The Russlander (44 page)

Soon after she came to Arbusovka, she learned of the death of Nela Siemens's father. Ohm Siemens had used the occasion of his winter bath to divert the Makhnovite bandits, but instead they used it to place wagers on how long it would take for him to freeze to death. They'd put rifles across the hole in the ice and stood on them, pinning his shoulders while they counted the number of minutes it took for him to give up the ghost. She'd heard that in a village near to Nikolaifeld, Helena Sudermann and Franz Pauls and others had been conducting a religious service in a school when they were interrupted by Nestor Makhno and his men. The worshippers fled. But God did not intervene, and in spite of Helena Sudermann's and Franz Pauls's prayers, the shutters and doors were nailed closed, and the building set on fire. Helena Sudermann, Franz Pauls, and three lay preachers were burned alive. She remembered the day Kornelius came to tell them, how her joy at seeing him had evaporated, and her mind numbed into its old woodenness by the horrible news.

Months later, her grandfather brought the news that she'd already learned from Kornelius. He also brought with him a bundle of spring and summer clothing and a sack of potatoes. He brought the recipe notebook, her mother's hand mirror, and Sara's doll. She and her sisters should remain in Arbusovka for a longer time, he said. The front sometimes passed through Rosenthal and Chortitza
twice in a day. With it came the demands of the Red Army, the Whites, the Makhnovites, for food, shelter, and horses, paying for the items in the exchange of the day: lice and hunger. Fifteen soldiers had been killed by shelling from across the river, and were buried in a grave in the yard of the Teachers' Seminary. He'd heard of such cruelty: Red soldiers nailing the epaulets of White officers to their shoulders. That the Whites sometimes buried their enemies alive. Three of their town boys had been challenged to denounce God or be thrown off the Einlage bridge. When they refused, two were thrown and drowned, and the other jumped, rather than be pushed, and saved himself.

She watched her grandfather and uncle Bernhard go off down the road, and within moments they were obliterated by snowfall, as though a curtain had been drawn behind them. A curtain that gave her a feeling of safety, that a vast distance lay between the village of Arbusovka and the town of Rosenthal, and not just an hour's ride.

The following spring and summer she grew used to the stillness that radiated above the land like heat shimmer, a stillness punctuated by the twittering of tomtits nesting in a tree outside her window, a rooster's solitary crowing as the town's only street began to emerge from a grey light. The stillness had been interrupted several times by what sounded like thunder reverberating in the distant sky, a trail of smoke calling attention to that far border and the people who lived beyond it, her grandparents, her uncle and his wife who, in her mind, had become featureless, and as small as clothes pegs.

One street divided the settlement; nothing in the village was far from Willy Krahn's house: a small church, school, the village's only store. She grew frustrated by the short distance she could walk up and down that single street, until Irma reminded her that the
smallness of Arbusovka was a blessing. There was little to attract men intent on mayhem. There had been several instances of riders coming to Arbusovka, but after they and their horses were fed and watered, they quickly moved on to a village or town that offered more in the way of spoils.

Near to the end of autumn, a woman whose family had travelled to visit relatives returned to Arbusovka with the news that many of the women in the towns of Rosenthal and Chortitza had been laid on the ground. Katya stood in the hallway, her body gone rigid with fear as she heard Liese tell Irma. The traveller and her companions had come upon wagons carrying the women, and girls as young as twelve. They were being taken to a doctor to be rid of disease and what was growing behind their aprons. Who they were, the woman couldn't say, as they had covered their faces. She said the poor dears were being taken to a far-away place to prevent their terrible secret from being known. She also brought news of the typhus that had felled as many as a hundred people in the colony of Chortitza. Not long afterwards, the woman herself succumbed to spotted fever, and then there was a small outbreak of typhus in Arbusovka, which claimed several members of one family.

Living with Willy Krahn and Irma, being surrounded on all sides by people in the house, was like wearing an extra coat or layer of fat. Katya felt removed from innuendo and rumour; she felt watched over and protected. Every day she sat down to meals with people who might, at any time, have broken out in a quarrel had it not been for Willy and Irma's mitigation, and their sense of humour. One such Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1921, she entered the parlour where Irma was visiting with several other women, and knew from their expressions that Irma was about to say something amusing.

“I heard a story recently about a woman who was worn out from having children,” Irma was saying. “And so the doctor thought it
was time to have a talk to the husband. He was concerned for the wife's health. Apparently her womb had fallen, and he couldn't get her blood up,” she said.

It was the word
womb
that had caught Katya's attention. She'd come into the parlour to add water to a pan set on a windowsill, which held jars. The clay-coated jars were to become table centre-pieces, a project she and her kindergarten children had completed only the day before. She felt Liese's eyes on her as she touched each of the cloth-wrapped jars, feeling them for moistness. She had begun to suspect that any reference to the affairs between men and women was directed at her. That the women could read her mind. When she was thinking about Kornelius, her body secreted an odour which they recognized. They knew about the strange constrictions, the sweet pain, the release.

“Come and sit,” Willy's daughter called, patting an empty chair beside her, and because Katya didn't know how to refuse, she joined them.

“I think I know which woman you're talking about,” a neighbour woman said to Irma.

The parlour where they sat was the only room not taken over by boarders. It was a large room with potted herbs, and now with jars wrapped in dampened cheesecloth lining the windowsills. A room with a wall clock whose minute hand was missing, and where Katya held her kindergarten class. The time was near to Easter, 1921, and she had taken her kindergarten children to a pit near a brickyard to gather clay, which they'd plastered onto the jars. She endured Liese Peters's criticism when she explained the project: the seeds of grain gleaned from nooks and crannies in the barn would be pressed into the slip. The jars would be kept moist and the seeds would sprout and grow, and become a table decoration which the children would take home for Easter. A waste of time, and seeds, Liese had said.

“That would be the P.P. Janzen family you're talking about,” Liese Peters said now, without missing a twist or loop of her crochet yarn and hook.

“It's more than likely Mary Dyck,” Willy's daughter said.

“The Janzen's fifteen children outdo the Dycks' by three,” Liese said.

“Yes, but don't forget, the Janzens' fifteen come from two wives,” the neighbour woman pointed out.

Katya had two of the Janzen children attending her kindergarten. Listless and white-faced children whose worried eyes often betrayed their hunger. Children whose eyes she'd had to bathe to soften a crust of mucus; she then boiled the cloths to prevent the infection from spreading to others. They always arrived early, knowing that a cup of soup awaited them. Soup she made with water, dill, a tablespoon of fat and a few egg noodles to give the children some nourishment. Famine fare, she would later call the soup when she began to add dandelions and strips of calf hide to it. Her kindergarten had not become a source of income for her, as she'd hoped, but rather a place for the children to come expecting to be fed a piece of bread, a single wafer of apple doled out from a bag of dried apples.

“It doesn't matter who the woman is. Tante Irma was going to tell us a joke,” Willy's daughter reminded them.

“Yes, let her say it. We can use a laugh, too,” the neighbour said when the sound of merriment rose outside where Willy and several men, Kornelius Heinrichs among them, were talking together on the platform.

“The doctor came to talk to the husband. He told him that his wife shouldn't have any more children, as her health was too poor. ‘Well, what am I supposed to do about it?' the husband asked. The doctor suggested that the husband should start sleeping in the barn.
‘Oh,' said the wife. ‘Do you think that would work? If so, then I should sleep in the barn, too,”' Irma said.

Their laughter filled the room while Katya stared at her hands in her lap, and felt herself blush.

When last week she'd gone to the barn in search of stray kernels of grain for the kindergarten project, she hadn't known Kornelius had come looking for Willy. She couldn't understand how she missed seeing his cart on the barnyard, the single emaciated nag hitched to it. Where once he'd had a barn filled with riding horses, this sway-backed mare was his one remaining animal. She heard someone step up behind her, turned, and found herself being held in his arms.

“Oh Katya, I have such a need for you,” he said. She thought her ribs would crack as he squeezed her suddenly and hard. Then he released her.

It happened so quickly she might have blamed her imagination, if it weren't for his odour and heat lingering as he turned and went towards the open doors and the sunlit barnyard. Daylight framed his body, accentuated the slight bow of his legs, his stiff-legged way of walking. Once he stepped from the barn into the light, he would disappear.

“I haven't thanked you for bringing us here,” she said. “It's true, what my opa said. God put you in the right place at the right moment. Twice now,” she added, after a pause.

Did he ever ask himself why that hadn't been the case when his wife met the hooligans on the road? She had heard about Kornelius's part-Arabian horse which he rode at top speed across open fields. He carried a pole, a hammer tied to the end of it, yelling at the top of his voice as he chased a rabbit down and killed it.

He turned to face her, and for moments they looked at each other, her words hanging in the space between them.

“People can read into things what they want. If you believe what your grandfather said, then thank God, and not me,” he said.

“They say … I've heard it said that you blame God for what happened to your wife. That it's the reason why you don't go to church,” she said.

“I don't go to church because there are enough hypocrites occupying the benches as it is,” he said.

A longing drew her to him, across the distance towards the light beyond the open door. When they stood face to face, she still felt the impression of his body against her own.

“If I blamed anyone, I blamed myself for being alive. But that was long ago. I don't any longer. Not since the day I saw you at the train station. I had said to myself, Kornelius, you need something to hope for. And when I saw you, I thought, there it is. Don't lose it.”

She felt the heat of tears, his hand come to rest on her shoulder, his bristly cheek, and then his mouth brushing against her own.

“It's not your fault that you're alive, and they're not. Put the blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of evil men,” he had said.

“Someone here doesn't care for your joke,” Liese said to Irma.

Katya felt the women's careful scrutiny, and was relieved when their conversation went off in another direction.

A wild woman had been seen running about the countryside, the neighbour woman told them, repeating what they'd already heard.

She had been seen among cows put out to pasture early one morning, on her hands and knees eating dandelions. A group of boys were out playing at dusk, and kicked a ball into the churchyard. When they climbed the wall to get it, they came upon the woman at the water pump. Her face was terrible to look at, scratched and streaked with dirt. When she spat at them, they threw stones at her, and she in turn flung liquid at them from a cup, which caused two of the boys to immediately become drowsy.

“Those were P.P. Janzen boys. Liars, all of them. And if you ask me, they're always half asleep,” Liese said. Her chain of safety pins had grown, a double loop that now reached her waist.

Katya had heard the story about the wild woman from Sara, who brought it home from the
Dorfschule
. She'd heard Kornelius telling Willy he'd seen the woman early one morning sneaking out of his barn, where he suspected she'd spent the night. People were saying that the woman was from Moscow, or Leningrad. That she was a distant relative of the Romanovs. She had come on the train along with the bagmen, and the thousands of beggars who believed the streets in the villages were paved with butter and liverwurst. Kornelius had laughed at his own joke, the sound of his laughter a note hanging in the air above the yard, holding her breathless, her knees quaking.

“Katherine is preparing for baptism,” Willy's daughter said when they'd exhausted the topic of the wild woman.

“Good,” the neighbour woman said and nodded, and Katya wasn't sure whether she meant it was good that she would publicly proclaim her faith and become a member of the church, or good because they recognized the feelings rising in her body, and baptism prepared the way for marriage.

If she'd grown up in a village she would have attended choir festivals and travelled to other villages and caught the attention of a man, not for what she'd said, but for how little she had spoken. He would have noticed her preference for dark colours, how neatly her apron was patched, and assume that she would look after his interests well. And after enquiries were made about the man's family, within a week or two, they'd be married and sharing a bed. And then what? She didn't exactly know, as she had neither mother nor older married sister to tell her, but when she pondered over it, the sweet clear pain came in waves.