The Russlander (5 page)

The workers and their children stood on two sides of the room, their feet barely touching the fringed border of the blue and gold Persian carpet, the children's eyes reflecting the lights of the chandelier hanging above the table. Although her parents were not standing with the Sudermanns, Katya didn't think of them as being among the workers, either. Her mother had parted her light brown hair at the centre and gathered it at the back of her head with ivory combs. She held her chin high, her graceful neck framed by the lace collar of a messaline blouse the colour of cream, which made her skin glow.

Katya would one day learn how her father and David became friends, brought together during their student years in Alexandrovsk, when they'd spent hours at the beginning and end of every day waiting in a station for a train to take them across the Dnieper. David Sudermann had studied Russian History, Language, and Literature to qualify him to teach, and her father had studied Agriculture. She would hear that when he came to ask her mother to marry him, his Adam's apple was chafed raw from his collar, and bobbed as he struggled to say the word,
yes
. Yes, he promised Oma and Opa Schroeder, he wouldn't take their only daughter far from her family
home in Rosenthal. There was no available land in either the Chortitza or the Second Colony, but instead in Arkadak, or in Ufa, which was near to the Ural mountains. Young men such as her father had gone to Omsk, parts of Kazakhstan, the Crimea and Georgia, and to the Caspian Sea for farmland, which was too far for the promise he'd made to the Schroeder grandparents. And so he went to work as overseer for Abram Sudermann, with the agreement that after ten years, Abram would sell him a parcel of land. Thirteen years had passed, David Sudermann had reminded his brothers during their meeting that morning. He'd found her father in the greenhouse and broke the good news. This year, Peta, my friend, you shall be your own man. In the coming months the brothers would decide which piece of land to sell to him.

By the time their carol had ended, the Wiebe sisters and Sophie were done fetching and carrying, and stood at attention in front of the sideboard, which was now laden with platters of cookies and jugs of
kvass
.

Everyone was now quiet as, from the youngest to the oldest, the children began to recite. Gerhard had memorized a long poem which he recited in a voice that would never be soft – the voice of a drunken sailor, someone had once joked. But in spite of the loudness of her brother's voice, Abram's head, which had begun to bob the moment he'd settled in his chair, dropped to his chest and remained there.

When Gerhard finished reciting there were smiles all around the room, and then a silence. Helena nodded at Katya. You may begin. Katya took a deep breath. “O come all ye children,” she began, and then realized that Mr. Red-Eyes –
Lehrer
Pauls, she corrected herself – was staring at her from the doorway. Did he question why she'd given Joseph a striped coat of many colours, mistaken her whim to be an error? Were there too many tulips growing around the manger?

The lights of the candles flickered in the cabinet doors across the room and in the glass front of a wall clock whose brass pendulum swung across a brocade wall. Abram Sudermann's goat head rested on his chest; his hands, clasped across his immense stomach, were obscured by his grizzled beard. His snores filled the silence. She felt her mother's eyes urging her to recite, Greta's arm nudge her shoulder.

“O come all ye children,” she began again, and then stopped.

Justina glanced at her mother, Aganetha nodding, giving Justina permission to tap Abram on a shoulder and wake him.

“
Ja, ja
,” he said roughly as his head reared up, a hand batting the air as though he'd been disturbed by a fly. “Let's get on with the parade.”

“O come one and all,” Gerhard said impatiently, and everyone smiled. In the silence that followed, one of the sister cousins laughed.

Across the room, someone began to recite in Katya's stead. She looked up and saw that it was Sophie, reciting in German, and so quickly that she hardly stopped to breathe. When she finished, astonishment bristled in the room, while Katya felt the heat of shame burning in her face.

Sophie stepped back and crossed her arms against her chest as though she expected to be buffeted by wind.

“Who is next?” Abram asked, breaking the silence, the only one in the room not to be astonished. While some of the Russian workers could speak a word or two of Plautdietsch, Sophie had recited in High German, the Mennonites' formal church and school language.

By the time they arrived at the part of the program when Abram and his brothers presented everyone with a Christmas plate, the sting of Katya's failure had subsided. Now, as she lined up once again with the other children, this time to receive a saucer of cookies and a glass of
kvass
, given the amount of jostling and excitement, she was sure everyone had forgotten. As she stepped up to the buffet, her eyes met Sophie's.

“It's wrong for someone to laugh,” Sophie muttered.

Aganetha clapped her hands for attention as she rose from her chair. Her taffeta skirts whispered loudly as she went over to the table and, except for the wavering flames of the candles clipped onto the evergreen tree, the room fell into darkness. Katya heard the collective intake of breath, felt the intense stillness radiating from the perimeter of the room, where the workers and children stood.

“And now, on again,” Aganetha sang as the chandelier above the table jumped with light. “And off,” she said, her cheeks flushed, a strand of pewter hair falling over one ear, plastered now against her slick face. “Off,
ja
?” she said with a childlike giggle, her bright eyes scanning the workers, who were trying not to be taken in by the electric lights as their children were, by the switch Aganetha held, which was on the end of the cord hanging from the chandelier.

“Enough is enough,” Abram grumbled.

“Once more,” Aganetha said.

The room went dark once again, then lit up again, the objects on the wooden plates disappearing and, much to the relief of the children, reappearing.

The clock had struck the hour, its pendulum sliding across the brocade wall; the candles on the tree had burned down to their holders when Abram wished everyone a good year and God's blessings. Katya went out into the vestibule, its windows fuzzy now with the velour of frost. She felt the satisfying heaviness of an orange and a box of crayons knocking against her thigh as she wedged her feet into her boots and tied the laces. Salt crystals shattered underfoot as she went down the stone steps. The excitement of the evening left her unmindful of the immediate contrast of the heat of the house, and the frigid air.
Ihr Kinderlein, kommet
, she recited, the words tumbling out unbidden, the entire two verses of the song.

When she reached the back of the house where her family waited, they turned all at once, and together they went through the darkness. Her father's reassuring clasp and then pat on her shoulder was what she needed to know, that her loss of memory was not taken as a failure.

As they passed through the shadows cast by the summer kitchen and washhouse, the inverted V-shaped hood of the butter well, the other workers returned to their identical brick houses which stood in a row near a stone fence and the Chortitza road.

Her family's house was on the opposite side of the compound where, in warm months of the year, yoked oxen went through a gate two by two onto the fields, and where a buried pipe entered the compound from Ox Lake, bringing water into an engine shed. Katya's house had been the house of Abram's parents, built when they'd first arrived from Prussia, with a trunk of gold, some people said. How else could Abram's father have managed to immediately buy up so much land from a Count Ignatieff? Abram had built the Big House while his parents were still alive, and they had chosen not to live in it, ending their days in what was now Katya's house, and had been for as long as she could remember hearing the rattling of its shutters in a high gale, the creak of a floorboard underfoot, seeing the sun shining through an open door turning the polished floor the colour of butter.

She knew each scuffed door sill, the dent in a door frame made by a hammer her father had thrown across the room in a fit of unaccustomed anger. He'd chosen not to mend the gouged wood; it served as a reminder of a time when he'd been too hotheaded, and not what he had become, a willow bending over a creek bed, giving into the wind and not breaking; a soft man with a hushed voice that made people stop and listen, a smile sometimes pulling his face lopsided over an inner picture that had arisen. Katya knew there was a mouse hole in the pantry behind a bottom drawer, a drawer that
held cooking utensils, a soup ladle whose ivory handle had turned brown when her mother had absentmindedly set it on the stove the day Gerhard was born. Everything in the house reminded her of something, a moment; a shaft of light moving with particles of dust brought to mind a time when she had sat on her mother's lap, when all around her had been new and unfamiliar.

Tonight when she looked out the back window of her little attic room, she would see the steppe moving with light. From the front window she would watch the lights in the windows of the workers' houses dim and extinguish. Look how one candle illuminates a window, a single lamp an entire room, and how the darkness is softened and made easier because of the light, her father had said. So let your light shine, and the world will be better for it.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and divided the light from darkness
. The crescent moon was bright and high, and tonight from the front attic window she might see beyond the forest to the Orlov estate, a dim suggestion of light from lanterns that were sometimes left burning all night in the sheep barns. She felt the orange knocking against her thigh and anticipated peeling it then scattering the pieces of rind on the windowsill to dry. Later she would put them into a drawer, the scent of Christmas lingering for months.

They were almost home when Katya suddenly realized something was wrong. She had the vague sense that she had forgotten something. When they had almost reached their gate she realized what it was. She dropped onto her haunches, her breath snatched away. The four little brass bells, two on each boot, were gone. She was eight years old and knew that thunder followed lightning, that if a sow had more piglets than she had teats, the smallest piglets would starve, that a hand held too close to a flame would soon feel its heat. But she had never known loss, and to lose something was incomprehensible. Oh, for the goodness of love, she cried out, bringing Gerhard to his knees beside her.

n the final day of school the tall grass went running before them in the wind, the unbroken land around and beyond Ox Lake becoming like water, and the plumage of the grass like a silver mist rolling across it. She would say to the young man who, in another time and place would want her to tell old-country stories, that in spring the steppe smelled like licorice. It was the perfume of the wild iris; and then there was also the sweet smell of hyacinth which always made her think of Easter – had he noticed that on Good Friday the sky was often grey with clouds? In Russia the sky was cloudy too. Nature did that. Nature paid homage to the one who had willingly gone into the tomb. She imagined that the scent of hyacinth was like the scent of the oil the women had used to prepare the Saviour's body.