The Russlander (29 page)

“They want money,” Dietrich explained, as he got back into the carriage. “They won't let us to pass through the village unless we pay them. The beggars are demanding a ruble for each
droschke
– five for the coach.”

Lydia snorted. “They should have asked for a hundred and made themselves feel even more important. It doesn't make any difference, because Papa would never pay.”

They were going to go around the village, Dietrich said.

“Fine,” Lydia said. “As if my body isn't sore enough already.”

As Yerik waited for the carriages behind them to turn on the road, he sat chuckling. Dietrich wanted to know what could possibly be amusing him, and Yerik told them what Katya's father had said. Comrades, you have the right to demand money from us, and we, being as equal as you, have the right to refuse to pay it. I know you will recognize the wisdom that every man is free to do as he chooses.

Yerik blew his nose between his fingers and wiped them on the seat of his trousers. “I never heard such a thing.”

“But will they allow us to go across the fields?” Mariechen, one of the sister cousins, asked.

“It's Papa's land. They're not so ignorant as to stop us from crossing our own land,” Lydia said.

“So, Yerik. As a free man, what do you choose to do now?” Dietrich called, his voice suddenly jovial, trying not to show he was
relieved the incident had passed. The men had returned to the yard and crowded around Pravda; a bottle passed between them.

“I freely choose to follow the other carriages,” he said.

What they had just experienced was only one incident of many similar incidents, and most of them sparked by Simeon Pravda, Dietrich told them matter-of-factly as they left the village and the road to cross a shallow ditch and go out into a cultivated field. Katya wasn't taken in by his casual manner. She saw that his eyes moved constantly, as though wary that at any moment someone might come riding. They went away from Lubitskoye, and then parallel to it, until the village was a distant smudge on the land. Then their
droschke
rejoined the road, Abram's coach passing them, once more in the lead, and they continued on their way to Nikolaifeld. Moments later she could see their church in the distance, its grey masonry and white arched windows, an abrupt presence on the flat and greening land.

Children sitting on the church wall, the prized vantage point from which to view the arrival of families, grew silent and stiff as Abram's coach approached the gates. The coach passed through, and the children swivelled round to watch it circle the yard beyond, coming to a standstill beside the coach of another estate owner. When Katya entered the walled churchyard, it was as though a storm had passed, the memory of what had happened only a faint rumbling of thunder in the far distance. People were gathered in clusters, visiting, turning to watch their arrival, Abram's black stallions already being unhitched, the animals snorting, heads lifted as they scented the other horses in their stalls. Yerik drove the team to the back of the yard, where a sea of wagons and carriages spread out from the perimeter of the church wall.

As Katya joined up with her family, Sara was begging to be allowed to sit among the girls of her age, but today being Greta's baptism, they would stay together, her mother said, just as Sara's
brothers would remain with their father on the men's side of the church. Katya searched among the groups of visiting women for a girl she used to sit with in church, and found her among the young women gathered near the women's entrance. She noticed suddenly that in comparison to women of the same age in the towns of Rosenthal and Chortitza, they were dressed plainly, and were more subdued. The girl nodded shyly as Katya greeted her, her shyness blunt and unappealing.

Katya sat between her mother and Greta, her baby sister Ann asleep in her mother's arms. Somehow a chickadee had got into the church, and the dry scurrying of its feathers against a window stirred the children, who craned their necks, bobbed up and down to try to find the source of the unaccustomed sound. A bird, a bird, a bird, they began to whisper, as though they had never before seen an ordinary chickadee. No bright bead of sound preceded the telltale
dee-dee
; instead, the bird's chirp became shrill and frantic as it battered at the window. Katya wished one of the men would show it the way to an open door. But then it gave up, darted through the air above them, and up to a ceiling beam, whereupon it perched, and gradually the children grew quiet too, their attention, Katya's attention drawn to the front of the church as the names of the baptism candidates were called out. Greta shed her felt cape and draped it across Sara's lap, her dress suddenly looking almost too glorious, which Greta seemed to feel too as she stepped into the aisle, her elbows tight against her sides, hands clenched against her stomach, cheeks flaring.

Each of the baptism candidates was questioned by the elders and gave a short and often hurried testimony of their faith, then came forward to receive a sprinkling of water on their head. But Katya's attention was drawn to the chickadee, a soft pouch of feathers set against the oiled timber. Its presence seemed uncanny and she thought of Helena's empty birdcage, and looked around for Helena
in the church. She found her sitting several benches behind, and to the right, her angular face framed by her black bonnet, the fringe of hair under her nose a straight line as she stared at the back of the woman's head in front of her, her expression calm, but unreadable.

After the service, the newly baptised, who were now members of the
Gemeinde
of the Nikolaifeld church, stayed to visit with each other in the churchyard, and so Katya was to return home with her parents. Her father guided the horses among the people who had come to church on foot, some calling out that her parents shouldn't be slow to visit, even though they knew that because of her father's responsibilities, they weren't free to visit. All of a sudden they saw Helena Sudermann going past in a carriage with people they didn't recognize. As the wagon came abreast, Helena turned to them, nodded and smiled, a rather sad smile, Katya thought. And she thought that perhaps Helena was conveying to her mother that she bore no hard feelings for whatever had passed between them the previous evening.

“Where's Tante Lena going?” Sara asked the question that was on Katya's tongue.

“She's going with the Baptists,” her mother said without explaining further. As though Helena joining another religious group was something that happened every Sunday.

Greta gave me this recipe, which she got from Frieda Krahn from Arbusovka, who got it from her oma Hildebrandt of Neuendorf. Frieda Krahn's oma baked these Gruznikie to hand out to Russians who came calling at Christmas. When Oma Hildebrandt passed the recipe to Frieda, she advised her that if she was still in bed when callers came, to let them come in anyhow, strangers or not. And if they sang a blessing, to give them a few extra Gruznikie.

Katya copied the recipe for
gruznikie
in her notebook on that Pentecost Sunday afternoon as she sat out on the platform, and her parents and young brothers napped. She watched Greta and Sara go walking along the road, their arms outstretched and teetering as they followed narrow ruts. She saw Abram and his brothers come from the Big House and go to the barns. Their dark trousers and shirts made them three black-and-white men, Jakob's hair the colour
of mahogany and setting him apart, as did Abram's girth. Abram supported himself on two walking-sticks now, his face scarlet after a short journey across the yard. She thought how comical he looked whenever he talked to anyone. He'd go over to whatever was nearby, a fence, wagon, table, and put the object between himself and the person. He'd rest his arms on it, and lay his chin on his arms, his legs crossed and his body on such a tilt that he appeared in danger of falling onto his stomach. In this way he presented only his huge goat head and shoulders to the listener, most likely thinking that the pounds of lard hanging from his body were invisible. She smiled inwardly at the thought as the three Sudermann men were swallowed up by the dim interior of the horse barn.

Now, as she waited in bed for Greta to come up the ladder to their attic room, she took out the notebook and recorded the circumstances of the day when she had written down the recipe. Years later, whenever she read the entry, she would be reminded of Greta's baptism and would wish they had travelled together as a family to and from church on what had proved to be one of their last outings together.

Later, she would reread what she had written and recall Greta, her dark hair like unravelled wool tumbling across a pillow; the warmth in their attic room being dispelled by chilly air that billowed the curtain, the brass bells she had pinned to it tinkling noisily. The sound of bells would always make her think of snow blanketing the compound, and banking up its walls. Snow wedged in the tongues of her boots, landing in clumps on the doormat as she loosened the laces. She would remember the feather quilt covering their bodies, a counterpane of white hovering in the shadows, the lamplight falling across Greta's face when she told Katya that she and Dietrich were going to marry.

Katya stood at the window, her sister's news still fresh and startling as first snow. The sound of the bells was like that of harness
bells, and she thought, and remembered: I am coming, I am here, I am going. Greta had broken the news, and Katya said, So you're engaged, and got out of bed. She felt that she didn't have the right to be so near to her sister, their legs touching.

“Papa says we should wait, and of course, we agreed,” Greta said from across the room.

“And the Sudermanns also?”

“Dietrich hasn't told them yet.”

Katya saw her father coming across the compound, heard him enter the house. Greta and Dietrich, living in the Big House. Katya's house connected to Greta's house by a narrow path, a spoke leading to the hub. Greta, mistress of Privol'noye. A moment later her father came to the bottom of the ladder and called up to them. They were to dress and come down, he said, as he had something to show them.

Their father walked behind them, the light of his lantern arcing on the path, lengthening and shortening their shadows as they went towards the greenhouse. To the greenhouse, what for? Sara asked, her boot laces undone and tripping her up. The light tilted suddenly as their father caught Sara before she fell and set her upright on the path. You'll soon see, he said. Now go quietly.

As they went through the potting shed and into the greenhouse, Katya smelled fresh damp earth even before her father lifted the lantern to reveal a mound of dirt where a potting table had once been.

“This is what I want you to see,” he said. He stepped around the pile of earth, and they looked down into a large rectangular hole in the greenhouse floor. As he lowered the lantern to the surface of the hole she saw that the dark earth gave way to yellow
clay, the marks of his spade, brown threads like hemp rope interwoven in the earth walls.

The hole was to remain a secret, her father said, a secret only he, their mother, and now they, would know. He spoke to all of them, but his eyes turned to Sara. “A secret. Which means no one else should know, understand? You're not to tell your brothers, either,” he said.

Sara nodded, her eyes large and solemn. “But what's it for?” she asked.

“For you three girls. To go inside, if need be,” he said.

“But I don't want to go inside, what for, anyway?” Sara asked, her lips beginning to tremble.

“Safety,” he said. “The hole is for safety.”

Greta made a sound as though she'd sipped at air, which made Katya's skin prickle. She hugged herself and looked at the lights shining in a window of their house. Safety for them and not for her brothers, why? she wondered. In a hole deep enough for them to sit in, chins on their knees, arms hugging their legs, heads only inches from the top. Smaller than a grave hole, but nevertheless it was a hole.