The Russlander (12 page)

Katya took a glass of juice from Auguste, who said that, since Greta began attending the
Mädchenschule
, she saw her often. And when would Katya enter the Girls' School?

When she told Auguste she would be attending the following autumn, the woman seemed surprised and said she had taken Katya to be younger. She'd brought a kaleidoscope for Gerhard to entertain himself with. She had also brought a book, an illustrated
Grimm's Fairy Tales
, and when she gave it to Katya, she did so with an apology for having remembered her as being younger.

“If you ask me, we're proud of our separateness. We've become architects of separateness,” David Sudermann said to her father, continuing the conversation when Auguste left the room. “Wherever our people have gone in this world, wherever we continue to go, we demand special privileges. And when those demands are met, it reaffirms how we view ourselves. We're superior. Some even think we're chosen. Don't say that's not a conceit.”

“Some people died for our beliefs,” her father reminded him.

“Yes, as recently as the seventeenth century,” David said with a sharp laugh.

Whenever either of them spoke, Gerhard moved the kaleidoscope from one face to the other as though spying on them, experimenting, wanting to see the difference the shades of light would make, Katya knew. David sat near to the window, his features were fair, while her father's were tanned by the sun.

“Martyrdom's a conceit too. I've come to think a person's willingness to die for a belief is in itself a vanity,” David said.

Her father smiled and shook his head. “If that's so, then I pray you and I will never be guilty of committing such an act. Sometimes I think you enjoy making things more complicated than they need to be.”

“Now there's a man who keeps life simple,” David said. He drew aside the curtain as a grain wagon went by in the street, a lone man stooped over the reins. “Bull-Headed is the most uncomplicated person I know. He decides there is no God, and so there isn't. No discussion. Nothing to ponder. That's top-quality grain he's taking to the mill. The wicked seem to prosper, too, and they get a good night's sleep while they're doing so, I might add.”

“Are you sure that's what the man thinks, or is that what people say he thinks?” her father asked.

“Well, he still refuses to darken the door of the church.”

“That's another thing altogether.”

David didn't respond, but went over to a desk in the corner of the room and returned with a brief letter, which he gave to her father to read.

When he finished reading, he returned it to David with a question in his eyes.

“I was sure you didn't know,” David said. “I could refuse to give him a recommendation, but that wouldn't change the fact that he's made up his mind to leave. I spoke to my dear brother about it, but it seems Abram isn't inclined to replace Franz Pauls now that his children have outgrown the need for a tutor,” he said.

The news made her father go quiet, his eyes coming to rest on Katya and Gerhard. “Nikolaifeld is too far for them to go to school. They'd have to board with someone; I can't afford that. And there are still three more at home,” he said quietly.

So Franz Pauls wanted to leave Privol'noye. She wasn't surprised. Last spring when Justina Sudermann married, Franz Pauls wore a sour-pot face to the wedding and held back his good wishes, looking throughout all the celebrations as though he'd bitten into a pickle gone soft.

“Look. Look who's coming. The
barashku
,” David said as Greta, Lydia, and the sister cousins, Barbara and Mariechen Sudermann, came hurrying along the street. With them were two other students.

Katya went to meet the girls as they came pounding up the steps looking self-conscious in their identical heavy capes, stiff white collars, black stockings and shoes. The day when her father learned that his dream of owning land would not come true, the Sudermann brothers scattered a few coins in his direction, in the way Isaac had done to avert a strike at his factory. They had volunteered to provide tuition for Greta and then Katya to attend the
Mädchenschule
in Chortitza.

Lydia introduced Katya to the two students: Olga, whose father owned a store, and Nela Siemens, whom Katya had already met, as Nela lived just across the road from her grandparents in Rosenthal. She was a tall and bony young woman whose thin hair didn't completely conceal her scalp. Katya was mesmerized the first time she'd discovered that Nela Siemens's nose was so thin, sunlight shone through the tip of it. When Nela felt herself being scrutinized she smiled and said, “You look terribly nice today.”

“So you've been out exploring with your papa, yes?” Barbara Sudermann asked Katya.

“Yes,” she said because she wanted to be agreeable. But no, they hadn't gone exploring. She and Gerhard had walked the two miles
with her father from the Schroeder house in Rosenthal to David's house in Chortitza, which, in her mind, wasn't exploring. But when she was in town, her tongue became too stiff for detailed explanations.

Auguste had been busy at needlework when they came into the family room, and she set it aside now and began filling glasses with grape juice from a pitcher resting on a side table. The girls brought their autograph books to show Auguste the verses and messages their friends had written bidding them, and the school year, farewell.

Greta had changed. She seemed quieter and more self-assured. Katya noticed too that Auguste's eyes would come to rest on Greta, and the woman paid careful attention whenever she spoke.

Did Katya want to come with them for a walk around the town? Lydia asked. They would acquaint her with what lay in store down the road.

Her father stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at her and Greta as though measuring them against the other girls, and then feeling satisfied. He said he knew that the five-kopeck coin Opa gave Katya the night before was singeing the pocket of her apron and he gave his permission for her to go with Lydia and Greta and the other girls.

As they walked, Lydia explained that they were going to a special store, not the one owned by Olga's father, but a different store, owned by a Jew who sometimes had quite unusual things in comparison to what could be found in a Mennonite store. They passed through the spotted shade of Lombardy poplars, beneath the canopies of mulberry trees sprawling across fences, the air immediately copier there. Fruit and nut trees crowded platforms and verandas, their trunks sometimes painted white and shining starkly among shade gardens overgrown with ferns and wild strawberries.

When they approached a machine shop, she saw workers standing out in a yard smoking, their faces blackened with coal. They were gathered around the grain wagon of the man David had
pointed out to her father earlier, the man he'd called Bull-Headed. As they passed by, the man stood up in the wagon and doffed his cap, and she saw that he was young, that his straw-coloured hair lay like thick ropes, and touched his shoulders. He bowed as they went by, his hair sweeping forward and narrowing his face. “Girls, girls, and more girls,” he said in a lazy-sounding voice.

The girls became stiff-legged and silent and looked down at their feet, except for Lydia, who squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “
Dommkopp
,” she muttered, causing Greta to giggle. Then they began jostling one another, Olga bumping Greta with her hip and sending her lurching from the sidewalk into the street.

“He's nothing but a cheese-head, a pimple, a pig's squeak,” they said one after another, while Nela remained silent, her cheeks flaring with colour.

“They call him Bull-Headed,” Nela said. “Don't you think that's enough?”

“Oh, don't be such an old nose,” Lydia said.

Katya took it all in, feeling as though the girls had moved far away, were years ahead of her, and in an unfamiliar land that she didn't think she would want to visit.

A bell jangled above a doorway as they entered a small store, and a man came out from a room behind the counter, his eyeglasses pushed up onto his head. The shelf behind him was stacked with bolts of bright fabric, the casing filled with a display of the usual remedies and dry goods. She was disappointed to find that there wasn't much that was different from a Mennonite store, after all.

Then she saw a small purse with a chain. Among its embroidered flowers of glass beads were tiny mirrors reflecting light. Lydia waited near the door with the others as Greta pointed out a comb with a grosgrain bow.
Nein
, not that, she thought. What she wanted was the purse, with its delicate decoration of beaded flowers and mirrors, the brass chain looped against the dark wood on the display
shelf. Her mouth filled with saliva, and her hands itched to feel the pebbly beads, the weight of the purse lying in her hand.

“You're such a turtle,” Lydia said.

Her parents would not approve, she knew. The purse wasn't something she could use for anything. She would keep it in a drawer and take it out now and then. As the man slid open the door of the showcase, she noticed a stack of notebooks on top of the counter, and reached for one.

“That? That's what you want?” Greta asked.

No, not that, she thought. But they were waiting for her to decide, the man too, his stained fingers already hovering over the items in the case, demanding that she point to what she wanted.

The notebook was an ordinary notebook, and when she opened it, she could smell a clean smell. She liked the cream-coloured paper lined faintly with black. What would she do with a beaded purse, except try not to treasure it too much?

“I guess everyone has her own taste,” Lydia said.

Yes, she did have her own taste. “I'll take the notebook,” Katya said, and as she spoke the words, it suddenly became what she did want, and most of all.

“I think you made a good choice,” Nela said to Katya as they continued on down the street.

Soon they came to a quiet stream, next to which goats on tethers were grazing. Lydia pointed out a pair of swans that were coming into view round a small island in the centre of the stream. The girls went onto a footbridge and waited for the swans to reach them, stood in a row at its railing, looking down, their faces given back to them in the sepia-coloured water; the stream a shallow one, Katya noticed. Water plants swayed gently beneath the surface among stones the size of her fist. She held the notebook against her chest, fearing she might drop it, listened as children playing near the water called to one another, a fish, a fish, they had just seen a fish. A
woman pushing a baby buggy hurried to them and stooped over the water to look.

“I wish you would change your mind and come to the Azov Sea with us,” Olga said to Greta moments later, and Katya was surprised to learn that Greta had been invited.

Greta smiled enigmatically and didn't reply, and Nela for some reason sent Olga a dark look over Greta's head. The swans glided towards them, seemingly without effort, as though drawn along by strings. But when the birds came near to the bridge, she saw the ripples radiating out around them, their paddling feet disturbing the water. The girls' features wavered and came apart, the white circles of their faces disappearing.

When she looked up, the children and woman were gone, Greta, Lydia, and the girls were not on the bridge, and for a moment the silence held her in place, and her legs began to tremble; it was as though everyone, the town itself, had vanished. The sound of laughter brought her back, and she saw that the girls had gone down to the bank of the stream on the other side of the footbridge. They were taking off their shoes and socks, and the swans were slowly drifting towards them.