The Russlander (36 page)

The thieves had also taken her grandmother's bread-kneading pan, a wide two-handled shallow tin pan that Oma later saw out in the yard of a brick factory, lying on the urine-sprayed snow. It was being used to feed dogs, she said. They could afford to give food to dogs, yet, she said indignantly. But the next time she went looking for it at the brickyard, it was gone. Days later, she saw it again. She saw her bread-kneading pan come flying down a snowbank on the other side of the Chortitza creek, a small child riding inside it. It wouldn't hurt as much if the pan was being used for its intended purpose, she said. Her grandmother could
forgive murderers, but she grieved and nursed grudges against waste and thievery.

“Go and get a stool and stand on it so we can measure,” her grandmother said even before the seamstress finished drinking the glass of
prips
and eating the bun which she tore apart bit by bit, as though to make it last longer. “There's been enough talk to cause nightmares already.”

As Katya stood on the stool, the women knelt on the floor, her grandmother scampering about on her hands and knees, as agile and quick as Njuta. Tina Funk calculated the number of inches the skirt needed to be lengthened in order to touch the tops of Katya's shoes, if that was the length Mrs. Schroeder thought the skirts should be. Yes, yes, that's what I think. Not above the ankle, Oma said. Not from this house. She didn't care if others were wearing their skirts that short.

Katya smiled inwardly, thinking that while her grandmother went about the day whistling hymns, and would sooner find something good rather than bad to say about a person, she judged women by the length of their skirts, and only one length was proper. Most of her growth must have happened when she was at Privol'noye, where not as much attention had been paid to the length of a skirt. But her new slenderness, the evidence of it in the buttons she'd moved on the waist of her petticoat and skirts, had come about, she knew, since she'd come to Rosenthal. She could feel her hip bones now, plates that she set her splayed fingers across as she stood on the stool.

When, later that day, Katya went about the village on errands, she was aware of her new height, and walked as though her centre of gravity had shifted, with the cautionary gait of a person about to venture across a patch of ice. She went up Main Street into Chortitza, counting the number of steps it took her to reach the
volost
offices, and turned there onto Hospital Street, going up to the post office, to collect the mail for her grandparents. A bell
tinkled above the door when she entered what was the front room of a house belonging to a Little Russian family, one of few who had always resided in Chortitza. A chair creaked in a closet-sized room off the main room, which housed a telephone central operated by Valentina, the postmaster's daughter. As the young woman tilted her chair to see who had come in, her face appeared in the doorway.

Her grandmother commented that in the past Valentina would at least have made a show of going behind the wicket to peer into the appropriate letter slot, pretending that she hadn't already snooped to see who had received mail, and from whom. But now, apparently, the postmaster's daughter no longer bothered with pretense. It's as though they suddenly think they're better than us, her grandmother said to explain the change of attitudes of the few non-Mennonites who lived in the two villages.

She knew her grandmother would be disappointed that there hadn't been any mail, but she was relieved. She didn't want to receive yet another letter from Franz Pauls. Soon after the massacre at Privol'noye, he began to write to her, her former tutor assuming a brotherly role that she found offensive, as if he could even come near to filling in one of the spaces. His letters came to her from the Red Cross train, where he'd seen more than he could remember, he'd written to her, his tone world-wise and condescending. Then his train received orders to go to Warsaw to collect the wounded, and he obeyed his instincts when it stopped at a remote station to take on water. All day he had seen columns of infantry, children and women going in the opposite direction. Something told him the train would likely meet more than the wounded in Warsaw, and so he joined a soldier-nurse who had ostensibly stepped out onto the platform for a cigarette. He and the other man began to talk, and arrived at the same conclusion. They traded their uniforms for rags and joined the stream of people going east. Now his letters came to her from a village in the colony of Ignatyevo, where he had gone
to join Helena Sudermann and the Baptists in their mission to evangelize the enemy. His letters became pious-sounding and full of reports of conversions and baptisms, the lost becoming found.

Sometimes she found herself hoping for a letter from Lydia, though she had no real expectation of receiving one. More and more she'd begun to wonder about her, and over the weeks had composed several letters, which she'd never sent.

With the exception of David, who, being a teacher and not considered bourgeois, the Sudermann brothers had fled to Ekaterinoslav, and when the Bolsheviks took over that city, they had gone to Spat, taking Lydia, Dietrich, and Barbara with them. Katya had heard that Privol'noye was going to ruin, as were other estates, had heard of a
gutsbesitzer
in the Second Colony who'd been robbed of ninety-five shirts and forty-seven pairs of shoes. His bake kitchen had been raided, cakes gulped down on the run, along with rings of sausages children had first wound about their necks. While the estate of Privol'noye had been taken over by peasant families, others had been abandoned, disappeared entirely when houses and barns were dismantled brick by brick and carted away to become dwellings in the new Russian villages that were beginning to spring up around the countryside.

She returned to Rosenthal on Main Street, once again counting her steps, how many it took for her to reach her grandparents' house. When viewed from across the street, the Schroeder house looked small. Pots of African violets and gloxinia lined the windowsills, their blossoms magenta and pink jewels. Her grandmother was known to have a hand with gloxinia, and hers were always in bloom. She knew her grandmother would have mourned the loss of a gloxinia plant more than she had the bread pan, and the loss of her bed. On losing the bed, she had pronounced that it was better to have no beds at all, God would only bless them more. She had replaced the bed with a sleeping bench, its wood groaning loudly when they climbed onto its unforgiving hardness.

A crisp wind tugged at Katya's skirt, and she felt the bite of it at her ankles. She wouldn't be able to tell her grandmother who'd been in the Penner store; when she'd gone by and looked in the window, what she'd seen was herself, shoulders bunched and arms slightly extended as though for balance, as though she expected to fall. A wagon went by in the street, going towards two dark figures, boys
standing at the side of the road, watching the wagon approach. When she returned home she also would not be able to say who had called a greeting from the passing wagon. She remembered seeing a brown leather coat, a sheepskin hand rising.

The wagon was approaching the two boys who waited at the side of the street for it to pass. Or so she thought, because no sooner was the wagon upon them, when first one and then the other dashed in front of it – Johann and Peter, two fists slamming her in the chest. The wagon didn't hesitate in its forward movement; her brothers did not appear on the opposite side of the road, but had vanished. She realized water was seeping through her shoes, she was standing in a puddle of slush, holding her chest and gulping for air.

Her feet crunched through frozen puddles as she approached the Kanserovka Creek and the community gardens beyond. She couldn't say if the weather was fitting for the end of April, or not. If the greyness was what they'd always experienced this time of year, the snowbanks along the Kanserovka Creek caving in, chunks of snow pulled into the black water to become islands carried away by the spring current to the Dnieper. Already she had forgotten what to expect; the end of April in the New Style seemed the same as the old one had been.

When she stepped inside a large room at the front of Dr. Warkentine's house, she was aware of people seemingly piled up on the benches. A fetid odour billowed up and escaped out the door behind her, the odour of their unwashed bodies, illnesses and lethargy. Peasant children lay on the floor at their mothers' feet; older ones crouched like wild animals about to spring at her. She couldn't look at them directly, but she felt they regarded her with suspicion. Lensch Warkentine emerged from the pharmacy, the starched apron and skirt of her nurse's uniform as stiff as paper. When she explained to the people in the waiting room that Katya was a friend who had come on a visit, and not a patient, their suspicion
changed to malevolent glares as Katya followed the doctor's wife into the pharmacy.

She had come for her monthly supply of iron pills, but she was not to be given them outright this time. Lensch Warkentine said she couldn't dispense the pills until Katya had seen either Dr. Hamm or her husband, agreed? She indicated that Katya should go sit on a stool beside a window and wait.

The two closed doors on either side of the pharmacy led to the examination rooms. Katya heard Dr. Warkentine talking behind one of the doors, and a man's halting reply, as though he were speaking with his mouth open. Eucalyptus oil burned in a metal dish which was suspended on chains above an alcohol burner that rested on a counter, its medicinal scent hardly dispelling the odour of the patients emanating from the waiting room. Lensch Warkentine and Auguste Sudermann were sisters, and the resemblance was strong in the woman's small sinewy body; in her hair, which she wore in a topknot; in her economy of expression. She was as stiff as her starched uniform, some said, unbending in her opinions, which she dispensed as efficiently as she did the ointments and liquid medicines to the “people of darkness” in the outer waiting room beyond, with succinct instructions that they were not to eat the salves, or smear the liquids on their lesions and boils.

As Katya waited, Lensch began to polish the glass doors of an almost empty wall cabinet behind the counter. She worked with a furious energy, her hand moving in quick tight circles as though she were angry. Like most women in the villages, Dr. Warkentine's wife had come to depend on the labour of Russian servants to lighten her household load, and suddenly they were without help.

Documents hung in frames on the wall beside the medicine cabinets, Dr. Warkentine's degrees, one from a university in Kharkov and another from Berlin. There was also a photograph of students sitting at tables in a classroom, a younger Warkentine among them.
An inscription that said this was at the Feodosia Gymnasium, Feodosia being the largest city near the village of Ogus-Tobe, where the doctor had grown up beside the Black Sea. The story was well known of how one day he had been snatched by soldiers from a Chortitza street and made to serve in the Japanese war. Eventually he'd been taken prisoner, and during the experience had become bald, which made his bushy eyebrows and walrus moustache seem even blacker.

She hoped it would be him and not Dr. Hamm she would see, because Dr. Warkentine exuded a kindness; things had happened to him which he preferred not to talk about. On one of her monthly visits she'd seen Dr. Hamm, and had got bound up inside when he'd asked questions that had to do with the reason she required the iron tablets.

She suddenly became aware of a whining sound coming from outside, and growing louder. She pushed aside the curtain, and saw a man beyond the fence gazing skyward. Lensch set her cloth on the counter and came over to her. All at once, people in the waiting room got up and fled out the door. She watched them over Lensch's shoulder, the children running through the mud of the community gardens, followed by the adults, all of them struggling through the black pudding, going towards the reed beds along the Kanserovka Creek.

She now saw what had frightened them, an airplane swooping low over Main Street, its wings tilting back and forth, looking as though they might brush against the treetops. As it passed overhead, its engine was like a hive of hornets, and then the sound flattened and gradually faded, and a quiet descended so that she could hear the hiss of the alcohol burner across the room. The people had stopped running now, and were turned towards the street as the silence was overtaken by a faint wash of sound that quickly grew louder. She saw metal flashing as a column of uniformed soldiers
came riding, four abreast, their steel helmets bobbing. Behind them was a row of automobiles, the flag of Germany fluttering above gleaming fenders. Yet another momentous event was taking place. A treaty had been signed at Brest-Litovsk, and she would one day hear of it and of its far-reaching implications, remember that for a brief time life in the village had returned to near normal while she stood in the middle of the event, unmoved, the elongated spots of bleached sky hovering beyond the leafless trees more tangible than what was unfolding in the street.