Ruth, a Portrait

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Maria,” Ruth repeated, “I’ve brought you a new Bible.”

  Lightly placing her fingers on Maria’s forearms, she attempted to lift them and replace the Bible with the New Testament. They were like iron pipes. Ruth could not budge them. She placed the New Testament next to Maria and talked for an hour while the unblinking eyes bored into hers. Ruth quoted Scripture.

  “I can’t help you,” Ruth finally said, “but God can.”

  Maria began panting and then slowly fell backward. Ruth caught her before she tumbled over the edge of the bed. She eased her around, resting her head on the pillow.

  “Remember, Maria,” she said as she left, “Jesus loves you and if you call for Jesus He will be here and He will help you.”

  Maria’s eyes closed and a single tear slipped down her cheek. Ruth took the Gideon Bible and left, meeting the ward supervisor outside the room. Ruth wondered aloud if this could be a case of demon possession.

  “Well,” the woman said coldly, “I just don’t happen to believe in demons.”

  “Well,” Ruth said, “my father was a medical missionary for twenty-five years in China and had personal experience with them. The Chinese had separate words for having a devil and being crazy. Once he was called out to see a woman who was demon-possessed. It was winter. He had on his long johns and an overcoat. He told the woman when he went into her room that he couldn’t help her but Christ could and only Christ could. And at the mention of His name, she went absolutely livid and grabbed his arm and bit him and broke the skin through all that clothing. It was superhuman power.”

  Years later a chaplain from Las Vegas, who was working as an usher at a crusade Ruth was attending, approached her. “I have the New Testament you gave Maria Torres,” he said.

  “Where did you find it?” Ruth asked, surprised.

  “In the trash at the hospital.”

  Eight months after the Las Vegas crusade, Ruth traveled to Eastern Europe. Her first stop was Sweden, then Poland, where three years later General Wojciech Jaruzelski would impose martial law, interning thousands as the government attempted to crush the trade union movement called Solidarity. On September 25, she boarded a plane in Charlotte and flew to Stockholm. She waited there two days while her husband preached to a crowd of twenty thousand people in Oslo and endured the assaults of the Heathen Society, whose members were determined to upset the services. A young woman struck him with a ball of a red doughy substance and then shinnied up a pole and unfurled a banner which read, “WHEN CHRISTIANS GET POWER THEY KILL PEOPLE.” A man climbed up after her and ripped it down to the wild applause of the crowd. Billy preached without pause.

  From September 27 to October 1 he visited Stockholm, conducting services which were broadcast in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland. On the night of the first meeting, Ruth was asked to address the wives of the men helping with the crusade. She sat between two interpreters from the Salvation Army. One was a woman named Gunvar Paulsson, who had been badly injured the summer before when terrorists attacked a mission station in Rhodesia. Two missionaries had been murdered. She was presumed dead and left facedown in the dirt. Now, in a black dress and bonnet, her left arm permanently crippled from bullets, she sat quietly on the platform, translating Swedish to English for Ruth.

  “How honored I am to sit beside you. I have never had to suffer for my Lord the way you have,” said Ruth, whose childhood prayer for martyrdom remained unanswered.

  “Believe me,” Miss Paulsson replied with a smile, “it was a joy. You know, I had never had to suffer for my Lord before this happened. And in spite of the horrors going on all around me at the time, there was such a sense of the presence of the Lord Jesus Himself that it was a pure joy.”

  The Grahams rested three days in a hotel in Copenhagen, where red tile and oxidized copper roofs stretched from their balcony to the Baltic Sea. On the raw, drizzly morning of October 6 they boarded a DC-9 and flew to Poland, passing low over wet black earth and fields of cabbages and three days earlier landed in Warsaw. Cardinal Karol Wojtyla had left from the same airport.

  Pope John Paul I had died the week before after serving only thirty-four days, and Cardinal Wojtyla would soon be named his successor. A sliver of history slipped by unnoticed as a Polish cardinal on his way to becoming the first non-Italian head of the Catholic Church in more than four centuries crossed paths with an American Protestant permitted by the Communist government to proclaim the Gospel in a land more than ninety percent Catholic.

  The Grahams would travel through Poland for ten days. On their way to their hotel, Billy laid wreaths on two monuments. Ruth, wearing a black coat, followed several paces behind him, the rain steadily falling on her bare head until a young Pole loped out of the crowd and held an umbrella over her. On Saturday, October 7, the sun broke through the overcast sky, dispelling the dark, wet weather for the first time in well over a week. Billy conferred with an ecumenical group of clergy in a Baptist church while Ruth and an interpreter met with a group of women. Ruth was expected to lecture. As she often did on such occasions, she opened the floor to questions.

  “How can we be sure our children will grow up believers?” a woman worried, for in Poland, both parents worked, their children turned over to state day care centers.

  “Samuel’s and Moses’ mothers kept them until they were weaned and we know that in primitive societies today, this can be three or four years,” Ruth replied. “I would think that Pharaoh’s court could hardly be described as an ideal place for a child to be raised. And Eli’s temple was even worse since, under the guise of religion, his sons had turned it into a cesspool of iniquity. And yet both Moses and Samuel grew up to be men of God.”

  As she left the meeting a young woman with plump cheeks, a babushka, and steel teeth approached her and said she had come from Russia. “And Christians from my town knew that I was coming and why,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “And they asked me to deliver a request. Will you pray for us?”

  “We have not ceased praying for Russian believers,” Ruth assured her.

  On a foggy Sunday, October 8, the Grahams, their associates, and Dr. Denton Lotz, brother of Anne’s husband Danny Lotz, departed for Bialystok, northeast of Warsaw and just short of the Russian border. Billy was to preach in an outdoor service at a Baptist church. He rode in a sedan, while Ruth followed in a bus loaded with BGEA team members and American journalists.

  Ruth had been told that in Poland when the bus made a comfort stop it meant the passengers were let out in the woods and left to their own devices. She didn’t understand what this meant, nor did it make sense to her when a young preacher-photographer named George Boltniev grinned at her and remarked, “I can’t wait for the rest stops so I can get a picture of Ruth Graham picking mushrooms.”

  At last, the bus lumbered to a halt, and passengers were set loose at the edge of a wooded area, thick with trees but disturbingly lacking in underbrush. Others ambled off in different directions, looking neither left nor right, each furtively in search of a fat tree, preferably with low, foliated branches. Ruth headed for a ramshackle privy, changing her mind six feet downwind of it. She was saved by her voluminous black raincoat. Unbelted, it settled around her like a tent. She picked a handful of mushrooms on her way back and, with mock solemnity, placed them in George Boltniev’s lap as she returned to her seat.

  There had been no advertising for the Graham crusades. Nonetheless, the news spread as Christians on foot and on bicycles relayed information by word of mouth. Eight hundred people attended the service that afternoon, standing stolidly in a chilly wind and listening intently to the message. Each face, Ruth observed at the time, was a sermon in itself, especially the older faces on which seemed to be etched centuries of suffering. Billy asked those who wanted to commit their lives to Christ to raise their hands. One-third of the audience did.

  After the closing prayer a distinct click-click-click-click rippled through the audience.

  “What was all that tongue cluck
ing?” Billy asked Ruth later, when they were back in their hotel room. “Did I say something that offended them?”

  “No, you nut,” she said, laughing. “Those were tape recorders being switched off.”

  Late that day as dusk fell and pockets of fog scudded over the bus’s windshield, the small caravan headed toward Treblinka, a concentration camp where more than half a million Jews had been exterminated during World War II. Billy had an appointment there with a West German film crew.

  “Doesn’t it seem ironic,” Ruth asked an Associated Press reporter, “that it should be a German film crew that had insisted on Bill’s coming to this particular extermination camp?”

  “Some elements of the liberal German press,” the man replied, “are doing all they can to keep the memory of these extermination camps fresh in people’s minds and to play them up whenever possible.”

  “That,” Ruth wrote at the time, “made me do some thinking. These places should never be forgotten, nor the horrors committed there. But, at the same time, I wonder if they could be used as a sort of diversionary tactic to keep our attention off what is happening in the world today.”

  The morning of October 10, a rosy mist veiled the old city of Poznan, and loud crows peppered the sky as the Grahams and team members boarded the buses for Wroclaw. It was the harvest season for sugar beets and potatoes, and they passed carts heavily laden and fishtailing behind straining horses. Ruth had awakened that morning exhausted, sick with a cold and looking it. Harold Lindsell, who since his Wheaton days had edited the Lindsell and Harper Study Bibles, was traveling with the BGEA on this trip. He studied his former girlfriend closely.

  “Ruth, I have a confession to make,” he remarked. “I have been praying for Bill on this trip, but as I sit here looking at you I realize it’s you I need to pray for.”

  “Thank you, Harold,” she replied. “It’s all right to tell a woman you’re praying for her but you don’t have to say she looks like she needs it.”

  On the Grahams’ first day in Poland they had attended a workers’ luncheon at the headquarters of the Polish Ecumenical Council where the heads of different churches rose to make lengthy extemporaneous speeches. Each expressed the same concern: a very real and deep fear of World War III.

  “When the United States dropped the atomic bomb,” one man said, “they looked for a flat place where it could do the most harm. Poland is a flat place.”

  “One could not but have deep sympathy for these who have suffered so much in the past and have a very real fear of going through it all again,” Ruth wrote at the time.

  On Thursday, October 12, she was granted a gut-wrenching view of the symbols of their pain in the grisly archive of Auschwitz. The bus turned off a main road onto a circuitous dirt lane and deposited the group in a parking lot packed with tour buses. Beyond were railroad tracks, a depot, and a simple archway with the German words for “Work Liberates” in wrought-iron letters. Inside were the red brick barracks built decades ago by the people who later died there.

  Their tour began with original films of the prisoners’ arrival, grainy, ghostly, and soundless save for the steady clicking of the reels. Darkly clad figures with pale faces pinched with pain, hollow-eyed men and women clutched their bags and filed into the camp. Some leaned on friends, others held babies. Suitcases, many bound in rope, were painstakingly marked with former addresses. They were merely relocating, they had been told. One day they would be reunited with their belongings, with their families and friends. The men who had invaded their homes weeks earlier had emphasized the importance of clearly marking the bags.

  Nazis, mouthing silent commands and gesturing mechanically on film, separated men from women. They hurried each line into the bleak, barren showers and ordered the prisoners to disrobe. After their ablutions, they were told, they would find fresh outfits awaiting them, new clothes for their trips to their new locations. Naked and naive, they herded beneath the nozzles that were connected to poison gas lines.

  Within an hour, all were dead, their bodies carried on conveyor belts to the next floor. Hair was shaved for mattress and furniture stuffing. Some would be woven into cloth. Gold fillings were extracted from teeth. Bodies, unadorned and pillaged, were again loaded on conveyor belts and fed into raging crematorium ovens. There and in the distance, the black smoke billowed from stacks, signaling the darkest evil of the human heart.

  Chilled and shaken, the Grahams were shown three bolts of the human-hair cloth, rough like homespun wool. They were taken to a cell where some prisoners awaiting death had been detained. On one of the walls, preserved behind a glass plate, was the outline of Christ’s head that a prisoner had etched with a thumbnail. Billy and Ruth moved past expansive glass showcases filled with clothing, shoes in adult and child sizes, eyeglasses, the carefully addressed suitcases, photographs, and hair, now bleached and gray with age.

  In a courtyard where prisoners had been lined up in front of a brick wall and shot, Billy placed a wreath before the wall, his throat tight with emotion, his wife beside him. Together they knelt in soil that had once been so soaked with blood that the Germans had tried to replace it bucket by bucket before the Allies arrived. The couple prayed silently, while camera shutters clicked around them, eerily sounding like the cocking of guns. Ruth rose, queasy and in a cold sweat.

  Later that day Ruth visited a home in Krakow run by the Catholic Order of Caritas for children with speech defects. On the second floor, children sat around small tables in a sun-washed room. When Ruth appeared at the door, they jumped to their feet.

  “Good day!” they said in unison.

  Ruth smiled as she seated herself. Through an interpreter, she asked the children if they would like to hear a story. They eagerly gathered around her feet, gazing up with wide eyes.

  “A little boy and girl had gone to the country to visit their grandmother,” she began. “The first day they were there the little boy was throwing some rocks and accidentally hit his grandmother’s pet duck, killing it. He looked all around to see if anyone was watching. He saw no one. So he quickly buried the duck.

  “That night after supper when the grandmother suggested he and his sister clear the table and wash the dishes, his sister said, ‘I don’t feel like washing the dishes but my brother would love to.’

  “Angrily the little boy whispered, ‘What do you mean you won’t wash the dishes but I would love to?’

  “Whereupon the sister whispered in his ear, ‘I saw what happened with the duck. I was looking out the window. If you don’t do what I say, I will tell Grandmother.’

  “So the little boy had to clear the table and wash the dishes. The next morning when the grandmother called them to breakfast, the same thing happened again and the little boy found himself doing the dishes while his sister played.

  “At lunchtime, the grandmother called them to come in and set the table and help with lunch. Again, the little girl said she didn’t want to but that she knew her brother would love to. When he started to object she whispered, ‘Remember the duck.’

  “At dinnertime it was the same way. This went on for several days, and his vacation was being ruined. Finally he went to his grandmother and told her exactly what had happened and how sorry he was for it. She listened to him kindly, then with a smile she said, ‘I was wondering how long it would take you to tell me. You see, I was looking out the kitchen window and saw just what happened. I was wondering how long you were going to let your sister make your life miserable for you. Now that you have told me what happened and how sorry you are, of course I forgive you!’

  “God,” Ruth told the children, “sees everything we’ve ever done and He’s willing to forgive. But we must confess to Him.”

  21

  CHAPTER

  Return to China

  NIXON WOULD LATER OPEN DOOR TO CHINA

  Beyond those hills

  lie yesterday

  the silenced now

  and a tomorrow.

  The clouds

&n
bsp; that wrap those hills

  like shrouds

  are free to come and go

  at will:

  no guns can frighten them away

  nor stop the moon

  and stars, nor say

  the sun must shine.

  No manifesto tells the rain

  where it must fall,

  how much

  and when …

  —Ruth Bell Graham, 19731

  June 8, 1973, a Friday afternoon, was cool and clean like glass. Ruth sat in a restaurant on a rise above the Hong Kong harbor, staring hypnotically out the window. The charred hull of the Queen Elizabeth lay on its side like a dead whale, dwarfing scores of multicolored boats quietly rocking nearby. The former luxury liner had burned and sunk the year before. Why no one hauled it away, she didn’t know.

  She could see Deep Bay bridging mainland China and the Portuguese province of Macao. Thousands of Chinese had swum across its waters to freedom since 1949, or died in the attempt. Far beyond, the mountains of China’s Guangdong province formed a chalky blue smudge across the bright sky. It was the closest she had been to the land of her birth since she had sailed from Qingdao thirty-six years earlier.

  The month before, she and her husband had traveled to the Orient where he was to hold several crusades. The sights and sounds stirred her, dislodging memories of her childhood and creating a yearning that overpowered her one night in a room in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. She lay awake until dawn, the thought of returning to China possessing her.

  The next day she placed telephone calls, then drafted a letter to the Chinese Travel Service in Beijing, requesting permission to visit Tsingkiang, or Qingjiang, as it was now spelled. In part, she was just as afraid of being told yes as she was of hearing no.

  Two weeks had passed since then, and now she sat in this Hong Kong restaurant surveying the Kowloon peninsula and listening to two Australian tourists sitting behind her argue about whether the body of water below them was Pearl Harbor. She had heard no reply to her request to return to her birthplace. The desire began to fade. It is too far to go back, she decided at the time.