by Miriam Toews
Shortly after that camping incident and after Elf had gone around town with her red paint, making her mark, the bishop (the alpha Mennonite) came to our house for what he liked to call a visit. Sometimes he referred to himself as a cowboy and these encounters as “mending fences.” But in reality it was more of a raid. He showed up on a Saturday in a convoy with his usual posse of elders, each in his own black, hard-topped car (they never carpool because it’s not as effective in creating terror when thirteen or fourteen similarly dressed men tumble out of one car) and my father and I watched from the window as they parked in front of our house and got out of their cars and walked slowly towards us, one behind the other, like a tired conga line. My mother was in the kitchen washing dishes. She knew they were coming but was intentionally ignoring them, passing off their “visit” as a minor inconvenience that wouldn’t interfere too much with her day. (It was the same bishop who had reprimanded my mother for wearing a wedding dress that was too full and billowy at the bottom. How am I to interpret this excess? he’d asked her.) My sister was somewhere in the house, probably working on her Black Panther look or re-piercing her ears with a potato and rubbing alcohol or staring down demons.
My father went to the door and ushered the men into our home. They all sat down in the living room and looked at the floor or occasionally at each other. My father stood alone with panicky eyes in the middle of the room, surrounded, like the sole remaining survivor of a strange game of dodge ball. My mother should have come out of the kitchen immediately, all bustle and warmth, and offered the men coffee or tea and some type of elaborate homemade pastry culled from The Mennonite Treasury cookbook, but instead she remained where she was, clanking dishes, whistling with a forced nonchalance, leaving my father to fight alone. They had argued about this before. Jake, she’d said, when they come here tell them it’s not a convenient time. They have no right to march into our home willy-nilly. He said he couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it. So my mother had offered to do it and he had begged her not to until she agreed but said she wouldn’t bounce around waiting on them hand and foot while they laid out plans for her family’s crucifixion. This particular visit was about Elf planning to go to university to study music. She was only fifteen but the authorities had heard from a local snitch that Elf had “expressed an indiscreet longing to leave the community” and they were apoplectically suspicious of higher learning—especially for girls. Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book.
She’ll get ideas, said one of them to my father in our living room, to which he had no response but to nod in agreement and look longingly towards the kitchen where my mother was staked out snapping her dishtowel at houseflies and pounding baby veal into schnitzel. I sat silently beside my father on the itchy davenport absorbing their “perfume of contempt” as my mother described it. I heard my mother call my name. I went into the kitchen and found her sitting on the counter, swinging her legs and chugging apple juice straight from the plastic jug. Where’s Elf? she asked me. I shrugged. How should I know? I hopped up on the counter next to her and she passed me the jug of apple juice. We heard murmuring from the living room, a combination of English and Plautdietsch, the vaguely Dutch sounding and unwritten medieval language spoken by all the old people in East Village. (I’m called “Jacob Von Riesen’s Yolandi” in Plautdietsch and when my mother introduces herself in Plautdietsch she says “I am of Jacob Von Riesen.”) Then after a minute or two had passed we heard the opening chords of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor, Opus 23. Elf was in the spare bedroom next to the front door where the piano was, where her life mostly took place in those days. The men stopped talking. The music got louder. It was Elf’s favourite piece, the soundtrack to her secret revolution perhaps. She’d been working on it for two years non-stop with a teacher from the conservatory in Winnipeg who drove to our house twice a week to give her lessons and my parents and I were familiar with every one of its nuances, its agony, its ecstasy, its total respect for the importance of the chaotic ramblings of an interior monologue. Elf had described it to us. Pianos weren’t even allowed in our town technically, too reminiscent of saloons and speakeasies and unbridled joy, but my parents snuck it into the house anyway because a doctor in the city had suggested that Elf be given a “creative outlet” for her energies to prevent her from becoming “wild” and that word had sinister implications. Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance. After a few years of having a secret piano, hastily covered with sheets and gunny sacks when the elders came to visit, my parents grew to love Elf’s playing and even made occasional requests along the way, like “Moon River” and “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” Eventually the elders did find out that we were harbouring a piano in our house and there was a long discussion about it, of course, and some talk of a three-month or six-month excommunication for my father who offered to take it like a man but when he appeared to go down so willingly they decided to let it go (meting out punishment isn’t fun when the victim asks for it) as long as my parents oversaw that Elf was using the piano only as an instrument for the Lord.
My mother began to hum along, her body began to sway. The men in the living room remained silent, as though they were being reprimanded. Elf played louder, then quieter, then louder again. The birds stopped singing and the flies in the kitchen stopped slamming up against the windows. The air was still. She was at the centre of the spinning world. This was the moment Elf took control of her life. It was her debut as an adult woman and, although we didn’t know it at the time, her debut also as a world-class pianist. I like to think that in that moment it became clear to the men in the living room that she wouldn’t be able to stay, not after the expression of so much passion and tumult, and furthermore that to hold her there she would have to be burned at the stake or buried alive. It was the moment Elf left us. And it was the moment my father lost everything all at once: approval from the elders, his authority as head of the household, and his daughter, who was now free and therefore dangerous.
The opus came to an end and we heard the piano top slam shut over the keys and the piano bench scrape the linoleum floor in the spare bedroom. Elf came into the kitchen and I passed her the jug of apple juice and she drank it all, finished it off and chucked the container into the garbage can. She punched a fist into her palm and said finally nailed it. We three stood in the kitchen while the men in suits filed out of our house in the order they had filed in and we heard the front door close softly and the men’s car engines start and the cars pull away from the curb and disappear. We waited for my father to join us in the kitchen but he had gone to his study. I’m still not sure whether or not Elf knew that the men were in the living room or even that the bishop and the elders had paid us a visit at all, or if it was just a coincidence that she chose that exact time to play the Rachmaninoff piece to fierce perfection.
But shortly after the visit from the bishop and his men Elf made a painting and put it in an old frame she’d found in the basement. She hung it in the middle of our living room wall right above the scratchy couch. It was a quote. It read:
“I know of a certainty, that a proud, haughty, avaricious, selfish, unchaste, lecherous, wrangling, envious, disobedient, idolatrous, false, lying, unfaithful, thievish, defaming, backbiting, blood-thirsty, unmerciful and revengeful man, whosoever he may be, is no Christian, even if he was baptized one hundred times and attended the Lord’s Supper daily.”
—Menno Simons.
Okay, but Elfie? said my mom.
No, said Elfie. It’s staying right there. It’s the words of Menno Simons! Aren’t we supposed to be following them?
Elfie’s new artwork hung in our living room for about a week until my father asked her: Well, kiddo, have you made your point? I’d really love to put mom’s embroidered steamship back in that spot. And by then her righteous indignation had blown over like so many of her wild personal storms.
TWO
ELFRIEDA DOESN’T DO INTERVIEWS. One tim
e she let me interview her for my cheesy class newspaper but that’s it. I was eleven and she was leaving home again, this time for good. She was on her way to Norway for a recital and to study with an old man she referred to as the Wizard of Oslo. She was seventeen. She’d finished high school early, at Christmas. She’d got honours everything and six scholarships to study the piano and a prize from the Governor General of Canada for highest marks which sent the elders into paroxysms of rage and fear. One day at dinner, a few weeks before she was due to leave, Elf casually mentioned that while she was in Europe she might as well go to Russia to explore her roots and my father almost stopped breathing. You will not! he said. Yeah, I might, said Elf. Why not?
My grandparents originally came from a tiny Mennonite village in Siberia in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution. Terrible things happened to them there in the land of blood. Any hint of the place, the slightest mention of anything Russian, and my parents would start clawing the air.
Plautdietsch was the language of shame. Mennonites had learned to remain silent, to shoulder their pain. My grandfather’s parents were murdered in a field beside their barn but their son, my father’s father, survived by burying himself in a pile of manure. Then, a few days later, he was put in a cattle car and taken with thousands of other Mennonites to Moscow and from there sent off to Canada. When Elf was born, he told my parents: Don’t teach your kids Plautdietsch if you want them to survive. When my mother went to university to become a therapist she learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big green eyes, and dimly lit scenes of slaughter, blood on snow, played out behind them all the time, even when he smiled.
Absurdities and lies, Yoli, said my mother. The worst thing you can do in life is be a bully.
My interview happened in the car on the way to the airport in Winnipeg. As usual, our parents were in the front seat, my dad was driving, and Elf and I were in the back. You’re never coming back, are you? I whispered to her. She told me that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. We looked at fields and snow. She was wearing her white leather choker with the blue bead and an army jacket. We were driving over black ice.
Is that your question for the interview? she asked me.
Yeah, I said.
Yoli, she said. You should have prepared other questions.
Okay, I said, what’s so hot about playing the piano?
She told me that the most important thing was to establish the tenderness right off the bat, or at least close to the top of the piece, just a hint of it, a whisper, but a deep whisper because the tension will mount, the excitement and the drama will build—I was writing it down as fast as I could—and when the action rises the audience might remember the earlier moment of tenderness, and remembering will make them long to return to infancy, to safety, to pure love, then you might move away from that, put the violence and agony of life into every note, building, building still, until there is an important decision to make: return to tenderness, even briefly, glancingly, or continue on with the truth, the violence, the pain, the tragedy, to the very end.
Okay, I said, that should do it, well thanks for sort of answering my question, Weirdo.
Both choices are valid, she said. It depends where you want to leave your audience, happy and content, innocent again, like babies, or wild and restless and yearning for something they’ve barely known. Both are good.
Got it, thanks, I said. Who’s gonna be your page-turner now? Some Norwegian?
She took a book out of her army backpack—she was into military-issued everything like Patty Hearst and Che Guevara—and chucked it into my lap. When you’re finished with that horse series, she said, your real life starts here. She tapped the book with her finger. She was referring to my obsession with The Black Stallion. Also, I had recently started horseback-riding lessons with my friend Julie and was on my way to becoming third-best barrel racer in the provincial Under Thirteen category, which contained only three members.
In a way I’m relieved that you’re going to Oslo, I said.
It was either that or hitchhike barefoot to the west coast, she said.
The roads are icy, said my father. See that semi in the ditch? He wanted to change the subject. Elf’s hitchhiking plan was a crazy idea he had buried. My mother had laughed and said hitchhiking barefoot to the west coast is a reasonable idea, maybe, but not in January. She didn’t believe in burying anything.
What is this? I was looking at the book Elf had given me.
Oh my god, Yolandi, she said. When you see the words “collected poems” on the cover of a book what do you think is inside the book?
Can you drive any faster? I asked my father. We don’t want her to miss her plane. I was trying to act tough but I truly believed that I might die from heartbreak when my sister went away, to the extent that I had written a secret will, bequeathing my skateboard to Julie and my lifeless body to Elf, which I hoped would make her feel really guilty for leaving me to die alone. I had nothing else but my skateboard and my body to give to people but I attached a note of gratitude to my parents and a drawing of a motorcycle with the New Hampshire state motto: Live Free or Die.
And by the way, I said, I’m not reading those horse books anymore.
What are you reading then? my sister asked.
Adorno, I said.
She laughed. Oh, because you saw that I’m reading him? she asked.
Don’t say “reading him,” I said. You think you’re so big.
Yoli, said Elf, don’t say “you think you’re so big.” That’s what everyone around here says when somebody purports to know about something. I could say tomorrow is Thursday and you’d say “oh, you think you’re so big.” Don’t say it anymore. It’s déclassé.
Our mother said, Elf, c’mon, enough advice on how to live like a dilettante. You’ll be gone soon. We should be using this precious time to have fun! Elf sank back and explained that she was just trying to help me survive the world outside our hamlet. And also, she added, dilettante is the exact wrong word for you to have used in this situation. Okay, Elf, said my mom, but let’s just speak English or sing or something like that. She’d had fifteen brothers and sisters so she knew about keeping the peace. Our father suggested we play I Spy.
Oh my god, Elf whispered into my ear. Are we six? Don’t ever tell them I’ve had three different types of sex already, okay?
What do you mean, three?
Elf told me that after the poet Shelley drowned, his body was cremated right there on the beach but his heart didn’t burn so his wife Mary kept it in a small silk bag in her desk. I asked her if it wouldn’t have rotted and begun to smell but she said no, it had calcified, like a skull, and that really it was only the remains of his heart. I told her that I would do that for her too, keep her heart with me in my desk or in my gym bag or my pencil case, somewhere very safe, and she hugged me and laughed and told me I was sweet but that really it was a romantic thing for lovers to do.
Before she disappeared behind the frosted glass doors of airport security Elf and I had played one last game of Concentration and in the midst of all that leg slapping and hand clapping she said, Swivelhead (that was her nickname for me because I was very often looking around for solid clues to what was going on and never finding them) you better write me letters. I said yeah, I will, but they’ll be boring. Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life. Well, I said, I’ll try. No, Yoli, said Elf, better than that. She yanked on my arms. Please. You have to. I’m counting on you.
They were calling her flight and she released her grip, she was pulling away from me. Our parents stood stricken but acting brave, smiling big and dabbing at their eyes with tissues. So I said, I will, okay? Take a chill pill. All right, said Elf, I’m outta here … Also, don’t say “chill pill.” Adieu, Arrividerci! I know she was crying but she turned her head away a
t the very last second so I wouldn’t notice and I thought I should include that in a letter to her under Observations of Things Meant to be Hidden. On the way home from the airport my mother drove and my father lay in the back seat with his eyes closed. I sat next to my mother in the front. It was snowing. We couldn’t see anything except snowflakes in the headlights and a tiny bit of the road ahead. I thought the snowflakes looked like notes and signatures falling and swirling over the little stave of road we could see in front of us, one measure of music. My mother told me she would tap the brake slightly to see if it was still icy and before I could stop her we had spun out of control and landed upside down in the ditch.
Janice comes into the hospital room to talk with us. We know Janice from the other times. She’s a psych nurse and during her time off she loves to tango because, she says, tango is about the embrace. She wears light pink track suits. She has a small furry stuffed animal chained to her belt loop. It’s supposed to be something that makes the patients relax and smile. She comes into the room and gives Elf a hug and tells her that she’s happy to see her but unhappy to see her here. Again.
I know, I know, says Elf. I’m sorry. She rakes her fingers through her hair and sighs.
My cellphone buzzes and I reach into my bag to turn it off.
Hey, says Janice. It’s not about being sorry. Right? We don’t say sorry. You haven’t done anything bad or wrong. You’ve acted on a feeling. Right? You wanted to end your suffering. That’s understandable and we want to help you end your suffering in different ways. In healthy ways. Right, Elfrieda? Constructive ways? We’ll start again. She sits down on one of the orange chairs.