The Russlander (40 page)

She studied him, took in his apparent satisfaction at knowing these things, as though the knowledge increased his stature, and she realized that his comment had been made without thinking about her, that he hadn't been referring to the buried treasure in Abram Sudermann's garden.

“Well, Katherine, won't you at last tell us what happened?” he asked after a moment of silence.

He, along with everyone else, knew more about what happened that day than she did, she would one day come to learn. Most people would have read the account of the massacre in the
Odessaer Zeitung
that her grandparents had kept from her, a vivid description which she later read in archives,
All of the victims had either been shot or had their throats cut. Gerhard Vogt was found slain on a field near a haystack, where it is believed the bandits caught up with him as he attempted to escape
.

And yet, when her father's brothers had come to see her after the funeral, they had expected she would tell them more. When
later she recalled the questions they had put to her, their questions seemed, in the light of the present day, almost preposterous. Had her father raised his hand against the men? Did he defend himself, or anyone else? She couldn't reassure them that this had not been the case. She couldn't ease their minds, tell them that her father had turned the other cheek while his wife and children were struck down. And so she had told them what little she knew. He'd tried to defend them with words. Tried to get them away from the scene by saying they would milk the cows. He'd tried to defuse Pravda with an invitation to come for a meal.

“Katherine, won't you tell me about Lydia? Was Lydia laid on the ground, too?” Franz asked, his voice lowered and cajoling.

She was confused, rooted by the phrase he'd used, and couldn't repeat it. She could only ask, “Too?”

At her question, he drew inward and stuffed his handkerchief into his pocket. Then he went over to the feeding table, becoming lively and jovial, rocking on his heels, his teacher's enthusiasm for the silkworm venture taking over. As though he hadn't asked her about Lydia, and left her muddled and worrying over the phrase he'd used.

When they returned to the parlour the table had been set for
faspa
, the samovar was heating water, and on the table were plates of buns and ham, a dish of apricot jam. The halvah was sliced and arranged on a plate.

As they talked, Katya only half-listened, thinking,
laid on the ground
, a phrase she'd heard whispered between women, its connotation ugly and something to be feared. She heard Franz tell her grandparents that Tsar Nicholas, the tsarina, and all their children had been murdered. She felt the room go still, heard water simmering in the samovar, saw steam curl from the spout of the teapot. If they can kill the tsar, then who is safe? Helena said, repeating a question that, wherever she went, she said, people were asking.

“There's the new Mennonite look,” Franz later said with a wryness, as he and Helena were about to leave. Young men no older than Gerhard would have been came marching down the street. They were being drilled by a German officer in the rudiments of marching before going off to the Second Colony to join the
Selbstschutz
, a self-defence unit of young men. Her grandfather looked on, shaking his head. “Those who live by the sword,” he said, and turned away.

“Some of those fellows are going around boasting how they're going to knock out teeth. Maim and pulverize, which doesn't sound like self-defence to me,” Franz Pauls said.

“Violence begets violence,” her grandfather said. “Wait and see.”

Katya waited until evening, after she had set a basin of water on the floor and sponged her sisters' bodies clean and washed their feet. When she was sure they were asleep, she went to the family room where her grandmother sat at the table mending, and Opa across from her, a wooden box set before him, its lid open, and what looked to be letters and photographs spread around him on the table.

“What does it mean when a woman is laid on the ground?” She knew if she had taken the time to sit down, her courage would have left.

Her grandmother's eyes darted from one thing to another, and her jaw began to work. She set aside the shirt she'd been mending as though she suddenly didn't have the stomach for darning. Opa glanced at her sharply overtop his reading glasses, got up, and left the room.

“I pray you'll never know,” her grandmother said.

“Franz Pauls asked if Lydia had been laid on the ground,” she said. Familiar faces looked up at her from the photographs spread across the table.

“Oh, I see. Franz Pauls wants to know. He's snooping around. He's still trying to catch a big fish, and he wants to make sure that
Lydia is good enough,” her grandmother said, her chest heaving with a sudden anger.

“He asked me if Lydia had been laid on the ground, too. What did he mean by ‘too'? Did he mean Greta?” she asked. The Wiebe sisters, her mother? She didn't ask.

Her grandmother closed her eyes, and then cradled her forehead with her hands, motionless for moments. She got up and left the room then, and Katya heard the pantry door close behind her.

She picked up a photograph, and held it to the light of the lamp. Greta, Lydia, Barbara and Mariechen Sudermann in their school uniforms, gathered around a pedestal and an open book. Greta's chin was lifted, her gaze direct with a self-assurance that she had only just gained. The more Katya studied the photograph, the more difficult it became to picture the Greta she remembered, the tilt of her head just before she would ask a question, the light shining from her eyes.

She was awakened in the night by the creak of footsteps as her grandfather went down the hall. She heard him pleading softly for her grandmother to come out of the pantry, and to bed. He returned to his room alone, a ghostly figure in a long nightshirt going past her open door with a heavy sigh. In the morning when she came into the family room her grandmother emerged from the pantry, haggard and pale, but whistling a hymn. Without glancing in her granddaughter's direction, she stopped whistling to say, “There are some things we don't talk about,” and went to the stove to set water to boil.

In autumn the silkworms began to spin, their heads moving in patterns of figure eights as they threw off loops of silk, an iridescent stream flowing from their spinnerets, hardening like glass as it met
the air and became the ribs of their sleeping chambers. Within two days the silkworms' encasements were too thick for her to see the shadowy figures inside, the gradual and final shedding of their skins, the nutshell pupae emerging. While she knew it was necessary, she was reluctant to harvest the cocoons, set them into bake pans and into the oven to roast like seeds. It took her and her grandfather several days to soak the baked cocoons in pails of soapy water, to find where to begin to pick at a string, and unravel a mile of silk thread, leaving behind the shrivelled pupae, brown debris floating in the water.

Throughout the late autumn, crickets chirped beneath the platforms of the houses and under the doormats. She heard the clap of beans in the watchman's rattle as he came down the street and went past the house. The sound was meant to relay the message: I am here, all is well. Lo, I am with you. She might have taken up that thought and asked, Where was the night watchman when the knock came at our door? For her to question the existence of God was unthinkable. If she had been a man, calloused by the killing of beasts, the unforgiving hardness of the earth and heat of the sun, she might have thought to blame God for being uncaring, or asleep. She'd been born a female, been given a soft body and hands, born to be a helper, a representative on earth of God's gentler side.

n mid-November, her grandfather brought the news home, following a meeting at David Sudermann's house, that armistice had been declared. A date when, years later, she would see a poppy pin on a lapel and realize why her body felt heavy, why the list of chores she had given herself to do that day would not be completed. A day that had brought cautious hope to the people around her, but that, to her, had little meaning.

Her grandfather had attended a meeting for prayer and a discussion, mediated by Nela's father, Ohm Siemens. When Katya went to hang Opa's coat in a cupboard she saw the elderly Ohm Siemens across the street climbing down from his wagon and going over to the barn gate to open it. She saw Nela on the veranda step. She sensed that Nela was watching her as she had been watching Ohm Siemens; all of them watching and waiting for what would happen next.

The time had come for meetings while they could still meet safely, as now that the armistice had been declared, the retreat of the Austrian and German armies would soon be complete, her
grandfather said. “Did we think that they were going to stay here forever?” he asked himself aloud. Throughout the war they had denied being German sympathizers, and then had welcomed the Germans as long-lost relatives, a fact that hadn't gone unnoticed. He had brought the wooden box of letters and photographs into the family room with him and set it on the table. He wanted to write a letter to a cousin living in Manitoba, Canada, a relative who had left Russia with the Bergthal villagers over forty years ago. But he was too agitated, his shaking hands wouldn't allow it, and so he asked Katya to write it in his stead.

“Greetings to all my cousins and what other relations who may still remember my dear father with kindness. Many thanks for the photograph you sent. Sincere greetings, in love.

“Now you are wondering, I'm sure, why it has taken me so long to answer your letter. You are correct in assuming that the turmoil of the past year has taken up most of our anxieties and thoughts. Our grandchildren continue to live with us as you surmised. How long we will be able to provide safety and comfort for them is a question that lies heavy on my heart. For this reason I am writing to ask you to pray for us.”

Most of the German and Austrian troops had left the colonies in early autumn, and the remainder retreated before the first snowfall, a three-day blizzard which buffeted the house. It was as though the storm had swept their protectors away, leaving in its wake knee-deep waves of snow that looked solid, as if sculpted from marble, and made the streets impassable.

Katya went outside and began shovelling a path across the barnyard. Her aunt Susa was due to deliver a third child, and she reasoned that the way to the house should be cleared. Her uncle Bernhard must have seen her, as he came now from his house with a shovel. The path they carved through the snow merged halfway across the yard, and he smiled, his eyes softening in appreciation.
She stood on the cleared path leaning on her shovel, a slender and tall figure in dark grey, the snowbanks on either side of her as high as her thighs. A scarf covered her head and the bottom of her face, ice particles matting the wool around her mouth and nose. When she had played in winter with Greta and Lydia, they would sometimes inhale deeply and pinch their nostrils to see who could hold their breath the longest, a spurt of white frost coming from a mouth betraying the cheater. She learned that it was better not to cheat; it was better to be still, to think of something other than breathing.

She leaned on the handle of the shovel, glad to have remembered a happy moment, realizing that she had stopped telling God that enough time had passed. The departed had played their trick long enough, and it was time they returned home. She followed her uncle Bernhard's gaze to the slope of the valley where children were mounting a hill to go sliding, Sara and Njuta among them, their footholes in the snow holding blue shadows.

“It's good that the children still know how to laugh,” her uncle said. His words surprised her, as he had spoken to her as an equal. What he said was true. Everyone went out of their way to shield the children from fear and worry. Olga Penner's parents had almost perished while journeying to Alexandrovsk during the blizzard in order to buy the Christmas toys and fare children would expect to see in their store before the holiday.