Starting Over

IN RETROSPECT IT SEEMED incredible that Alexander’s family survived the horror of the famine years. Alas, their elderly parents had not been able to withstand the physical and psychological terror. They had expected the deaths of the Baker grandparents – the Bakers had lived a long full life – but the death of Alexander’s parents shocked them. Yes, they had been an old couple, but they had been so vital and alive until the famine that their demise had been unthinkable.

All the while Russia’s people died, grain trains rolled from Ukraine into Europe and grain exporters, the ‘Barons of the Grain,’ made huge fortunes without a thought for the starving masses. At last, confronted with the pictures of the dying Russian population in the European press, the Tsarist government finally acted, stopping the grain sales and importing grain from neighboring countries; albeit, these saving measures came much too late for many of Russia’s citizens, especially those living along the lower Volga.

During this period of destruction and death Alexander had become the head of a private committee, formed by the foremost citizens of the colonies. This committee was exceedingly busy, raising monies with which to buy food from Estonia, Finland, Germany. Besides Alexander, Heinrich Baker’s manager, the Schmidt brothers, Holger and others concerned with the collapse of the farming and cottage industry had joined the group forming this committee. It was the citizens’ response to an unresponsive, ill-prepared government.

In the beginning of the famine this group had loaned money to those in need; however, when they saw that the exorbitant amounts loaned bought little sustenance, indebting people beyond their means to ever repay the borrowed sums, they decided to act and buy food elsewhere.

Alexander’s frustrations were many because the Russian transportation system was woefully lacking in conveyances and regular schedules. His committee was forced to hire heavily armed guards to accompany each convoy in order to see their shipments arriving safely in Saratov and Katharinenstadt. And so, little by little, the famine was contained.

When the rains returned on time once more and the farmers went into the fields to sow their grains, many pulled their own plows, deprived of horses. Alexander pulled on boots to observe the progress being made in his fields. He was gratified to see that his workers, looking better than even three month before, were ambitiously preparing the ground for the new crops.

However, as he slowly returned to Katharina’s Thor, he beheld in the unkempt, weedy fields adjacent to his own a German farmer, no one he knew, leaning on his hoe. The man in his wretched, worn clothes was still so thin that he reminded Alexander of a scarecrow. The never-ending gentle wind caressing the steppe pulled the man’s hanging rags close to his body, outlining the gaunt shanks of his thighs, his skeletal arms. His body could have been the beaten frame of an old man, yet his face was young, sharp with emaciation and exhaustion. His eyes held the vanquished look of a broken, hopeless creature.

Alexander was a child of the soil, having worked alongside his father into his teens, at which time his great-grandmother had freed him from drudgery. He had always thought of the hoe as the most divine tool among all others. To him it was the most versatile of all implements. And yet, as he thought about the many hours of agonizing work, weeding with the hoe, he realized that it also was the defining symbol for all the backbreaking work on a farm.

As he stared at the wretched, tired man, a poem came to his mind, a poem he had recently seen in a magazine. Translated into German, it had come to him from America, whence Volga German transplants had mailed it. It had grabbed the imagination of many in the colonies because it captured the conditions of the Russian farmer.

He pondered, and slowly recalled, one by one, the words inscribed in his mind:

The Man with a Hoe

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back, the burden of the world.

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

A thing that never grieves and never hopes,

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?

Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?

Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

- Edwin Markham

“Lo,” he thought, “when did Markham see our Russian farmers, for he seemed to have written this with minor adjustments just for us; we, toiling in brutal soil, defying the ever harsh climate, a ruthless government upon our backs, bleeding us with high taxes, bent to strip us of pride and all cultural and historical attachment? I have seen that man, ‘Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox.’

Returned to his home, he retrieved the magazine’s translation and learned that the poem had been inspired by Jean-Francois Millet’s painting L’Homme à la houe, completed in 1862.

The daunting poem once more compelled him to think of leaving the country. If he could just make headstrong Vicky and Holger leave for other, better places. They would do better in America. There were wide-open spaces to be farmed in America, and they could start over again. There were ways to transfer money if one was clever. Why not?

Although their boys Peter and Paul were married in Germany with thriving families, he knew with absolute certainty that he and Adela were trapped here if Vicky stayed. They were hopelessly attached to their wonderful, wild, imaginative child, this woman who used her wealth to create monuments to God’s glory.

No, she had not created monuments of stone, thereby providing ambitious men to further their agendas. Hers were living monuments. She had begun a school for the children of the most deprived. There, the children of poor settlers and poor serfs learned, besides standard knowledge and Russian, the Gospel and Lutheran tenets.

She had used some of Holger's money to buy a large parcel of land, not far from her beloved church, where she’d planted beautiful trees and shrubs, creating a quiet park.

She had given them three beautiful grandchildren, two girls and one boy. The boy, Martin, was the oldest, followed by two girls, Barbara and Albina; and here was the other reason for their inability to leave – their lovely grandchildren.

Especially the youngest, Albina, tugged at their heart. Looking so much like Adela, she had been endowed with Victoria’s mind and spirit. They had valiantly tried to love all their Enkelkinder, grandchildren, the same, but it was Adela who reminded Alexander of a saying, “Some just manage to creep in closer to your heart than others.”

“I can’t figure out whether we love in these special ones the traits that are more like us, or are aspects of our opposites,” he confided to Adela.

Yet deep in his heart, Alexander knew why he loved the girl so fiercely, and he finally told Adela his reasons: “Albina just overwhelms me with her sweetness and her loyalty. Unlike the other children she never abandoned the two of us when a better game, a more interesting, younger person or an exciting event outside came along. She will stick with us, because that is what she comes here for.”

A year after Albina’s birth, problems, dark like ugly clouds, had been arising all over the empire, making people fearful. In 1894, Tsar Nicholas II had ascended the throne. The kind, tender child of a bullying father and a cloying, possessive mother had been kept away from matters of state. He had traveled extensively, however, receiving thus at least an inkling of World politics.

Somehow Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov could not conceive that he would ever become Tsar and rule this vast country. Envisioning his demanding, dominating father to rule forever, he had remained uninvolved in politics. Then, upon his father’s sudden demise, he felt so unprepared to rule that he tearfully asked his cousin, “What is going to happen to me and all of Russia?”

None the less, this weak, unorganized man, suddenly undaunted despite his scruples, assumed the duties of ruler. Little in his character recommended him for this role. He had neither charisma, inspiring people to follow his lead, nor the strength to allow people to feel secure. In the year of his accession he married the woman he had fallen in love with, Princess Alix of Hessen, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

Nikolay was so utterly devoted to his wife, renamed Alexandra at their coronation, that he incurred ridicule. His marriage and his coronation, an ill-conceived, opulent event in Moscow’s Uspensky Sobor Cathedral, angered, nay infuriated, many Russians. Why a German Princess? Could the Romanovs never find brides other than German? Furthermore, why insult the populace with pomp, and push the outrageous luxury into starving people’s faces?

The foes of the monarchy in the political arena asked the question, “Why would the Crown use such unseemly, excessive display of wealth? Was it to mock the poor wretches barely surviving in the empire?” Such questions resonated with the masses wherever they were posed.

And then, in January 1905, only months after Nikolay’s splendid coronation, the first tone of the monarchy’s death knell was heard. A peaceful demonstration by workers in Palace Square in St. Petersburg, for greater political freedom, had ended by troops firing on women and men.

Taking advantage of the unmitigated slaughter, the Tsar’s opposition attached to him the gruesome sobriquet “Bloody Nikolay,” making him even more hated. Instead of surrounding himself with Russia’s best minds and allowing the implementation of democratic freedoms, thereby controlling rebellious factions fomenting revolution, Nikolay plodded on, maintaining the conservative, unworkable policies of his father. To continue these policies he ordered bloody repression of all dissent.

Along the Volga, where the Russification of the colonists’ lives continued under great pressure, the feeling of insecurity grew ever stronger.

Meanwhile, in London, Geneva, Berlin and Paris, Russia’s banished intelligentsia gathered, prepared for the firestorm, the revolution that would grant the proletariat, including the serfs, dominion over all other classes. Lenin, with maniacal single-mindedness, prepared his party, the Bolsheviks, for the take-over. Because the revolutionary forces were divided over revolutionary method and later the ways to rule, he had cleverly split the driving force into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, insuring that his faction, named the greater, although they were in the minority, contained only members sworn to ruthless overthrow and bloody cleansing of the country.

This was the climate in which Victoria’s children began their lives. Many estates surrounding their own came up for sale, as the fearful, the visionaries and politically astute left their homes, their farms, their possessions, and emigrated to America, to Argentina to farm and even to Brazil to work on the railroad lines. Yet, although they saw their neighbors leave, harboring many unsettling doubts themselves, Victoria and Holger could not leave. They could not conceive that their homeland would turn on their most faithful, most productive and most obedient citizens.

As Adela and Alexander observed Albina grow up, they were never disappointed in the girl. She was strong, like her mother, knew what she wanted and was never afraid of the work to get it. Like her mother she loved books and horses. Sometimes it was hard to discern which of the two she loved best. She was either sitting in the lower branches of an old walnut tree, quietly reading a book, or racing about on a horse.

As a young teen she had seen a special horse on a journey to Sarepta. The family sometimes visited this splendid colony, sporting a comfortable hotel, while on their way to Astrakhan and the shores of the Caspian Sea. Alexander had Russian business partners in Astrakhan, because good tobacco was a sought after commodity. The Russians were great hosts, feasting the Germans generously at their comfortable dachas along the Caspian.

It had been the beginning of summer, a pleasant breeze moved the mild air, and they were in great spirits. The whole clan, Vicky and her family, Peter and Paul with their families, Alexander and Adela, traveled in three carriages with three armed guards, for bandits once more roamed the countryside since the famine. The men in the party, including the boys, all carried weapons, in addition to the guards, making their party a formidable force.

Once again Alexander and Holger owned good, nay, splendid horses; even the escort rode fine mounts and the small cavalcade moved speedily along. Alexander remembered the very moment – they had been traveling through the Kalmykian steppe for a while – when their route intersected the path of a group of traveling herdsmen.

The Kalmyks were horsed on small, hardy, rough-looking steppe horses, with the exception of a young, adventurous-looking man, standing out among the others through his taller stature, cleaner clothes and a truly magnificent horse.

He knew what kind of a mount he owned because he sat very erect, almost arrogant, astride a tall, well-conformed black mare, her groomed, healthy coat glistening in the bright sun.

Albina’s eyes sparkled. “What a horse!” she almost shouted her pleasure. The creature so engaged her that she scintillated, positively radiated with admiration.

“I bet he stole that mare from someone with means,” said Holger dryly. “She looks English thoroughbred with Arab thrown in. Fine mare.”

“You are right, Father, the horse looks like he stole it,” agreed Martin, home on leave from duty with the mounted Semeonovsky Regiment. This was an elite regiment, not easily accessible to Germans. Alexander and Holger had heavily weighed in monetarily, on top of using their influence, to get him the commission for this regiment. For Martin it was the best way to serve, because he was a horse nut like the rest of the family and a fine soldier at heart. Undeterred by the party’s comments, the girl had persisted, “Oh, Papa, she is the best horse I have ever seen. Papa dear, I want her. Do you think we could buy her?”

Albina at fifteen had grown into an appealing young woman. She had inherited Adela’s elegant figure and carriage and was of medium height. She lacked her mother’s commanding beauty, the strong contrast of black hair and porcelain skin. If Victoria represented the beauty of summer, Albina represented the palette of winter. Her skin was pale-white, her light brown hair was overlaid with a silver cast and her eyes were gray. However, these mild, subdued shades combined into a beauty capable of drawing people instantly to her. She was unassuming, modest to a fault, and she rarely asked for anything. If she did ask for a favor it was mostly to grant the wish of another.

Therefore Holger looked at her with unconcealed astonishment.

“Albina, Liebe, do you know what you are asking? This man does not look like he will be easy to deal with. Also, the horse looks like it was stolen from a prominent person. We should not encourage thieves in their activities by rewarding them.”

“Papa, dear Papa, I must have her. She is so beautiful. A life on the steppe would be very hard for her. Anyone can see that she was not bred for such a life. Can’t we just ask if he will sell her?”

“If you can persuade the man to part with her, I will buy her for a reasonable price.”

The cavalcade had come to a complete stop. Strangely enough, as if the Kalmyks sensed the girl’s interest, they, too, had halted their progress. They stood, their horses drawn into a loose group, observing. Albina spoke Russian well. She had learned Russian early on from Victoria, who spoke the language flawlessly.

“Albina, for God’s love, give up this crazy idea. Just look at the ragtag band. This horse could have fleas,” cried Barbara, offended by her sister’s obviously infantile behavior.

But, encouraged by her father’s words, Albina jumped from the lead carriage, lithely running over to the Kalmyks. Standing before the man astride the object of her desire, she cried out, “How much money for the horse you are riding?”

“Why do you want to know?” asked the young Kalmyk, suddenly looking very young, alive, and quite handsome.

“I want to buy her!”

“Why? You have enough horses as far as I can see. You do not need her.”

“I want to buy her because she is beautiful, bred for a better life. Your life on the steppe will break her soon. She is not like your horses, able to survive on dry grass and hard scraps of brush.”

The girl’s eyes were beseeching the man as she pleaded for the horse. “She is meant to live in a stall in winter, have blankets on her back when taken out into the icy wind and must be fed grain besides grass to keep her looking the way she does now. Where are you going to give her what she needs, Nomad?”

By now Albina was almost crying, so clearly did she see the horrible life the grand creature would live among the Kalmyks.

“Sell her to me!” she urged the man, “I will treasure her! I will take care of her as she needs to be taken care of.”

Her outburst was followed by a great stillness. Albina’s family in the carriages sat silent, thunderstruck. The Kalmyks were equally puzzled.

“What an outburst over a horse? Germans are crazy! As crazy as some of the Russians!” That’s what they thought. Yet the silence continued.

At last the young rider had made up his mind. He jumped off his horse and said: “I will sell you the horse. Ten rubles silver, no paper, and a kiss from you – that’s the price.”

For a moment the earth seemed to stand still. It seemed as though the ever-present breeze subsided, every blade of grass stopped weaving in the wind, and the humans watching the scene before them remained frozen in astonished uncertainty.

What cheek the Kalmyk! Who did he think he was? This was the daughter of one of Russia’s most privileged citizens standing before him. And then it happened, the privileged girl, the special one, smiled at the arrogant, uncouth youth and said, “Done! Ten silver rubles and a kiss. Come and claim it. Give the mare to my father and get your rubles. I will kiss you to seal the deal.”

Holger, stricken, looked at Vicky and said, “She is your daughter! Ten rubles silver! An exorbitant sum. It is an outrage!” But, looking into his wife’s eyes he read a message that made him add, “However, I will obey the strange law of the steppe, if you tell me I should.”

“Do it, Husband! Albina feels part Russian, as I do, and God knows, this strange youth is more Russian than Kalmyk!”

Alexander sat bewildered in his carriage seat. What was happening here? Whatever it was, it was confusing to a man of his age and upbringing. His granddaughter had become more Russian in her nature than even her mother, Victoria.

Holger handed the young bandit – he was sure that’s what he was – ten silver rubles and received the bridle together with the splendid mare. As he still stood there, dumbfounded, he saw the interesting young Kalmyk walk boldly up to the sweetly smiling Albina who stood up on tiptoes and presented her face to the man of the steppe.

Seldom was there a kiss exchanged with more solemnity and meaning as there was on this day on the Russian steppe. The man kissed Albina courtly, short and precise on her lips and said, “I think you should have the horse – you love her more than I. Whenever you ride her, will you think of me and the steppe?”

Albina smiled and pertly said, “Yes, but whenever you ride across the steppe, you will think of me and a God who loves all peoples, wishing all of us to be good.”

The strange girl returned to her party, smiling and happy. “Wasn’t this great?” she shouted. “He is such a gentleman, the young Kalmyk, and now I own the gorgeous horse.”

“Ha,” snorted Holger. “For ten silver rubles I could have bought you a stable filled with horses, girl. But since you never ask for anything, I had to oblige.” He smiled fondly, secretly pleased with his odd child, as she climbed back onto her seat in the carriage.

Meanwhile, at the other grouping, the Kalmyks berated the young man looking for an extra horse among them. “Fool, imbecile!”

“Did you not have a mount, grander than any in our troupe?”

“You sold the mare cheaply, you idiot. You could have commanded a much greater price than what you asked for.”

But the young man just smiled a knowing smile and said, “The wise men say that once in a lifetime a miracle occurs. And we have to know when the time for the miracle has arrived. I say to you, my miracle just occurred. With the horse I gave the girl a part of Kalmykia, something of our spirit will be attached to her for the rest of her days.”

Away, in the carriage, Victoria fought for composure. The rubles for the horse, fine, but the kiss? What was her daughter thinking? She felt compromised by her girl’s easy behavior and was about to shout, “How could you, Albina.”

“Don’t say a word, Vicky,” smiled Alexander, looking into his daughter’s hot eyes. “She is very much the same girl I know from not too long ago. Albina kissed a Kalmyk to gain a horse – you kissed a Kossack many times because you loved him, loved his spirit, loved his soul. Forgive her this moment of impetuousness, for it was conducted in the right spirit.”

Four days later, in Sarepta, the incident was not forgotten. The party and the people welcoming them to Sarepta talked much about the beautiful horse. But in Albina’s heart remained the picture of a man who wanted to come out of the shadows into the light, a man who had no idea how to accomplish this deed. He would ride over the fields of the steppe, seeking the light he had seen, and yet could find no more. She knew that, although his mind was unaware, his search was for goodness, for meaning, for God.