The Russlander (45 page)

“What is the church of God?” Irma asked, looking up from the catechism book to peer at Katya overtop her rimless glasses. She had come to Katya's room later that evening to drill her in the questions she would need to answer to be baptised. If you like, we can do it, Irma said. And although they usually did not study on Sunday, Katya invited Irma to stay, her intuition telling her that there was another reason for her visit.

“Those who believe in Jesus Christ,” she replied.

“Who are to be baptised?”

“Those who believe in him.”

“What should the believer's conduct in his daily walk and life be?”

“We should love one another.”

“Our enemies also?” Irma asked.

When Katya's grandmother had gone to attend to Pravda's ulcerated stump that night, she had been showing love for the enemy. Katya knew she wouldn't be able to do the same; that instead she waited for news of the man's death.

“There is no reason for you to worry. You know the answers,” Irma said and closed the catechism book, not realizing – or choosing to ignore – that Katya hadn't responded to the last question.

Yes, she knew the answers. But if she stood before the congregation and said that she would bless and do good to those who hated her, she would become one of those hypocrites Kornelius had referred to.

“You weren't … you didn't like the little story I told this afternoon? Am I right?” Irma asked.

When Katya didn't reply, Irma tapped her knee with the book and said, “Maybe you didn't find it funny because you didn't understand.”

Katya confessed she hadn't understood entirely.

“But you were honest enough not to pretend that you had,” Irma said. “Look here. I'm going to show you something.”

She put the book on the table and made a fist of her large hand and set it on her knee. Then she spread open two fingers. “These are a woman's legs.”

Then she extended the index finger of her other hand. “This is what a man has between his legs,” she said, and wiggled it.

Yes, his stick, Katya thought, and suppressed a smile. Her little brothers, pointing their sticks at the pee-pot.

Then Irma slid her index finger between the spread fingers. “He moves it around inside the woman, and by and by, honey comes out of it. The honey stays inside the woman. The honey mixes with seeds you carry, here,” she said, and poked Katya in the abdomen.

“And that's how children are made. So you see, if the woman had gone and joined her man to sleep in the barn, well, it still would have happened. It takes two people to make a baby,” she said. “A man and a woman. His honey, her seeds.”

For shame, Katya thought, and felt herself blushing. So then, in spite of love and tender feelings, it
was
just like horses, like pigs, goats. She'd always been told, we're not animals.

“Sometimes he groans and moans, and sometimes he says, ‘I love you.' But usually he's too busy to think. While the woman? The woman says, Come on in. And along the way some of us begin to want to do it as much as he does,” Irma said, as she got up. “Even though it could mean having another child, and the woman is already worn out from child-bearing. That's what the real joke was. The woman was playing with the doctor at being simple. She didn't want to stop sleeping with her husband.”

Kornelius, putting himself inside her. The heat of her face had spread throughout her body and her stomach tingled with it. For shame, she had thought, but at the same time, the idea of it gave her pleasure. If she got up to see Irma to the door she would betray herself, the sudden dampness at her underarms, its pungent odour.

“Don't be afraid to ask,” Irma said as she left the room.

Katya stood at the window looking out and saw that Sara was coming down the street. With her wind-burned cheeks, and darkening hair, she was beginning to resemble Greta. She noticed the buttons on her sister's dress were strained, that her breasts were forming. At twelve, she thought in amazement and fear, and wondered about the rusty-looking spots she had come across in their bed linen now and again, when it hadn't been her time for it. The time would come too soon when she would need to explain to Sara. The street and yards were sprinkled with the petals of apple and cherry blossoms; ridges of what looked like pink snow had gathered against the edges of sidewalks, and in the fenced corners of freshly tilled gardens. She remembered a time when she was acutely aware of nature unfolding around her, its daily drama played out in the changing sky, the air in the garden hanging with mist, shimmering with heat. She remembered the acacia trees in bloom at Privol'noye, how the roof would be covered with their petals; a wind carrying a curtain of white rain across the steppes, as far away as Lubitskoye.

She'd been Sara's age when she'd written: “His Majesty King Winter is upon us and has covered the world outside my little attic window in a cloak of ermine. Soft as fur from a distance, light as feathers when I walk through it, and if I should ever see a diamond, the stone would not shine as brightly as the diamonds found in deep winter snow. The jewels King Winter sometimes sprinkles onto the earth to make up for the cruel cold. Cruel winter cold, Lydia used to say when it was winter. Cruel heat, she said in the summer. Cruel weather that, when I sometimes run between the Big House and home, makes my chest hurt from the cold, my feet burn with its heat.”

She ran her finger across Lydia's name now as if to draw her essence from the ink. She remembered Lydia at Justina's wedding, a mauve taper set on a tapestry of grass beside the west garden wall.
Lydia in a dress the colour of lilacs. Lydia standing at a piano one grey morning with feathers drifting in the air around her. What are you making, Lydia? What are you making with your life, Katya wondered. Then she wrote:

he following morning Katya went along the broad main street of Arbusovka, thinking that the sudden absence of bloom on the fruit trees made it seem as though spring had taken a step backwards. Sara pulled the wagon, and Njuta rode inside it, cuddling Sara's doll, which had become her doll now, against her neck. They would go out to Willy Krahn's land, a strip of earth he'd ploughed in autumn and allocated for his boarders' use, should they have anything to plant come spring. The wagon wheels ground against stones and cinders, setting her teeth on edge. A solemn young boy sat on a step, his watchful eyes made large by the gauntness of his face. He was hungry, she knew by his stillness, from the way his attention remained fixed on the wagon, and the bowl Njuta cradled between her legs. As they passed by the gate, he got up abruptly and went into the house without greeting them, the door closing behind him with a decisive clap.

In the street beyond she saw women gathered in the yard of the village store, Liese Peters among them. They all looked to be
the same age. They were all old, she thought, even though she had discovered Liese was not much older than she was. Hunger had turned the women into babushka gossips. Their pinched and suspicious-looking pusses were set off by the dark headscarves they constantly wore because they were chilled from lack of food, because they didn't have the energy to fix their hair. She hadn't looked in her mother's hand mirror lately, or she would have known that her hair had thinned, too. Her skin was dry, and she had the same lines puckering her mouth.

“Where are you going?” a woman called out from the store yard. All the women, their expressions careful, swivelled their heads to watch Katya and her sisters approach.

“We're going to plant beans and potatoes,” Sara called out. Then Njuta held up the doll. “Look. My baby has a new dress,” she said, a declaration from a child who had learned to trust that the women around her were always benevolent, and interested in her world.

Katya was aware that Liese had come over to the gate with another woman, both of them craning their necks to peer into the bowl between Njuta's legs that held chunks of seed potatoes, and beans swollen from an overnight soaking.

“You won't get much from that, even if it should rain,” the woman with Liese said.

“One can always hope,” Katya said, knowing that the woman was suggesting she would be better served eating the seed potatoes and beans than sticking them in the parched earth.

“
Ja, ja
. We can hope for snow in July too,” the woman said. There was a craftiness in her, a sharpness that said she was looking out for herself.

“Look here, Njuta, why don't you show me your dolly's new dress,” Liese Peters said. She had come out of the gate and was marching towards the wagon, and for a moment Katya thought she
meant to snatch the bowl from between Njuta's legs. That like the young boy, the sarcastic woman, she coveted the potatoes and beans, and wasn't really interested in the doll.

She was aware from Sara's expression that something was wrong, even before Liese had taken the doll from Njuta, flipped it over, and pointed triumphantly to a safety pin fastening the dress closed at the back.

“Well, well,” Liese said and expelled her breath as though she had been holding it for a long time. She unfastened the pin, and dropped the doll into Njuta's outstretched hands. Her hands shook as she added the safety pin to her necklace, and then turned her angry gaze on Sara. “I had a feeling it was you.

“What will you do about this?” Liese asked, turning her attention from Sara to Katya.

“We didn't have any hooks. Or a spare button,” Sara said.

“That's neither here nor there,” Katya said, speaking what was expected of her, while her heart remained detached. “You must apologize.” She was aware that the women standing in the yard had come to the gate to watch.

“I'm sorry,” Sara said.

Which was a lie, Katya knew from Sara's defiant pout, but she was relieved to hear it.

“People who steal should be punished,” Liese called after them as they went down the street.

For borrowing a safety pin, she should punish a child for that? For throwing a cup into a butter well? She had turned back without thinking, she was striding towards the woman, going faster and faster, her breath rising, her arms swinging and body pulsing with heat. She had been punished with a neverending silence; with a void every time she had asked for a voice; had turned back to a room expecting to find her mother at the table, a brother going out a
door. She had been punished with memories that came unbidden, such as a time spent sponging and ironing her brothers' trousers when they'd come back from Ox Lake, the heat and damp cloth releasing the mushroom scent of Gerhard; Johann, a wet-animal smell; Peter, the earth after a lightning storm; Daniel. Daniel still too young for wandering, and attached to the immediate yard, and his mother's skirts. All of them having the smell of motion, arms and legs churning through a day, the heat of ideas and plans. She'd been told she had been fortunate to have been spared images that would stay with her forever, but her imagination was hers forever, and it gave her pictures that snatched away her breath.

“What do you know about being punished?” she shouted. “Be still. Go home, and shut your mouth for once, you're nothing but a small-minded puddle of cow shit.”

She felt their silence, a force that pressed against her body. When Liese scurried back through the gate and rejoined the others, Katya was relieved, as she was angry enough to have struck her.

Within moments they were at the garden, a strip of tilled earth Willy had prepared for whoever wished to use it. She found release as she hacked apart clods of earth with a hoe, and felt the impact in her elbows. She carved out a furrow, while Sara came behind dropping beans into it, Njuta behind Sara, filling in the trough with loose earth and then tamping it down with her feet. The village lay far beyond them, a single dusty street with houses on either side of it, the picket fences in need of repair and whitewash.

The wind that had carried away the fruit-tree blossoms swept across the open land, raining dirt against their faces, flipping the leaves of a grove of poplars which had been planted as a windbreak beyond Willy's fields. The lack of rain and uncommon spring heat, the wind, would bring drought; another punishment, she thought.
He turns rivers into a wilderness, a fruitful land into barrenness for the
wickedness of them that dwell therein
. She was beginning to sound like everyone around her, those in church who nodded in agreement when the psalm had been read.

She didn't know that the villagers of Arbusovka were like many others in the colonies, like people in the Second Colony, and in Arkadak, Alt Samar, and Ufa in the north. In Kuban, Suvorka, and Terek beside the Caspian Sea. People who wanted to point fingers, to find reasons, to take the blame for having brought on the end of their world. They had somehow caused the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War with their piety, their high-mindedness, greed, a worldliness. They had either been too arrogant, or too timid. They had eaten too much crackle and too many fatted calves. They were guilty of harbouring unkind thoughts, resentments, and had failed to make things right before taking communion.