Read Online The Russlander by Sandra Birdsell - Free Book Online Page B

Baba Yaga banging her pestle against the mortar, but tree poachers axing down trees in the night, which they left lying to infuriate Abram with the evidence of their thievery and waste. She didn’t know that women went into the ruined garden to meet their working men in its gloam and shadows. She would be surprised to discover that people who had never been to Privol’noye would know such things, that the stories would travel wide and far and into the future.
    She didn’t know what Helena Sudermann knew, that Abram would sometimes follow a woman into the forest. His aging legs and girth no longer allowed for a chase, and so he was known to wheedle, and threaten, and to offer a ruble. She would remember finding the headscarf and imagine Abram had followed Manya into the forest and come upon her sitting on the steps of the mausoleum, her skirts up about her thighs to cool herself, and had taken it to be an invitation.
    Lydia suddenly came to life. What they should do was play hide-and-seek, she said, and began to pace out the boundaries for their game. They wouldn’t go any farther than the mausoleum, a gooseberry bush, a particular birch whose bark was scoured and peeling. Then she put her forehead against a column, and began to count.
    Katya saw a fallen tree and ran to it, Gerhard behind her, the two of them dropping onto their stomachs on the ground beside it, while Greta ran first in one direction, and then another, as Lydia counted. And then her voice seemed to come from a greaterdistance than the pillars, but Katya didn’t dare lift her head to see if Lydia had moved. A magpie settled in a tree beside her hiding place and began screeching, as if to boss them away, and then the sound of dogs barking grew louder, while Lydia’s voice grew faint.
    â€œReady,” Greta called out from where she’d at last settled.
    Katya could no longer hear Lydia counting. A second magpie joined the one in the tree above her, and their scolding became intense. Then the baying of dogs suddenly grew closer, and the magpies flew away, a flitter of white and black darting among the trees. Gerhard sucked air and slapped his arm.
Mensch
, he said. The ants were stinging. Moments later they heard the snap of twigs and rustle of underbrush as Greta emerged from her hiding place.
    Katya and Gerhard approached the steps where Greta sat, looking down-hearted. White fluff clung to her dark hair, seeds that had hitched a ride, and Gerhard pulled them out and blew them off the palm of his hand. This wasn’t the first time Lydia had played a trick on them. Lydia, pretending to be surprised when they found her in the Big House playing the piano, asking, What? Were you still hiding? The sound of the dogs grew faint again, and a silence moved in. The air around the mausoleum smelled like a closet of mice, Katya thought. The stillness made her feel she was being watched. They began to hear a mewing sound, like a cat.
    They crept back along the path through wild rhubarb and fern, the sound growing louder, the mewing turning into an angry cry that rose to a howl. Greta stood still on the path, and then she suddenly hugged herself. “Oh no,” she said. There, lying on a shawl near the rock at the entrance to the forest, was a baby, its fists beating the air. Lydia had stolen the fruit picker’s baby.
    They began to hear the woman call, her voice on edge, and rising above the baying of the dogs. “My Ivanoushka, poor Ivanoushka, Mother’s coming,” she called as she came running through the meadow.
    Katya braced herself against the woman’s anger, as she thought it was the woman who was now scuttling through the underbrush towards them, and not a small animal on the run from the dogs. She heard the boom of a gun, and the air reverberated with the sound, and the sudden ferocious noise of the dogs, the woman’s cries. Greta scooped the baby up, and then hunters, Dietrich, the elder Orlov and his son