The Caretaker
FOR FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Alexander, Katharina’s death was a terrible blow. He was ill prepared for his wise friend to leave him. He was the oldest of Anna’s seven children.
No wonder that he sorely missed his great-grandmother. He lived a life of competition, besides being a part-time parent to his siblings. Katharina had been the only adult who had paid him the total attention a young adult craved.
It was Katharina who had explained to him with unfailing patience the problematic situation of the German settlers’ children. By the mid1800s the German immigrant population had grown to the point where numerous re-divisions of the available land needed to be undertaken. However, such measures were not enough to satisfy the needs of the farmers, because instead of adding land, the existing parcels were just reapportioned in smaller measure.
Smaller land parcels for each family meant that one bad harvest could destroy a family’s ability to live for another year debt free. Alexander remembered sitting in his great-grandmother’s tidy kitchen, a room dominated by a huge cooking stove cast from newly made steel, adorned with smooth shiny nickel-plated corners, on which one might catch a garment in passing. There he learned about the re-divisions.
The one large kitchen window yielded a view into the garden, a place very special to Katharina. Besides vegetables, she had grown flowers there, for no other reason but that she loved them.
“I must refresh my eye and feed my soul on their dainty beauty in spring and summer, so that I can bear the long, barren winter months,” she had told him when, as a small boy, he had questioned her hard work for naught but fleeting glimpses of glory.
He had always adored it when she separated him from the passel of younger brothers and sisters, carrying him off to this place of quiet peace and order. Although his parents had secretly resented that their oldest left for Katharinenstadt to be spoiled by Urgrossmutter, they never voiced their misgivings, for Great-grandmother was powerful, having the money and means to help or hurt.
Katharina had never as much as hinted at withholding funds from any of her children, but just knowing that she could, if she wanted to, was enough to keep them pliable.
Alexander had been the stave that kept her upright and strong all these years. He had been her reason to rise in the morning, forcing her arthritic bones to perform the needed tasks. During the winter months he had often lived with her, for weeks on end, in her beautiful, roomy house, where to his delight he had his own room.
Katharina had employed two servants, an elderly widow, unwilling to live at her children’s beck and call on their farm, and an old Cossack who performed the heavy house chores, yet mostly tending her garden and orchard.
Her late husband’s employees and her son Martin managed the rest of the immense property for her.
Early on the Cossack, Yuri, had intrigued Alexander. He was of medium height, with coal black hair sporting a few sprouts of silver, standing up straight from his scalp as boar’s bristles do. He was an orderly man, keeping his haircut all the same length, creating a halo effect. However, Alexander did not see him with this halo often because Yuri wore, through rain and shine, a round gray Karakul lamb hat.
Yuri’s face had been tanned by the sun and looked as tough as the leather of his strong, well-worn boots. Black inscrutable eyes judged man, beast and inanimate objects with the same sharpness, and his prominent nose and chin bore evidence of the firmness of his character.
Despite his age – he was already in his sixties when Alexander first met him – Yuri was incredibly strong. Having judged Alexander to be worthy of attention, Yuri one day waved him along on one of his jaunts to the stable. He did not speak to the boy, who was about six years old at the time.
As Alexander watched with bated breath, the Cossack saddled two horses. Alexander had never ridden a horse except for a workhorse exhausted from hard work, dripping sweat, riding it in the evening into a stream to wash it off. One could not even call these proceedings horseback riding; it was more like sitting on a moving couch. The boy knew what Yuri was up to. He was a bit frightened. Part of him wanted to run. Yet, he stayed and watched as the saddles slid onto the horses’ backs.
For himself Yuri saddled the offspring of an English imported stallion bred to a smaller local mare, a tall, knobby-looking gray horse with strong withers, hocks and back. For Alexander he chose another specially bred horse. Nicholas Träger had in his lifetime, besides tobacco, a passion for horses. Once he had become rich enough to indulge his desires, he had imported a few stallions and choice mares as founding stock, and bred from them offspring with desirable qualities.
And so Alexander suddenly found himself on the back of an elegant bay mare with decidedly Arabian looks. Yuri had not asked if he could ride. Without question, without consent, he had picked the small figure off the ground, placing him on the mount. He agilely mounted the powerful gray horse, clicking his tongue softly, and both horses moved out as one.
“Look at my hands and see how I hold my reins,” he said casually, while Alexander, his eyes huge like chestnuts, swallowed air with excitement.
They rode through the orchard out into the meadow, and as the horses, seeing open ground, picked up their gait, Yuri looked at the boy and said, “Use your legs to hang on. A man must use his legs all his life and you might as well learn now how to stay up.”
Yuri set his horse into a trot. Without seeming to pay attention to Alexander, he knew exactly when to increase the tempo of their ride. Alexander’s color had risen until his cheeks were flushed and his breath came hard. His breast was filled with a heavy mixture of happy excitement and slightly sickish fear. However, the happiness won out as he gave himself up to this moment of freedom, of testing nature.
They rode home at a light canter. At the stable, waiting, stood Great-grandmother. She gave Yuri a strange, piercing look, which he returned, saying, “It is time for him to become a man.”
As if that had settled the matter, he showed Alexander how to dismount and help with the removal of the tack. Before leading the mounts to their stalls, he looked fully into Katharina’s face and said, beaming approval, “The boy of your blood did well.”
By now Alexander had found his voice and asked, “Can we do it again?”
“Yes, every time you come to your Baba.”
Henceforth Alexander had a rare kind of mentor – a rare kind of friend. Great-grandmother never said a word about the ride and how it had come about, but the boy sensed that, angry at first, she had understood and approved, more even, that she had been pleased.
As Alexander reminisced, he saw himself again as a teenager as he sat across from this woman, grown slight and silver haired with age. For as long as he could remember, her hair had been combed back from the high forehead and gathered in the back with a heavy, ornate Spanish comb made from ivory, inlaid with gems, her one great vanity. As always, since she had turned fifty, she wore black, frequently dresses with slight puffiness above the shoulder and long tight sleeves that buttoned at the wrist. They were long dresses, falling straight to the ankles from a tight bodice, showing off her still small waistline.
At her kitchen table, covered with gentility by a lace cloth for her afternoon coffee, she used to set before her grandson a round cake with a filling of fruit and whipped cream. It was one of those country cakes German women conjured into being with the help of twelve eggs, a pound of butter, half a pound of flour, half a pound of sugar and a pinch of saffron, a very precious spice they sometimes bought from Asian traders.
Alexander remembered that he began salivating the moment he beheld Katharina’s monumental achievement. He was always hungry. He couldn’t remember when last he was sated. However, his great-grandmother was not about to cut the much-desired cake yet. She had placed two plates and cake forks on the table, wielding a huge knife in her right hand. But before she gave in to his enormous appetite he had to endure a lesson.
“Look at this cake,” she said, “and imagine this is the entire land reserved for the German settlers on the Volga. It was apportioned in the first years to those arriving here.”
The knife had then sliced decisively through her masterpiece.
“Look, this slice is for Norka, this one for Walter, for Anton, for Grimm, for Hildmann and Huck, Kamenka, Kamyshin and Katharinenstadt….” She sliced on and on, each slice just a sliver really, a fact he began to resent.
“Stop, Oma! You are ruining the whole cake. No one will be happy with the slivers you chop out of it. Least of all I!”
Katharina had laughed her gentle old woman’s laugh that doubly creased her face, making her look younger despite the wrinkles.
“Aha,” she laughed, “Now you are beginning to see the problem.”
Taking a short cut, she now reasoned that the slivers had to be cut again and again as the population grew.
“Now you see the dilemma. The state had promised each male settler the same amount of desyatinas of land, and now we do not have enough. You, my boy, are growing up at the precise moment when the problem culminates.”
“So what will happen to me when my share is due our family?” he had asked.
“I don’t know. There are disputed tracts of land in litigation. It is land promised the settlers, but stolen by Tartars and the Russian gentry who appropriated huge tracts of Crown land by settling on it, paying the Crown neither the purchase price nor the taxes due on the land.”
“Father says the courts can take forever. We will starve if we depend on the courts.”
“There is some land between villages that can be had. Perhaps they will allow the creation of new villages on land’s edge, at Norka for example. We will see.”
Katharina had fallen silent, finally serving up her grand cake, and Alexander, pouncing upon it like a wolf upon a lamb, instantly forgot all the land woes.
A few days later, riding out along the Volga with Yuri, Alexander had brought up the problem and asked the Cossack’s opinion on the matter. In the crisp, clear air, filled with the smell of approaching winter, the Volga looked like a placid, mighty lake. From horseback, their eyes, unencumbered by breaks in the topography, searched the immense emptiness of the steppe for signs of life.
They had left behind the fields of the settlers and entered long disputed government land, land that had been promised to the settlers in the early decrees and had never been handed over. Wild geese flew overhead, going south for the winter.
Yuri thought the land issue over for a while before answering:
“Never believe what the Russian byurocratiya promises. You cannot trust them. They make promise, make law – come time, they break it,” he said laconically. “I know Russians! And I know that no good Russians come from Moscow or St. Petersburg.”
With that, the matter was done for him. He now had dutifully pre
pared the boy to expect nothing from the powers controlling the land, looking for life’s fulfillment to himself only.
Later, already in his teens, Alexander had asked his great-grandmother how and why Yuri was in service with her. Cossacks were a proud, independent lot who hired out for war, seldom for service.
“I bought him,” Katharina had said laconically.
“You bought a human being? We do not buy and keep slaves,” cried the youth indignantly, leading Katharina to quickly explain.
“A border regiment had caught him stealing horses and was about to hang him when I drove by in my carriage. I stopped because a crowd wanting to watch him die blocked my way.”
Katharina’s face had assumed a far away look, as if she had returned to the place of execution. “When they brought him to the small platform where he was to find his end, a tall, well dressed Russian said, ‘What a shame that a good man will die for want of fifty rubles.’ What do you mean? I asked him. ‘Oh, if he could pay for the stolen horses he would be free,’ was his answer.”
His great-grandmother had suddenly smiled and said, “Sometimes it is very nice to be well off, because I bought him. I walked up to the gallows, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Give me your word that you will work honestly for me and I will set you free’.”
By now his great-grandmother had been laughing, her hundred little wrinkles were all drawn upward. “He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘If you will honestly pay me for my work, I will’. “
“I bought his freedom, and because of his answer we started off even. He never told me anything about his past, but I heard that he had lost his entire family. How that happened I never found out, but they said without his family he became an outcast, a horse thief. I have always blessed the day I saved him.”