by Rudy Wiebe
My mother is calling, and at a certain point even I, her reading avoider, am ashamed to ignore her. Work must be done, the whole bright day cannot be wasted following words.
Mam, in the long dress and apron she wears all day, sits on our plank front step, cutting potatoes for planting.
“Etj lauss de Bibel,” I tell her. I was reading the Bible.
She concentrates on the cluster of eyes in a red potato, turning it in her broad, worker hands. “Don’t lie.”
“The Old Testament, one of the killing stories.”
“You’re not too big yet for a thrashing,” though she has never really vedrasht me.
I laugh. “It’s not lying if you know it’s not true.”
“What is it then?”
“A joke,” I tell her, and add in English, “a story!”
She absolutely refuses “joke;” she will not so much as permit herself to smile, though her lips twitch. “Du enn diene Jeschijchte. You and your stories. Sometimes I don’t know if that’s what they are.”
“Then it’s your fault,” I say, picking up the pail with cut potatoes. “Catch on.”
“Soo eenfach es daut nijch,” she says. It’s not that simple.
But to me then, an impatient, impulsive boy, it seemed she was the simple one; for her everything seemed to be ent’wäda ooda, either or, black or white.
Either or: anything anyone did, in all of God’s creation, it was always black or white—with the black most likely to come first. I then thought of my mother’s life as contradiction: her abiding fear at the immanence of divine, eternal wrath, yet she herself lived a life devoted to goodness and love—perhaps not a contradiction as much as an inexplicable dissonance, a disharmony so powerful I recognized it like an echoing revelation a decade later in Münich’s Alte Pinakothek where the Renaissance paintings of the life of Jesus presented him in magnificent wealth, an opulence so stunning it rivalled any possible Medici: the Son of Man who in biblical story walked the dry earth of Palestine with lepers and described himself as having nothing, no, not so much as a place where to lay his head. Either or. Black or white. Where, I wondered, were the brilliant colours of God’s rainbow that arched all together? Only promised, occasionally, in the sky?
I had been too young to notice earlier, but after Vancouver it seemed to me there was no avoiding it: the world was enormous beyond all comprehension, certainly beyond only black or white. But what my mother actually meant when she said, “It’s not that simple,” was still beyond me.
Along the bush on the far side of the garden Dan is plowing with four horses, seated on our two-share plow. His big arm works the depth lever, threading the plowshares along the line between shallow grey-wooded soil and the underlying clay. I walk the furrow bent low, nudge the cut potatoes into the soil, tight as I was taught years ago, so the next round of the plow will cover them to an exact depth and then we will mark the long rows with pegs and rake the surface smooth. A winter’s worth of good food, to be eaten in all the ways Mennonites prepare potatoes, but best they are sliced and fried in Jreewe’schmolt, rendered pork fat with bits of red meat, we call it “cracklings,” nothing can taste better after a day outside in February than these potatoes browned deep and fat between your teeth. In garden ground my bare toes bump into stones, curl in pockets of sand scattered like bits of ante-diluvial beach in the tan clay, sand so moist you can shape it momentarily between your toes—actually in the sunlight the varied earth feels more intriguing than any book. That was one stupid thing about winter: the early dark is good for reading, but your feet and hands are always wrapped in something heavy—bare feet and hands know things too, especially in sunlight; they are the four opposite corners of your always inquiring body and they can know things far beyond your hard head.
In this garden our food begins; and in our farmyard where the chickens graze, in the sloughs where cattle forage along the edge of mossy water, in the boreal bush where saskatoons and cranberries and chokecherries grow, wild strawberries on deserted fields; and miles north of Speedwell School, beyond the fire cutline where forest fires begun by lightning burned years before I was born, over the sandy jack pine and poplar hills grow wild blueberries, square miles of them bunched in drops bluer than sky, which we pick in August to fill five-gallon cream cans, and Mam boils them in the hot summer kitchen and I carry them down the ladder into the cellar below the house and set the preserves in rows of purple, red, blue and black sealers: winter jam for bread and berries for Plautz and for whipped cream desserts with just a ration sprinkle of sugar.
Standing barefoot in the turned soil behind our house, I know: Of this earth my cells are made.
I have felt remembrance beyond words when I returned to the boreal place where my sister is buried, where my mother conceived and bore and fed me.
But such remembrance also happened when, after six decades of life, I walked in places where I had never before physically been: in Russia, the former Mennonite village once called Number Eight Romanovka, north of the city of Orenburg, driving up the great steppe hills that stretch into horizons, the village cemetery where my parents met beside my grandmother’s grave and where gravestones overgrown by grass and lilac bushes still say “Wiebe” in both German and Russian; and also two thousand kilometres west of Orenburg in Ukraine, in the former Mennonite village of Neuendorf, now Shirokoye, just west of the huge Dnieper River city of Zaporizhzhia where my father was born and where the bricks of the village school he first attended are falling from the walls in broken piles among wandering chickens; and in the town of Harlingen on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands where my blood forebears were forced to begin their wandering, where in 2003 the registration clerk at the Hotel Anna Casparii recognizes my Frisian name Wiebe and asks when our family left Holland and I tell him, “Almost four hundred years ago.”
And then, when I step back out onto narrow Noorder Haven Street in Harlingen, I have a sudden, overwhelming, sense that this water glittering in this canal passing this hotel door and being pumped up into the North Sea, is, molecule for molecule, cycle for cycle, the very water my ancestor Wybe Adams van Harlingen last saw here in the town of his birth, when he sailed away to Danzig in 1616.
It may be that our bodies, despite our minds, retain what we have neglected to notice; or even undermine our ability to forget what we long not to know about ourselves. For a survivor of the fire-bombing of Hamburg, the sudden drone of a plane overhead can convulse the body in shudders; a midnight pounding on the door awaken a Gulag survivor into uncontrollable screams. Even when all facts seem lost, the bodily effects remain, as the poet Dionne Brand details in her memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return. When she lists for her grandfather the names of all the African peoples she knows, he tells her none of them are their people, but “he would know [the name] if he heard it.” However, he never does remember and because of that, Brand writes, “A small space opened in me … a tear in the world … It was a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being. It was also a physical rupture, a rupture of geography.” It seems that when you have lost the place on earth where you come from, when your ancestral name has been ground out of existence, you suffer damage.
Memory as psychic and physical evanescence. As I wrote and rewrote these words, gradually a memory of my Speedwell nightmares returned to me. A betrayal by sleep: the child life I lived somewhere in the Land of Sleep would on occasion be ripped open, exposed frightfully in my physical bed. There were many nightmares, beginning, I know, when I first began to walk because my mother would awaken to pick me up in my wanderings and lay me back in bed, but now I first remembered knowing the name. Not Low German, which is simply a modification of Droom, dream, like beesa, bad, or gruselja, repulsive, frightful, but English knew better: “nightmare,” a gigantic horse that suddenly burst with you into darkness, you were clinging to its bare back, no reins or even a halter shank, its neck too huge for your arms to reach around and you could only clutch the short tufts on its withers as it rus
hed you into terror. Like Bell, always uncontrollable and now gone suddenly berserk. The shape of only one nightmare came back clearly, a smeared apparition from the spring of our leaving. I had to do something, Right now! and it was of course already too late, I would burn in Hell from all ages to endless ages for this, fire and ice burned the same, there was no difference, but someone was pounding on the door downstairs and I had to answer, Now! I was out of bed and backwards down the ladder stairs in the darkness and something tried to stop me, someone and someone else, but I was fighting them—I have to do this! and the door opened to no one on the porch, I could see, so they must be waiting in the yard, a wagon and a team of horses, a car! I am outside in the spring night burning my feet like ice and fire and past the summer kitchen through the slab fence gate, Etj mot! I have to! and I’m halfway down the empty slope to the barn,
And I feel that “I” is too little for me!
There’s somebody fighting his way
Out of me!
But it is my mother, out there. Even as I lunged from the house I had sensed something double, I both knew I had to! and also that there would be nothing to do—there never had been—and my mother clasps me tight around the shoulders and I am afraid and enraged at the same time, I should have done something but there is nothing, I am barefoot in the cold night yard in my spring underwear, my warm Mam murmuring in my ear and I shake her off and walk back past Pah at the slab gate doing nothing as usual, just watching, I hate them for seeing me act so stupid again, I love them, there was someone and I had to and I’ll show them, I’m Tüss, home, I’ll go upstairs and sleep. And I do it.
Years later I found those three lines of split image for being inside a nightmare, “And I feel that ‘I’ is too little for me …” in the long, raging poem by the Georgian/Cossack poet Vladimir Mayakovsky called A Cloud in Trousers. A close friend said to me, “You’re always reading Russian writers, are you sure you’re not half Mennonite and half Russian?” and I could only mutter, “To be so lucky.”
With every passing day our memory is what we can still find in it, or cannot avoid, and no doubt Gao Xinjian is correct when he comments in Soul Mountain that losing particular memories is a form of liberation. But there are many we would wish never to lose: the more precise they are, the more they comfort us. Liz wrote nothing in her 1947 diary after her sixteenth birthday, not even of Dan and Isola’s wedding on May 11, but suddenly on Thursday, May 15 she recorded these facts:
We arrived in Coaldale about 7: o’clock p.m. Had a very pleasant welcome at Voths with a warm supper, after supper Ed. [Voth] took us to our new home.
The former Speedwell storekeeper Wilhelm Voth with his removable teeth had returned to our Saskatchewan bush for hire in a dusty car to carry Pah, Mam, Liz and me 470 dirt and gravel miles (756 kilometres) to Coaldale, Alberta. We held no public auction, that community burial of all things farm and family, gathered bit by bit in the fourteen years—almost to the day—of our Speedwell living. Rather, we shipped a few household possessions by train, packed in two wooden boxes Pah built, and left the farm, all its animals and machinery to Dan and his marvellously good-natured wife, Isola. Mam went to Helen’s grave on Wednesday and we started at sunrise on Thursday to drive it in one day and save ourselves overnight expense. On Friday, before Mr. Voth took us to Lethbridge to shop for furniture, I washed the various layers of my wind-and-sun-hardened travel vomit from below his right car window.
Coaldale was the first stop east of Lethbridge on the railroad originally built in 1885 by Sir Alexander Galt’s business consortium to haul the coal they mined along the Belly (now Oldman) River below Lethbridge to the new transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railroad at Medicine Hat. In 1947 Coaldale’s main street, where Highway 3 led us from Medicine Hat, ran parallel to the track and its stores and houses clustered around three grain elevators, but our “new home” was in Nortondale, an outgrowth on the town’s west side.
There were two streets of Nortondale houses and, though I did not recognize it at the time, Second Street Nortondale—now Coaldale’s west Twenty-third Avenue—was as close to a Russian Mennonite village as my parents ever found in Canada. With two exceptions, all the thirty-odd families living there had arrived in Canada during the 1920s and spoke Low German. Our small lumber houses set on two-acre plots faced each other across narrow irrigation canals on either side of the gravel road; each yard had a huge garden and many, like ours, had small buildings where we could raise chickens and feed a pig or sheep for butchering. By fall Pah had even bought a milk cow, which he staked out to graze on our back acre or along the irrigation ditches like other families since there was of course no Russian herdsman to take our animals to a communal pasture. I did not realize that, until I left for the University of Alberta six years later, it would be my daily chore to milk that cow morning and evening in the small shed that hid our family outhouse from the street. She was a good cow, Guernsey at least in her soft beige colouring, and we sold the extra milk to neighbours for ten cents a quart.
Standing on the high bank of the main irrigation ditch whose muddy water flowed east just beyond the houses and plots on the south side of the street, I could look over farms, fields and pastures leaning up the vast slope of the plains to where the Front Wall of the Rocky Mountains appeared and vanished again into mist beyond the Milk River Ridge. The ridge separated the continental rivers flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico from those flowing north to Hudson Bay. Over it the square peak of Chief Mountain hovered like the snow and granite profile of a man lying on his back. But it was too distant for me to discern clearly, nor had I any notion yet of the Blackfoot stories about Old Man and Thunderbird surrounding that awesome place.
Coaldale was not landscape for Mam; it was cautious hope. Though not quite fifty-two, her years had been too difficult for outright optimism. Her life’s mottos had always been “Harre auf Gott,” wait for God, and “Den Mutigen gehöert die Welt,” to the courageous belongs the world, and now, by moving to southern Alberta, it seemed her patient hope gradually was becoming more than a glimmer in the distance. Here there were steady wages for Pah, he no longer needed to struggle with farming decisions—let Dan do that in Speedwell, he was much better at it and could explain himself in English—and for her last two children there was a huge church with over a hundred Christian young people to become friends with, to attend Sunday school and sing in choirs. Indeed, the Coaldale Mennonite Brethren Church offered a fine three year Bible school and, even more amazing, also ran an Alberta Department of Education–approved sep arate high school on the north edge of town. Here, in Coaldale, it might very well be possible, Mam thought, for both Liz and me to be saved from the endless, subversive temptations of the post-war world. And there were many older Mennonite women for her to talk to: they understood this Canadian world in ways she never would.
Pah did not waste time staring across southern Alberta prairie which looked so much like the steppes where, as a boy he had carried lunch to their Bashkir herdsman grazing the village cattle in the Number Eight Hills. He was happy for the well-shingled house—though it had no foundation, it merely sat on stones in the brown earth—happy for the street with its ditch of running water, the huge Coaldale Mennonite Brethren Church north of town, his job on a dairy farm where every day someone would tell him exactly what to do.
“Hia oppe Stap woa wie aundasch läwe,” he said. Here on the prairie we’ll live differently.
And my lengthening bones knew he was right; truly aundasch, different.
EPILOGUE
THE COMING WIND
1947. Monday, May 19: Dad went to Lethbridge today to work. Rudy went to school and mother and I worked in the garden. Then went to town a little bit yet.
The town of Coaldale was dominated by English names like Graham, King, Handley, McCann, Foxall, Greer, Fairhurst, though there were a few main street businesses with Mennonite names like Martens and Thiessen on their false fronts. In Mrs. Jinty Graham’s classroom of thirty-seven students P
rincipal Roy Baker assigned me the end corner desk nearest the cloakroom door: as if I’d slipped into grade seven very late, perhaps accidentally, and might be gone if someone noticed me. That was fine with me; my seat was beside the tall windows and I could look out through the huge branches of the cottonwoods to the gravel street, where cars passed and people walked in shiny leather shoes on wooden sidewalks even when it rained.
And soon I discovered that I was totally unique in school for wearing blue denim farm overalls, particularly since the buttonholes at my hips were so worn the metal buttons did not hold the side flaps closed as they should. Though school ended in a few weeks, there was more than time enough for the poetic English class wits, playing with “Rudyard” I think, to cross-label me “Barnyard.” A particular fit for the more general names like “bohunk” or “schmo.”
As Big Bear says, “A word is power, it comes from nothing into meaning.” I could add that some words are so powerful they are fixed in us beyond any possibility of forgetting.
The Frank and Helen Wiens family lived beside us in Nortondale, eight children—four in their teens like Liz and me—Mennonite neighbours happy to help us learn how to live and work in hot summer Alberta. The oldest son, Abe, farmed eighty acres of land east of town; they had a contract with Canadian Sugar Factories for sugar beets and soon we joined them hoeing the endless rows, those straight, flat lines etched by bright threads of irrigation water reaching, as it seemed, beyond the treeless horizon.
Before the fifties, beet seed was still unsegmented: the tiny sprouts came up in clusters and they had to be thinned to single plants one hoe width apart so each beet could mature into a thick, swollen root. Actually, hoes were fine for weeds but not much help for thinning: only on your knees with your bare fingers could you properly single them down. Bent down into long acres of sugar beets, you gradually became a distant bump, nameless under the scorching sun.