The Russlander (24 page)

“You haven't left anything for me to do,” Nela said when she saw the stripped bed, the mirror and wall sampler leaning against a wall, a commode basin and pitcher on the floor beside the door.

“There's still something for you to do yet,” Tante Anna said. She pointed to the doorsill over Nela's head.

Nela understood, and dragged a chair to the door and climbed onto it. When she stepped down, her hands were filled with cubes wrapped in cheesecloth.

The odour that Katya had always wondered about now filled the room. It was the smell of old cheese. As Nela put the cheese into
the woman's lap, Tante Anna selected a bundle for each of them; a parting gift, she said.

Nela locked the door behind them and was about to cross the hall, close and lock the door of what had been the students' room, but Tante Anna stopped her. She wanted one last look, she said. “I hope those girls remember what I told them when they came to say goodbye,” she said.

“What did you tell them, Tante Anna?” Nela asked.

“I told them about eating ice cream bought on the street,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper.

Nela coloured. “I'm sure they'll remember.” Bernhard was already at the gate, she said. Katya watched Nela go off down the path through the orchard, carrying the woman's satchel, and was curious. Obviously Nela knew what Tante Anna was going to say.

“I'll tell you, also,” Tante Anna said, and took Katya by the arm. “You should know about this. Katya, if you're ever in a city, and someone is selling ice cream on the street, be sure not to buy it. They make the ice cream they sell on the street from leftover milk. Milk that actresses have bathed in.”

They went through the frozen orchard, Tante Anna leaning heavily on Katya's arm. “Why would someone want to bathe in milk?” Katya asked.

“I don't know, Katya. But I do know that one day they'll have to answer to God for it,” Tante Anna said. “I suppose we'll all have things to answer for one day,” she added, her indignation evaporating.

They stood on the platform at the train station waiting for Tante Anna's travelling companions to arrive. Snow fell all around them, large flakes that felt good as they melted on Katya's face. The woman's gift of cheese was a pungent lump in her coat pocket, and she'd been relieved when they'd left the stifling heat of the waiting room, as people had begun to question the source of the odour. Her uncle had gone to talk to several men gathered in the railway-yard.
Men who hoped to receive a delivery of coal, the supplies they ordered, but which seldom arrived.

Nela fussed over Tante Anna, tucking a loose strand of hair into her black bonnet. The elderly woman looked frailer out in the open. She stared straight ahead, her chin high, ancient and dignified in the falling snow. Tante Anna had allowed herself to be led here and there and, at last, to be planted in this spot to wait to be taken away to live in a strange household, gloved hands clasped against her stomach, satchel at her feet.

A wagon rumbled towards the railway-yard, and although years had passed since the first time Katya had seen the man in it, she recognized him as Bull-Headed Heinrichs. He glanced in their direction with curiosity, his eyes going from one to the other, and then coming to rest on her. He lifted his cap, and she saw that his straw-coloured hair was not as long as before, but still looked as though he had never pulled a brush or comb through it.

Nela saw Katya looking at the guns in the wagon, three barrels filled with guns, their muzzles pointed at a sky heavy with snow clouds.

“He buys them from the soldiers for wheat. There's talk about what he does with them, who he sells them to. Talk from men who wish they'd thought to do the same, and denounce him now because they didn't,” Nela said.

Katya was surprised to hear such a speech coming from Nela, her defence of a person it seemed she hardly knew. Snowflakes melted on her eyelashes, and for a moment, Bull-Headed became a blur. She blinked, and he became clear again. He was still looking at her, and this was not the curious glance of a man wondering what family she came from. This was not a teacher's look, a question, a greeting, patience, impatience. He was trying to pull something out of her. He smiled, and she felt heat rise in her neck. And then he wasn't
smiling any more, but astonished and looking beyond her. In an instant he had jumped from the wagon and came running towards her, his jacket open and flapping.

What happened next happened in an instant.

“What is it?” Nela asked, and then she was pitched forward onto the platform, her hat flying across it and onto the tracks.

Katya could feel someone standing immediately behind her, she could hear movement, and then suddenly Tante Anna was thrown into her side, hard, the force sending her down onto the platform with Tante Anna on top of her. The boards shook with the pounding of feet as someone ran away, and Bull-Headed leapt onto the platform. She heard him shout for help as he went chasing after the fleeing person. She saw Nela rise to her knees, people moving towards them, felt Tante Anna's weight against her body as the woman sighed and relaxed, lay still, a child going to sleep.

The
Ältester
decided the funeral for Tante Anna should be held in Chortitza church to accommodate the number of people who wished to attend, who wanted to hear what had happened, to speak to those who had been bystanders to the tragedy, and to point out the survivors, Nela and herself, as though she and Nela had come near to God, had been brushed against by the angel coming for the old woman. After the funeral, Tante Anna was buried in the cemetery beyond the Orthodox church and the men returned to the church for a meeting that went on past supper, and passersby could hear a loud debate going on inside.

The debate had degenerated into a shouting duel between two groups, her grandfather said when he returned with her father, who had been granted a day's leave to attend the funeral. With them was Abram Sudermann. He had come to Chortitza on business, and in
hopes of speaking to her father. A small number of men had overcome the majority with their voices and threats, as the subject of the debate had escalated from whether or not to arm the town watchmen, to whether or not it was time to do as the
Gemeinde
in the Second Colony had done, and form a self-defence unit.

There was no reason to hold such a discussion, her father said. The death of the woman had nothing to do with hatred against Mennonites, but was the act of a madman. Tante Anna had died from shock, and thanks to the heaviness of Nela's coat, the ice chisel had not gone through it, so her wound was not a wound, but a contusion. A half-quart of Red Head vodka was behind Trifon's act, and not hatred towards Mennonites.

“I agree with you. But it doesn't change the circumstances. Your girl could have been hurt too, or worse, if Heinrichs hadn't been there. If he hadn't chased that hooligan off, he might have taken the time to come back at them again,” Abram Sudermann said. He sat in the parlour, his knees spread; on his lap rested the pumpkin that was his stomach.

He had come to urge her father to reconsider an early release from service. He'd hired more Cossacks; there had been no trouble at Privol'noye, except for the usual thieving and beggars coming by on the road. The estate was suffering. The barns and building roofs needed repair. What horses hadn't been requisitioned were neglected and in poor condition. Many
gutsbesitzers
had left their homes, and were hiding in the villages for the sake of safety, but someone had to take a stand.

“In any case, you see what can happen in a village where it's supposed to be safe. Peter, let David arrange things,” Abram said.

The day was dismal with wet slush and the biting cold of February. On a similar day a man would come knocking on her door wanting her to speak stories into a small microphone he held, his
knuckles chapped from the cold, his trousers damp around the cuffs. Bringing the wet smell of the outside with him.

She told him that although she hadn't been present during Abram Sudermann's visit, she later heard how her father had hitched up his shoulders and taken a deep breath before speaking. He would agree to apply for an early medical leave and return to Privol'noye as overseer on the condition that Abram give him ten
desiatini
of land. Her grandmother enjoyed retelling the story, how Abram had sputtered and begun to perspire. Now, Peta, listen here, be reasonable. How could you oversee and, at the same time, farm? Yes, her father had said, I am a reasonable man. And, in turn, Abram should also be reasonable. Abram must give him the meadow land, he bargained in the end, and reluctantly, Abram gave in.

And that was how, and when, and why they had returned to Privol'noye. Her father's fate, their fate, sealed by a promise her grandparents had extracted from him, oh so many years ago, that he wouldn't go and take their only daughter far away in his search for land.

Katya had been to funerals in the past, of children and the elderly taken by illness, a young man who'd been struck by a falling tree. She had seen the photograph of her dead grandmother held upright by her sons, and a son of the photographer, unseen, crouching behind her with his back set against hers. But she hadn't been present at the moment of a person's last breath until Tante Anna, whose passing she'd felt in a weight on her chest. When she couldn't sleep, her mother invited her into her bed as she had every night since the day of Trifon's attack at the train station. Now as she lay beside her mother in the dark, the clock in the parlour struck the ninth hour, and the portraits of the Schroeder ancestors kept their
watch. She knew she'd always been moving towards this moment.

With each passing second – the clock's striking finished, and the house settling once again into a deep silence – she realized she'd known this time would come. She might hear a voice calling, such as the voice she'd heard at the butter well, or perhaps a circumstance would arise: one minute Tante Anna had been sitting in a rocking chair telling her of the dream, and the next, she was in heaven and able to read all of their lives from the beginning to the end, Katya's life, her misdeeds, unkind thoughts. She couldn't sleep, not because the need for sleep wasn't present, but because she was afraid she would dream and find herself once again in the courtyard, and in the presence of the millstone carved with names.

She thought of Lydia's silver cup and the jealousy, the anger that had caused her to drop it down the well. There was tension in her mother's curled body, her breathing shallow, and Katya knew she wasn't asleep.

“Mama,” she said. She had waited too long, she had carried around the weight of the secret for too many years. Her mother lifted her head so as to listen with both ears.

“Do you remember Lydia had a silver cup?”

“What cup?” her mother asked.

“The silver cup with two handles.” She couldn't imagine how her mother wouldn't remember. Everyone had gone looking for it, including her mother. “I threw the cup in the butter well.”

When she'd finished telling the story, her mother sighed and rolled onto her back, her hand coming to rest on Katya's stomach.

“But why? Why would you do such a thing?”

She recalled the impulse, but no longer remembered the reason behind it. She remembered the initials she had stamped out on the lake melting as the snow had melted, initials being wiped from a windowpane in spring, initials she'd stitched into the corner of a handkerchief becoming frayed with each washing. She remembered
thinking that Lydia's initials on the cup would last forever, for as long as a name chiselled in stone.

“I never suspected you would have had anything to do with it. Well, what's done can't be undone. You'll have to tell Lydia, and ask for her forgiveness.”

But what was done
had
been undone. It was over, finished. She'd grabbed hold of the moment.

“However much the cup was worth, we'll find a way for you to pay for it,” her mother said. With difficulty and groaning she rolled onto her side and pulled her knees up to cradle her pregnant belly. “It's good for everyone that you confessed. But most of all, it's good for you,” she said.

A spot of warmth centred on Katya's forehead and spread into her neck and shoulders. She was being infused with a light that made her limbs weightless, her new breasts jelly sliding off her ribcage, and she could breathe more deeply now, draw in more air. Although at fifteen years old she was almost a woman, she had a child's faith in the existence of angels, and a God who would arrange this day, the dream she'd had early that morning, in order to bring her into His courtyard.