The Russlander Read Online Free PDF Page B

messaline blouse the colour of cream, which made her skin glow.
    Katya would one day learn how her father and David became friends, brought together during their student years in Alexandrovsk, when they’d spent hours at the beginning and end of every day waiting in a station for a train to take them across the Dnieper. David Sudermann had studied Russian History, Language, and Literature to qualify him to teach, and her father had studied Agriculture. She would hear that when he came to ask her mother to marry him, his Adam’s apple was chafed raw from his collar, and bobbed as he struggled to say the word,
yes
. Yes, he promised Oma and Opa Schroeder, he wouldn’t take their only daughter far from her familyhome in Rosenthal. There was no available land in either the Chortitza or the Second Colony, but instead in Arkadak, or in Ufa, which was near to the Ural mountains. Young men such as her father had gone to Omsk, parts of Kazakhstan, the Crimea and Georgia, and to the Caspian Sea for farmland, which was too far for the promise he’d made to the Schroeder grandparents. And so he went to work as overseer for Abram Sudermann, with the agreement that after ten years, Abram would sell him a parcel of land. Thirteen years had passed, David Sudermann had reminded his brothers during their meeting that morning. He’d found her father in the greenhouse and broke the good news. This year, Peta, my friend, you shall be your own man. In the coming months the brothers would decide which piece of land to sell to him.
    By the time their carol had ended, the Wiebe sisters and Sophie were done fetching and carrying, and stood at attention in front of the sideboard, which was now laden with platters of cookies and jugs of
kvass
.
    Everyone was now quiet as, from the youngest to the oldest, the children began to recite. Gerhard had memorized a long poem which he recited in a voice that would never be soft – the voice of a drunken sailor, someone had once joked. But in spite of the loudness of her brother’s voice, Abram’s head, which had begun to bob the moment he’d settled in his chair, dropped to his chest and remained there.
    When Gerhard finished reciting there were smiles all around the room, and then a silence. Helena nodded at Katya. You may begin. Katya took a deep breath. “O come all ye children,” she began, and then realized that Mr. Red-Eyes –
Lehrer
Pauls, she corrected herself – was staring at her from the doorway. Did he question why she’d given Joseph a striped coat of many colours, mistaken her whim to be an error? Were there too many tulips growing around the manger?
    The lights of the candles flickered in the cabinet doors across the room and in the glass front of a wall clock whose brass pendulum swung across a brocade wall. Abram Sudermann’s goat head rested on his chest; his hands, clasped across his immense stomach, were obscured by his grizzled beard. His snores filled the silence. She felt her mother’s eyes urging her to recite, Greta’s arm nudge her shoulder.
    â€œO come all ye children,” she began again, and then stopped.
    Justina glanced at her mother, Aganetha nodding, giving Justina permission to tap Abram on a shoulder and wake him.
    â€œ
Ja, ja
,” he said roughly as his head reared up, a hand batting the air as though he’d been disturbed by a fly. “Let’s get on with the parade.”
    â€œO come one and all,” Gerhard said impatiently, and everyone smiled. In the silence that followed, one of the sister cousins laughed.
    Across the room, someone began to recite in Katya’s stead. She looked up and saw that it was Sophie, reciting in German, and so quickly that she hardly stopped to breathe. When she finished, astonishment bristled in the room, while Katya felt the heat of shame burning in her face.
    Sophie stepped back and crossed her arms against her chest as though she expected to be buffeted