The Russlander (28 page)

She had begun the day's list of chores that morning, and now, as the land turned dusky with twilight, she was in the summer kitchen rubbing shanks of lamb with fat and salt to prepare them for the oven. The buildings had turned pigeon grey in the fading light, gullies of shadows deepening between them. She was nearing the end of the first day of what would be a month of service.

Faint waves of sound travelled through the moisture-laden air, young voices, the coachman's children, she realized, out in the yard in their night clothing. Scampering, ghostlike creatures, the grainy air making them seem indistinct and fleeting, their nightshirts rippling about their legs as they played what looked to be a game of chase-the-goose. Likely they had been sent to relieve themselves behind the house before bed, and had forgotten to return. A light had come on in the kitchen of the Big House, but the windows in her own house were not yet lit with lamplight, the glass in the summer-room windows reflecting the twilight and becoming the colour of mercury.

She would always prefer this time of day, a farmyard in another country bathed in the same light, the land broken here and there by a copse of burr oak, mist rising from a dugout pond as cattle came to drink. Her children coming, wanting to be held at sundown; a cup of tea sweetened with barley honey sipped in the quiet while sitting outside on benches at the back of an old farmhouse. The strong light of day sometimes defined too clearly the business of life, and the hard brilliance of the night sky made a person ache for things beyond their reach. The gloam of twilight softened hard edges, her thoughts about Helena, a woman whose strictness might well be concealing a person hungry for love.

Her mother emerged from the house and came along the path to the summer kitchen. She stood at the screen door looking in, her apron a patch of white, but otherwise she was a silhouette, her features indiscernible.

Moments later she said, “I didn't think when we came here that it meant my children would become servants.” To herself, Katya knew, as when she spoke, she'd turned and looked at the Big House.

Katya suddenly wanted to weep. She was chilled; the fire she'd lit when she'd opened up the summer kitchen had long ago gone
out; the thought of being left behind tomorrow was almost more than she could bear.

Her mother shivered and hugged herself against the cold, and Katya stifled the desire to cry. “You don't have to do this, Katya. We could somehow find the money. I will not have you miss your own sister's baptism.”

“I'm doing this because I want to do this.”

“If it's your conscience saying so, then fine. Just be sure you aren't wallowing in your feelings,” her mother said.

Then they saw Katya's father and Gerhard coming down the steps of the coachman's house, the coachman and his son Yerik behind them. As they left the yard, the small children filed into the house.

Katya's mother went with her to the storage cellar, its roof a hump of earth overgrown with grass and wild asters. The coolness of the dank interior enveloped them as they went among the carcasses of chickens hanging from the ceiling. They put the shanks of lamb on a shelf. When they came up out of the darkness of the underground room, it seemed lighter outside than it had been, light enough for a walk in the garden, her mother suggested, to see what flowers they could find that might brighten the family room for Pentecost Sunday.

Katya's father and Gerhard had gone to the carriage house with the coachman and Yerik to make arrangements for their trip to church tomorrow, her mother said while they went among the flowers, her mother snipping stems with the scissors she'd brought with her. More than twenty people would be going in three carriages and the coach, washed, its brass and leather polished. Abram preferred to travel to church in the coach. “His back-loader coach hitched to six matching black stallions,” her mother said. “He likes to be noticed. Apparently when he came calling on Aganetha, he made the driver go at top speed from one end of Main Street to the
other, then return and do it once again just in case someone hadn't seen him.”

Her parents had heard stories of Abram's courting of Aganetha, his showy arrival that scattered the chickens and ducks, brought the village children on the run. There was no understanding his choice of bride, Aganetha, daughter of a half-farmer who had caught his eye at a funeral. She was known to burst into giggles whenever anyone looked at her. A person only had to say, Hello Aganetha, and she was caught in a fit of giggling, red-faced and bent over clutching her stomach.

Aganetha was nothing more than a backward girl from backward people whose manners in church offended others, her mother said. They talked during prayers, the men using coarse language and telling crude stories in the churchyard. Aganetha's people were the kind who would fill their pockets with their hosts' baking, and who never knew when to go home, staying on and on waiting to be invited for supper.

Her mother straightened, cradled a bundle of daffodils against her breasts, their pollen streaking her apron bib with gold dust. “She thinks she's become a silk purse,” she said softly, her tiny smile implying that she thought otherwise.

As they went towards the garden gate, Katya thought of her mother's self-knowing smile, the way she now walked, swinging her shoulders slightly, her chin lifted, her step sure. With a haughtiness Katya had once seen before, a self-possessed assurance. She thought she might be seeing her mother as she might have been when she'd been Greta's age, when Katya's father had begun to notice her.

Helena Sudermann was coming towards the garden now, no doubt for a moment of quiet prayer.

“Here,” her mother said suddenly, and thrust the daffodils into Katya's arms. She went on ahead to meet Helena, her arms swinging, as though this were a moment she'd been looking for. Katya's
mother drew near to Helena, who waited on the path, her shoulders becoming hunched and face jutting forward. Katya heard the low murmur of her mother's voice, a sentence uttered, and then another, her voice growing stronger as she continued to speak, her hands raised at her sides and chopping the air, Helena attempting to interrupt, and being cut off. Helena rose to her full height and stepped back, Katya's mother advancing. Then there was silence while the women looked at each other, Helena then turning away and going back to the house.

When Katya joined her mother, she saw that her eyes were shining, and her chest heaved. As they fell into step, Katya asked her what she had said.

“Never mind. It's said, and that's that. And what's more, you'll be going to church with us tomorrow.”

Dampness shaped the smoke pouring from the outside oven, a white column set against the early morning sky. Katya hurried with her family across the compound to the carriage house where Abram's coach and three carriages stood waiting to take them to church in Nikolaifeld. The land beyond the perimeter of the stone fence seemed to be a well of darkness, the birds and insects waiting for the first hint of sunrise to begin sculpting the fields with sound. The lanterns on the vehicles bathed the gathering of people in a warm light, the Sudermann brothers and their puffy-faced wives, the sister cousins, the Wiebe sisters who huddled together. The young people would travel in one
droschke
, Abram said, Mary and Martha in the smallest one. Go, Katya's mother said as Greta joined Dietrich, Lydia, and the sister cousins waiting beside the carriage. Yerik, their driver, was already in place and looking half asleep. You're a young
person, no? her mother said. Sara would help her with the little ones. What's keeping Helena, Abram came over and asked Martha gruffly.

Helena, when she at last appeared, stood on the top step for moments, outlined by light shining from the doorway. While she must have known that her oldest brother percolated with impatience, she took her time, standing, to gaze down the avenue, then descended the steps with slow deliberation. Helena ignored her brothers and their wives, went past them where they had come together beside the coach, the women bulky and stolid-looking in fur coats and hats. She went over to the smallest
droschke
, and the Wiebe sisters, then motioned to the driver that he should take her bags, in this way telling everyone that she would not be riding in the coach with her brothers.

Once the convoy got underway their voices seemed to overcome the darkness that pooled in the fields beyond the road. The road's surface was sticky from an overnight drizzle, and the animals' hooves made pleasant sucking sounds.

Throughout the following hour, a mist was gradually drawn off by the rising sun, the land appeared, and streaks of magenta emerged in the sky. A rim of fiery liquid simmered on the horizon, and then the sun appeared all at once. Lanterns were extinguished, scarves and hats removed. Greta and Dietrich were seated across from Katya side by side, their arms touching. Dietrich plucked at Greta's cape, and while she didn't look at him, it was obvious her smile was meant for him. Lydia sat on the other side of Dietrich, turned away from him and looking out across the land as though wishing she were somewhere else. When Greta took off her coat in church everyone would see how beautiful she had become, Katya thought. For the baptism, Frieda Krahn had helped Greta sew a dress of fine sateen, a dress that even Katya's brothers couldn't help but admire, were struck silent by when Greta tried it on. A white
dress, a narrow ribbon banding its hem, flounced sleeves trimmed with satin rosettes. Her mother had worried that the dress would draw attention, that they would be accused of trying to stand in the same light as the Sudermanns. Greta's dark eyelashes fluttered, her eyes turned aside as her mother fussed with the shirred yoke, pressing it flat, her hands crossing the soft swell of Greta's breasts. Greta had become a ruby, a virtuous woman, she had become so aloof and secretive, and for a moment Katya wanted to smack her. She would never possess such a fine dress; she didn't think she would ever want to be as self-satisfied as Greta. Their Gypsy Queen, she thought, her eyes suddenly brimming.

Soon they were near to Lubitskoye, and as they drew closer, the green dome of a church appeared through the trees, and then houses that nested behind wattle fences. Abram's coach travelled ahead, and was already midway through the village as their carriage was entering. A church bell began to toll, but although the bell called the people to prayers, the street lay empty.

Ahead of them, a silver-haired man came out of his yard carrying a hoe, and went to the side of the road and stood there. Several other men followed. Their movements seemed disjointed and odd; they flailed their arms, a cap was doffed, and jammed back on again. They all went off in different directions. Then as suddenly as they'd dispersed, they returned to the side of the road.

Dietrich muttered under his breath, “I see the neighbours are up to their eyebrows in the spirit of Pentecost.”

Abram's coach slowed, and stopped when it came alongside the men, who all at once marched single-file across the road, as though, someone had given them a command. They stood now in front of Abram's coach, legs spread and arms crossed against their chests.

“Yerik, go and see what's happening,” Dietrich told their young driver, and although he seemed reluctant to do so, he climbed down from the carriage, and slouched off down the road.

Just then someone else came through the gate of the same yard, a man sitting on a wheeled platform, which he propelled over to the side of the road with his hands.

“Simeon Pravda, up to his usual tricks,” Dietrich said. He attempted to sound nonchalant, to convey that Pravda was nothing more than a bothersome and unruly child, but Katya heard an edge in his voice.

As Simeon called out, Abram's head emerged from a coach window; Katya recognized Simeon's effusive, sing-song greeting as belonging to the beggar she had seen years ago at Privol'noye.

Yerik stopped in his tracks, and when it appeared he had no intention of going any farther, Dietrich left the carriage. When he met up with Yerik, he, too, did not venture any further.

Abram's voice grew loud in a familiar tone, one Katya knew was meant to convey that he was the boss. The driver of the
droschke
behind them had climbed down and as Katya's father came walking along the road, he joined him. “What is it?” Helena called, but her father didn't stop to answer. As he approached the carriage, his eyes found Katya's, and he nodded. He said they should act normal, try not to appear worried or frightened, and then he walked to Abram's coach.

By then, Jakob and Isaac Sudermann had got out of the coach, and as they were about to go round it, they were encircled by the men, who began shouting and cursing at them. The brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, meeting the flow of the men's abuse with silence, refusing to reply to their taunts.

The sister cousins were stricken with fear, their faces mottled as they held back tears, while Lydia seemed unmoved, as though she thought the commotion wasn't worth the effort to turn and have a look at. Katya's father stood outside the stormy circle, arms crossed over his chest. He must have spoken, as moments later one of the men, and then all of them, noticed he was there. In all the time
he'd been overseer, he'd had occasion to hire many men from Lubitskoye, and they knew him to be fair, her mother had said, and both the village and Abram prospered because of it. When her father finished talking to the men, an agreement seemed to have been reached, as they dispersed and went back to the side of the road, and to Simeon Pravda. Now they were laughing and needing to lean into each other in order to stay upright. Her father returned to the convoy with the other driver, meeting up with Dietrich and Yerik along the way.