The Russlander by Sandra Birdsell Page B

beard. He was a young man in the 1870s, when most of the people in Bergthal, fearing their rightswere about to be taken away by the tsar, packed up and went to Canada. She’d heard the story often, that his father wanted to go to Canada too, but he had promised his wife’s parents he wouldn’t take their daughter far away. He never mentioned that he had extracted a similar promise from Katya’s father. Then, soon after the villagers left Bergthal for Canada, the village burned down, and Opa’s father returned to Rosenthal. He bought the farm of someone who also wanted to immigrate to Manitoba, a place where land had been designated for Mennonites on the east and west sides of a river. A river that often flooded, Opa had heard; a hard and frozen place, the soil was black, but the growing season shorter, so that winter wheat didn’t produce nearly as well as it did in Russia. Opa’s father had built the house at the front of the property, in the style of the houses in the Vistula, L-shaped, with the barn attached, and Katya’s grandfather had inherited it, a house built to last more than a hundred years.
    Whenever her grandfather told the stories behind the three portraits, Katya was reminded of a chapter in Genesis: And these are the generations of Noah … Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In church tomorrow she would come together with her even larger family and be made to stand still, to turn, to feel hands under her chin drawing her to face the inquisitor. This one looks like Tooth-Puller Jakob’s daughter, a man known to yank out his own teeth when they offended him, sparing the expense of a dentist. They would ask if she had a way with her hands, as her namesake did, her father’s mother who had died on a picture-taking day.
    These are the generations of the Schroeders: Wilhelm, Johann, Gerhard, she recited, the last thought she had before drifting into sleep.
    The towns of Rosenthal and Chortitza spread halfway up the sides of a valley, red and umber brick houses graced with trellises of ivy,their shiny windowpanes mirrors reflecting light. Coal piles glistened in yards of factories, chimney stacks trailed smoke, a factory door was open and its dark interior alive with the chuffing sound of a machine building steam, a clatter and whirr of wheels and belts. In the town, when they walked down the street, men came over to their gates to greet her father, and she felt taller as she walked beside him, made so by his easy friendliness and people’s apparent respect for him. She noticed, too, that after the initial greeting and talk, there came the usual sideways questions about Privol’noye, which her father dealt with in his usual way, evading, or pretending not to hear.
    One day she and Gerhard went with their father on foot from Rosenthal to David Sudermann’s house on New Row Street in Chortitza. The main street of Rosenthal merged with Chortitza’s New and Old Row Streets, Old Row being a broad street paved with cobblestone, the oldest street in the oldest Mennonite settlement in Russia. The street became a carriage road, led to outlying villages such as Arbusovka, a settlement that once boasted a silkworm factory, until other countries began producing machine-spun silk. In the east, Old Row Street led to the town of Einlage, known for its wagon makers – such as Jakob Sudermann – and then across the Dnieper via the Einlage bridge, to the city of Alexandrovsk. Although the city was only an hour away, Katya had never been there. She had stood on the banks of the Dnieper watching the steamboat
Leonid
cross the river below the rapids, ploughing towards Alexandrovsk, a collection of buff-coloured buildings, a smudge of dark smoke staining the sky above them.
    She knew they were near David Sudermann’s house when she saw his three blond daughters playing on a veranda with other children. Their large flat eyes turned on her as she went by, and she felt