The Russlander (34 page)

Lydia stood with an arm about her mother's shoulders, and Aganetha, whose lips had been moving with silent prayer, whimpered, “Don't leave me.”

“Come now, Aganetha, a little music is good for the soul, yes?” Katya's father said with a false lightness, which Lydia seemed to understand. “Something everyone will enjoy,” he called after her as she walked slowly over to the piano and stood before it, hands splayed above the keys. Her hands then descended, and the melody of a Russian folk song rose up and carried across the yard, drawing the men who had not gone to the well over to the piano, and they stood around it, their blunt faces softening with pleasure at the sound of a favourite song rising from beneath Lydia's touch. They began to sing, first one, and then the others took up the song, their voices harmonizing naturally, full with longing. Pravda gripped the arm of the chair, his head rolling from side to side.

The men who had gone to the well returned, the trousers of the smallest one among them soaked to the knees. He began emptying his pockets. Three long-handled dessert spoons fell to the ground, one after the other, then a small silver tray, and finally, Lydia's two-eared cup. Abram backed away from the objects lying on the ground, shaking his head in disbelief. Katya could almost feel the weight of the cup in her hand. Her teeth began to chatter; she wanted to hold her jaw to make it stop, but she couldn't move.

Pravda took the cup as it was handed to him, spat on it, and rubbed it against his sleeve. His face opened in a smile of triumph as he lifted it and turned its engraved initials out for all to see.

It was then that Kolya swung the shovel, silencing Abram's sputtering with a blow to the side of his head. As Abram fell, the men descended on him, and Katya heard the solid thud of their fists and feet pounding his body. Someone cried out, Aganetha, or one of the Wiebe sisters, a high-pitched sound that came from the back of a throat, becoming a scream as the first sabre slashed through Abram's nightshirt, parting the flesh of his shoulder. Katya saw how white and shiny was his bone.

Sara was yanking her hand, but Katya couldn't move. The sounds burst forth, Sara's whine of fear, her father's sharp gasp as he moved towards them now and was stopped suddenly by a rifle butt rammed against his chest. Greta, silent while she backed away from the men, their sabres hacking and fists and boots pounding at Abram. Daniel and Johann whimpering, turning their faces into her stomach, still clinging to her nightdress. She was inching them away from the sight of blood splattering pant legs, from the sound of Aganetha's sobbing, which became a shriek as one of the men struck her with an axe. Gerhard bolted away from their mother's side, gone suddenly from sight. Greta kept inching away, as if hoping she might back into a deep shadow with her brothers and disappear, until one of the little ones stumbled and fell against her, sending her sprawling to the ground.

“
Schnell
,” her father shouted as he pushed the man's gun aside, his fists tight and shaking in the air beside his head, his features swollen and contorted. Hurry, hurry, he screamed at them. She saw his mouth shape the words, saw Greta rise to her knees, saw someone come up behind her and force her back down. “Oh God, God in heaven,” her mother cried out, while Katya felt the ground moving beneath her feet as she began to run, Sara before her pulling her along. She saw Lydia, across the yard at the piano, begin to run at the same time.

When she finished telling the story that day, she ended it by saying, After they killed Abram they thought they had to keep on killing until no one was left. They didn't want to leave a witness. They didn't know that the times were such that they could kill without fear of punishment. They hadn't known yet that they could have chosen who to shoot and hack to death and who to leave standing.

Well, yes.
Na ja
. And so they killed them all, she said, and noticed that the young man's hand had begun to shake, that he had to turn off his machine and go over to the window for a moment and look out at the parking lot, where cars were beginning to arrive for the Sunday-afternoon visiting. Children were emerging from the vehicles with their parents, were being urged to button up against the cold, promised a trip to somewhere more interesting afterwards. Had they remembered to bring nail clippers, yet? Oma likes to have her nails just so, filed and shining with clear nail polish. How had she got to be so vain?

III
S
URELY
G
OODNESS
AND
M
ERCY

And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove!

for then would I fly away and be at rest
.

– PSALM 55:6

he had wanted to run farther than the hole in a greenhouse floor, to run away from her thoughts, from waking each morning to the absence of voices; escape to another country. But that wasn't possible, not yet. In any case, escape where, and to what, she didn't have the will to imagine. She hadn't known that men of influence were beginning to sound out the possibilities for a mass migration to Canada, the United States, Mexico, and South America. Perhaps it was just as well that she hadn't known. Because she would have held her breath, waited too long for her life to begin. By the time she left, a rigor mortis might have set in. She had no choice except to go on breathing, and she wound up escaping into the heart of a man who always seemed to be there when she needed him.

She had wanted to go away, she would tell the earnest young interviewer, who was accustomed to a warmer winter than what was experienced in Manitoba, judging from the way he was dressed. But she couldn't go away, and so for a time she went away in her mind from the place of the accident. Yes, that's what it was, an accident. When she grew old, she came to understand that life was a series of
accidents. Since she'd come to live at Bethania, she'd heard of other people's accidents, told to her by the onlookers, and survivors such as she was, people who, like her, had come to end their days in identical cubicle-sized rooms of a personal-care home. Rooms with a single window; rooms about the size of one where a doctor might instruct, Put your feet into the stirrups, here, and here. Where a doctor once told her – a Mennonite with a self-satisfied smile, offspring of one of the wealthy ones, a man so satisfied with his own plain face that she was always relieved to see the back of him when he went out the door – he had said: The uterus, yes, there it is. The cause of most of the world's problems. He would leave her shaking because she'd been enraged, and so intensely.

All right, then. She would come to need personal care, and to live among other survivors of that time in Russia, women mostly, who had stories to tell, but no words to tell them. Just as their recipes had lacked concise instructions and measures, their Plautdietsch language lacked the necessary words to give shape to the colours, describe the nuances, the interior shadows of their stories. Perhaps they would have been better off trying to sing them, a hymn with stanzas and a rousing chorus to inflame the heart with a desire to be better at things. Better at loving, at being, or, at least, better at doing. In their time, the road to eternity had been crowded with everyday things, chickens, children and men that required constant tending, the earth in the garden crying out to be subdued, and so they were used to singing hymns to remind them that heaven was their ultimate goal, and joy was the best vehicle to get them from here to there.

The people she would come to live with near the end of her life were octogenarians and older, several within grasp of their hundredth year, as she was. Doddering people who were half the size they'd once been, could not see the numbers on the telephone, or work the button on the elevator. Some of them slobbered when they
ate, their dentures caked with bits of food while they told nonsensical stories such as the one about a child who had been born without a bone in her nose because her mother had looked upon the cruel beating of a dog. Who would give credence to their stories?

The tall young man would smile sadly when she said it was an accident. Something that happens without being expected, which could mean almost everything that came to a person in life. But perhaps there was no such thing as an accident, for a person could easily make a list of known causes, point fingers, find fault and intention for every small and large misfortune. One cause would lead to another and another, and finally come down to this: If only God hadn't created Adam and Eve, then such-and-such would not have happened.

Six months following the massacre of her family she was still faraway, the word
far-away
coming from Nela Siemens. She's not here yet. She's far-away and doesn't have much to say, which is to be expected, Nela told a neighbour who stopped at her gate to enquire.

She's far-away
, Katya heard Nela say on an afternoon when the windowpanes in the house buzzed with a concussion of sound, the Soviets having dynamited a section of the Einlage bridge while fleeing the city of Alexandrovsk. The Bolsheviks had captured Kharkov, Kiev, and Ekaterinoslav, and now they were retreating, blowing up the bridge behind them. Petrograd was now Leningrad. Kerensky had been replaced by the Bolsheviks. The Old Style calendar had given way to the New Style, the Julian; and as with all the other changes, it was as if something had passed away while she'd been asleep and something had arrived, without it making much difference to what she was thinking or feeling. She was far-away, which was to be expected; that she would endure was prayed for, and also expected. She had lifted up her mother's hand mirror to see what a far-away expression was, and for a fleeting moment caught herself unaware, a stranger looking at a stranger.

“It's time to lengthen your clothes,” her grandmother said one morning soon after Katya had heard Nela say she was far-away. She had returned from walking Sara to school to find Tina Funk in her grandmother's kitchen. Her grandmother had made the announcement as though she were saying that something had passed, and something had arrived. That it was time to lengthen Katya's skirts, and get on with being alive.

“A girl from Neuenburg ran away with a Russian bricklayer,” Tina Funk said. She had finished unpacking her supplies, fabric ends of various materials and colours, and seated herself at the table. Now the real purpose of her visit, gossip, could begin. She was a middle-aged bespectacled woman who lived across the backyard from them, across the Chortitza creek.

“A Kasdorf girl. Green-Thursday Kasdorf's daughter. You remember he was given the Green Thursday twice for working on a Sunday. His daughter, just like him, is rebellious. What you plant, you harvest,” Tina said. “Show me the skirts.”

“Everyone knows about the girl,” her grandmother said, pointing out that the news was old news, and Tina shouldn't bother embellishing.

“You look good,” Tina Funk said to Katya as she sorted through the skirts Oma had draped across her knees, and apparently didn't expect a reply, as she went on to say, “Your oma is right, there's not much to let down.” Her voice had become less animated, and she didn't look directly at Katya, which was what many people did, turned their heads as though not wanting to breathe the same air, as though she might have something contagious.

“Your grandfather took Njuta along to the barn to give us a moment,” Oma said to Katya, as she'd seen the girl was puzzled by the sight of the empty high chair.

“False hems won't do,” Tina Funk said.

“I've already considered that,” Oma said. What they should consider was adding a band of fabric and concealing the seam with trim. She rummaged through the woman's basket and came up with packages of trim, which she spread almost lovingly across the table and stepped back to admire.

“
Na, ja
,” Oma said and turned away from the table, the pleasure in her eyes fading. What would it look like, so fancy, and so soon after. She anticipated gossip.