The Russlander (37 page)

Dr. Warkentine emerged from the examination room, the muscles in his face working as he came to the window and put an arm about his wife's shoulder; she had begun to weep. People were already hurrying to meet the German cavalry. Women still wearing their washday aprons, men in their barn overalls, came from yards, their children lining up along the street, Sara among them. Women had filled baskets with baking, and were offering it to the riders going by in the street. Others, like Lensch Warkentine, were weeping, aprons held to their faces. There was a noise behind them, and they turned to see the man Katya had heard in Dr. Warkentine's office, standing in the doorway looking on in bewilderment.

“Hans, come and see this – the Germans are here. I never thought I would say this, but I have to admit I'm glad to see them. Maybe those fellows will bring us some peace and order,” Dr. Warkentine said.

The peasants hadn't returned to the waiting room, but had trudged up the valley and gone out across the windswept plateau, going back to wherever it was they had come from, poor souls, Dr. Warkentine later said to Katya. She sat on a chair as he drew down the skin beneath her eye, exposing the tissues to look for signs of her anemia.

“Are you still flowing as much?” he asked.

“The same.” She wanted to tell him, they cut open the bedding, and feathers covered the ground like snow.

“Can you describe how much?” he asked.

No, she couldn't. She was shy to admit to the heat of it, the sodden cloths that needed to be changed hourly. She was aware of Lensch hovering in the background, her stiffness intact, her face closed; listening, she knew.

It was snowing. That's what I at first thought. Then Greta said it was the bedding. It's the bedding, Greta said. She had gone over and over the events of that early morning, and had realized that those had been her sister's last words.

He turned from her and went over to a basin, holding his hands over it, while Lensch trickled carbolic-smelling water from a jug over them.

“Do you pray often?” he asked as he washed his hands.

Did she ever pray? Did she pray,
forgive them
, as her oma had done? Did she pray,
let me not harbour anger, or entertain thoughts of vengeance. Help me to love my enemy?
She wondered if that was what lay behind Dr. Warkentine's question. “No,” she said.

As she got up to leave, he lifted her hand and wrapped her fingers around a bottle of iron pills. “Try to pray. One word, that's all. Then next time, say two words, and so on, until your prayer is at least three minutes long. Sometimes prayer can be the best cure of all,” he said.

When she returned along Main Street, she saw a wagon parked in front of her grandparents' gate. She saw it intermittently, through the passing of other wagons and carriages going by, people hurrying off to Chortitza, where the German cavalry had gone.

Sara came out of the Siemenses' veranda, and Katya held her breath when she saw her crouch down, then propel herself through the air, jumping to the bottom of the steps. Only once had Sara asked, where are they? She'd looked up at the lip of the valley, and the dome of the Orthodox church, likely thinking of the cemetery lying beyond that church. They aren't there, Oma explained. Even though they had seen her mother, father, and brothers all in a row in their wooden cradles, seen them being lowered into the ground, they were somewhere else, above, alive, and waiting for a glorious family reunion.

Think of them as just being in another room, someone had said. Katya in one, and they in another. She thought of hearing the clank of a spoon against a bowl, a rustling of voices, on the other side of a wall. But the idea of them being in another room wasn't a comforting thought. Eternal happiness and hymn-singing in the presence of God and the angels while the living grieved amounted to callous indifference.

As Sara came through the Siemenses' gate, she saw Katya and quickly pulled a scarf up onto her head. She had only just recovered from an ear infection, and knew better than to go outdoors without her ears protected against the wind. A scolding rose to Katya's tongue as her sister came running to meet her, but as Sara took her hand and began to chatter, Katya forgave her for being who she was, brave and eager, a puppy on the end of a tether, pulling Katya off in several directions at once.

Had she seen the Germans? Sara asked.

Ja
, she'd seen them.

Weren't their helmets funny looking? Ohm Siemens said that the Germans and Austrians would make the bandits bring back their cream separator. They would order them to return Opa and Oma's bed, and the sofa, also. Young boys in the street had told her the
Germans would whip the thieves and teach them a lesson not to steal, Sara said.

As they came near to her grandparents' house, Katya noticed that whoever the wagon belonged to had left his coat behind on its seat. Already the presence of the Germans made people feel safer, she thought. The brown leather coat looked familiar, and then she realized she'd seen it on the driver of the wagon that had gone by when she was on the way to the doctor's house.

Bull-Headed Heinrichs ducked as he came out the door of her grandparents' house, as though he thought himself tall and not a middle-sized man, which was what he was. A strong and sturdy-limbed man, whose broad hands were freckled, his knuckles scuffed and enlarged. It was his long face, bristly with gold whiskers, that had presented itself to Katya as the slatted covering of their hole in the greenhouse was lifted. She remembered how the insides of her thighs had stung as her bladder emptied with relief to be looking in the eyes of a Mennonite face. Sunlight shot through the glass roof, obliterating the darkness and the fumes of the mouldering earth, and she, heard herself say
Danke, danke
, as he drew her up and out of the hole into clean air. She wept with the release of fear and held her stomach to contain her retching. As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw him up to his hips in the hole, gathering a sleeping Sara into his arms.

Don't thank me, Bull-Headed said, his voice clotted and strange-sounding as he stood before her, Sara held against his chest. She was thanking God, she said. Don't thank anyone, he said, and as she looked across the yard he tried to block her view. She stepped around him and saw the Big House beyond, its shattered windows, a tattered strip of window curtain pulled through the shards of glass and trailing in a breeze. She saw the bodies of the dogs, their legs crooked as though they'd been struck down while on the run.

There were people, men, standing in a huddle near the back door of the Big House. One of them left the group and stooped over a mound lying on the ground, lifted the blanket covering it, and let it fall. Then she saw all of them, the large and small mounds beneath blankets, lined in a row. She ran to the far wall of the greenhouse, pressing her hands against the glass, wanting to see if anything under the blankets would move. Then she was running between tables of flats and potted plants, knocking them to the floor in her panic to find the door to the potting shed and outside, the way she had come when she had known exactly where that door was, her hands undoing the latch in the dark while Sara stood panting. But now, in daylight, she couldn't find it.

You don't want to go out there, Bull-Headed said. Sara began to wail, and Katya thought then that all of them might be gone. Her father the last to breathe, Bull-Headed would later tell her. Still alive when Bull-Headed had arrived at Privol'noye early that morning at Abram's request to sell him draft horses. Then he'd found them. Katya's father alive for long enough to say where she and Sara might be hiding, in a hole in the ground, but where it was, he hadn't the breath to say. There's a baby crying, she was inside the house, whose is it? Bull-Headed had asked Katya, and she knew then for certain that, of her family, only Njuta, Sara, and she had survived.

Now, as Katya waited beside the gate for Bull-Headed Heinrichs to come down the stairs of her grandparents' house and out the gate, Sara let go of her hand, and stared after him as he climbed up onto his wagon, her eyes becoming glittering blue agates, remembering, Katya thought.

When Katya came into the house, her grandparents were sitting on a bench in the parlour, silent, studying their hands, which rested in their laps. They looked up as she came past the door, and she knew immediately that Bull-Headed Heinrichs's visit had something to do with her.

That evening, she stood at a window peering through a veil of fog that had settled on the valley, thinking, This is the man who, twice now, has saved my life. Kornelius was his real name. Bull-Headed, he'd been called, because he refused to go to church following the death of his young wife. He'd asked her grandparents if he might come calling. What made him think Katya was the one for him, Opa had asked. Not everything needs an explanation, Kornelius said. Not everything, and not to everyone, her opa agreed. But your desire requires an explanation, as Katya is ours, and so we're entitled to hear it. They wanted to hear that he'd reconciled his mind to God, but he refused to give them even the hope that he might do so in the future.

There will be others, Oma had said to Katya, as if Katya had set her mind on Kornelius and was in need of consoling. And in any case, it was too soon after, there would be gossip. Streetlamps and lights in windows were yellow smears of colour barely illuminating the snow in the street and yards as she stood looking out through the fog, emotionless, thinking that the man wanted her for his wife. She did not remember what she'd felt the day Kornelius Heinrichs had smiled at her at the train station. She thought of him wanting to marry her, though she didn't yet know what the act was that consummated a marriage.

The next morning the fog had lifted, and as she walked with her grandparents and sisters to church, it was through a world hung with lace. Ice crystals sparked iridescent fires, a brilliance that made her squint. The hoarfrosted trees and underbrush spread across the valley slopes like orchards in bloom.

The church service was at the halfway point when Katya heard a name being whispered, and then a rustle of clothing and creak of benches as people shifted in their seats. As the singing gradually
faded, she turned and saw Kornelius striding down the centre aisle, his hat in place. In the moment of silence that followed, the air bristled. Then the
Ältester
stood up and went to the pulpit. Did Kornelius wish to speak? he asked.

No, he did not. He had come to listen, Kornelius said, and made a motion as though to sit down with the other men, but although there was space on the bench, those on the outside did not move over to make room for him.

There was a proper way for this to be done, the
Ältester
said. In order to be among them and to listen, Kornelius first had to come before the ministers and speak.

At that, Kornelius laughed and shook his head. I have twenty thousand rubles, he said. Will that be enough?

Katya heard gasps of shock, a rising murmur of voices; saw looks being passed around. The ministers, sitting on the front bench, Nela's old father among them, stood. Kornelius didn't wait to be escorted to the door, but left using the centre aisle, his hat still in place on his head. Separated from the church, and therefore separated from God. Trying to buy his way into heaven, Katya heard when she walked outside after the service, and then down the street, not wanting to linger, fearful that people might have made a connection between Kornelius's visit at her grandparents' house and his sudden appearance at church.

She was at the gate when a sleigh stopped in front of the house. Her grandparents and sisters had accepted a ride home with Olga Penner and her father, and with them was Nela Siemens. They were about to go riding in the country – would Katya like to come? Nela asked. Her grandmother suddenly fussed with Njuta's bonnet, pretending that she wasn't praying that Katya would begin to take in some of the world around her and agree to go, while Njuta gazed into the empty air as though something had caught her attention. Who had taken her to Abram's office? Had it been an act of
kindness, or a whim? Could she remember? Perhaps she was attuned to the invisible, hearing voices, a clink of a spoon against glass.

They left the village of Rosenthal, then Chortitza, the land still snow-bound from a late and recent storm that muted the sounds of the sleigh and harness bells and the sing of runners against the packed trail. She sat beside Olga, warm beneath a sheepskin. Nela faced them, her hands buried inside a muff, her sharp features softened by a fur muffler that covered her chin and met the edge of a muskrat-trimmed hat, her pale eyes shining as she looked down at Olga's black mongrel curled around her feet.

Katya had forgotten how satisfying it was to ride through the countryside. Their breath escaped in white puffs, which were pulled sideways and shredded by the wind. Barbara and Dietrich were going to have a baby, she learned from Olga. They would all change, grow older, while Greta remained the same. Beyond them, there was movement in a field, white moving on white, a rabbit bounding away, and then another. The dog got up onto its haunches and sniffed the air.

Rabbits, Olga shouted, and her father stopped the horses. The dog leapt out of the sleigh and ran across the field, going in one direction and then another, barely able to keep track of the rabbits that sprang out of a thicket of bushes, their ears pricked. Soon the dog became a black spot moving against white, until Olga called and the animal returned to them, its tongue bright red and mouth steaming. Laughing, Katya thought.

The sleigh followed a well-worn trail, which soon dipped into a shallow valley and curved round a pond, its surface stippled with the footprints of birds. Then they left the pond behind, and as they neared a group of houses, Olga's father urged the horses into a gallop. The houses were the beginning of a new Russian settlement, he told them. Haystacks stood behind twig fences; there were goats in a yard, and a dog that yapped frantically as they approached.
Then the sleigh emerged from the shallow bowl of land, and beyond them the countryside spread out flat and broad, the sky dropping to meet the tufts of yellow grass where the wind had skimmed the crests off snowbanks, flattened drifts, and exposed the frozen earth.