The Russlander (9 page)

Dmitri's wife lost her shyness and spoke to them in Russian, asked them how many sisters and brothers they had, and their names, and they replied in Russian, which they studied in school, but which, except for talking Russian to Sophie, they seldom had the opportunity to practise. Unlike their father, who spoke Russian most of his working day. An old oma perched on the stove, the baby's cradle suspended from the ceiling above it.

That Sophie's home was such a damp and smelly place grew large in Katya's mind as they rode away from it. They were not
returning to Privol'noye, as she'd expected they would, but going away from it. She was surprised, but neither she nor Greta asked why. Dmitri's wife had served them sweet tea and hard-boiled eggs after they had apologized to her for the worry they had caused, even though they had not caused it. Never mind, the woman had said, her face becoming young when she smiled. She likely knew who was responsible for making her worry. But their apology had not eased the moodiness Katya had felt gathering in her father for weeks. He sat now with back too straight, eyes fixed above the horses' heads, and unswerving. Moths fluttered about the lanterns hanging on each side of the wagon, keeping up with them as they travelled towards a thin rim of watery light on the horizon.

“
Ja, ja
, you're just going to have to wait and see,” her father said suddenly, and then, realizing he had spoken aloud, he grinned at them, looking sheepish, his shoulders relaxing into a slouch. He reached behind him in the wagon for woollen shawls, which he dropped into Greta's lap and hers. As Katya huddled into her shawl, its scent brought to mind the bright clean rooms of her house, and she thought of Sophie, sleeping on a bench, or the floor, along with all the others, including a goat and pig in winter.

“Open your hand,” her father said to Greta as he fished about in the pocket on the bib of his overall. He dropped an object the size of a thimble into it. Greta held it near to the lantern's light, and Katya saw the glint of gold. Greta gave the object to Katya, a tiny head of a woman, a sharp-featured woman whose hair was braided and hung in loops at the sides of a crown.

“I found it over there,” her father said. He pointed to a dark loaf of land where the ground dipped into a gully overgrown with stunted trees and shrubs, and then headed towards it. When they had come as close to the mound as the growth would allow, he stopped the team. The silence filled with chirping crickets, a vibrating hum of insects, a hum that seemed to come from beneath the earth.

“I was kneeling one day to take a stone from a horse's shoe, and I saw something shining on the ground. There it was,” her father said. “I thought this would be a good chance to bring it back.”

He took a lantern and went round to the back of the wagon for a spade. He chopped at the hard earth again and again, but failed to break it. Then he tried cutting through the grass with the spade, stepping on it with his whole weight, finally throwing the spade aside, and gathering the long grass in his arms, grunting as he wrestled the roots from the ground. Almost brought to cursing, Katya thought as her father began to dig furiously, the earth flying from his shovel.

He held up his hand to receive the figure and she gave it to him, its presence lingering in the heat it left on her skin as he went to the shallow hole he'd dug and put the figure gently down, covering it with earth.

When they got back onto the wagon, the night closed in and the lanterns seemed to eat up the darkness, but when she turned, she saw the darkness behind them, a black smudge hanging above the trail.

They came near to the sprawl of buildings that made up Privol'noye, the rhythmic clop of the horses' hooves along the road growing faster as the animals anticipated the gates and horse barns beyond.

“What the devil,” her father said. The presence of light in Abram's office brought him out of his slouch. He urged the horses into a gallop, but as they came near to the service road he slowed the team, as though needing time to think. Then they went past the service road and turned at the avenue of chestnuts towards the house, the wagon wheels throwing off sparks against the cobblestone drive. There was movement at a window in Abram's office, a shadow, and moments later light spilled out from the vestibule door and onto the steps as Abram came outside.

The wagon came to a standstill beside the rondel, whose clipped symmetrical hedges appeared to have been carved from stone. At the centre of the rondel was a fountain, made up of tiers of bowl-shaped marble, cascading water, which meant that the master of the house was home. In the dusky light, the water looked like silvery banners of silk. When Abram went away Aganetha had the gardener turn off the fountain to save on water, not believing what the gardener had told her, that the same water was used over and over, and except for a bit of evaporation caused by sun and wind, the birds coming to drink, no water was lost.

Greta climbed down from the wagon and hurried away, going to look for Dietrich and Lydia, Katya knew, while her father reached for her and swung her to the ground, saying, Hup! as he did so, becoming suddenly filled with energy, swinging her so hard that her legs and skirts went flying, and she felt giddy when her feet met the ground.

“Go tell Mama where I've stayed,” he said without turning, as he went to meet Abram, following him up the steps and disappearing into the vestibule.

She went along the side of the Big House and saw that Helena Sudermann's room was lit, saw Helena beyond the window at a table and the Wiebe sisters with her, listening as Helena read to them. Greta had already disappeared into the shadows of the west garden, wanting to find Lydia and Dietrich in the vine arbour where they had begun to go since the evenings had grown cool. A rustle of cloth came from beside the back door, Sophie on a bench, brushing her hair.

“Hsst. You there, come here,” Sophie called in a whisper.

“I can't. I'm supposed to tell Mama where my papa is,” Katya said.

“She already knows,” Sophie said. She had seen Aganetha Sudermann going over to Katya's house. It was unusual for
Aganetha to visit her mother, and the news made Katya want to rush home, but Sophie drew her into her lap.

Sophie's chin poked into Katya's shoulder as they watched lights moving in the orchard; the harvest was over, and the seasonal workers free to glean grain on the fields, fruit in the orchard, as they were now doing. They were free to pick through the gardens for potatoes and other vegetables the diggers' forks had missed. They had the right to some of the produce of their labour, what wheat there might be lying on a field, scraps of fat from the fall killing, the feet of butchered chickens. The gardener had set out paper sacks of flower seeds in the greenhouse and the workers were encouraged to take what they wanted to brighten their own yards, a sapling to provide a legacy of shade for their children, to break the wind and snow, a swaying green crown to rest the eye, weary of the flat bleakness of the steppe. They weren't free, however, to roam about the pastures, where villagers drove their cows to graze until Abram fenced the pasture lands and hired several Cossacks to ride the steppe, both day and night. And they weren't free to help themselves to the timber growing in Abram Sudermann's forest, although some of them protested that they had the right to do so, and to prove their point would drag a felled tree out onto the meadow and light it on fire.

“So you didn't come and tell me about your trip to the forest,” Sophie said with mock petulance. “Next time you ask for a story, I'll think twice. Guns going off, you girls could have been mistaken for a rabbit. And my baby brother, too. I heard all about it from my father.”

“We didn't do it. We didn't take your brother,” Katya said.

“Good thing, or I would have bitten off your ear.” Sophie laughed and nibbled at Katya's earlobe, her breath warm and smelling of garlic and onions.

“And you didn't tell me about this, either,” Sophie continued, pulling the headscarf from her apron pocket. Lydia had brought it to her, she said.

“When you were on the road, did you see Manya anywhere along the way?” Sophie asked. “This is her headscarf.”

Katya looked across the yard at the women's quarters, where the windows were always the first to go dark. The women would be up and about before daybreak, when she would sometimes hear the clink of their milk pails, a faint rising din of the cows bawling for relief as the women entered the barns.

“I don't think she's going to come back,” Sophie said. “She's a Pravda, and most of them have no pride. They're known to kiss the hand of a person who kicks them around. But that's not Manya.”

Katya thought of Sophie's cottage, its one crowded room, the dirt floor, and that Manya likely came from a similar place. “But why would Manya want to leave?”

“If I were God, I'd be able to tell you,” Sophie said.

With Manya gone, Sophie wouldn't have anyone of her age and kind to meet with at the bathhouse on Sundays and complain to about the knotholes, which, although they were frequently stuffed with sod, were always unplugged. Sophie would have no one to grumble with about aching muscles, that her ears were full up from listening to Helena, who sometimes acted as though she had a ram in her skirt. Let her chew on her own moustache, not mine, Katya had overheard Sophie saying to Manya. Sophie would plug the knotholes, bathe, and say nothing, except she would tell the other outside women that Manya had been complaining about there being a fox prowling about their quarters, a fox that had followed her into the forest.

One by one the lights left the orchard. Horses whinnied in a field beyond the fruit trees, and wagon trusses began to jingle. The peasants would likely sleep on straw beside the road, as once
the harvest was over, the doors on the seasonal workers' quarters were padlocked. The sky was clear and bright with stars and a quarter moon whose light was strong. Look how the darkness is made less dark by the moon's reflection on the water in the rain barrel, how everything, even a spider's web, is turned to silver by its light.

“Do you believe in God?” Katya asked Sophie. She was thinking of the Red Corner in the one-room cottage where Sophie had lived. She was thinking of its saint-picture, the candles placed before it, thou shalt not worship idols or any graven image.

“What kind of question are you asking? Of course. Everyone believes in God.”

“And God's son in the New Testament?”

“Oh, that book. Helena reads it to them every night,” Sophie said with a scornful snort. “It's better not to believe in that book. When the priests come round with their Pope sacks, they expect you to give them twice as much. For the son, and for the ghost. If you only believe in God, then they don't come as often,” she said.

“Sophie, it's time Katya went home, and for you to come inside,” Helena said from the doorway.

Sophie started, and released Katya from her lap.

“Yes, Mistress, I'm coming,” she said.

Sophie hesitated before going into the house, and turned to Katya. “When you were at my house, did you see my sister Vera?”

“
Ja
.” And she was rough-looking and too bold.

“I miss that little
suslik
so much, sometimes my stomach hurts,” Sophie said. She sighed deeply and the screen door closed with a gentle clap.

Katya was drawn through the dark gulf between the lit windows of the Big House, towards a warm glow of lamplight in the open doorway and windows of her own house. Acacia trees, their crowns the breadth of the roof, were guardians leaning over, listening,
she thought, to her mother and Aganetha's visiting outside on the platform.

“You'd think that woman would have had more sense than to buy meat from a Russian,” Aganetha Sudermann was saying as Katya came up the steps.

Her mother had dragged their one good chair from the parlour outside, and Aganetha sat in it, overflowed the chair on all sides, her plump arms resting on the shelf of her bosom, while Katya's mother sat on a bench leaning against the house.

“So, Katherine, you had a nice trip with your papa, yes?” Aganetha said to acknowledge her presence.

Before Katya could answer, Aganetha turned to Katya's mother, who leaned against the house, her face patterned with diamond shapes of light and shadows cast by lamplight through a trellis beside the door, her hands folded across her lap as though not itching to scrub the cucumbers afloat in the washtub at her feet. Katya realized that Aganetha's visit had not been expected.

“She was grinding meat in the summer kitchen,” Katya's mother said to remind Aganetha where she'd left off in the story. She glanced at the tub of water, a scrub brush floating on its surface, then across the yard at the Big House, her eyes coming to rest on Katya's face and asking, Do you have any idea why your father is taking so long?

“Yes, she was grinding meat in the summer kitchen, and she called across the yard to one of her help, who was carrying the milk too carelessly and slopping it over the sides of the pail. I was telling your mama about a Mrs. Krahn. Mrs. Willy Krahn from Arbusovka,” Aganetha said to Katya. “She passed away, and her funeral is on Saturday. The woman had bought a butchered lamb from a Russian who came knocking at her door. When she was
grinding the meat and calling out to the girl who was slopping the milk, the meat grinder came loose and fell. It landed on her foot and split open her big toe. The meat was bad, and so she was poisoned,” Aganetha said.

I'm so hungry for company, Katya's mother often said. Sometimes she sang a ditty about a bird that came carrying a letter in its beak. A letter from a mother in Rosenthal. The tips of her mother's shoes barely touched the platform as she sat on the bench, which made her look like a child. She motioned to Katya that she should take up scrubbing the cucumbers.

Katya cleaned the cucumbers, hearing Lydia and Greta's voices rise from the arbour in the west garden, and then the sound of a mandolin as Dietrich began to play. A balalaika took up the song, its music coming from the field beyond the orchard where the light of the gleaners' bonfire glimmered through the trees. A man began singing –
Odnozvuchno zvenit kalakol'chik
– his voice, honey sweetening the night. A door closed, and moments later Franz Pauls came across the yard, drawn by the magnet of song through the garden gate and the orchard, singing in his thin tenor voice as he went into the field to join the workers at their fire. A breeze wafted across the compound from the outer edges of their oasis, flipping the leaves of the acacia guardians behind her house, bringing with it the smell of manure which had been spread on the fields. When enough time had passed, and an ocean distanced her from the place where she had been born, she would recall this moment as proof that she had once lived in paradise.