The Russlander (10 page)

Aganetha sighed. “I'll be so glad when Lydia goes off to
Mädchenschule
. There's just not enough for that girl to do out here. She's too old to be playing with babies. When our Justina went, we saw such a difference,” she said.

Just after Dietrich came home in spring, Justina returned from the Girls' School, but left to holiday in Simferopol in the middle of
summer. It seemed that once her children got an appetite for travel they wouldn't stay put. The same thing had happened with her married sons, Aganetha said.

Katya had been relieved when Justina went away. She tried to avoid Justina, whose mouth uttered sweetness while her eyes said something else.

“Yes, soon Lydia will go off to the
Mädchenschule
,” Katya's mother said as a spark of laughter rose from the gazebo. “I wish Greta were able to go, too.”

“Well,” Aganetha Sudermann said, and appeared as though she wanted to say more but was restraining herself.

“Mrs. Krahn's kitchen girl went out and collected herbs to make a poultice for her injured toe,” Aganetha said, taking up the story again. “She also came back with mushrooms. Frau Krahn fed those mushrooms to the pigs later on. She didn't want to cause hurt feelings, and so, when the girl's back was turned, she hobbled barefoot to the pigpen and threw the mushrooms to the sows. By then, her toe was too swollen for a shoe, but she wasn't worried about it. The next morning, however, it had become worse. She had a black streak going up the inside of her calf. When she started to feel dizzy, Willy Krahn sent one of his men to Chortitza for the doctor. By the time Dr. Warkentine came, she was sweating so much they had to change her bedding on the hour. Not even a week later, she was dead,” Aganetha said.

Katya set a cucumber on top of a pile in a basket and it started a slide. Cucumbers tumbled down and rolled across the platform.

Aganetha nudged a cucumber with the toe of her shoe. “Some people call this clean?” she said.

Katya's mother bristled, and then swallowed whatever was on her tongue.

“All I can say is, that's what happens when you buy meat from a Russian who comes knocking at the door,” Aganetha said.

“It's more than likely germs got into the wound from the pigsty,” her mother said. Her voice trailed off as though she regretted having spoken.

Katya's mother stood up and massaged a spot near her lower back, her eyes drawn to the Big House. As her mother stretched, Aganetha stared at her stomach long and hard, her eyes veering away when her mother noticed and blushed.

“Dr. Warkentine said the meat was spoiled. The woman handled the meat when she was grinding it, and then she handled her injured foot. That's how the poison must have got in,” Aganetha said.

“Yes, that's likely what happened,” her mother said, as though wanting to drop the topic. “Will Abram be home for a while now, or will he be off on business again?” she asked.

“He's going to Simferopol soon to get Justina and take her back to school,” Aganetha said.

“Then we won't get to see her before she goes.”

“I thought it was best Abram took her right to school. Keep her away from Mr. Cow-Eyes,” Aganetha said cryptically, and then, in a whisper, “From Mr. New-Riding-Breeches. Mr. Trying-to-Grow-a-Moustache.”

“Mr. Rained-on-Rooster,” Katya's mother said, and for a moment the two women laughed as though they were girls sitting on a step, trying to outdo one another. Katya stopped scrubbing, amazed to think that her mother would say such a thing, that she would hear her own opinion of Franz Pauls coming from her. The kitchen door at the Big House opened and Helena emerged. Her long white apron glowed as she went along a stone path and into the gardens where she had begun to go at the end of a day to say her prayers. She wanted to be close to nature, and to make sure that the garden paths had been raked.

“East India, yet,” Aganetha muttered as they watched the woman disappear into the shadows.

Her mother's face closed, and she remained silent.

They heard the horses and wagon before they saw them emerge from the half-circle drive at the front of the Big House, her father going with the team to the wagon house.

Aganetha put her hands on her knees in preparation to leave, as though this action would somehow assist her in heaving her bulk up from the chair. “Do you know what Mrs. Krahn's last words to her family were?” she asked as she got up and shook creases from her skirt. A smile strayed across her face.

“No, I don't,” Katya's mother said, surprised the conversation had turned back to this.

“She told them to be sure and scrub the meat grinder before they put it away.”

Her mother stifled a burst of laughter, the tension relieved as Katya's father came across the compound.

“You may remember what the woman was like,” Aganetha continued. “She was always, Do this, do that. But I suppose she had to be. Willy isn't known to be overly energetic. I'm sure it won't be long before he finds someone else. Those kind always do.”

“Yes, some poor young girl who needs a place to go. Someone who doesn't have much say in the matter,” her mother said.

“Never mind that.” Aganetha's voice became soft. “I came over here because I wanted to say something.”

As Katya's father drew nearer, she saw Aganetha's quick nervous glance in his direction. She knew his presence had stopped Aganetha from finishing what she'd wanted to say to her mother, and wondered why. If she had been older and more experienced in the ways of women's talk, she would have known that Aganetha had something on her mind that made her feel guilty.

“The prime minister has been killed. Stolypin. I think that's who Abram said it was. He was shot,” Aganetha said.

“How could that have happened?” her mother exclaimed.

“In Kiev. In the opera house. And in the presence of the tsar, too. Had Chaliapin been singing? Of course, Abram couldn't say. I wondered, though, because I once read in the
Odessaer Zietung
that Chaliapin had agreed to sing in Kiev,” she said, the sentence trailing off as she realized how foolish she sounded. There she was going on about an opera singer she had once heard sing and was eager to remind people of at any appropriate gathering, when the prime minister had been assassinated. A man whose name she couldn't remember.

A name that would come back to Katya when, years later, she saw a photograph in a book, a dacha wall blown to bits, timber tossed about a yard like sticks of kindling, Stolypin's summer home bombed during a first attempt on his life. She would read somewhere that the death of the prime minister in the opera house had ended what chance there'd been to turn aside the runaway horses of revolution, and would remember that a woman in Arbusovka had died when a meat grinder fell on her foot.

“What I really came to say is, I'm sorry,” Aganetha said, and fled as quickly as her jiggling girth would allow.

As Katya's father came up the steps, her mother rose to greet him. “I heard about the prime minister. Is that what brought Abram back so soon?”

“Well, yes. He came with news,” her father said, his eyes flaring with a sudden hardness, and his jaw working.

“Peta, tell me.” Her mother took his arm and led him to the bench.

Her father leaned forward and dangled his cap between his knees, breathing deeply, his mouth twisted to one side as though to prevent him from speaking.

“Yes, it's true,” he said at last, and tossed his cap across the platform. “Stolypin has been assassinated, which likely means the end to land reforms. Some people are breathing a little easier over that.” His voice held more than a touch of bitterness.

“What other news?” her mother asked. When she put her hand on his arm, he drew away from her touch. She glanced at him with worry, at Katya, and began bouncing her knee. Katya felt the platform jiggle as she sat at the water-filled tub, her stomach gathering into knots.

What other news? he repeated. Abram and Jakob had been elected to a committee which would plan a celebration to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. A pharmacy in Chortitza had been robbed twice. Workers in Isaac Sudermann's factory in Ekaterinoslav had threatened to strike, but Isaac averted the strike by scattering coins about the factory yard.

“And so?”

“Do you need to ask?” The words were a fist against a table. Then his shoulders slumped and he buried his face in his hands, his fingers curling to grasp at his skull. “It's not to be,” he said, the words muffled.

“Not? Why not?” Her mother's voice was accusing.

“Because it's not to be.” He left her side to pick up his cap and returned to the bench. “Because we couldn't agree on the price. The brothers believed I should pay today's prices for the land, not the price the land stood at when Abram and I made our agreement years ago, which was understood at the time. All except David wanted more. But when I reminded Abram, he said I was mistaken, he couldn't remember agreeing to any such thing. It was not written down that the price would be the same, but it was understood. It was understood. Before God it was understood.” His voice had risen and then dropped, all his energy suddenly gone.

“But how much more?” her mother asked.

“Over three times more. Marie, it's not to be, not now, likely, not ever.” The light in the doorway showed the sudden weariness on his face.

Katya felt her mother's deep sigh in her own chest. It was as though her mother had been holding her breath, had feared this disappointment might be in store. “I don't know if I'll ever want to forgive them,” she said.

Katya's anger rose with her mother's bitter-sounding words. If she had had a stick, she would have hit something. The stairs, the railing. Blood-sucker, blood-sucker, she thought, repeating what she'd overheard in winter, without knowing the meaning behind it. She had taken the words to be an expression of anger, and now used them because she didn't have any curse words of her own. She threw the scrub brush into the pail of water and her father started at the sound, seemed almost surprised to find her crouching on the platform.

“Go and see where the others are keeping, Katya,” her mother said. Go and leave us alone, her eyes said.

Her father's feeble smile gnawed at her stomach as she went to the arbour, where light was shining out through the vines. As she stepped inside she saw that Dietrich, Lydia, and Greta were gone. They had left a lantern burning on a table and, beside the lantern, the scooped-out remains of an unripe watermelon, the tabletop scattered with its pale seeds. And there, on a bench, was Lydia's silver cup she'd seen that morning in Abram's office; Lydia must have decided to use it.

The sight of the cup, which had been polished, made her suddenly furious at Lydia for having forgotten to take it in. A silver cup wasn't something to be left out in the damp air. Nor should a lantern burn for no reason. The square of sheepskin lay folded in her apron pocket, but there was no need to clutch it and recite a psalm. Lydia's voice came from the front of the Big House where she, Greta, and Dietrich were likely sitting on the edge of the fountain, trailing their feet in it.

She snuffed the flame and took the cup with her as she left the arbour, intending to go to them and point out that they had wasted kerosene. She went along the path in a grainy darkness hearing her parents' voices, their long silences taken over by the sound of rustling leaves of the acacia trees. Her father's grief eclipsed any joy she might have had at the prospect of not having to leave the estate. The intent of Aganetha's uncommon visit was now clear.

She approached the summer kitchen and the butter well just beyond, its roof a silhouette in the faint remnant of light. She was going to go to the front of the house, point out to Lydia and the blond sheepdog that they had wasted fuel, that Lydia had left behind her cup, which, in the dampness, would become tarnished again. A waste of polish. But her parents' hushed and hesitant voices, their sentences all turning up at the ends in a question, the sight of the Big House, its windows bold with light, diverted her from the path.

Before she knew it, she had gone to the butter well. She stepped up onto a log which Greta stood on when she drew the butter box up from the depths. She set Lydia's drinking cup on the brick wall enclosing the well and leaned over the wall, immediately feeling a chilly dampness emanating from the water below. The reflection of her head on the black surface blotted out what light there was from the moon.

Then someone called her name. She would remember for the rest of her days that someone had called, and would hear the voice among other voices in a crowded restaurant, coming to her on a lake shore while she watched over grandchildren at play, the voice would travel across the water, clear and distinct,
Katya
. If only she had answered, Yes, I'm here. But she hadn't. No, instead she had picked up Lydia's cup and held it over that chasm of damp darkness, and thrown it in. She had willfully thrown Lydia's cup into the butter well.

hey arrived in Rosenthal during night, when it was too dark to see much of anything, certainly not the storks nesting on the
Zentralschule
, which Greta had written Katya she should be sure and look for. She would likely hear the clacking of the birds' beaks before she saw them, Greta said. They had started out for Rosenthal in the morning, and had stopped only once, to eat and to rest the horses. Katya's arms ached from holding her brother, Peter, on her lap. He'd been asleep for several hours and now she was clammy from his heat, her feet chilled from not being able to move. A light shone from a ridge of hills beyond the town, someone walking with a lantern, she thought, and when she pointed it out, her mother said it was the silver dome of an Orthodox church.