The Russlander (6 page)

But on that last day of school when she was young – her legs sometimes carrying her too fast, and she'd go rolling like a tumble-weed across the ground – she thought, such a waste, the iris and hyacinth blossoms shrivel so quickly and turn the colour of rust. You had to go slowly, search for them growing near to the ground among
the steppe grass. She wondered if that was why they looked and smelled so extravagant, so they'd be noticed, even for a short time. The sight of spring wildflowers lifted a sadness she'd felt throughout the winter whenever she thought of the missing bells. She had expected she might yet find them when the snow had melted, but that was not to be.

Lydia called, and pointed out a steppe eagle riding the air currents far above them, and soon after they heard a grebe call out a warning from among the reed beds. They went round Ox Lake, the wind sweeping through the reeds, the sound a church of whispering, a dryness soon to be filled with green shoots and birdsong. In a field beyond the lake Greta startled a nest of newly hatched larks. She bent, hands on knees as she peered at them, the wind tearing her hair loose from its braids and whipping about her head. Look, when she moved, the birds opened their beaks. They became three apricot-coloured flutes as wide around as their bodies. If she should go close enough, why, she'd be able to see right through to their feet, yes? Let's not, Katya told her; the sight of near-naked birds always made her shiver. They must remember what they'd seen, as their parents would want to know.

We saw baby larks in a nest.

We heard a water fowl of some kind.

We saw an eagle.

When we went close by the baby larks, we looked inside their beaks and saw a pile of wriggling worms.

Earlier in the day she had gone to the road with Lydia and Greta, had chased after a carriage taking Helena Sudermann to the train station at Ekaterinoslav. Their former tutor was off on a journey and would be gone for the entire summer. Who was going to yammer at them for bringing mud into the kitchen? Not Sophie. The Wiebe sisters perhaps, but they were so mild they couldn't scold without weeping. Like Helena Sudermann, the Wiebe sisters
hadn't married and borne children. While the absence of such joy had made Helena as gritty and bitter as a grape seed, the Wiebe sisters were as malleable as butter.

Now they went far away from Privol'noye and the Chortitza road, the meadow and forest beyond it. They went away from the Orlov estate, which they were not to explore as they had once done, had gone near to its wooden Great House stained charcoal by the elements, its roof carpeted with moss and peppered with the growth of mushrooms. They had taken turns standing on an upended pail and looking in a window to see a dwarflike man dressed all in black, poking at a fire. Then they had peered in a front window to see a long table spread for Easter with two-foot-high
paska
breads and bowls of coloured eggs. They had been surprised to find the familiar, and wondered how the Russians had come to know their custom.

Greta and Lydia began to run, their gingham backs becoming a flutter of pink and blue amid the rolling plumage of grass. Katya, watching them move away from her, would see them that way when her hair had turned white, moving away from her like that, their arms swimming to part the air and grass before their faces, the clouds racing before them as the clouds beyond their classroom windows had all morning on their final day of school. Windows which looked out east and south, and on clear mornings Franz Pauls, whose red-rimmed eyes were sensitive to light, would draw the blinds against the sun. Draw the blinds to blind him to what was going on in the compound beyond. Especially at the parade barn, where Abram, if he had a visitor, would bring his prized red stallion out into the yard and put it through its paces.

“Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations,” Greta and Lydia had chanted as Franz Pauls's slender frame passed in front of a window. He had the mincing and calculating step of a rooster; he would stretch his neck suddenly and poke his head in this
and that direction, as though amazed at something he'd just seen. Katya's earlier recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm had been almost perfect, and now Lydia and Greta were reciting the books of the Bible for the final test of the year. Lydia's fingernails grew white half-moon spots as she gripped the back of her chair, standing shoulder to shoulder with Greta, whose dark eyes shone with concentration.

Franz Pauls raised a ruler as though he might stop them, but his attention had been drawn by the sight of Dietrich coming across the compound. Dietrich had returned home for the summer, which meant that his older sister, Justina, must have too. Katya guessed this was what occupied their tutor's mind, from the way he began preening his rooster feathers, grooming the moustache he'd sprouted since coming to Privol'noye, smoothing it, twirling its waxed ends that curved so proudly up to his ears.

From the way Franz Pauls paced, only half listening to Greta and Lydia's recitation, Katya guessed that their tutor was as impatient as they were for school to be over. A guitar rested against the wall beneath a window; he'd brought it with him intending to play it as accompaniment for his proposed choir. But they hadn't done much choir-singing, after all. Instead, Franz Pauls frequently gazed out a window while he plucked the guitar, thinking of his town of Rosenthal, she supposed. Thinking of his pals at the high school he'd left a year early, going out into the wilderness to teach children who did not necessarily want to be taught. Thinking of the red stallion Abram, in a fit of good nature, had promised he would ride. Franz Pauls had bought new leather riding breeches which he wore on Sundays and holidays no doubt to remind Abram of his promise, but to no avail.

The sun came out from behind clouds, beaming full strength, and instantly the classroom was warmer. Brass chains looped against a wall brightened to the colour of gold. The chains were attached to
the Swiss clock whose works were so efficient, she couldn't hear the clock ticking above Lydia and Greta's recitation. Beneath the face of the clock was an alpine house with two doors. A boy in blue trousers stood in one of the doorways, as though he couldn't decide whether to come out and predict rain, or go back inside and let his red-frocked sister come out of her door to give them a day of sunshine. The light was reflected in the picture glass of a photograph of the tsar hanging on a wall opposite the windows, highlighting a diorama, a picture they'd painted depicting the zones of plant and animal life of a eutrophic lake.

A silence followed when Greta and Lydia finished reciting. Franz Pauls's moustache went flying up as he smiled. “Very good, girls,” he said, and their last day of school was over. Katya heard a hollow click, like a key being turned in a lock. The boy in blue had gone back inside the house, and the red-frocked girl had come out. The remainder of the day was going to be a fine one to go roaming.

They had wandered only for a short time when the wind rose suddenly, pressing the purple globes of wild onion flat against the grass, its plumage becoming stiff brushes which chafed their skin. Soon they had to shout to be heard, and by the time they'd reached the pipeline path and were racing to the compound, Katya was soaked to her skin and had nothing to gain by running.

By summer, the larks they had come upon in the nest were fledglings, and Katya couldn't tell them apart from their parents. When they perched on a marmot's hill and sang, they too stretched their crested heads and dipped their tails when they trilled.

How do you know those are the same birds? Gerhard asked, his voice full and rough-sounding. Her brother was eager to know what Katya knew, and more, his shoulders already squared in anticipation
of gaining a seat on a bench in the classroom following the harvest.

Greta said she couldn't be sure it was the same nest, but Katya recognized the indentation of the earth where it sat.

“Yes, it's possible to know,” her father said.

He had something to tell them, and so he'd come walking with them, his long legs pulling him through the weeds, a wide-shouldered, sinewy and work-fit man with a pie-shaped and flat face, a fringe of brown beard decorating its edge. You wait, they'll be back soon, he'd called to Lydia, who'd stood on the road watching them go. Just his own this time, he told her without explaining why.

He took them out into a field, where they startled a flock of birds, hundreds of starlings rising up at once, twittering, their wing pinions squeaking. As the birds flew off, they became a broad ribbon wavering above the steppe. The ribbon began rising at each end, the ends finally meeting at centre sky and forming a circle. It brought to mind Jeremiah's chariot, her father said as they watched the birds wheel from one end of the horizon to the other.

He said they should notice how certain plants turned the edges of their broad leaves to the sun, rotating as the sun travelled from east to west. They did so to preserve precious moisture. Notice the downy stem hairs, which drew in what moisture there was from the air. The plants' thirsty roots spread deep into the soil under their feet. Which was what he wanted for them, he said. He wanted his sons to put their roots down into their own soil. For his daughters to learn how weeds in a vegetable garden disguised themselves in similar-looking foliage, mingled with the food plants in order to escape the eye of a gardener. He wanted them to take lessons from the garden, to become good stewards of their future husbands' efforts, to become precious rubies. He wanted them to know that the next harvest he brought in would be their own. Over here, there, or there, he told them, gesturing with a wide sweep of his
arm, west, east, south, their harvest brought in from whatever land Abram and his brothers saw fit to sell to him. Beyond them the grass lay flattened in a swirl, as though crushed by the body of a huge sleeping animal.

On the same day in late summer that Helena Sudermann returned home, the harvest workers arrived, all at once, over a hundred and fifty men. Katya was in the summer kitchen with the Wiebe sisters when they heard them coming down the road. They went to the stone fence to watch as the workers came four abreast, singing. They had just brought in the Orlov harvest, and were coming now to do the same at Privol'noye.

Their harmonious song rolled across the land as they streamed onto the compound along the service road, Little Russians, Tartars wearing astrakhan hats, Rumanians and Bulgarians. Men who would one day all look alike in grey army uniforms. Her father would sit next to such men on a bench in an inductee centre, but they would go to war carrying guns while her father would never even know the weight of a gun carried for shooting another human being. Instead, her father would wear the uniform of a Red Cross
Sanitäter
, and be trained as a nurse, and would know how to turn their bodies in a bed without causing needless pain, to change their bed linens and the dressings on their wounds.

The harvesters were met at the provision house by her father and Dmitri, the gardener's assistant, who recorded the workers' names and gave each one a mattress tick to fill at the straw pile, and a tin basin holding a rolled-up towel and a cube of soap. There were women among them, stubby and tanned, their faces lined and mouths chapped from the sun. They were field workers, and cooks whose cart was drawn by two lean cows and filled with bundles and pots and an icon which the women would set up on a shelf in their kitchen. When the workers had filled their ticks with straw, chosen their bunks, stowed what musical instruments they had brought
with them, they formed a line again, this time at a shed, where Dmitri distributed tools.

In the days that followed, the men rolled a shed on wheels across a field, freeing the harvesting machine inside it. They dug an ash pit beside the harvester, and shovelled the wagonloads of coal until it towered in a glistening black mountain beside the machine. They sang as they unloaded barrels of water hauled from the lake. As Katya watched from her attic window, the oxen, looking like miniature wood carvings, went out into the fields at the break of day. They were hitched to cutters, whose blades carved a swathe through the gold carpet and threw it off in rows for the women to gather and tie into stooks. Throughout the days of the harvest the air in the compound was saturated with spicy cooking odours, the smell of straw firing the bake ovens, of freshly baked rye bread.

Katya's father was gone from the house long before sunrise, and returned only after the sun had set. He became one of the workers, unrecognizable, his face caked with the dust of chafe, the shape of his body emerging in the creases and folds of his dusty clothing. She lay awake in the thick heat of the attic room beside Greta, listening for him to return, listening as the house stilled and the clock's tick in the
grossestube
downstairs took over. During the day she watched over Sara and baby Johann, while Greta helped her mother harvest their own vegetable garden, the two of them picking it clean, hovering over the heat of a stove in the summer kitchen as they set jars of vegetables to cook in a boiler.

The day came when, for the last time, the women greased their hands and faces with fat to protect their already cracked and bleeding skin against the bite of wheat chafe and straw. At the end of the day when the harvester was shut down for the last time, the silence seemed deeper, and more complete. That evening the fires outside the workers' quarters were smaller; the songs the men sang quavered with melancholy, sighs and longing.

In the morning the workers lined up at the provision house, bundles and instruments slung from their backs, waiting for Katya's father to pay them.

When they left, he slept for half a day on a bench in the summer room, overcome finally by exhaustion and the silence in the compound beyond, lulled by the sound of baby Johann as he crawled about the floor. When he awoke, he hitched up his suspenders and went to see Abram. Today was the day he would talk to him about the land.

They were going to have a house in a village and land nearby where her father would go out and work with his own hired men, the village community pastures becoming home to their German red cows, watched over by a herder and shepherd dogs. Katya went through the rooms of the Big House looking to tell someone who did not already know, and found Mary and Martha Wiebe in the kitchen. The sisters were daughters of a drink-bump, a man who loved his brandy more than life, she'd heard, and they had been sent away to work at an early age to keep the family going. They were ordinary-looking women, Martha being heavy-set and brown-haired, Mary lighter-coloured and lighter of nature, too, more apt to laugh, while her sister looked for the dark side of things.
Ja, ja
, Katya, we know, the Wiebe sisters said, their soft sadness emanating from them like a night vapour.