The Russlander (43 page)

As Katya was about to leave the table, Liese came with a basin of potatoes and plunked it down in front of her. “Seeing as how you're so anxious to help,” Liese said.

Just as swiftly, Irma took the bowl away. “Don't be so quick,” she scolded.

Katya knew from Liese's abrupt movements as she scrubbed and then peeled the potatoes that she was fired up with resentment over her presence. The pencils the woman had stuck into her hair resembled insect antennae as she hunched over the bowl, and Sara kept glancing at them as she helped clear the table.

When they finished washing up, Irma set a ham bone to boil, and then measured flour into a bowl and set it aside to be leavened in the morning and pummelled into elastic loaves of dough that would be peppered with the leftover grounds of
prips
, or the potato peelings Liese would put through the meat grinder when she finished
peeling them, Irma explained to Sara. Sara's eyes went round with a question, which made Irma laugh. “Yes, Miss Big-Eyes. Potato peelings, beet skins, too. Carrot and apple peels. You'd be surprised what Tante Irma can put into bread and still make it taste good.”

By the time the clock in the parlour chimed the eighth hour, Willy's boarders had gone to their rooms, and the house grew quiet. As Katya sat beside the bed waiting for her sisters to fall asleep, she thought of Kornelius, and realized that she stopped thinking of him as Bull-Headed. She liked the cracked skin of his knuckles, the broadness of the backs of his hands, the orange woolly hair in his ears. The door to his room was ajar, and when she'd gone past, she'd seen the heel of his foot sticking out from the blankets, its skin worn smooth and shining. The image was something new for her to think about. That, and his inert form, a hill of a man whose body would warm her own. She didn't know where the thought came from, or why her feeling for him had changed from gratitude to desire. She recognized a longing to lie beside him, to curl around his hard body.

She heard movement in the room next to their room, the scraping of chair legs against the floor. A man clearing his throat, and Liese's voice; for some reason their near presence made her anxious. She sorted through the bundle of clothing she had brought, and when she began to put them in the cupboard, Sara asked, “Are we going to live here now?”

“Yes,” she said. But she didn't know for how long.

“It's not right that we have to be here while Papa and Mama are in heaven doing nothing except being happy,” Sara said, and Katya was shocked at hearing her own earlier thoughts come from her little sister.

She felt empty as she sat watching her sisters sleep, taking in their crooked fingers resting on a pillow, the sweep of their lashes against pale cheeks. People talked about heaven as though it were a country they had visited and returned from with stories of their
adventures. Heaven: a city of shining houses, flowers made of glass, a fiery choir of angels suspended in clouds, the music indescribable. Heaven: a wooden room with rows and rows of narrow cots neatly made up, and everyone arriving being handed a broom and put to work. She wondered if the stories of heaven gleaned from dreams and fevers were wishes, ghostly birds in search of a home. She left her sisters and went to join Willy and Irma in the family room.

Irma looked up from her mending and greeted Katya with a smile, and then nodded in the direction of the rocking chair in the corner. Willy stood at the table smoothing wrinkles from a cloth spread across it. A paint box lay open beside the cloth, and beside it stood a glass of water. The window curtains had been taken down, washed, and were now hanging on a line near the stove, Katya noted. Willy was about to decorate another pair. His step was springy as he went to a cupboard and took down a jar that held pencils and paintbrushes. He sat at the table, the cloth spread out before him, and Irma, with a smile pulling at her mouth, said, “
Na
, Willy. You're sure you haven't borrowed someone else's pencil by mistake?”

Willy grinned, and held up the pencil to show Irma that it was notched. “There's only one rule in this house, Katherine,” he said, and winked. “Make sure the pencil you use is your own.”

“And safety pins, also?” Katya asked, which brought laughter.

“
Ja
, pins. I wonder how you could know? Needles, too. And thread,” Irma said.

“And you'll discover that she likes to pull backwards. She would argue against blue being blue. If you want blue to be blue, say it's green,” Willy said.

“She's had a hard life,” Irma said in defence of Liese Peters.

And she doesn't want us to be here, Katya thought. She wanted to do something to help earn their keep. An idea had come to her while waiting for her sisters to fall asleep. “I could teach kindergarten,” she
said. Three days a week, she went on to say in a rush. There must be other children like Erika, of kindergarten age.

“Not many people could afford to pay,” Irma said.

“Butter and eggs, whatever their parents could manage,” she said.

“You're welcome to try, if you like. See what happens,” Irma said, but she didn't sound convinced. You don't have to do it on our account, she went on to say. The miracle of the loaves and fishes happened over and over again. No matter how many people sat down at the table, they always went away fed, if not satisfied.

“So when will you two marry, tell me?” Irma asked. She nodded in the direction of the room down the hall where Kornelius stayed.

Katya's expression was one of shock.

“But you
are
engaged, yes?” Her eyes turned to her brother for help.

Katya knew too well how rumours like that were spread. From church to church, from a wagon passing another wagon on a road. Before she could deny being engaged to Kornelius, Willy and Irma broke into soft laughter. “He told Willy the two of you were engaged,” Irma said.

Katya felt a rush of emotions, tears; a hunger. “It's not possible, and anyway he doesn't go to church,” she said, and felt her face grow hot with embarrassment.

“
Ja
, we know. People around here think they know all there is to know about Kornelius. But I've known him since he was a boy. He was always hot-tempered, but just as quick to be sorry for showing his temper. Sooner or later Kornelius will grow tired from being so angry. Wait and see. Anger is poor fuel to keep a man warm the way a man needs to be kept warm. Especially one who has already sat by the fire,” Willy said.

ll through those first winter months in Arbusovka, I waited to hear that Pravda had died,” she told the young man. Ernest Unger was his name, he'd said, and while he insisted they might be related, she doubted it, as the Ungers were mostly from the Second Colony, and it wasn't all that common that someone would marry across the river.

“I didn't pray that he would die, but I hoped he would. From cholera, gangrene. Or at the hand of one of his enemies. In the end he was being chased by the Reds; with him was Yerik, the coachman's son, and Kolya. A wheel on their carriage broke, and they had to run for it, but of course Pravda, with his cut-off legs, couldn't run. He begged them not to abandon him, but they said he had whipped them with his
nagaika
for the last time. Pravda knew what he would face when the Reds came, and so he shot himself dead. The story goes, when the Reds found him, they were so angry they cut him into pieces with their sabres.”

The so-called anarchists with their black flags had slunk off, their tails between their legs. Many disappeared back into their
families, shamed or unbowed; their leaders were hunted by the Red Army, Nestor Makhno eventually ending up living in exile in Paris.

“I don't know what happened to Yerik, but Kolya, I heard, found refuge with the Baptists,” she said. “Apparently he was converted and became a good Christian. And so I suppose one day I'll see him in heaven.”

She kept her voice even, but she saw Ernest Unger glance at her feet, which were resting on a hassock, at the way she'd begun to move a red-slippered foot rapidly back and forth. She made it be still. Then she told him that the slippers were from Indonesia, a gift from a granddaughter who had bought them at the Mennonite Self-Help store. When he didn't reply, she thought to offer him a peppermint from a bowl sitting on the table beside her chair, but then decided not to, for he might take the tremble of her hand to mean more than the shakiness of old age.

“Well, yes. My father used to say, one day we'll be surprised to find out who all will be in heaven, just as we'll be surprised to find out who isn't,” she said moments later.

She saw the faint hint of a smile rise in his narrow face – of agreement? She couldn't tell. But more than likely, like her grandchildren, he was amused by her old-fashioned way of speaking.

“That first winter in Arbusovka, all we heard about was the killings. After the Germans left, Makhno and his Little Fathers, Pravda included, went rampaging through the colonies, killing our people,” she said.

“Two hundred souls in the colony of Zagradovka died in a single weekend. Thirty-seven in the village of Number Seven were herded into a church basement and blown to bits by grenades,” Ernest Unger said, breaking in suddenly, his voice strong and rising. “Rosenthal,” he said, “one thousand three hundred and fifty inhabitants, one thousand and ninety sick with typhoid. In Chortitza, another six hundred and sixty were stricken.” He ticked off the
numbers on his fingers – wearing a school ring, she noticed, but not one that she recognized from her own children.

He had been to the archives, she supposed, had read the stories which, in the end, all sounded the same, and which had made her own stomach rumble with gas, a taste on her tongue as though she'd just eaten blood sausage. He must have read her translations of the Sudermann diaries and letters, done so many years ago when her eyesight still permitted, when she was one of the few remaining Russländers in Winnipeg, it seemed, who could read German Gothic script.

Across the room, a tiny wooden door on a clock opened, and a cuckoo bird sprang out. They waited in silence until the mechanical bird had stopped chirping. Ernest Unger rewound the audio tape in the machine, to record over the cuckoo-bird sounds, she thought. Then he pressed a button and the wheels began turning slowly once again, with, she noticed, a slight grinding sound. His wrists were chapped from the cold, and the cuffs of his plaid shirt looked worn. He seemed only half grown, not having completely filled in his skin yet, she thought. He was not well-off, she gathered this from the look of his cuffs, and likely he didn't have a car, as when he'd arrived at her door, his pant legs were wet from the slushy snow, and he'd complained about how long it had taken him to reach Bethania because of the poor Sunday service of the metro transit.

“Just what do you hope to get from my story?” she asked, and saw a brief flare of surprise in his face, that she would be one who would want to know something about him, too.

Moments later, he said he had just come from Saskatchewan, where he had been doing the same thing, collecting stories which he intended to give to the Mennonite Heritage Centre. The stories of the Russländers, told in their own voices, for future generations to come and listen to. “It's important they know what happened. All in
all, disease and violence took nearly three thousand lives,” he said.

Then he told her that he had once come across a Russian proverb, which was what had started him on his journey. “Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye,” he recited; “ignore the past and you'll lose both of them.”

She laughed, which sounded to her more like a sharp little bark than laughter. As if the past could be ignored. She listened every Saturday to news broadcasts from the Mennonite radio station. To the community news following the news, which included birthday announcements.
Our best wishes go out to Mrs. Mary Klassen of Niverville, who reached her one-hundredth year on February 12; Mrs. Sara Neufeld of Mordon, who today is ninety-two years old; Mrs. Margaret Funk of Altona will celebrate her ninety-fifth birthday on February 27
. Despite the hunger, disease and what they had gone through, the Russländer women lived to be very old. They had taken on the responsibility to live long lives, to remember, she believed, and so those who had not come through were resurrected to continue their lives – Well hello, Katya, there you are, coming to visit me again.

“You have heard, I'm sure, about Eichenfeld-Dubovka,” Ernest Unger said. His father as a young boy had witnessed his own father being killed there, along with eighty-two people.

Yes, she knew about Eichenfeld-Dubovka. Most of the men had been whisked quietly away, and their jugulars were severed before the women knew they were gone. A grandfather had been decapitated in the presence of his grandchildren. She had learned about Eichenfeld-Dubovka, and other atrocities, from the women she lived with. When there were no children, no men around to consider, they sometimes spoke with a bluntness that Plautdietsch afforded. A sentence coming out of the blue during a moment of conversation in the vestibule; chairs lined up on either side of the entrance and windows that looked out on a busy street, a street of tall city buildings; a square
of grass enclosed by a perimeter of new trees, and in the centre of it, the brightly coloured tunnels and climbing structures of a playground.
They fried her breasts in a frying pan. They did it to her with the barrel of a gun. A man was swinging from a tree by a leg, naked, with a walking cane hanging out of his rear
. There was no point in telling Ernest Unger those kinds of things. The majority of the women kept the more vivid details to themselves. They were like her grandparents had been, they had no desire to draw pictures. God knew what had happened and, for them, that was enough.