The Russlander (31 page)

now smothered the sour odour coming off the burned fields beyond the estate walls, and gradually began to conceal their blackness. The meadow – what had been the meadow and was now her father's land – was also black. The rye he'd grown with Dmitri's family, and was about to harvest, hadn't escaped the live torches, the stray dogs, tails dipped in kerosene and lit on fire, that were released to run through the ripened grain. She had stood at the stone wall the night the crops were destroyed, watching the dogs burn a fiery trail through the fields as Abram and her father tried in vain to shoot the animals. Not only had Abram's Cossack guards failed to stop the burning, they hadn't even appeared, although the flames could be seen for miles. Her father had wondered about their absence, about Kolya, who stood before him with the other workers the following morning, his hat off and head bowed. If I know who did this, I'm ashamed to tell you, he said. The fire had spread to the edge of the forest beyond the meadow lands, and the burned trees now stood like black stumps of teeth among the falling snow.

The snow was early but she welcomed it. Slate-grey clouds had pressed close to the earth for days, and now a tension was being released. She had written,
It looks as though His Majesty Winter will soon take possession of the land, and for this I'm glad. It will make everything look and feel so much better
.

She saw the carriage come along the Chortitza road, moving silently and steadily through the falling snow, large airy flakes, pieces of muslin sailing down end-over-end. Tree branches above the avenue dripped with melting snow; the hedges in the rondel and garden looked as though they were loosely draped in cheesecloth. The plants she and her sisters had uprooted lay in a mound beyond the picket fence, their leaves wet and a heightened green. Dahlias, pink and white gladioli, zinnias, their blossoms salvaged and put in a tub of water to bring into the house. Dahlia rhizomes lay in a heap against the fence. Just as Katya used to do, Sara had turned work into play. She found one rhizome that resembled a camel, another, a rabbit. She found two grown together and dunked them into water, and when the tubers emerged shiny brown and ancient-looking, Sara named them Oma and Opa, and set them onto the fence railing to oversee while they cleaned the garden. To oversee Greta going about as though her heart weren't sore.

Katya was fifteen then, but knew she looked younger, younger than she felt. She wore her father's barn jacket, which hung down to her knees. Her ankles were knobs protruding through the softened felt of her boots, whose soles had loosened, and were bound to the boots with twine. She had stuck begonias into the bib of her apron, wanting to warm them near to her breasts. The sight of the blossoms pinched off by the cold and lying on the ground disturbed her, made her feel as though she were somehow responsible for the sudden and early snow.

“They're coming,” Sara announced suddenly.

“Yes, we know,” Greta said.

Katya saw how Greta's spine went rigid, and she felt a rigidness in her own. She harvested the corms Greta's garden fork turned up, carried them in her apron to a sack already littered with gladioli corms lying at the edge of the garden.

The two dogs, sisal doormats thrown in a heap against the side of the house, jumped up in an instant, running for the road and barking ferociously, as though to make up for having been caught asleep.

The carriage bringing Dietrich and Barbara to Privol'noye emerged from the avenue and stopped at the parade barn. The coachman shook snow from his red hat, and then dusted his shoulders before climbing down from the carriage seat.

“What took you so long?” Abram shouted as he made his way across the yard in his house slippers. “Your mama has been looking out the window for hours, already. Sophie made
varenyky
. Where did you stay?” he shouted, flailing his walking sticks as though the snow were a line of wet laundry he had to get through.

“They're here,” Sara said in a subdued voice, stating the obvious. Katya knew that Sara had concluded from their silence that they were not to go running to meet the couple. She sympathized with Sara's bewilderment, knowing what she was feeling. Her parents and Greta had endured the humiliation in silence, her mother stilling the little ones' questions or mentions of Dietrich and Barbara's engagement with a shake of her head. They'd learned of the engagement at church when the minister had read the banns, only days before the couple would be wed. Katya thought the minister was confused and had made an error, until her mother reached for Greta, clutching her knee to prevent her from fleeing. Katya realized then that it was true. It will be worse if you leave, her mother whispered to Greta. But what was worse than staying, pretending not to notice the sideways and backward glances, eyes examining their family for signs of a loose thread, knots in their shoelaces, some indication that they had not measured up?

Her parents and Greta had sat up late each evening, and on the day Dietrich was married she heard her father reading Scripture in the parlour, her mother's consoling murmurs, Greta's silence. She awoke in the night to find Greta, her back turned to her in bed, shaking as though with cold. “We all love you,” Katya said, knowing enough not to expect a reply. The wedding had taken place in Barbara's village of Einlage, in a machine shed on Jakob Sudermann's factory yard. The wedded couple spent the week following their marriage travelling from village to village to visit relatives and friends, and had come now to Privol'noye to do the same.

As the dogs barked and circled the carriage, Aganetha and Lydia hurried across the compound from the Big House calling their greetings, and the noise brought Katya's mother out onto the platform.

“Why don't you girls come inside now, you're getting wet,” her mother said.

“We'll finish here yet,” Greta said, her voice thin but determined.

“Don't go and make it hard for yourself. There's no reward for that.”

Katya had been asked to prepare the room for the couple. She had aired new bed linens, was appointed the task of monogramming towels and pillowcases, which she'd done in the sewing room of the Big House, their initials embroidered in white satin stitch over and over again, her chest tight, and eyes growing weary. That morning she filled vases with white chrysanthemums and maidenhair fern and set them on a bureau in the room, avoided the hurt in Greta's eyes when she returned home.

Dietrich came towards them, the fox lining of his overcoat a flash of russet moving through the snow, and before Katya could stop her, Sara was out of the gate and running to meet him, snatching up flowers from the tub. As Dietrich accepted the bouquet, he looked across the yard at Greta. When their eyes met, Greta's
features twisted as though she'd been struck in the stomach. She dropped the garden fork and fled round the side of the house.

“Go with her. Stay with her until she has it out with herself,” her mother said.

Katya yanked the begonias from her apron bib and threw them down, wanting to trample the blossoms into the ground. Her anger sent her running towards him, her body suddenly tense and shaking. She knew she was clenching her teeth, that she wanted to feel the sting of her palm against his face, even while she knew that she would not strike him, that she didn't know what she would do when she got there. She was vaguely aware of people across the yard, statues standing amid the falling snow, their faces turned towards her, and then she realized that she was shouting. What she wanted to say became
you, you, you
. You hard and cruel people. You self-loving and selfish people. You fat people.

She stood before him, her heart knocking against her breastbone, recognizing his longing as he looked back at the Big House, where his parents and new wife stood waiting, then to where Greta had gone round the side of the house. Rivulets of melted snow ran down his cheeks and dripped off his nose and chin. He was like a dog caught between two masters, fearing one and loving the other, the pull between them equally strong. She tore Sara's flowers from his arms and threw them to the ground.

Greta's weeping upstairs in the attic room overcame the sound of the wall clock ticking in the parlour. The family Bible lay open on its stand beneath the clock, at what would be the reading at the end of the day.
A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike. Whosoever hideth her, hideth the wind
. Her mother entered the room and stood before her. Katya felt something hit her
lap, and saw the square of sheepskin, grey and grimy-looking against her apron.

“You're like your father,” her mother said.

Katya sat with her mother, waiting in silence while Greta's weeping grew muffled and the metronomic ticking of the Kroeger clock took over the room.

“You should apologize to Dietrich,” her mother said.

“Dietrich is the one who should apologize,” Katya said.

“To Greta, yes. And more than likely he has,” her mother said, referring to a letter Dietrich had begged Katya to give to Greta. “But that isn't your concern.” Her hand moved across the space between their chairs and descended, warm, on Katya's thigh. “Your father had such a temper, too. But he tamed it, and gradually I never saw it raised any more.”

Katya held the square of sheepskin to her nose, smelled her youth in it, remembered when she had carried it wherever she went, traipsing back and forth across the compound, going in and out of the Big House at will, her world seemingly larger than it was now.

“Greta will survive,” her mother said.

Throughout the following week, the snow fell intermittently, white strings slanting across the compound, joining the sky to earth. The land was covered in a wet blanket of snow that muffled the cries of geese congregating on Ox Lake. The temperature hadn't fallen enough for the water to freeze, and the geese preened and fed all day. Their wild, harsh cries, sounding on edge, would quicken Katya's step, but as the snow lay thicker on the land, the birds' calls became indistinct, and less intrusive.

When the day arrived for Dietrich and Barbara to leave Privol'noye and travel to Ekaterinoslav, the clouds thinned, and
here and there sunlight lit the land. Katya had been awakened by the hardy voices of the Cossack guards who would accompany their carriage, and she could see that Greta was already up and watching at the window. She got out of bed and went to the other window, and saw that the lake had been wiped clean of birds. A beam of sunlight shone through an opening in clouds above the lake, and the lake's glassy surface reflected the colour of lemon, and she could see in the distance a mist hovering between the thinning clouds.

The more she looked, the more it seemed to her that the mist concealed something. Grey creatures trickled across the earth from the north and south, and met at the centre of the horizon. There they piled up, became a bulge, a wobbling grey eye sitting on the land. Then the eye disintegrated as the grey creatures drifted off in opposite directions, only to return moments later to the centre of the horizon where they melded, and flattened into a gelatinous grey band. She saw Dietrich and Barbara's carriage going down the road, the Cossacks' coats spots of scarlet moving against the unmarked snow beyond the carriage. Their horses' hooves threw up crescents of snow as the riders and carriage went on and far away to where the Chortitza road would meet up with Colony Road, on towards the grey band on the horizon, their dark trail marking where they had been. They would turn and disappear into the horizon.

She realized that her eyes were wet, that she was weeping.

Her hair had become a cloud of white and too soft to hold combs when, for the first time, she told what happened that day. Her stilled hands, their enlarged knuckles and translucent skin, were strangers. She could see through the backs of them to all the tiny bones and veins. Like branches of a winter tree, she thought. She had known all along that she would one day tell what happened, but had delayed
telling it until she'd become a widow, until her children settled into middle age and had satisfying lives, not wanting to chance harming anyone lest the spirits of the story pollute the air.

The moment to tell it had arrived, a young stranger coming with his recording machine, wanting her to speak into it. She would let the story tell itself, let it wander just as she had often permitted an exploring child the freedom to wander while she watched from a distance.

When she told him the story of what happened that day; she began by saying that when Dietrich and his wife left the estate, the rest of the day passed slowly. That's the way time went, more slowly, when people left the estate. As with the geese departing so suddenly in the night, it took time to become used to their absence, for the clock to return to normal speed.

She said to him, “After the noon meal my father went to the carpentry shop to repair a chair whose leg rungs had come loose. He had been promising my mother he would do so when harvest was over. I remember that he was also looking forward to finishing a bureau. The previous spring he'd cut and planed the pieces and stored them in the rafters. Dmitri was supposed to come and help him assemble the pieces when he had finished sanding. Greta and I went to the classroom in the Big House looking for lesson books; my mother had sent us there. Greta should keep busy, she said. Keeping busy was the best thing a person could do while waiting to feel better. Since we'd returned from Rosenthal in spring, the little ones had gone without schooling. Abram had hired a tutor as promised, a young Polish woman, but she wasn't able to begin until the new year, and so my mother said Greta should tutor the little ones.”