The Russlander Read Online Free PDF Page A

questions, and so fast, she hadn’t had time to come up with an answer for the first one. Gerhard came behind her mother, and was the last to disappear into the dining room, a room halfway down the length of the hall.
    Dietrich was at the piano, no longer looking like a sheepdog with his slicked-back hair and his trousers tucked into his knee-high boots. Only Greta, Lydia, and she took school in the classroom nowthat Dietrich went to
Zentrakchule
in Chortitza town. There would be four of them once Gerhard began. Do four people make a good choir, she wanted to ask him, but he was leafing through a music book on the piano as though he could read the notes flying up and down its pages, trying to look loose, like a high-school student. Beyond him, on a settee beneath a window, was Helena, fanning her face with a handkerchief.
    Abram’s coachman was the next to come, wearing his uniform, his scarlet cap held against his chest. With him was his wife in a blue striped dress of cotton madras, her head bound in a scarf and decorated with paper flowers. Their six children followed single-file, with Kolya, the oldest, in the lead. They were hushed and solemn, each one pausing before entering the dining room to peer up at the electric lamps lighting the hall, both mesmerized and confounded by the sight.
    â€œAnd those children?” Franz Pauls asked.
    Justina shook her head. “Some of them go to school in Lubitskoye. My father provides a man to take them, and a wagon. Those who aren’t inclined don’t attend, which is most of them.” She spoke curtly, as though the question had rankled her.
    The coachman was followed by the blacksmith, his eyes owlish, the skin around them, compared to his smoke-tinged complexion, startlingly white. His wife walked with him, a child in her arms, and behind them came another eight children, shuffling along in their sock feet, their hair shining as though wet.
    The gardener and his family came down the hall next, and then the locksmith, who was keeper of the provision house and granaries, followed by Abram’s head groom, an old bachelor, with two unmarried assistants. Last of all came the outside women, looking freshly scrubbed and wearing embroidered holiday blouses and red skirts. Manya was among them, the skin of her jaw stretched taut and shining with its swelling. Unlike the others, the outside womenlooked down at the floor, shy, and too overwhelmed to take in the sweep of lilies and ferns on the wallpaper, the electric sconces on the walls shedding their pale orange light. The Wiebe sisters and Sophie made their entrance behind the outside women, flushed and self-conscious in the frilly white caps and aprons they were required to wear with dark flannel dresses on special occasions.
    Helena Sudermann got up from the settee and came over to Katya, extending her hand. “I can see you’re surprised to have a new tutor,” she said. “Everything in this life comes to an end, but something new begins, yes?” Katya took Helena’s hand, feeling the scratch of thick calluses against her palm, and they went down the hall to the dining room where everyone had gathered.
    Helena must have been in a woman’s time of night-sweating and heat when she’d asked Abram to hire a tutor to replace her. There was much about Helena Katya didn’t know and would only learn years later, when Helena’s life was unravelled by others in another country, an old sweater taken apart piece by piece and knit into something that bore little resemblance to the person Katya remembered.
    â€œNow let’s go and sing our very
best, ja
? Let’s go and make those little bells ring,” Helena Sudermann said.
    After much tugging and whispering by Helena, Katya lined up with the other children in front of the Christmas tree. The smallest – David Sudermann’s children and her sister Sara – made up the front row, while she stood between Greta and