The Russlander by Sandra Birdsell Page A

running off down the Chortitza road. Oy, Sophie said, now my eyes really do hurt.
    Photographs of the tsar and tsarina hung near the ceiling of Abram Sudermann’s office, and Katya felt watched as she waited for Dietrich to show her and Gerhard what the imperial seal on land documents looked like. Her father would come to own such a document, he said. A Wells Fargo safe sat under a table in the office; a vise was clamped to the table and held a half-finished carving of a horse; a bottle of peach schnapps stood near the vise, and a glass clouded with fingerprints. The room held the conflicting smells of newly carved wood and a heavy body odour emanating from a chair whose back and arms were stained with perspiration. A smaller chair sat across from it, and she wondered if that was where her father sat when, throughout the years, he had come for his meetings with Abram. If that was where he’d sat when he’d come to remind Abram that it was understood and had been agreed. The time had arrived for the brothers to determine which parcel of their almost twenty thousand
desiatini
of land they would sell to him.
    The office had two doors, and one was always closed. She knew from overhearing Aganetha’s complaints about having to go through her husband’s messy office at the start and end of every day that their bedroom lay beyond the closed door.
    Abram’s office was in disarray; piles of magazines were stacked around his chair, which sat at an angle near two tall windows. Their sills were deeply grooved with burns the length and width of her finger. She imagined Abram in his chair at the window, watching for incompetence and sloth, for
nekhai
– don’t bother, it’s good enough– the prevailing attitude of a Russian worker, he said. When Abram had grown too heavy for horse riding, he conducted his business from the overstuffed armchair, her father explained, and relied on him to be where his eyes and ears couldn’t reach. Whoever would become Abram’s extra pair of hands now in place of her father, would live in her house?
    Dietrich found the combination to the Wells Fargo safe in the toe of an old boot lying to one side of it, and she was relieved when at last, after much fiddling, the door opened, and Dietrich put the slip of paper back into its hiding place. Just then Lydia came down the hall and stood in the doorway, startling Dietrich, who then grinned sheepishly. You should have had someone keep watch, she said. You should start using your brains. You watch, he told her as he slid documents from a leather portfolio and began unfolding them. Katya went to look. The papers were stiff with age, and crackled. She peered over his shoulder with Gerhard, as awed by the sight of the official papers as her brother was. She touched the embossed double-headed eagle pressed into wax.
    The document proved that his father had purchased the forest land from the Orlov family, Dietrich said. As he put the papers away, Katya turned back to the room and the shelves lining the wall above Abram’s workbench, which were littered with an assortment of cobbler’s tools, a bottle of horse liniment, a bronze statue of a bull. Scraps of papers were tacked to the edge of a shelf, lists of supplies to be bought, the names of horse dealers and grain handlers, Scripture verses to remind Abram that the meek would inherit the earth, to render unto God, and unto Caesar; Christ’s instruction on how to pray, in secret, and to begin,
Our Father which art in heaven
. She noticed the inevitable presence of a sack of roasted
knacksot
on a shelf, and beside it, a silver cup. A cup with two ear-shaped handles.
    â€œThat used to be yours,” she said to Lydia, surprised that she had remembered, and to find the cup in Abram’s study.
    Lydia followed Katya’s gaze as she came over and took the cup down from the shelf. She held it up to the light in the window. The silver had tarnished, which