At harvest time female workers came over from the Island of Moon.* They wore red kerchiefs on their heads and were strong-willed women, who did not let themselves be pushed around. But each one of them could do the work of two men.
The Moon girls had a house to themselves and set great store by cleanliness and neatness. They were always dissatisfied with everything, but the most tyrannical landlords yielded to their demands in all matters.
These girls were extremely chaste, and no man was allowed into their house. In the evenings they walked about in pairs, like wandering poppies with dark red heads.
In the autumn Russian women were brought in for the potato harvest.
The moment they saw me, they would again ask: “Have you a son now?
What, not yet? Well, why haven’t you a son?” They would scold me, sit down on the ground near me, and give me all sorts of good tips to help me finally have a child.
The Russian women were the despair of the manager and the foremen.
They would work very industriously for a certain time and then all sit down in the field and sing songs. No amount of scolding or threats affected them. Not until they had had their fill of singing would they return to work.
The German colonists who were being hired on many of the estates were dangerous competition for the Estonian workers. One autumn my father-in-law too decided to employ German colonists. Stocky, sturdy peasant types with long blond and red beards, they arrived with their whole kit and caboodle. Strangely enough these Swabian peasants, who for generations had only married among themselves and still spoke in Swabian dialect, were very Jewish in appearance. The colonists were not packed together in some hole like the Estonian “herd of animals.” They were given decent, clean accommodations; they also got better pay and more allowances.
“It is a real pleasure all the same,” my father-in-law opined, “to deal with people who speak our own language and who have honesty written all over their faces.”
And my mother-in-law chimed in enthusiastically: “They are so God-fearing, they have asked me to read a sermon to them every Sunday and sing hymns with them.”
“Isn’t the service for the ‘common herd’ good enough for them?” I asked spitefully.
In the various Lutheran churches scattered widely over the countryside there were in fact two services on Sunday – one, very early in the morning, for the “people” and one, later in the morning, for “gentlefolk.” No
“common” person was permitted to attend the latter. I myself once saw the sexton shut the door of the church in the face of an old peasant woman who had the audacity to want to attend the “gentlefolk’s” service.
On Sundays the colonists streamed into the big salon. They asked for a
“nice, long sermon” and could not get enough of hymns; they always had to sing “just one more.”
“There is something really touching about the piety of these simple people,” said my father-in-law, who was not easily touched.
“What about their work?” I inquired somewhat indelicately. I did not like these cunning peasant types with their nauseating religious zeal.
“They haven’t got used to things yet. But you’ll see – as soon as they feel more at home they’ll get twice as much done as the Estonians.”
The labour contracts were, as a rule, for one year. For that entire period, a worker did not have the right to leave the job and equally the landlord did not really have the right to fire a worker, though that stipulation was not taken too seriously. As wages were paid half-yearly in cash, it was impossible for a worker to leave. The German colonists were craftier than the Estonians; they insisted on being paid monthly. When winter came all those good people, except for one tall, thin, red-haired fellow, cleared out without saying a word, in the dead of night. The following morning their houses stood empty, and my father-in-law was left to manage as best he could. I was triumphant, for with much effort I had kept my husband from hiring colonists and so taking the bread out of the mouths of our Estonian workers, and he had finally agreed to wait and see “how the folk at W. turn out”
The “one faithful colonist,” tall red-haired Ulrich, now became an important person on the W. estate. My father-in-law made him assistant manager and trusted him blindly; my mother-in-law gave a long sermon every Sunday for him alone, and then all the other members of the family had to come and sing hymns with him. Being of “another faith,” I was generally excused from this domestic religious service, though I “went along” with it when my two youngest brothers-in-law were at home. With them it was always possible to get something amusing going. We agreed to come to the service if we were permitted to select the hymns. So one fine day, to the horror of the God-fearing Ulrich, we sang a Moravian hymn which I had discovered in an old scrap book, and which – among other beautiful verses – contained the following:
I am an evil carrion, A wicked child of sin, Whose sins like Jewish usuries Consume themselves within. Lord take this sinful dog to You, Throw out the bone of grace, And bring this poor benighted one Unto Your Heavenly place.
As it turned out, red-haired Ulrich was indeed himself, in the depths of his heart, a child of sin. Just before the half-yearly pay-day my
father-in-law sent him to the nearest town to pick up the money for the wages – a very considerable sum – at the bank. Ulrich disappeared with the money, leaving no trace. My mother-in-law warned me over the telephone: “When you come to see us on Sunday, dear child, please don’t ask father about the
‘last of the Mohicans’; he is certain to fly into a rage.”
No more German colonists were given employment on the W. estate.