by Rudy Wiebe
In our home, not in public, Pah said, “Those Germans better watch out, Stalin has lots of practice, he knows how to kill anybody.”
“Such talk,” our mother chided him. She tried never to speak of suffering or killing; only in her long prayers in the evening before we went to bed did we overhear her endless fears.
“And your brother Heinrich, if he’s still in Stalin’s army, they better watch out even more!” Pah laughed, but not as if it was funny.
Mam said nothing; she turned away to the pan of Kottletten, flattened meat balls, deep-frying on the stove; next to raw sliced potatoes fried brown my favourite food. In our cardboard box of family pictures was a portrait of Heinrich Knelsen in a Red Army uniform, complete with the Red Star on his pointed military cap. He had a handsome fringe of moustache over his full lips. I thought of him somewhere in the Russia that spread across half the school’s world map like a long bloated monster, a soldier certainly bravest of the brave with a big rifle fighting Germans, though I could not visualize how. What did soldiers in a big army do when they fought? What happened when a bullet hit them, did they explode, their head break open even if they wore a uniform? I had never seen a man in uniform, only pictures, not even the Handley brothers—though Dan worked all winter with Bill Handley for Lobes at Cold Lake, we never visited the Handleys and they never visited us—and when Abe Fehr brought his .22 and shot our big pig for butchering, only a tiny hole happened on the pig’s forehead. Though it fell over and Pah could dagger its throat, thick blood pouring out like a spilled pail, but in war shooting people would be much more horrible, bullets bigger, bodies would explode. Maybe there was a picture in a book at school of armies fighting, but Helen said no no, there was something quite terrible about Onkel Heinrich’s picture too. What, with such a nice, sad face? Well, how could he wear such a uniform for that Stalin? And also, Onkel Heinrich had written on the back with a very fine pen, in perfectly shaped German,
As Red Army officer … with artelistic greetings, your brother, brother-in-law and uncle, Romanovka, x, xi, 1931
“What’s that, ‘artelistic’?”
“A Communist word, Mam will never say.”
I studied the beautifully swirled, indecipherable signature of my uncle Heinrich; the Communist words “Rotarmist,” “Artelistengrüss.” But “Onkel” was written there as well, the word as warm as Preacher Onkel Jacob Enns smiling over the pulpit. And if Onkel Heinrich was with Stalin he would be fighting against Hitler now, and maybe Hitler and Stalin would kill each other and everyone could go home happy. You don’t understand yet, Helen said, and there’s Onkel Johann too.
“What about Onkel Johann? Is he a Rotarmist?” I asked.
“No no, he’s older,” Helen told me. “He was in the First World War, a medical orderly.”
“What’s ‘medical orderly’?”
“He helped wounded soldiers get to hospitals from the war, but now Stalin dragged him to Siberia, to prison.”
“Why, if he helped soldiers?”
“That’s the way Stalin is,” Helen said. “Onkel Johann was a teacher, but now he’s chained like a dog, freezing in a camp.”
“Siberia is on the big map, where in Siberia?” “Onkel Johann is maybe dead. You can’t understand yet.”
Yet! The youngest in the family so I had to learn everything from everybody, and always yets! But I would know, sometime, soon I’d know everything I wanted, know so much I could forget half of it and still know more than I had to tell anyone, maybe even as much as Mr. War Churchill if I wanted to, glowering in that small picture at the corner of the long blackboard that stretched across the entire north front of the school and halfway down the east side, right to the library cupboard below the small window; the picture beside the two large, rectangular Neilson Chocolate maps, one of Canada and one of The World with the Communists, including Siberia, in green—I thought, though I never asked anyone—and the British Empire scattered everywhere on the blue oceans in obvious red because Canada was that too, the sun never setting on it, not yet. And it never would, Miss Hingston told us. I’d know everything by then, exactly what had gone so badly wrong between my mother’s brothers Heinrich and Johann in Russia.
The five large western windows let the light fall on our desks from the left. This was standard prairie school design, since everyone had to write and draw right-handed; those born naturally left-handed were, by Department of Education fiat enforced by the school inspector, simply forced to write with their right hands. In spring and early fall when most of us came to school barefoot we played at writing with our toes in the dust, or with sticks held between them. We discovered our feet had skills parallel to our hands.
It may have been Wesley Dunz in grade two who said, “See, I can write better with my left foot than my right hand.”
Someone told me his last name in English meant “stupid.”
“Don’t say that,” Helen said. “He’s just a hard learner.”
Like my brother Dan, as our family said, though I think now it was mostly his erratic, quickly ended Canadian schooling; in any case he was an excellent, hardworking farmer, managing our farm with Mam better than when Pah was home from working out. Dan was nineteen and, like Abe and Emmanuel, had to report to the government in North Battleford. I knew our church and family did not believe in guns; the only time our father would allow a small rifle on the yard was when we butchered pig, not even a gun for hunting. And though the Fiedlers and the Lobes had big rifles and hunted deer and ate them every fall season, none of them believed in killing people either, not even when the Canadian government decided it was good, they’d send you over the ocean where you were supposed to kill Germans, the Mounted Police wouldn’t put you in jail if you did that, rather you’d become a hero and meet the King so he could pin a medal on your chest. There were pictures like that in the Free Press Prairie Farmer quite often.
Our family had no soldiers during the war years. Gust was too old with four children, Abe and Emmanuel were pastors in mission churches in small towns in Saskatchewan bush: Abe and Gilda north in Pierceland, Emmanuel and Mary in Livelong, then Sandy Lake, and Dan was excused for essential farm work. We did not have much more grain, our land on Gust’s homestead as Speedwell stony as anywhere else, but we did have more cattle, both milk cows for cream and steers for sale as beef, and pigs for pork. With war food prices rising, in 1942 our family finally paid off the last $100 of its Reiseschuld, the travel debt almost all Mennonites owed the CPR for bringing them from Europe to Canada on credit in the 1920s.
Pah had our family’s exact travel route and dates stamped all over a long four-page yellow form issued to him by the Prenzlau, Germany Police Authority on 7 Feb. 1930:
Personalausweis Nr. 157, Identity Card No. 157
Passersatz, Passport Substitute
which declared him a staatlos, stateless, person who had left Russia on 1.12.1929 with a present temporary address at the refugee camp in Prenzlau, Germany. On Mam’s long yellow Passersatz, Nr. 158, just above and to the right of her name were the names of their five children listed by order of birth. In the picture our mother, thirty-four years old, is gaunt and large-eyed; it may be she has never known how to smile. Sometimes on a winter Sunday afternoon my father would take de Papiere as he called them, the papers, out of the box on the short shelf above the clothes hanging in a corner of the bedroom and bring them to the kitchen table. I would kneel on the bench so I could lean into the lamplight beside him and look at, even touch the strange heavy documents long as foolscap in school but thicker, so yellow, doubled with broken edges and incomprehensible words. The names were clear enough, delicate pen-and-ink names that were certainly my parents and sisters and brothers, but with so many stamps pounded blue everywhere in the spaces and the long blank pages: round Prenzlau Police and the absolutely critical “Department of Health Canada 10 Feb. 1930,” the rectangular blocks of “Government of Canada Civil Inspection Hamburg” and “Immigration Officer Grimsby” to the miraculous tiny
oval of “Immigration Canada St. John N. B. Feb 24 1930.” And just below that, the last indispensable stamp in high capitals: C.P. R., followed by a handwritten “# 19622.”
The Passersatz, passport substitute, had a small black-and-white picture attached to the front page, stamped on its top corners by both the Prenzlau Police and Canadian Immigration Hamburg. My father’s stamped picture seems barely possible: a man in a high black turtleneck, trimmed moustache and tight cropped hair staring straight ahead so wide eyed and frozen he appears on the verge of terror. Even in Germany, well beyond Stalin’s clutches. In Speedwell, Saskatchewan, fourteen years later my father sat with his head between his hands, his elbows on the kitchen oilcloth, musing over de Papiere as he did his Bible; saying nothing. Staring at his gaunt family backed against a board wall in Moscow, November 1929. At Baby Helen crooked tight in Mam’s arm, her face already blurring before life’s iron reality.
And Germany had been so good to us, had welcomed us fleeing the Communists in winter with barely our summer clothes, fed us, given us papers so the CPR could bring us to Canada on credit because they knew Mennonites always paid their debts … what land is Canada, what will we do there penniless with all our children? A total of seven hundred and twenty dollars Reiseschuld, travel debt: seven people by train from Prenzlau to Hamburg, ship to English Grimsby, train to Liverpool, CPR ship SS Metagama to Canadian Saint John, train to Montreal and Calgary and finally the small station in a prairie town with “Didsbury” painted on its mansard roof; almost a month of travel, February 8 to March 4, 1930. And now, in 1942, our Abe and Dan were supposed to help Canada shoot Germans?
According to reliable statistics, during World War II about 12,000 men who identified themselves as Mennonite registered with the Canadian government. Of these, 4,500 served in the military forces and 7,500 did alternative service as registered conscientious objectors. In Speedwell three sons of Mennonite families joined the Canadian military: Abe Koop, who served in the medical corps, Henry Koehn, a son of our Speedwell Church deacon, and Orville Fehr, the oldest brother of Isola and of Troy, with whom I was now becoming friends. One summer Sunday Orville came to church in a belted khaki uniform and I studied him as he talked to a circle of young people in his confident “I’ve-seen-pretty-much-everything-there-is-to-see” manner. All those badges on his jacket, and a big “G S” sewn on his sleeve at the wrist. I was confused, I dared not ask a question, but later I whispered to Troy, “That ‘G S,’ is Orville really a German Soldier?”
Troy laughed out loud at my usual ignorance. “You stupid, that’s who we’re fighting! It means ‘General Service.’”
The great miracle of Canada, as great as enough food and always some work and seeing a policeman only once in twelve years and giving him a drink of water, was that my brothers were forced to shoot no one; not in the name of Canada, not for Great Britain, not for anyone else. Even in the throes of war, in this country their personal conscience was respected. They could individually register as conscientious objectors and work at acceptable public-benefit jobs for fifty cents a day while making monthly donations to the Red Cross on terms that were negotiated between historic peace church leaders (Mennonite, Quaker, Brethren in Christ) and the government of Prime Minister Mackenzie King. There was some writing in the Free Press about this, but in Speedwell no one said a word, not even Joe Handley and in 1944 our next teacher, Miss Klassen, showed us a picture of Mr. King and Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt sitting close together with the stone walls of Quebec City behind them. But we never saw Mr. King beside King George and Queen Elizabeth, and so the Quebec picture was never hung at the top of the blackboard. Mackenzie King had no war face.
Any number, any word, could be written white on the big blackboard, any picture drawn. The longest number in the world, or those less than zero, or all the words in the English language. I leafed through the school dictionary and looked at the blackboard: since Speedwell School began—in grade two I had no idea that was barely twelve years before, the school might well have existed forever—numberless words had been written and erased there. Thin as chalk marks were, perhaps if they had not been cleaned off with the felt eraser—what a beautiful word, fast and abrupt as a swip over the board and it was blank—if the words had been written over and over on top of each other, perhaps the latest chalk words Miss Hingston wrote would stick out thick enough to drip dust onto her desk! Writing on the blackboard was like talking, more and more words could follow each other, you could write and see and say them in endless arrangements, write or speak and erase and forget them as long as you wished, they were there an instant and gone. But books were different.
Books always said exactly the same thing; if you had the book in your hands the words were there to see, they could not be erased, changed or forgotten. When you opened Highroads to Reading, Book Three to page 224—Book Three was none of your business but you looked across the aisle at Wilfred Heinrichs’ grade three reader anyway—you saw:
SILVER
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon …
“What’s a ‘shoon’?”
“How should I know,” said Wilfred.
“It’s a very old word for shoes,” Miss Hingston had materialized at my shoulder, “so old it isn’t used any more, it’s dead.”
Words could die? Why did it die, it felt better than “shoes,” it didn’t end hissing; so, books could say words even after they were dead—
“Rudy! Read what I told you,” Miss Hingston said in the air over me.
I already had, seven times. But I flipped back in Highroads to Reading, Book Two, to page 229: to the last section, called “More Enjoyment (For Good Readers)” where I always saw “4. The Fisherman and his Wife.” On page 230 was the picture of the barefoot fisherman hauling a huge fish onto the beach, the black diagonal of the fishing line between his right hand and the fish’s gaping mouth cutting through the tiny thatched hut far away up the sand. And the fish exclaiming, hook in mouth:
“Oh, do not eat me. Put me back into the sea, and you shall have whatever you wish.”
The fisherman quickly threw the fish back into the sea.
“Who would want to eat a talking fish?” he said.
True enough. But when he gets home his wife calls him a goose! and sends him back to make a wish. Reluctantly the fisherman obeys; he walks slowly along the sea and sings a song I have always remembered, word for word:
Oh, Man of the Sea,
Come listen to me,
For Ilsa, my wife,
The plague of my life,
Hath sent me to ask a gift of thee.
Her first desire is for a “pretty little cottage,” but one wish fulfilled can never be enough for the woman: the next is for a big stone castle; then she gives up on houses and asks to become queen of all the land; the fish grants even that, but as her fourth wish approaches the sea is black under rolling thunder. When the now fearful fisherman shouts his song into the roaring surf,
The fish rose to the top of a wave.
The fisherman said, “My wife wishes the power to make the sun and moon rise and set whenever she chooses.”
“Go to your little old house,” said the fish. “Remain there, and be content.”
And there you will find the fisherman and his wife to this very day.
I knew it would end like that. Again. I flipped back to the fisherman’s poem:
For Ilsa, my wife,
The plague of my life …
Plague. Like Pah said my grandfather had told him when he wanted to marry Mam: “Ploag die nijch met ahr,” don’t plague yourself with her. I realize now that this word is a translation shift; the lines of the song in the Grimm Brothers collection are, literally, “My wife, Ilsebill, does not want what I want,” a disagreement that grows from her wanting to be Queen, then Emperor and even the Pope, and finally shatters at her demanding to be God. But I was learning English, this was the penultimate story in Book Two, and I rea
d that in four fast demands a wife could become so greedy as to be, for her husband, a “virulent, pandemic disease?” Something here, as Miss Hingston sometimes said, was really fishy.
I remember grade two so well because of Miss Hingston: she very much wanted us poor Speed-wellers with our weathered log-and-plaster school—Jack Pine four miles away now had beautiful board siding painted creamy yellow with brown trim around door and windows—to be proud of ourselves. So she took individual pictures of every class, and when we told her we had never won a softball game against Jack Pine, she drilled us every noon and after school for the annual sports day and that spring, 1943, with the Martens twins alternately pitching and catching, we won both games, first on our school diamond and then on theirs. In 1971, when CBC television was making a documentary about my childhood, she came from North Battleford and we leaned out one of the school window spaces together—the building had been unused for fifteen years, but the walls, roof and floor were still in place—and she gave me a copy of the mouse-eaten school register. But the library cupboard, which always stood below the high window on the opposite wall, was gone; and so were all the books.
I studied the mouth of the huge jackfish Dan hauled hand over hand out of Turtle Lake into our rowboat. I was in the bow to bail the seeping water out with a tomato can; the summer sun blazed blue to the bristle of spruce on the far shore and in the heat of rowing Dan had taken off his shirt. I watched his enormous hand, already thickened by endless heavy work, clamp on the neck of that jack writhing, pounding itself against the boards of the boat, saw it tighten, and then his other hand lifted our farm hammer and hit the fish once, exactly, on the flat of its slick bone head. Crunch. The jack had hit the trolling hook so hard Dan had to slash the lower jaw open to get it out, use pliers to reach in past those spiked teeth. His quick cut ruined the fish’s mouth: how could a fish, even though it had teeth like a saw, speak to me with its lower jaw split?