The Russlander (48 page)

“Opa, come look, here's Katherine, she's coming,” Katya heard her grandmother call, and she felt Lydia's lips brush her cheek before Lydia turned away.

Katya barely recognized the stooped figure who came towards them on the path, the round tanned face now pallid and hollow-cheeked, her mouth collapsed into her jaw. She reached for her grandmother, and in holding her felt she was cupping a wounded bird, and feeling its weak flutter against her palms.

he sat with her grandparents in the semi-darkness, while across the room her sisters slept on a makeshift bed on the floor. She recalled the last time she'd been in the room, imagined the air still held the scent of ammonia and old cheese, remembered that her father had appeared to Tante Anna in a dream and told her that he was going home.

They didn't have any kerosene, her grandmother had explained, and so, like most, they usually went to bed at sundown. In order for them to sit and visit for a while this night, she had made a
pracher
, and the grease-soaked rag now burned in a saucer on the table between them, giving off the odour of animal fat and singed wool. The twist of flame illuminated the surface of the table and the space immediately around them, and the photographs of the Schroeder ancestors seemed to dissolve into the wall where they hung. She felt their sombre gazes penetrate the darkness, imagined that they'd heard the hoot of a barn owl coming from beyond a sandpit behind the house, listened now as her grandfather read aloud from a letter he'd received in reply to one of his own. “We think it's best you stay
where you are, as even here in Canada, there are hardships. English may soon become the language of our children's schools. It seems everywhere in the world there is trouble. It may be best for you and yours if you remain where things are at least familiar.”

There was much talk about going to Canada, her grandfather said with a sigh. The loudest voices in favour of it were those of the well-to-do, while others were willing to wait and see what changes the Soviets might bring. Contacts had been made in the United States, too, and food parcels were beginning to arrive from there, he told her. People were being given vouchers, which they were supposed to take to a central office in order to claim the parcel. But the office was nearly a hundred miles away, how would they get there?

With some difficulty he refolded the letter, and when his shaking hands made it impossible for him to slide it back into the sleeve of the envelope, she did it for him. The foreign-looking script, the red-and-blue stamp holding the likeness of the king of England made her feel the letter was heavy with importance.

“Speaking English yet,” he said and shifted his body away from her as though he did not want her to see his bitterness, as though she hadn't heard it in his voice.

“We wrote to them that we would be willing to learn Chinese, if we had to,” her grandmother said. “They don't know hardship. Here, if we were fortunate enough to own a cow, we'd have to pay the government eleven million rubles in tax, eighty million for a horse.” She had heard of several cases of animals committing suicide, she said. A cow's head had been stuck on a fence post, and a sign saying that life before the Communists had meant lots of hay and grain to eat, and now the cow was only given straw and had to deliver so much milk as a tax to the government that life was not worth living. A hen had done the same thing, complained of her owner's demands for more eggs in order to pay the taxes.

Her grandfather's face lit up with a smile that quickly faded. “It's funny, but would be very dangerous for the person who made the sign if they were ever found out.”

It was no wonder so many wanted to emigrate, he said. He had put their names on a list along with the names of over seventeen thousand Mennonites who wished to emigrate. Countries such as Mexico, Paraguay, South Africa and the United States had been visited by a committee. But after two years of travelling and negotiations, they learned it was Canada, in the end, that agreed to take them in. The final arrangements were now being made with the Canadian Pacific Railway, for payment of transportation costs. Some people had already begun to sell their belongings in anticipation of needing to pay for their passports.

He sounded breathless, and any physical exertion made him wheeze. Katya had noticed his laboured breathing when earlier, to ward off dampness, he'd lit a small fire in the stove. With great effort he had kept the fire stoked, and seemed almost relieved when the fuel, a sack of twigs and wood chips, was depleted. The stove had barely warmed the room when the meagre fire died. The sun had now set; the chill returned and dampness was seeping like smoke through the floorboards.

Her grandmother got up and went over to a bench beside the door, returning with several pieces of leather, which she held out. “Look, your opa has become a shoemaker,” she said, and went on to tell Katya that he had been hired by a
kulak
, supplied with the necessary leather, and promised a hundred rubles to fashion a pair of boots. “An application for immigration costs twelve hundred rubles. Twelve pairs of boots. There aren't that many people in town who can afford new boots.” She shrugged in resignation and returned the leather pieces to the bench.

Bernhard had taken the china dishes they'd stored in the attic to Alexandrovsk and sold them, her grandfather said, which had
provided them with enough flour to get through the previous winter, and now they were without. What little money came their way went to buy food, if and when food staples could be found. A person did what he could. Her grandfather had been forced to acquire new skills, as had most of the men, David Sudermann included. He had made a window frame from scavenged wood, and sold it in the market across the river. He had even sold a fish or two he'd managed to catch in the creek.

Across the room, her sisters were dark shapes on the floor, their breathing shallow and even. The owl hooted, an eerie sound that seemed to come from the bottom of a barrel, and not across the sandpit behind the house, from the yard of Teacher Friesen, a man who had answered a knock on his door one night and been killed by the blast of a gun.

At least Friesen doesn't have to see this, her grandfather said. He didn't have to witness people meeting on street corners and trying not to say the words
hungry, food, eat
. Her grandparents had told what happened as though they were reading the event from a newspaper, as though they lacked energy for strong emotions and had become immune to grief. They had seized this opportunity to voice their worries, though in better times they would have waited until Katya, like Sara and Njuta, had fallen asleep. In the silence that followed, she became aware of the dampness, her feet and legs sweating and chilled, the feeble light barely illuminating her grandparents' aged and colourless faces. They had become like animals huddled in a cave, she thought.

Nela Siemens and her mother had joined them for supper, the latter bringing an unsweetened rhubarb
mooss
, her grandmother dividing half a loaf of bread among them, black unsalted bread made with more clay powder than flour, and which stuck to Katya's teeth and the roof of her mouth. She had been relieved at the appearance of Nela, whose soft heart had somehow remained soft,
and seemed reinforced with a determination that was surprising.

She had gone with Nela to the room across the hall where the school boarders had once stayed. Its windows were now covered with sacking and the walls hung with horse blankets and carpet to keep out the cold. She wanted to show her the clothes she was making, various items of baby apparel, which, Nela said, she had cut from old garments, and planned to sell at the market in Alexandrovsk. Clothing hung from lines strung across one end of the room.

“And these? You're not using this?” Katya said, tugging at a shirt which seemed like new. She thought of the man she had come upon, reduced to wearing his dead wife's underslip.

“No, no. That belongs to Dietrich,” Nela said.

The damp blouses, pillow casings, towels and various pieces of undergarments and nightdresses pinned to the lines belonged to Dietrich Sudermann, his wife, and his sisters. It was their laundry, which Nela had scrubbed only that morning, she explained. She had taken on the chore of doing their wash and cleaning their house, she said. As though the house had always belonged to the Sudermanns, and not the Schroeders.

“They're not used to that kind of work. And I don't mind doing what I can. A piece of ham now and then makes a lot of soup,” Nela had said when she saw Katya's reaction.

“So are the Sudermanns paying you rent for the house?” Katya asked her grandparents now. Her grandmother's face disappeared into the darkness as she turned away from the light, while her grandfather looked down at his hands, folded across his stomach.

“
Ja ja
. At first they did,” he said. “But now all their money is gone.”

“Justina's man is being kept in prison in Sevastopol. Their money went towards bribing the officials to keep him alive,” her grandmother said.

“And Dietrich's child isn't well, either,” her grandfather added. “I suppose they have their own kind of troubles.”

Some things remained the same, Katya thought. Dietrich and his sisters living in her grandparents' house, and although their wealth was gone they were still exalted, so much so that people were expected, and willing, to give way to them.

She stood and carried the
pracher
across the room to the cupboard. She lifted the light and saw a coat that had once been hers, and that would now fit Sara. Instinctively, she dug into the pocket's flannel pouch, half expecting her hand would meet a soft, balled piece of sheepskin. The memory of it made her smile and want to weep. She went through the other clothing hanging there for something she could fashion into a child's trousers, a tunic, a nightshirt, or a baby's dress she might trim with a bit of old lace and embroidery, but there was little in the cupboard to choose from. She touched Greta's baptism dress, and then lifted it from the cupboard and held the light up to it. The dress was yellowing but unstained; the satin ribbons and rosettes were still intact. Then she decided. She would cut it apart, wash the pieces and iron them, make two, perhaps three infant dresses and sell them at the thieves' market.

“
Nanu
, you haven't said about yourself and Bull-Headed Heinrichs,” her grandmother said.

Katya had known from her grandmother's studying looks all evening that she had wanted to ask this question. She used the darkness now, the opportunity of Sara and Njuta being asleep, to at last speak it.

Katya crossed the room, thinking of the sack of sugar Kornelius had given to Irma to sell, regretting that she hadn't brought them something, a loaf of Irma's famine-fare bread. As she set the
pracher
on the table, her grandparents' faces emerged from the gloom, their eyes reflecting the flicker of amber light.

“So you've heard, then, that Kornelius Heinrichs still wants to marry me,” she said moments later.

“
Ja
, we heard,” her grandfather said. Then he smiled and shook his head in wonder. “Imagine, love in these times.”

Yes, imagine. Love, she thought. If this ache to hear his voice was love, then, yes, she had come to love Kornelius.

Her grandmother's features had grown pinched and stern. “Yes, we heard, but I thought likely it was just gossip. Katya, you know that no minister would agree to marry you and Bull-Headed,” she said.

“Kornelius,” Katya said.

“And you know very well what your parents would have said about this,” her grandmother added with a note of finality.

Her parents. She had come to think of them as stones worn smooth by the elements. Stones polished by a flow of water. She accepted that they had been where they were supposed to be in life, in a stream whose water had flowed over, around, and under them, and swept them away. There, at Privol'noye where her father had worked as an overseer on the Sudermann estate during a time of contentment. When a house cat could sleep for hours undisturbed in a bureau drawer.

“Yes.” She knew what they would say, but while they had taught her who she was and what she'd been born into, they had also led her to expect that they would always be near to answer for her.

The next morning her grandmother brought out what remained of the loaf of bread and tore it into three pieces. She set the chunks of bread on plates and slid the plates across the table in front of them. Then she turned away from the questions forming in Sara's and Njuta's eyes.

“Eat it slowly,” Katya told her sisters, believing that her grandmother would open the shutters and let the sunlight warm the room,
but she went over to the bed where Katya's grandfather lay facing the wall and, fully clothed, climbed in beside him. Going back to bed to conserve energy. Because hunger made her cold, constantly.

Katya's sisters had already devoured their bread, and now they looked at her as though expecting there would be something more. She divided her portion in half and gave it to them. Somehow, from somewhere, she would need to find more, or the money to buy it. She left the room and went out into the hall without knowing what she would do, and seeing that the door to the other room was open, she stepped into it.