The Russlander (22 page)

Tante Anna's presence in the house ensured that the students never became rambunctious, that they faithfully attended to their lessons before going to bed. But it was more that the girls attended to the elderly woman, Nela had said. Before they went to school they laid out the woman's clothes and made sure she had an adequate supply of handkerchiefs, as she'd had a mild stroke which had left her with a drool. When, in the evening, Tante Anna finished telling them an old-time story, they lowered the curtains
around her bed, rinsed out her handkerchiefs and hung them to dry.

Katya had seen this happen, she'd been invited to come and hear Tante Anna tell a favourite story, and had felt the girls' reverence, their sincerity and earnestness. How dear the spinster was to them. Which made Katya think of Helena Sudermann, and her own sometimes less-than-favourable thoughts about the woman.

A sparrow hawk followed her and Nela down the street, lighting in a tree beyond them and screeching as they went by. They came near to a crossroads, the boundary between Rosenthal and Chortitza. Had they gone west, they would've come to the
Lazarett
, the brown brick building where her father stayed. They went beyond the crossroads and passed by the
Mädchenschule
. The three-storey red-brick school towered over the street, its canal-house front upheld with arches and pillars in contrasting white brick.

Auguste Sudermann came to meet them at the gate, and Katya was surprised by the heat of her arm against her own, as her narrow body didn't suggest warmth. Both Auguste and Nela wore similar wire-rimmed glasses that gave them a studious look. Nela's sharp nose and her thin hair made her look needy, newly-hatched and wingless. As they came up the steps, Katya heard a noise inside the house, and was surprised when Dietrich appeared in the doorway with one of Auguste's girls straddling his shoulders.

“Hello, Katherine Vogt. I'm Dee Dee the horse. And so I'm sorry, but I can't stop to visit. Unless you have a carrot in your pocket, that is,” Dietrich said.

“She doesn't have anything in her pocket,” the girl shouted and thumped Dietrich's chest with her heels to make him go.

“Goodness, Tante Auguste, what are you raising here?” Dietrich asked. Then he whinnied and went galloping down the stairs and into the yard, the girl screaming with joy.

“It's like that every time he visits,” Auguste complained, shaking her head in mock dismay. Another of Auguste's girls stood watching
at the door as her sister and Dietrich went galloping down the street. A woman came to her gate to investigate the commotion, and began calling that Dietrich should go faster. What was he, a horse or a lazy camel? she called.

“Me, me. My turn,” the girl at the door whimpered, her bottom lip quivering.

Nela laughed and dashed up the steps and into the house. She scooped the girl into her arms and nuzzled her neck, while the child squirmed to be free.

“Tien, Tien. No hugs for Nela? What's poor Nela going to do for hugs if you don't give them to her?” Nela asked as she set the child down.

“You'll have to get your own girl,” the child said and Auguste laughed, her eyes touching on her daughter with fondness, not seeing that Nela had turned away quickly, not seeing the hurt in her eyes.

“Sasha will never get them settled for bed now,” Auguste chided as Dietrich returned from giving the first girl a ride, and swung her down from his shoulders.

The book they would discuss that evening was a collection of essays by Ufer Hold,
Quiet Women, Powerful Women
. Katya shouldn't be concerned about not having read it, Auguste said.

But Katya had read the book, and had concluded after reading it that her moodiness was a weakness that needed to be overcome. She was someone who took herself too seriously. In her room, hanging above a washstand, was a calendar whose squares she coloured in according to her different moods: yellow for the days she felt like whistling, purple when she felt as though she was ploughing thigh-deep through water, blue for a sinking feeling she sometimes got in her stomach that something was about to go wrong.

Another of Auguste's girls came over to Dietrich and held up her arms. He obliged by swinging her onto his shoulders. “So Katya, how's life treating you in the big town?” he asked.

“It's altogether different,” she told him.

“Of course,” he said, and nodded as though what she'd said was significant and had started him off on a train of thought. “Tante Lena says the bustards have begun to venture across the road. It seems they've developed a taste for apples,” he continued cheerfully. “Who knows, maybe we'll all be home again, soon.” His aunt Helena and the Wiebe sisters were looking forward to his parents returning. The Big House had been too quiet since the war.

“It sounds as though you've gained an appreciation for Privol'noye,” Auguste said.

Annoyance flickered in Dietrich's face, which Auguste didn't seem to notice.

“When your father returns, I'm sure he'll put a stop to the tent meetings,” Auguste said, more to herself than to Dietrich.

“Not necessarily,” Dietrich said rather curtly. Then spots of colour rose in his narrow cheeks. “Not many people have been attending anyway,” he said, softening his tone.

Helena had invited Baptist preachers to use the meadow at Privol'noye to set up their tent and all summer long they had been conducting religious services, Dietrich went on to explain to Katya.

“Oh look, the girls are here,” he said, obviously relieved to see Lydia, the sister cousins, and Olga Penner coming through the gate, followed by another girl Katya hadn't met.

When Lydia saw Katya, her face worked with a variety of emotions, and then she collected herself and became Lydia the student, slightly aloof.

“What have you heard from Greta?” Lydia asked when they embraced.

“She's joined a choir, and likes it very much,” Dietrich said, jumping in to answer the question himself. “We exchange letters often,” he said in reply to his aunt's quizzical look. Then he left the room to give his niece the longed-for ride.

“Everyone hears from Greta,” Lydia said, her tone implying that she didn't.

“Sometimes a person has to write letters in order to receive them,” Auguste said as she steered her daughter towards a doorway and called for a woman named Sasha to come and get the girl washed up for bed.

“Margareta's an example of a person who does whatever she's called to do, and with a cheerfulness,” Auguste said. “Which is a good way to begin our discussion.”

“Oh, are we going to go ahead with it?” Olga asked. She had gone over to a bookshelf and was scanning the titles. The other girl who arrived with them had been introduced to Katya as Agnes Friesen.

“Yes, of course, would you rather we didn't?” Auguste asked.

“Well, I thought … because we have company …” Olga said.

The girls exchanged glances, half-smiles of acknowledgement that more than likely Olga hadn't, as usual, read the book.

The discussion that followed didn't seem to be a discussion but a rewording of the author's essays, each of the girls struggling to find a different way to say the same thing, Katya not contributing, grateful that they seemed not to expect that she would. When they ran out of things to say, Auguste brought the discussion to a close with a quick summation, and then said it was time to remember a blessing they had experienced during the week. “Let's go around the room and share something,” she said.

From the way Auguste looked at her, Katya realized she was expected to contribute, and her face grew stiff. She knew she was thankful for her grandparents' house, especially the large corner summer room whose windows let in the morning sun, and had a view of the street and Nela's house. She watched the students arriving and leaving, Tante Anna working in the garden stooped and slow, enjoyed the symmetry of the white picket fences enclosing
the houses and yards. The fences were a pleasant geometry of definition and division, she would come to think when enough time had passed and picket fences were no longer in style. Now, as the young women spoke, she was overcome by her rushing thoughts. What should she tell them?

When it came time for Katya to speak she didn't tell them that she liked the way the town of Chortitza began where Rosenthal left off, that she felt sheltered by the valley; its arms of rose bushes and trees made her patient to wait for the war to end, to be reunited as a family and returned to the steppe, where there was nothing between the eye and the horizon but a sea of grass. Instead, she told them she was blessed by her grandparents' house, without explaining why, and knew they'd been puzzled and had likely attributed her vagueness to her young age.

Nela's old father came to get them, and Katya waited in the carriage with Nela while he stood at the gate talking with Dietrich. Ohm Siemens was a secretary at the Chortitza
volost
, and one of the church's eight ministers. He was a cheerful man, and well liked. He was known to cut a hole in the ice on the creek in winter, strip to his combinations, and lower himself into it while singing “Gott ist die Liebe.” The stars are bright, yes? Nela said. She was blessed every day by nature, Nela had told the girls. The previous night she'd heard an owl hooting behind the little house, which had put her to sleep.

As Katya rode home with Nela and her father, the moon lighting the hilltops, the roofs, the silver dome of the Orthodox church, she wondered if there would ever come a time when she didn't feel disappointed in herself.

he winter came early and all at once, the shortened days and the extreme cold keeping the little ones underfoot. Katya's mother became too quick to scold, which bothered Katya's grandfather, but he kept silent and began to spend more time in the barn. Her mother often seemed not to notice when there was work to be done, and increasingly Katya's grandmother took over caring for the small children. It was February when Katya was awakened to the darkness of early morning, grateful for the sound of her grandfather's coughing in the room next to the one she shared with Sara. The sound had pulled her out of a dream. She'd been in a courtyard, and standing before her was what looked to be a millstone. There were names engraved on the stone radiating out from its hub, and she'd heard a voice saying that if her name was on the stone, she would be allowed to enter heaven. She awoke damp with perspiration.

Floorboards creaked as her grandfather got up and went across the room. When he took the lid off the chamber pot it clanked, just as it did when he set it back on. He made as much noise as
possible, as it was a cue for Peter, their very own
vorsänger
, to call out from the boys' room.

“Opa, hurry and make a fire. Won't you please make a fire, make a fire, make a fire,” Peter, their song leader, obliged, Johann then adding his voice to the chant.

“
Ja, ja
. You boys hold your horses in there. Opa's going to make a fire yet,” her grandfather called.

“Make-a-fire, make-a-fire, make-a-fire,” her brothers chanted, Gerhard adding his voice to theirs, sure-sounding and clear.

Katya heard her grandfather go out into the kitchen, through a hall and into the barn, and her brothers stopped calling. Moments later there was a washing sound against the walls and floor as he returned with a bundle of weeds.

There wasn't an apron wide enough to conceal how high her mother's stomach had risen, and so Katya had taken her place on the milking stool. She didn't mind getting up before the others as it gave her time go roaming in her thoughts. Beyond the window, the barn cast its shadow across the snowy yard. A lantern moved through the darkness as her uncle Bernhard came from his house at the back of the property.

While the image of the millstone had faded, the fear of not knowing if her name was written on it remained strong as she went into the family room, bits of dried weeds crunching underfoot. Opa knelt in front of the oven, raking ashes from its chamber.

“You slept well?” he asked.

“Yes, soundly.” Until the dream, she thought.

“Then it should be a good day, snow or shine,” he said.

She took her father's barn jacket from a hook in the hall and went out into the equipment shed, following a path down its centre that was kept clear. At the end of the path the darkness gave way to sepia light shed by the lantern her uncle had hung near to the stalls. As she came into the barn, the air was warmer and moist, full with
the sounds of lowing, a swish of tail and thump of hoof against the earthen floor.

The outside barn door opened a crack, and her uncle Bernhard's wife Susa slipped through it, bringing a bluster of icy wind that billowed up Katya's skirt.

“You should be glad you don't have to go out in the cold first thing in the morning,” her aunt said as she closed the door behind her.

Her aunt Susa came with more than the hump of early-morning discontent on her back. Her youngest child, Ernest, was huddled under her shawls, his hands folded against his mother's neck. He wormed his way up through the layers of wool and peered at Katya, his eyes lighting with a grin.