by Rudy Wiebe
Our families taught us we were Mennonites, and that meant we were hard-working, quiet and simple people who should do almost anything to live peacefully together and go to church several times a week to pray, study the Bible, listen to sermons and sing, sing, sing. Always full harmony, the small church bulging with harmony you could hear across the hilly forests for miles if the windows were open. And visit. The only community recreation, every Sunday and sometimes two or three evenings a week, especially during the long winters, was family visiting.
To visit meant eating, laughing, drinking Pripps—no church Mennonite in Speedwell drank alcohol; true, a bottle of Alpenkräuter had a higher alcohol content than any wine, but it was advertised in the weekly Rundschau as an excellent medicine “to cleanse all body systems,” and two tablespoons every evening before bed was perfectly acceptable to my mother for her ever-unsettled stomach. Above all, visiting meant Resse’riete.
Like so many Low German expressions, the subtleties of “Resse’riete” are difficult to translate. The two words do not simply mean storytelling; they carry an alliterative aura of communal comprehension, and earthiness; the very sounds spring a taste in your mouth. The noun “Ress” means both a “well-deserved whipping” and a “trick,” a “prank;” the verb “riete” means “to pull, tug, tear,” very much like an ache in the body (the noun “Rieting” means rheumatism), and so Resse’riete could be paraphrased in English as whipping out or tearing off some good stories that will make you ache, or sting, with laughter, sentiment, even tears. For Russian Mennonites who don’t drink or dance, storytelling is the heart’s core of visiting and my generation, the first born in Canada, was imprinted with story in our mothers’ wombs.
Stories of the magnificent Ukrainian and Russian steppes, the lovely Mennonite villages where everyone lived, not isolated and scattered, lost somewhere in bush like Canada, but together, sheltered in a deep, sometimes steep valley where a stream of clear water always flowed, where the great village farmsteads faced each other across the single street and the window gables of the high-raftered houses kept watch over each other through the leafy branches of mulberry trees. Trees you planted exactly where you wanted them—you never had to chop them down in their thousands to create a field, never had to laboriously hack down and uproot even a single tree—and every morning the men drove their horses and machines out to their big fields sloping up from the village onto the horizon of the steppes and children walked to school at the village crossroads opposite the church and in the evening the Ukrainian or Bashkir herdsman brought the village cattle herd back from the communal pasture and every cow with her calf would turn in at their home gate, where the mother was waiting with her pail, ready to milk her.
I sat on the floor in the heater corner or under the kitchen table and listened to this, a world I did not know and would never see. I would lay my head on my arms folded across my drawn-up knees, and I would feel as if I were looking at one of those pictures of tiny thatch-roofed houses almost hidden against hills beside a stream that were background to the German Bible mottos that hung in every Speedwell living room, ours too: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” As real as my leg muscles’ ache when I plowed my felt boots through snowdrifts to the woodpile.
But then the stories changed. The First World War came, bringing Forstei duty for the men, and long hospital trains where Mennonite men and women served as medical orderlies or nurses for thousands of horribly torn soldiers who died of their wounds in the train cars and were carried off at sidings—who knew who was shovelled under, or where—and then, worst of all, the Communists and their violent, unending Revolutions. Speedwellers had lived in Russian Mennonite colonies thousands of kilometres apart; they had escaped to Canada in many different ways between 1923 and 1930, but they all had stories to tell that were stunning in their own way: of starvation, cholera, murderous bandit raids, beatings, fire and theft, vicious Red and White Army battles of advance and retreat and again advance; of torture, sons forced at gunpoint to torture their fathers, the slaughter in villages of every male over fifteen with not a shot fired, sabres only, and every woman—
No one ever said the word “rape.” I knew the word jewaultijch, which meant God, All-powerful and Great and Capable of Anything, but never did I hear the word vejewaultje—to be overpowered, or forced, as in sexually violated. No Mennonite child in Canada needed to hear that such a word existed, oh God have mercy.
And in our small family, a story stretching thin between the two pictures from Russia that my mother sometimes held in her hands, crying as she prayed: of her two brothers, Heinrich and Johann, the Red Army soldier and the conscientious-objector medical orderly. My parents never spoke of them while visiting neighbours, and only decades later, from my cousins in Paraguay and those who resettled in Germany from the Soviet Union after 1982, would I hear more about the tragic Stalin-Communist fates of my two Knelsen uncles.
The August Fiedlers, who had helped our family so much and whom we visited most often, seemed not to have such stories about their past, and neither did their close relatives the Lobes, the Dunzes, the Biechs and the Leischners. Their older children were born in the United States, the younger ones in Canada and they spoke only English among themselves and there was nothing about Orenburg or Molotschna or Neu-Samara or Chortiza for them to tell: their stories were from the isolated plains of North Dakota or, for the parents, Bessarabia on the Moldavian plateau—wherever that was, I was never certain—where they had lived in German villages as well, though even old August, who had married Pauline Lobe there, could barely remember them. Nor did he appear to want to; he had been forced to serve the Czar three years in the Russo-Japanese War and when he finally got home again to his Pauline and tiny Olga in 1906, they packed up and left for the United States as fast as they could. Eighteen years later they hauled themselves north into Saskatchewan, where they chopped and burned and plowed a homestead out of bush and got their six sons on their feet—husbands would take care of Elsie and Ruth. That was enough for old August to think about, forget that slave past of Europe where every little big shot could tell you what to do, what good was it talking about that now? Now was Canada, here, and he’d had enough of Speedwell too, they were moving again, to find a warm place by the ocean to die.
Mrs. Fiedler rarely smiled; her lips seemed too thin for it. She was always busy sliding deep bowls of boiled potatoes and sausage and very strong sauerkraut onto the oilcloth of their kitchen table around which sixteen or seventeen people could sit, easily.
When my sister Mary married Emmanuel Fiedler I became aware not only of the possible sexual behaviour of human beings, but also that Fiedler life was not as straightforward as patriarch August implied. It seemed that one of the six Fiedler sons was perhaps not a son at all; perhaps a grandson. His mother, they said, was the Fiedler’s oldest daughter, Olga, who was married to Gustav Racho after, with whom she had five other children; they lived on the ramshackle farm just over our sledding hill north of Speedwell School. As if by family and communal osmosis I came to understand that God sometimes gave a girl a child before she was married and then she had to leave it with her parents, maybe forever. Maybe that explained Mrs. Racho’s face: her features were handsome like all the Fiedlers, but her facial expression was often fierce, scowling, and her left eye peered out from under a dark growth round and hard as a marble poised on her eyebrow. And then, when Troy in the Fehr barn shoved me into knowing what a man forced on a woman in sex, I thought that might explain it: her anger had solidified into that growth and now she had to stare out from under her sin forever.
Well. Such things happened in the United States, or Bessarabia perhaps, but not to Mennonites who fled Russia to escape de Kommuniste. So I thought then. And, our parents repeated, it was Germany that said to them in December 1929, Come, come to us out of that Stalin hell. Germany gave them refuge, fed them for three months, made them healthy enough to pass the Canadian doctor tests every time till the CPR could bring them
here … but now Germany was so horrible, and Churchill and Roosevelt were calling Stalin their friend, his devil’s Schnur’boat, moustache, smiled on the front page of the Free Press Prairie Farmer with them. And the Americans had even built a highway thousands of miles long across Canada to Alaska and were hauling guns and food to help him—what had happened? In a few years?
“It’s the war,” Mam said. “War turns everything good upside down. Suddenly in war good is evil, evil good.”
Dan said, “Hitler never got us into Germany.”
“Was it Mr. Churchill?” I asked.
Pah guffawed, without amusement. “Huh! Aul de groote Manna,” he said. “Wann’ et doa’ropp aun tjemmt, saje dee bloss, ‘Itj sie fe Dootscheeten.’” Huh! all those big men! When it comes right down to it, all they ever say is, “I’m for shooting them all dead.”
But what if Stalin had converted and was now, really, good? God could do anything, the Bible said that He could even change a heart of stone—so steel would be easy, just heat it a little like Sam Heinrichs. And Stalin was fighting Hitler, who they said had started this latest of world wars. So, had the worst Communist in the world been saved?
There was a late summer evening, after the mosquito season, when I brought our small cattle herd home from their slough pasture, and I looked beyond them to the barbed-wire gate that opened our yard to the road allowance, there between the young poplars always sprouting along the fenceline with the muskeg spruce black, spiky across the road behind them; almost as though they were a great wall, hiding us from the Big World of Groote Manna forever killing poor people in some new, more horrible way. I watched our scrubby cows—I knew every one clear as a photograph, the warts on every leg, the twist of each horn or dolloped ear—trail to the water trough I’d laboriously filled by hauling the long bucket up out of our well over and over. Beyond the eastern trees the Thiessen dog was barking half a mile away, and farther still the Enns rooster crowed once and then again, faintly. The late summer twilight was levelling down into shadow.
And it came to me: okay, war and Big Men twist the world upside down, so what if a big touring car suddenly appeared and turned in at our gate, a long car with the top down, all yellow with black trim and Stalin sitting in it. And he would stop in our yard beside the buggy and from under his moustache offer my father his land in Orenburg again, if he wanted it back. I knew my father was forty-one years old when they fled Russia and that he had never owned land there; my parents had always been landless, they worked for their parents or older brothers who inherited the family lands, but Communism taught that everyone should share equally, so if Stalin—What would Pah answer? It struck me he would laugh, incredulously; wordless as he often was. Or say he would think about it, the way he tried to avoid direct decisions and ask Mam when they were alone, what is to be done? Or maybe he’d just smile a little, and mention that perhaps Stalin had a lot of people on his famous memory, what about them?
But my mother would know instantly, absolutely: “Niemols. Wie komme nie tridj.” Never. We’re never coming back.
And since she had Stalin right there, smiling in her yard, face to face, she’d lay it on him: “Now you tell me, Joseph Vissarionovich, where is my brother? Johann Knelsen, the teacher in Orenburg, Number Eight Romanovka. Woa hast du dem omm’jebroght? Where did you murder him?”
And Stalin’s smile would slowly freeze into the steel of his name. For he would certainly know Johann Knelsen. They said Stalin never had to write anything down, he remembered everything his Bolsheviks did and to whom, every single name. God gave him that living hell, my mother said, to be able never to forget, anything.
There were moments when my parents’ stories, and the distant explosions of the Great World that I heard about at school or saw in the Free Press, settled my bare feet into the grassy muck of our yard splotched with cow and chicken shit—every summer evening we washed our crusted feet clean in a basin before we went to bed, that cleansed feeling of my hard, tough feet as comforting as the eleven-word prayer I ripped off to Lieber Heiland, my Dearest Saviour, while curled under the blankets—my bare feet on bare earth made me feel as if I knew, that my body already remembered what happened everywhere on the globe, and that someday I would understand it too; that what I was aware of had some meaning and that by believing in Jesus as the Son of God—as I surely did, as I hoped and trusted and believed with all my heart I absolutely did—I would someday comprehend what that meaning was. As clearly and directly as I knew that, in a moment, I would chase these cows into the corral and start milking.
Over years of daily repetition, milking a cow is an intense intimacy; a warmth you comprehend even decades after you have stopped doing it. The corral is drifting with good, acrid smoke from the smudge you have lit to drive off the evening mosquitoes, you have balanced your small butt on a one-legged stump stool and now you lean your head and right shoulder tight against the cow’s flank and belly. The milk pail stands on the ground (your legs are too short to hold it between them, like Mam or Dan does) directly under her heavy udder and you clamp your left hand onto the nearest front teat, your right reaches across to the other, and you are surrounded by warmth, and anchored: your hands can begin to grip and release and grip the heat of her teats into rhythm and the warm milk will jet out in a thick stream ringing in the pail. Every milking is a reincarnation of your own infancy your hands your tiny mouth at your mother’s nipples, you will not smell or feel such comfort move everywhere within the skin of your body until you lay your face between your sweetheart’s breasts and she enfolds you.
I did not know enough, had endured too little hard facticity in my nine years to comprehend what I experienced watering cows. As I tipped the pail into the trough, the water crashing out, what I saw was scrubby animals stretching their necks down, their hides bumped by warblefly larvae about to hatch; I did not know I knew even less about my Mennonite forebears than about the barbaric war killing people half the world away; such knowledge came only with years and reading and many books, the stories of Jesus’s followers martyred as Anabaptists—“rebaptizers” as they were derisively called—for their beliefs during two centuries of European Reformation, their flight from Friesland, Holland and Flanders to find a generous refuge in Roman Catholic Poland from the Spanish Inquisition, their further flight to Imperial Russia’s Ukrainian steppes two hundred years later from Prussian militarism, and their flight again from Communism to North and South America in the twentieth century. Neither my parents nor my community could tell me this massive burden of stories; what they knew were their own, particular, small narratives: so obvious, so usual in our circles they were almost unnecessary to relate.
Certainly no one in Speedwell could have told me of a genius named Wybe Adams, or Adam Wiebe, the Frisian ancestor of all Russian Mennonite Wiebes, who in 1616 sailed from Harlingen on invitation by the Free City of Danzig to become its water engineer, and who protected Danzig from the ravages of the Thirty Years War, which between 1618 and 1648 destroyed more than half the population and nearly all the civilization of Europe, by building a high, thick wall of earth around the entire city which was impenetrable by cannon balls. He moved all that earth in the walls from the hill across the Raduane River by inventing the cable car: buckets hung from an endless rope running over wheels on poles that circulated over the river, carrying the earth down and returning the empty buckets back up again.
That’s a long and complex heritage story. For a bush homestead boy doing his evening chores, a bucket on a rope running over a pulley was simply water down the well, it had to be dipped full before it came up, and there was Liz coming from the house past the firewood piled along the fence to pull the butter and cream for supper out of the coolness of the well, and behind her smoke rising from our summer kitchen—Joseph Stalin in his touring car already gone like momentary mist. A red-and-black rooster was following a hen across the yard,
Kjemma die nijch omm de Eia dee noch nijch jelajt senn.
Don’t concern
yourself about eggs that haven’t been laid yet.
an unnecessary animal after summer who would be supper soup tomorrow; but he padded across the yard placing one claw foot and then the other so precisely, his head cocked and twitching at each step as if he could stare the world into living forever.
While I gnawed my way happily through grade school, Helen did not. Miss Hingston’s register in October 1942 lists her as “Age 14, Grade 7, Distance from School 3 miles,” but her attendance days throughout October, November and December are simply marked “S”—sick. Her fifteenth birthday was on January 5, 1943; the school began on Wednesday, January 6, and her line of attendance for the rest of the year is blank: she never returned to any school.
She was the gentlest sister. In her tiny pulp-paper notebook she always recorded the dates of her life in the third person:
Helen Wiebe got baptized August 10, 1941,
11 A.M. at Turtle Lake
I remember a grey picture, now lost: a blank sky and water horizon with a line of seven slender girls, unrecognizable at that distance but all holding hands, coming out of the lake curling waves at the hems of their white dresses. A man, it must be Reverend Jacob Enns, wades beside them in shirt, tie and trousers.