The Russlander (32 page)

Their footsteps echoed in the empty room as they walked around it, Greta noting that not much had changed. The same diorama depicting the biosphere of their eutrophic Ox Lake hung on the wall, as did the alphabet cards whose black ink letters had faded. The chart Katya and Gerhard had drawn, of the leeches in their
various states of prognostication, was pinned to the wall beside the window. Imagine, Greta said, when Franz Pauls was our teacher he was only seventeen, younger than I am now.

That evening, as usual, they gathered around the table in the family room, listening while Sara and her brothers read, Peter only five and already reading, and much quicker than Johann, who was always more interested in what was going on around him than an open book. She finished a cutwork piece of embroidery, a bureau runner to present to Sophie and Kolya as a belated wedding present. She completed the delicate task of snipping open its embroidered pattern, although daylight would have better served the intricate work.

It was November, the killing had been done, and so there were fresh smoked sausages. Her mother made sausage
bobbat
and
plumemooss
for the noon meal – but not with
kjielkje
, as some would do; they didn't prefer noodles in
plumemooss
, but dried apricots and apples. She used damsons – that, and anise, made the
mooss
special. Because killing day had taken place recently, they had been allotted a proportionate amount of hams and sausages. The sausages were already smoked, and so her mother had put a ring of sausage into the
bobbat
for their noon meal. They didn't do their curing and smoking in the chimney the way most people did, as Abram's estate had a smokehouse. Otherwise, they would have hung hams and rings of sausages in the chimney chamber in the attic. It happened sometimes that someone would allow a fire in a stove to get too hot, or forget to watch it. She'd heard people in villages tell how it could happen, how a fire would get up too much, and the smoke and heat of it would send a ham flying out a chimney to land in a neighbour's yard.

She and her sisters had spent several days cooking blue plums in the outside oven, hovering over them until the skins swelled to the point of splitting, the exact moment to take them from the oven to dry into prunes. Then they brought in the melons, a hill of
muskmelons, cantaloupes, and sugar melons beside the front gate. She wrote down the instructions for pickled watermelons that her mother told her, and which, later in her life, she would come across and pass on to her oldest daughter without telling her the circumstances of the day when she entered it into the recipe notebook.

The cheesecloth would accumulate scum as the watermelons fermented, and she'd rinsed the cloth out every morning since the melons were set for pickling. The barrel of melons sat in the cellar under the kitchen, along with two barrels of sauerkraut, and crocks of eggs in waterglass. Like the King of Egypt, like everyone around them, her family heeded Joseph's interpretation of the king's dream,
and laid up provisions for times of need. The granaries and cellars in the Mennonite commonwealth burgeoned with the record harvest; in the boys' room there were muskmelons under the beds, sacks of roasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds on shelves above their windows. She and her sisters had already dried apples and apricots on the roof during the heat of autumn, and the dried fruit now hung in sacks from rafters above their bed, filling the room with its fragrance. She and Greta went to bed that night surrounded by the musky fragrance of dried fruit, their attic room seeming like a cradle. It seemed as though the house breathed, its walls expanding with the energy the fruits and vegetables gave off, the sun's energy and the goodness of the earth held inside them.

She awoke to the darkness of early morning, the sound of pounding on the door downstairs, Greta already awake, halfway across the room. The coachman and his son hadn't returned from taking Dietrich and Barbara to Ekaterinoslav the previous evening as expected, and her father had worried – this was what came to her mind as she followed Greta down the ladder. She thought, something has happened to the coachman and his son, there's been an accident, and she began to pray. Her father had already left the house with one of two men who came for him. The other man stayed behind. When she entered the outer room, her brothers were already there, in their night clothing, lined up against the oven wall. Her mother stood in front of the open door holding the baby, Ann, and Katya could see her father going across the compound with a man, heard the voices of other men, and saw a wagon standing beside the Big House. Then there was a glow of light just beyond the open door, a man smoking. His shoulders were so broad that at first she thought he must be Kolya, and was going to call him to come inside, but something stopped her.

She would remember her mother's bare feet against the splintered floorboards, her toes crooking to grip the floor as she rocked
Ann, who slept. They were all in their nightclothes, her brothers in their long nightshirts that were so white they gleamed in the semi-darkness as the boys pressed their backs to the oven tiles for warmth. She went to close the door and her mother spoke for the first time, her eyes hollow-looking in the light cast by a lantern on the table, its wick turned low. The man outside had said to leave it open. Why? She didn't know. I just don't know, they wouldn't say why your father should go, either, just that he should go, and that the one out there should stay.

“Are we supposed to stand here freezing?” Greta said. When she left the room, the man outside on the platform came over to the door and watched until she returned. She had gone through the rooms gathering up shawls, coats, and sweaters. She draped a garment around their mother's shoulders, tucking it about the sleeping Ann, or Njuta, as her brothers had named their newest sister; and as the clock chimed the hour in the parlour, Greta went to each of her brothers doing the same, draping them with sweaters, with shawls, the melancholic sound of the clock's chimes like a benediction. Her mother went over to the window and looked out, still rocking.

Katya put on the shawl Greta gave her, and the clock stopped chiming; the fifth hour, she thought, grateful for the warmth of the woolly garment as she stood to one side of the open door, the cold air scuttling around her ankles and up her nightgown to her knees. She wondered if Greta was asking the same question as she was: why had the man been told to stay? She looked out across the yard. The stars and moonlight had faded and the sky was beginning to lighten, so perhaps the clock had marked the sixth hour and not the fifth; she couldn't be sure. The sky was cloudless and so why then was it snowing? What looked like snow funnelled out from the upstairs windows of the Big House and billowed across the yard. There were men out there, grey figures threading among wagons that stood
on the compound near to the Big House. She felt the warmth and softness of Greta's breasts against her arm as her sister leaned into her to look out at the yard.

“It's bedding. Those are feathers,” Greta said.

“
Ja
, that's what it looks like to me. They're spoiling the bedding,” her mother said.

“Who is?” Gerhard's loud question made the man on the platform shift and adjust his cap. Then he left the platform and went over to the gate, and she thought he would leave, but moments later he returned, his cigarette butt dropping to the ground, its glow ground out under his heel as he muttered to himself.

Her mother must have forgotten about the little ones when she'd spoken, as she turned to them and said softly, “It's not important. Your papa will tell you about it when he comes.”

Thieves breaking in, moths and rust corrupting; Katya thought of the Scripture warning against putting too much store in earthly treasures when she saw the feathers swirling in the air. Pillow feathers, down feathers from quilts and mattresses, Lydia's dowry likely taken from trunks in an upstairs storage room, cut open and emptied to the wind.

The man outside swore suddenly and once again went to the gate as though wanting to join the others. He came pounding back up the steps to the doorway, breathing heavily. They should follow him, he said.

She went across the yard with her sisters and brothers to the Big House, their mother hurrying them along. Katya was certain her father had taken the time to pull on trousers before answering the door. She didn't know why this had become so important to her. She didn't want him to be out there like they were, in their night clothing. The dark had dissolved to shadows that were set against the sides of buildings, the summer kitchen and washhouse, and she sensed
bones creaking, sinew humming, that someone might be standing in the shadows between the two buildings, watching as they came by.

She remembered seeing a light flickering across a window in the women's quarters beyond the parade barn, and thinking that although the outside women were awake and moving about, they hadn't gone to do the milking, judging from the lowing and bellowing coming from the cow barn. When she would go over and over this moment, she would realize there had been sounds, the cows, the voices of the men; she had seen a light in the women's quarters. But then, it was as though she was seeing the world from underwater, voices and movements muted and slow. A man came across the compound from the generator house, suddenly becoming a huge bird about to lift off from the ground as a gust of wind filled a cape he wore and flung it out and around him. As she came closer, she recognized the gold cape as the velvet tablecloth which covered the dining-room table in the Big House. The same gust of wind wrapped her nightgown around her body, and for the first time she felt the cold go through her.

Her father stood beside the wagon fully clothed, she was relieved to discover, and on the wagon was a man reclining in an armchair. Even before they arrived, the man's long hair told her he must be the half-man from Lubitskoye, Simeon Pravda. She saw he was surrounded by furniture, the oval cherrywood table from Abram's study, his plush sofa and sagging armchair; his smokestand lay across the arms of another chair. There were other wagons also piled with furniture, and she vaguely recognized the plank table from the bake kitchen, a washstand, a bureau.

Her father saw them coming, his concern quickly masked, and he gave his attention to Pravda. The men moved between the house and the wagons as though they were in a race, throwing what they had brought onto the piles of furniture, and hurrying back inside, the man who had led them across the yard quickly joining them. Pravda talked to her father rapidly, gesticulating with a small whip, pointing
out the men whose families, he had decided, would move into the Big House once they were finished rummaging through it. The house was large enough for as many as five families, Pravda told her father. Dmitri's family would be given two rooms, it was only right, he said, and for the first time Katya wondered, where were the Sudermanns? Lights shone in all the windows but there was no sign of them.

“Will you also live there?” her father asked.

“Me? No, perhaps I'll live over there,” Pravda said, and with his whip, pointed to their house.

“Live where you please,” her father said.

When Pravda talked, he rolled his head from side to side. His hair, brilliant with grease, had feathers stuck to it, a corona of white fluff that was being tugged and riffled by a breeze.

“He looks like a chicken,” Sara whispered, and clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a nervous giggle.

Her comment caught the attention of Pravda. “Are these your children? Why are they here?” he asked, frowned, and looked about the yard. When he saw the man who had brought them, he shouted at him in Ukrainian and received a string of curses in reply. “Please forgive him,” Pravda said to her mother in a contrite voice.

This was how they should call him, he said: Little Father, Father Pravda, Bat'ko Pravda. They would see much of him now. Her mother's question, Peta, what is it? had been stilled by a look from the Little Father. It was for him to ask questions, he said.

“Yes, all these children are mine,” her father said, after he had explained to them who Pravda was, and how they were to address him. Simeon Panteleimon Pravda was a patriot, an anarchist. He was a bandit, his voice told them.

They were his basket of apples, her father said. Four daughters and four sons, one of whom was almost a man, could work as hard as a man. At the mention of himself, Gerhard covered his lap with his hands to conceal his member, stiff and poking against his nightshirt.

“The Queen of Heaven has blessed you,” Pravda said. Katya felt his eyes pass across her, saw that when he looked at Greta, his eyes stayed on her for moments before going on to the others. Greta was looking away, hard, at the Big House, at the lit-up windows. What had happened to the Sudermanns, the Wiebe sisters?

“Now you've met them, and now they're going home and back to bed,” her father said.

“You're afraid for them,” Pravda said. “You don't need to fear,” he said when her father didn't reply.

“I'm sure that's true. I believe you,” her father said, and folded his hands across his chest.