Grandmother, Laughing

by Armin Wiebe

  It’s like if a person puts her ear against a hydro pole to hear the humming. Something like that I thought I could hear when I listened to Beethoven listening. And then for sure I was happy that no swarm of people was bizzing me around. On days when the listening was good, Beethoven would sit down in the grass and take out his writing book and his pencil, and I would sit close to him, but not beside, because I wanted to watch his face and his hands and his shoulders and even his knees as he scribbled what he was hearing. Some days he wouldn’t say a word, but I would hear his pencil scratching on the page. Other days he would talk things through. Thinking out loud, a person could say, but I always felt like he was talking it through to me. He would lift his eyes from the book and look at me when he talked, even if I often couldn’t make head or tail out of what he said. I didn’t know what those big words meant, for sure not the big German words that I hadn’t learned in school or heard in church. But I felt close to him then, and I felt close to the ground we were sitting on too. And when he was finished talking it through, he would stand up and reach with his hand to help me stand up and he would lead me back to the yard with a spring in his step like he could hardly wait to get back to that poor piano in the schpikja house.

  Ach, my story is like hackel wire tangled in tall grass and hawthorn bushes, and I need thick leather gloves to fathom it out. Lucky that Obrum Kehler didn’t believe in fences all that much so we didn’t have much real hackel wire lying around, but what we had was rusty and sharp. But Isaac—that’s who I need to talk about.

  I wonder sometimes if my turned-inward life kept me from seeing what was happening with my own Isaac. It wasn’t like I had a dozen children bizzing around me with no time to notice a quiet one … but maybe that was part of the problem. My shy nature and my life away from the village maybe left me with too many bewildering questions to gribble out all by myself. Before I met Obrum Kehler I was so turned into myself that I was frightened to step out from our yard and for sure I saw hardly anything outside the village. Then Obrum showed me a bigger world and Blatz too, but still I was almost alone on the unploughed prairie. The way I got married to Obrum, who couldn’t bend to fit in with the village, raised a hackel wire fence between me and my family that wasn’t so easy to crawl through without tearing something. And for sure, when Liestje married herself with Preacher Funk, that made it hard for me to have the kind of sister talks that maybe would have been good to have. When I followed Obrum Kehler to his sod house on the unploughed prairie, I never thought how far that would be.

  And then there was Beethoven Blatz, who took me places far from the village too, and I would be lying if I said that I wished he had never come. But none of us three, not Obrum, not Blatz, not I, knew how to talk with each other about what had happened with us. We had lived through a kjrieseling snowstorm and then Isaac was born. We were frightened. Without talking about it, our eyes met and we saw that such a thing must not happen with us again.

  And it didn’t, never in all those years that Obrum carpentered away for weeks at a time, though if I am honest I have to say that wasn’t easy. When Isaac told me how men had called him Little Blatz, my heart felt like a needle had stuck it through. I often wondered how it might have been if we had been willing to live through such a storm again so that Isaac could have had a brother or a sister to share life’s burdens with him. But by this time it was too late; far, far too late.

  And then the question that plagues me still. Would things have been different if I had told Isaac the truth when he was ten? Huy yuy yuy, even with all this old woman’s yeschwieta, am I still febeizeling the truth at the dark edges of my brain?

  23

  Susch

  Darpslied Elders Villa

  Yes, things there were that I carried in the dark edges in my brain for long years, but I kept them out of the way like dustballs under the bed until Koadel brought me Beethoven’s Tagebuch, his journal. Well, two books really, scribbled full with handwriting in that pointy German style we used to learn in school. I could see that Beethoven was writing with English and German mixed together and with a bit of trying, I could figure it out. On the page where I opened the book the first time, I saw this:

  Gretna, Manitoba

  Die Mennonitische Schul August 20

  Ich bin hier in Kanada. What will I here? They tell me if I qualify myself with Englisch I will get permit to be Lehrer in the approved government schools.

  He had written the date and the place for each little story and I could see that he had started writing this journal in Russlaund already. Those stories were all in High German and a little hard for me, so I looked for the stories he had written in Canada, the ones from the boarding school in Gretna.

  Some of those things I already knew from Obrum but other things were new to me. Obrum hadn’t exactly told me about the Lutheran carpenter’s wife, Maria. For sure not that this Maria had put on her wedding dress to play piano with him on Halloween night. I read about it.

  And then to hear Klavierenspiel through the frostich air. Prost simple Musik but Klavierenspiel it was, and then Funk says to me, this is the house where stays the Mexikanner Kehler. And so we nearer by went until through a window we could see a woman wearing marriage dress playing piano beside our freund Kehler. Before I could still my heart, Funk was knocking on the door and then the woman with the white gown opens the door and Funk says to her that his friend is famous Klavierspieler von Rusland and the woman us invites inside. Kehler is sitting still by the piano and his face doesn’t look happy to see us there.

  What kind of woman would do such a thing—even if it Halloween was? My knees wobbled when my head started twieveling that such a woman had given Obrum her wedding dress for me to wear for our wedding in the Mary’s Creek church. But then Blatz writes next:

  But Maria, the jungfrau in the marriage dress is so peppich and allürisch that Kehler matters little to me and I let her lead me to the piano bench. I think only to play some simple Volkslied like “Hänsjen klein, Geht allein” but when my stiff fingers reach for the keys there is only one place to begin and as soon as Beethoven’s chord murmurs through the room I forget where I am and … ach Sonia, how can I yet set it down in words where the Sonata 14 took me?

  What is a woman to think? The two weighty men in my life have the same woman with a piano and a wedding dress schlikjing around in the shadows of their brains. And both this piano and this wedding dress come to stay in my house. Where fit I into all this?

  The presto agitato I just had entered when my ear began to detect mistonish sounds as I played the high notes over the treble staff. I further played but when the mistonish high notes appeared again I felt such a disharmonisch scratching through my bones I understood those Hamlet words from Schapansky’s class about “sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh” and I could not play more. I could not stay.

  Means he that the piano was out of tune before it even fell the wagon off? Yet he came to repair it when Obrum asked.

  I now hear ängstlich Aufruhr in my head that mixes Sonia’s Himmlisches Musik and the Götterdämmerung of the Anarchists. But I feel too, and I fear it, a winzig kleine flame of something, an itch of music, not hope, no there can be no more hope, just Glut, an ember that hardly glows but will not die, and tonight the Klavierenspiel and the woman Maria in her marriage dress breathe on that Glut, threaten to grow it into a flame, and I fear what a flame in my soul will have me do. Can such a Klavier be found as I would need to play the horror music of my heart? Could such horror be even music?

  Ach Beethoven, still you make me weep. When I first read those words I had not yet felt the hurt of such grief except through your words in the barn that stormy night. Now, when I read your words, I think I have some small understanding of what torment you had then. But there is more:

  Die Muzik gipt mir ein Teufel Herz Schmerz. I wish for deafness. I thought the music I had killed. But now that I have acquainted me with
Maria and her piano it is again here like a headache returned to the side of the skull. Sonia she is not, aber like enough to disturb my dreams with Beethoven and desire. I envy even that Kehler who lives in the same house with her—and her Lutheran Baumeister working away building a school in the next town. I cannot use the piano in the chapel room. I must not draw notice to my Muzik disease.

  To think that you thought your music was a disease, music that confused my heart, clappered my heart, tickled me like a snake in the grass, and lifted me from bread dough in the pan to white clouds in the sky. And you—jealous of Obrum yet.

  Ach mein Gott, my fingers could not help themselves. When they touched Maria’s keys the Moonlight had to be released, even as I felt the pain of the chords and the arpeggios, and most of all, the irritation of Sonia’s teasing admonition to break free and compose my own music, and today almost I sat with the chapel Klavier … aber such improvizieren would encourage the schpottish Natür of Funk and his kind …

  Ach, mein lieber Beethoven, I feel a church full of people squeezing my thinking—only now sometimes I wonder if maybe such squeezing comes from inside a person, that place where the angst lives and makes up scary things in the air. Still, air is real, even if a person can’t see it.

  Yesterday night I could not hold my thoughts on the books in front of me. It was my fortune that Funk was not in the dormitory room—he was with the young men making ice for skating. My winter coat I pulled on and I sneaked out of the building without leave from the dean. Such Kinder regulations have they here in this scholarly place. Perhaps it is good that my Sonia such restrictions never had to endure. The wind chilled my coat through, but my anticipation of Maria’s warm house hurried my steps. Fortune smiled on me, it seemed, for when I got to the house, Maria the door opened and as she took my coat she said Kehler was building shelves in a store on the Hauptstrasse, her face pleased that such a word she could use with me and be understood. I started toward the piano, thankful that I would not be concerned with Kehler’s ears while I played, when I felt Maria’s hand clasp my arm. “Sit on sofa. A glass Schnaps before you play.”

  Ach, I must watch what I set down. Who can trust a Schuft like Funk to respect a man’s private belongings? Der Rotkopf Kehler never must hear of this. Aber Sonia, for one Augenblick in your arms again I was. But I hear footsteps …

  So many times I have read this, and it plagues me still to be aufjenstijch jealous over something so long ago that didn’t really have anything to do with me. How come it is that a person can want to own another person’s life from even before that person was part of your life? But Beethoven, and you too Obrum, there is more. After the storm—our storm—Blatz writes:

  Hab Ich kein Herz? Am I now so cynical become that I have such a thing done? Where yet will my torment lead me? The storm and that poor barn—and telling this peasant woman about Sonia—I was transported back to Ekaterinoslav, that night in the rehearsal room with Sonia and her violin on the piano stool—I was swept away then too. Has a man no free will? Such rending of my soul. Such betrayals. Such longings again awakened. Aber der Kehler’s wife, how could I, even when … but how can I refuse the music? Understanding I have not, but such a gift—hellish yes—but to hear such notes, such melodies—my head is so full of notes I can not set them all down. But I must—I feel Sonia in every chord and trill. Kehler’s wife—die Susch—she listened, I felt her feeling the story—then she became Sonia and now this mess of notes I must set down on my hastily scribbled staff. Despite the music’s torment, I hear beauty too—like a Dornröschen—a little thorn rose. Then I despair at my cold heart that makes music from blood—Sonia’s blood, spilled. And yet for that eyeblink when the notes seem true I feel loosening the bonds that ensnare my soul. Such a brief Erlösung gives me hope.

  But can this music wash away my betrayals? Of Sonia. Of Kehler, twice, once with Maria, and now with Susch. Of Susch. Aber is it? Argued not that Kehler with me to do what he said he could not do because of the mumps he had in the winter before to Gretna I came? Can it betrayal be when all receive what they are wanting? Even you, Sonia—your wanting for my music? If I refuse the music, would not I then betray you?

  What keeps me from giving in and embracing the gift of this music, hellish as it is? Blame it I could on Maria’s Klavier, broken when it fell the wagon off. The wires that lose their tunings each time my music starts to flow. Each time I come face to face with the vision of you, Sonia, splayed on Toews’s wagon, guilt and shame crushes me—it was I who begged the scoundrel to bring you to the village.

  Gott im Himmel, such men! Obrum argued with Blatz to tempt him to … yauma mie! And I was just another cat with fur to stroke after this Maria? How could I let myself get smeared on like that? Had I no backstring? I, a woman who schlikjed out of her father’s house and away from the village, through Mary’s Creek to knock on Obrum’s sod-house door in the moonlight? No one made me do that, not even Fuschtje Funk with his lies. And Beethoven … when he touched my loose hair, my fingers reached to stroke his cheek. Then Obrum brought the rocking chair … huy yuy yuy, he wanted such to happen. I was not alone in my wanting.

  Aber, that truth we spoke not, we three—Blatz, Obrum, and I—the truth that became ghostly fog hanging between us, never altogether letting us rest. And I didn’t tell Isaac the truth and I didn’t tell Obrum about what Isaac was hearing. Would Isaac have told Obrum? Would he have told Blatz? I don’t know, but the way things turned out I know that my answer to Isaac maybe closed his mouth but didn’t settle his mind.

  24

  Susch

  Darpslied Elders Villa

  Such a plague it must have been for a boy to be pulled between Obrum and Blatz. Between the piano and baseball too. We knew that music was deep inside Isaac, deep to his bones. He couldn’t help that, even when he wanted to. After Isaac told me about being called Little Blatz, he seemed to want to spend every minute with Obrum when he was at home, which for sure wasn’t often enough. And Obrum liked to have Isaac with him, but he didn’t do all he could have. Even during the times he was home, Obrum didn’t make any headway in making more of a farm out of his land. He never broke more than the twenty acres of land.

  I think Obrum was already thinking this way when I first met him and he took me to see his sod house. Then, after Beethoven Blatz started wandering the prairie, hearing the sounds that he would then make new music with, I don’t think even a lightning voice from a dark thunder cloud could have made Obrum hitch up the plough. Even if Obrum himself didn’t bend so much to music, he really wanted the boy to learn piano. He wondered over how Blatz could play and make up new music with writing down the sounds he heard walking the prairie. And for sure, I wanted Isaac to learn the music too. I wondered over Beethoven’s music far more than Obrum.

  Still, if Obrum had built a farm for the boy, I think Isaac would have fit in better with his friends. It is hard to be different. And Obrum couldn’t bring it by to Isaac why he didn’t want to plough this section of prairie that he had been given. He tried, I think, when he took the boy for long walks through the grass, showing him the things that were there to see. But I think now that Isaac’s wanting to be like his friends pressed on him the way the church people’s fuscheling in their heads had pressed on me.

  As I said, Isaac got very quiet after he told me about Little Blatz. Not naughty, just quiet. He had been quite a chatterbox before, but not after that. He still learned piano from Blatz, and when Blatz wandered the fields Isaac would sneak to the piano and play wild music. And he played baseball every chance he got. He played in school and on Sundays he went to where the big boys would get together to play. By the time he was sixteen he was on a team that played against other villages and sometimes even against towns. He could pitch and he could hit homers and people called him Knackbaul Kehler. I didn’t understand it so much then, Isaac’s drive to play baseball, but now I think that for him baseball was the one way he could see that would
help him fit in with a community that didn’t seem to have use for a piano-playing boy whose family was different and lived away from the village. Baseball was that one thing that brought men together outside of the church and the farm. But I didn’t understand this then.

  Around the time Isaac was sixteen, Blatz got a pamphlet about a music camp for young people that was going to happen by the Peace Gardens on the other side of the Pembina Hills someplace. He showed this to Obrum and me and we all agreed that this would be a good thing for Isaac to go to. Blatz said that the boy needed to be with other musical young people. This made sense to me and to Obrum too, so we sent in an application for Isaac to go to the Peace Gardens camp.

  A few weeks later, we were standing in front of Blatz’s schpikja house, Obrum and Blatz and me, looking at the music camp envelope with Isaac’s name on it, when Isaac came home from school, his baseball bat over his shoulder and his glove hanging from his belt. “Isaac, mail,” Obrum called. Isaac stopped for half a step, then slowly walked closer. He had a pamphlet too, pinched in his hand. Obrum reached him the envelope. “For you, it says.”

  Isaac took the envelope and looked at the writing on it. His face clouded over. “Open it, Isaac,” I said. Isaac put his pamphlet into his shirt pocket and then, like he was holding a mouse by the tail, he slowly tore open the end of the envelope. He squeezed the long edges so the envelope opened and he stuck in his fingers like he was stealing cheese from a mousetrap. He pulled out the letter and slowly read it through. His schwierijch look got darker. Then he let the letter fall from his fingers.

  “How come these people think I want to go to music camp?” His voice scraped like a spade scooping up gravel. He slowly looked up at me and then at Obrum. Blatz bent to pick up the letter and Isaac looked so dirty at him that I thought he would bring up.