, even when they were off the train and walking in the countryside.

Her father, following three months in Moscow, had been sent to work in the town of Chortitza, in the Teachers' Seminary, which had been turned into a
Lazarett
. In her family, as in most, it was taken for granted that the mothers cared for the ill; now her father was changing soiled diapers of Russian men and washing their stitched-together bodies. He spoon-fed them
kasha
and soup, comforted and prayed over them; he described the heat pouring from their lungs as though they were being consumed inside by fire.

The many times she went to the post office and passed by the
Lazarett
, she'd see the open doors and imagine how the fresh air
must lift the men's spirits. She once saw her father sitting outside on a chair, looking up at trees on the slope of the valley where something seemed to have caught his attention, and it took her a moment to recognize him. That her father had a life separate from theirs made him seem a stranger, and the days when he was on leave there was an awkwardness until he shed his uniform and emerged from the summer room freshly bathed and wearing his farm clothes.

A fog of yellow dust hung above the crest of the hill, and she knew the cows would soon appear. She saw Nela come out of the house across the street and onto the veranda. When she saw Katya, she hurried down a set of stone steps leading through the garden, and came over to her gate. The book circle was meeting tonight at Auguste Sudermann's house in Chortitza, Nela called. Would she be able to come?

I'll see, Katya said, which was what she'd said both times Nela had invited her, declining, at the last moment, to go.

“What is there to see?” Nela asked in a teasing voice.

“I haven't read the book,” she said.

“Many don't. Olga, for example. She comes for the gossip and the eats,” Nela said. “Auguste and Lydia said I should issue a special invitation.”

“I'll see,” Katya repeated.

“When you see what there is to see, let me know if that means whether or not you're able to come,” Nela said, and laughed.

Within moments they heard the sound of the herder's horn, and then, up and down the street, people opened their barn gates. The cows drew nearer, each one knowing which gate to enter. Gerhard rode their gate open, and the animals entered the barnyard, their bodies streaked with sweat and dust.

When her uncle and grandfather brought the team and wagon through the gate, she and Gerhard went with them to help with the
weed cutting, riding on the back of the wagon, their legs dangling. Dear Greta, Katya thought, composing a letter she would later write.

The rain would hold off, don't worry, her grandfather predicted. Wait and see. She heard a faint rumble of thunder as though the earth had been lifted and shaken. Her uncle Bernhard chewed on a piece of straw and, as usual, let her grandfather do most of the talking. Uncle Bernhard wore his cap low on his forehead, which made him look like an animal peering out from a burrow. When he did speak, he would noisily clear his throat before, and after. Her mother's oldest brother had been born with one leg shorter than the other, which had made him exempt from military service.

The road out of the village was lined with houses; they passed by the colony's gardens and, beyond the gardens, the watermelon
patch, at its centre a cone-shaped twig hut where an old man stayed the night to guard the melons whose syrup would be a valued source of sweetener if sugar proved costly or scarce. They crossed a bridge at Kanserovka Creek, the creek bed almost dry in autumn except for a narrow stream of wet trickling down the centre, colouring the stones a brighter grey.

Then they were mounting a hill, and as the wagon reached its crest it seemed as though the town had disappeared. Always, the wind was different on the plateau, it held smells and sounds that didn't reach town. The weather was different, too, warmer or colder, and up there, the land was hooked onto the edge of the world and the sky more generous.

Today the rain clouds had gathered, but were not pressing against the earth as they appeared to be in town. Today the land rattled with clusters of black seed-pods that grew near the tops of weeds as tall as her uncle. Last year the field had raised emmer, but there was a shortage of draft animals, and so the field was one of several that had been given over to the weeds which, because of a scarcity of straw, they would burn in the stove for winter.

Without speaking, her uncle Bernhard strode off into the field, his scythe in motion, a giant cutting down a forest as the scythe cleared a broad path. Gerhard took up a ball of twine, ran to keep up with him.

“
Na
, then, girl. You stay a good distance from my blade. I don't want to have to think about you being too close behind me,” her grandfather warned. “Don't try and make the bundles too large. They only come loose in the end.”

She followed him into the field and went to work, listening to the rhythmic sweep of his scythe, watching his body pulling it through thick stalks without hesitation; a sweep, and a step forward, and another sweep. The seed-pods rattled loudly in a rift of sudden
wind, and behind the wind came a shake of thunder. But she trusted what her grandfather said, that the rain would wait, and as she gathered the cut weeds into bundles and tied them, the air became thick with dust that stung the membranes of her nose.

Since the decision had been made to move to Rosenthal so that they might be near to her father, she hadn't yet visited with Lydia, who, during school months, stayed in Chortitza with her aunt Auguste on New Row Street, and the remainder of the time with her sister Justina in Berdiansk. Lydia lived a world away, in a language learned at the Girls' School. Katya had seen her walking across the street with the students who boarded at the Siemenses', heard them singing in harmony a song they had just learned in Music. Their classroom windows faced a courtyard, and at one end of the courtyard were the teachers' residences and gardens where Katya had once been sent on an errand. She had smelled the bread baking in an outdoor oven, heard the girls' voices as they conjugated Russian verbs in unison, imagined them struggling with geometry, algebra, and cross-stitch embroidery. If the day was a Monday, they'd study Religion, Russian reading and poetry, German reading, Arithmetic, and Music. The girls who went to the book circle had been Greta's school friends, Lydia and the Sudermann cousins, who made her aware that the gap between them was more than a difference in age.

She noticed that the light around her had changed, and that it had been a while since she'd last heard the sweep of her grandfather's scythe. When she turned around, she saw that she had wandered from the cleared path, and the weeds she'd bundled were not to be seen. She was lost, suddenly, in a forest of weeds, not knowing which way to go. She heard a train whistle, its echo returning across the land. A train was arriving at the station on the outskirts of Chortitza, or departing, she thought, and as the whistle came again, she made her way through the weeds towards the sound. She battered at the thick dried stalks, her hands out before
her to protect her face, until suddenly her hands met air, and there in a clearing on the ground before her lay a man.

She must have startled him as much as his presence startled her, as he sat up quickly, looking as though he were in the wrong, and then he snatched up a jacket he'd been using as a pillow as though fearing she might steal it. A broad scar ran along one side of his nose and pulled up a corner of his mouth, revealing purple and swollen-looking gums.

“Close the door, you booby,” he said. His voice came out full of breath and hollow-sounding. She wheeled around and went crashing through the weeds in the opposite direction, feeling the plants scratching her arms and not caring. She ran without thinking where she was going, only knowing that she had to get away. She stumbled into a ditch alongside the road. Beside the road in the distance stood the wagon, and she ran to it, climbed onto it, and onto its bench, from where she could see. Her uncle, her grandfather and brother were standing on a large burial mound, looking towards the cluster of buildings and sheds that was the train station. When she called, Gerhard turned and waved, motioning that she should come. She followed the path her uncle had cut through the weeds, which took her directly to them.

They'd been watching the train come into the station on the edge of town, and a yard beyond the tracks where the teamsters were gathered with their horses and wagons. Dust rose from the road going into Chortitza, and what looked to be a grey banner moved along it. Soldiers, she realized. A black dog dodged among them; here and there metal glinted, a sabre, a gun.

“They don't have the heart to fight any more,” her grandfather said, his pale eyes looking beyond the scene, looking into his thoughts, she knew, as he shook his head and turned away. “That's war. It takes the strong and leaves the old, like me. And those who return are maimed in one way or another.”

As they came across the Kanserovka bridge, she saw the man she had stumbled across in the field, coming over the crest of the hill. His short bowed legs propelled him down the grade faster than his body wanted to go. Her grandfather said that he'd seen him before. The man went from door to door, looking for chores in return for food. He'd shown up in town one day, from where, no one knew. A stranger who didn't have a place to lay his head, like so many others who came to town. He went by the name of Trifon.

The thunderclouds had circled around the valley and emptied out far beyond the town, and Main Street was lit by twilight, pink light trimming rooftops and chimneys. People sat out on their platforms, verandas, and steps, and as their wagon passed by a yard, the pungent aroma of tobacco would sometimes come wafting across a garden amid laughter, and a woman's voice as she called for her children to come inside.

Later that evening she stood waiting at the gate for Nela, knowing that her grandmother and mother were at a window. She'd felt their satisfaction when she'd given in to their prodding to go with Nela to the book circle meeting.

Nela's house was set back from the street and on an incline, and the entire front of it was enclosed in a veranda whose walls were covered in clematis vines. Stone steps ascended through a garden that throughout the summer was tall with delphinium, monkshood and hollyhocks. It was one of the most beautiful houses and yards on the street. Behind the house stood an orchard, and beyond it, the small house where the Siemenses boarded Tante Anna and the students. She often watched the students coming and going in their school uniforms. Aganetha had stolen Greta's dream, and without needing to ask why, Katya understood she herself would not attend
Mädchenschule
.

Her day began with the appearance of the students coming through the Siemenses' garden, looking bright-faced with anticipation as they went off to school amid the humming sound of cream separators, the slosh, kerplunk of butter churns, and she didn't regret not being with them. She knew from having visited them that a china dish on a bureau held their combs, odd buttons, and safety pins; their shoes were lined up on a shelf in a wardrobe; three beds had been pushed together to make room for a long table and benches. One of the girls had lavender oil, which she'd purchased in the Crimea when her class went there on a spring outing. She gave Katya a dab to rub on her temples to experience the scent's soothing qualities. She claimed the smell reminded her of Greek ruins she'd visited at Chersonesus, where Christ's message had come ashore from Constantinople. The lavender reminded her of Lavadia, she said, where they had gone walking, hoping to come upon the tsarinas doing the same, in a park.

Tante Anna, a spinster, occupied a smaller room in the two-room house where the students boarded. Katya had been there one evening, and learned that the students would pile onto the woman's canopied bed and listen as she told them stories of the olden days, which they heard many times over. A mirror, whose frame was a carving of greyhounds bounding up to its centre, gave them their reflection as they reclined on the woman's bed, and always under the soft and remote gaze of a young tsar and tsarina.