If bad behaviour did come to light, a mumbled apology to the men in the church—only the men had the power to dole out God’s forgiveness—would bring them back into the good graces of community leaders. I was taken aback by the pervasiveness of it, and by the sinister raping of women so naive and sheltered that they were taught by their mothers to accept this as part of being a woman.
“It keeps happening because there is no punishment for it,” Lisa said. “If the punishment were the same as it is off the colony, as it is out in the world, where they’d go to jail, it wouldn’t happen so much. But here they don’t even always get banned by the church, and that’s the worst that could happen. They pay something, or they talk to the preacher, and everything is okay. And then there is the silence. The women, even though they know what has happened and that it is wrong, they’re terrified to talk about it, because these things are not talked about. Even the words themselves, for sexual organs or acts, they can’t even say them to me.”
The men said the women were filling their heads with silly thoughts, expressing their own devious sexual fantasies. Or maybe the men were telling stories to cover up their nighttime dalliances. And anyway, sex was not a topic to be discussed publicly, outside the family home. So be quiet. Ignore it, and it will go away.
But it didn’t go away.
Manitoba Colony’s flat fields and pastures were divided into a regular grid of dirt roads. The ditches on either side had been torn up by the steel wheels of tractors, which drove in the ditches to save the roads for the horse-drawn carts.
Every kilometre or so a driveway led to a small farm with a modest house and a few outbuildings. Gardens held straight rows of green vegetables that varied in shade like paint samples. Women were bent over the rows, hoeing, picking, planting. Instead of recorded music or the cacophony of mechanization they lived amid the lowing of animals, the clank of dishes inside a house, the creak of a passing horse-drawn carriage. The land here was so rich that farmers could raise crops without the use of artificial fertilizers. Manitoba Colony was thriving, with 2,000 babies born every year.
There was a steady trickle of traffic on the roads. Women driving single-horse buggies averted their eyes as I passed them on my motorcycle. The children stared at me, open-mouthed. I waved and shouted hello at everyone I met, but only the men responded. They drove rougher, unpainted work wagons pulled by two horses. Some of them drove tractors, making their jolting way through the ditches on steel wheels that had spade-like paddles for traction. The men grinned at me, and if they were with friends they’d burst into laughter, sharing a joke about this stranger who drove through their quiet land.
I put myself in their place, on the narrow buggy bench, forward view blocked by a giant horse’s ass, or on a tractor shuddering along on soul-saving steel wheels. In a long dark dress or forced to wear the hot, constrictive schlaub’betjse. Before them was a man, wet and muddy up to his knees from bucking his motorcycle through the squelchy roads. Black motorcycle with a huge black bag slung across the back of the seat, black riding clothes, black boots, black helmet with dark glasses covering his eyes. And strangest of all, the man spoke to them in Plautdietsch. Weltmensch, those from the outside, they didn’t speak Plautdietsch.
My great-grandfather Johann probably knew their great-grandfathers. They shared the escape from Russia to the New World, but then their paths took different directions in the Canadian Prairies. These Mennonites went south, trying life in Mexico, Paraguay, and other lands in between before planting their wheat here. I knew all this about them even though they remained silent, just as they were taught.
I found Abram Wall, one of the colony leaders who had helped push the rape case through the courts, on his farm. He was a successful Old Colony farmer and business owner with nine children. He lived in a comfortable, airy home, his barns and sheds were large and well-built, and the modern machinery parked inside was fuelled and ready for planting season.
He invited me into his home, and we sat in rattan rocking chairs on the veranda, a wall of greenery and flowers around us. He rocked to and fro, his arms set stiffly on the armrests. He was tall and wiry, with stick-out ears and a nose with a flattened end.
Abram’s eyes lit up when I told him I lived in Hong Kong. He and several other Mennonite men had recently gone to China to buy agricultural chemicals, solar panels, and a deep freezer for his wife. They had spent three weeks holed up in their Shanghai hotel, venturing forth to visit factories and then retreating to their rooms. He had previously travelled throughout the Americas, and that had always been pleasurable, but not China. They had seen little or done little other than strike the necessary business deals. “We ate at McDonald’s a lot,” Abram said. “The food there, it’s always small bits, never a good big piece of meat. And there were too many people. I don’t understand how a Mennonite could live in a place like that, but I guess a person can become accustomed to anything if they are forced to.”
But I hadn’t come calling to ask Abram about his travels. I told him David had suggested I speak to him about the case that had put his colony in newspapers around the globe. He cleared his throat, paused for a moment, and then spoke.
“We heard complaints of things that were happening. Then a boy was arrested and interrogated about what was happening, and he said exactly what they had been doing, and with whom. So they drove to those boys’ homes to ask them, and they said the same thing as the first boy, which places they’d visited, what they had all done, and with whom.”
Boys. The accused were grown men, most with families of their own. Abram also avoided using any words that might suggest he was talking about a sexual act, the most common euphemism being that the women were “used.” Not raped. No one said rape, and so neither did I. The boys had “done things” to the women and children, there had been “trouble” in a home. I only learned the Plautdietsch word for rape, vejewaultje, with force, later, when I looked it up in the dictionary. So I adopted the euphemisms I heard everyone else use. Lies are sneaky like that.
“All of us Mennonites are very sorry it happened,” Abram said. “But if this has indeed happened, to keep it quiet would be very bad as well. The saddest part is that it happened. That’s the way it is.”
Abram looked down at his lap, pain showing in the slump of his shoulders. His large hands were wrapped over the ends of the armrests, hanging on for strength.
“When we questioned them, they described the houses, the people that were in them. The boys said exactly which farms they went to, which houses, and then inside the house, they could tell us how the beds were placed in the room, and which bed the fat girl was in, the skinny girl, which rooms the children were in, everything.”
Abram said the stories had started changing once the vigilantes had taken the accused to the police. Then they began denying everything they’d told the colony leaders and the story became muddled, like it was now.
“Of course the story changed, because you got their confessions out of them by torturing them,” I said. I suspected Abram was trying to elicit my sympathy. It wasn’t working.
“I wasn’t there when they were questioned, but they said that no one has tortured them, no one laid a hand on them, no hitting,” he said. His voice rose an octave and he gripped the armrests of the rocker even tighter. “They were interrogated, but no one tortured them. They made all of that up.”
Later, I’d learn that there was a dead body to prove Abram was lying. But I didn’t know that as I watched his face pucker with emotion.
Abram regretted the bad reputation this was giving Bolivia’s Mennonite colonies, but he denied there was a larger problem of incest in the community. No one he knew did that. It was all just talk.
“We brought a lot of women to the doctors in the city. But then there were a lot of children we were wondering about, underage girls, so we brought the doctors from the city here, to the colony. The doctors could say exactly whi
ch ones had been used, and which ones not. It was over one hundred, in total.”
Abram rocked back and forth and looked me straight in the eye. I waited for him to continue, but he said nothing. He gave his head a little tilt, shrugged as if to say, “What’s done is done.”
Over one hundred young women were raped, but there were no pregnancies. Abram said the rapists had used condoms. I found that hard to believe because sexual education was non-existent and birth control was frowned on as an interference with God’s will. Abram shrugged his shoulders.
“No, thankfully there were no pregnancies that I’m aware of.”
I asked him if he could introduce me to some of the women. Abram shook his head.
“They are tired of talking about it, too ashamed. We had all kinds of reporters here when the court case was on, it was very bad for the colony. I can tell you everything you need to know,” he said.
“So how could they do this? Why did no one wake up? How did it take so long for everyone to find out about this?”
“They had a spray,” Abram said, raising his hand and wiggling his index finger, as if operating a spray bottle.
While Abram didn’t believe anything else the accused had said, he did believe the story of a magic spray, told during interrogation. No one had actually found any samples of the spray.
“I haven’t seen the spray. They just said themselves that they used such a spray. People also said they had sensed something. Some said that after those nights they woke up with a big headache and they could feel it in their heads that they hadn’t had a good night or had had a different kind of sleep than usual.”
“It all sounds so unbelievable. Like something someone made up,” I said.
“If we wanted to make up a story there are a lot of stories that are easier and better to make up than this one,” Abram shot back.
“The main proof was that children woke up and were bleeding in the morning. And that the boys were seen. The women are almost positive they saw them, although they can’t be totally clear because they were sleeping. But they were certain enough. One little girl even woke up and saw someone there, beside the bed, and then he hid under the bed. She went and looked under the bed and”—Abram made a snakelike motion with his hand—“he slipped out the door.”
Abram’s yard was ripe and green in the warm sun that blazed beyond the shade of the veranda. I could hear someone working inside the house, the occasional enquiring voices of children. A cock crowed somewhere beyond the bushes. It was cool and peaceful in the shade.
“It’s hard to believe that here, in this place, among Mennonites, that this kind of stuff can happen,” I said.
“It will never be quiet and tranquil again,” Abram said. “A lot has happened, and no one will come back 100 percent to where they were before.”
“There are many people who wonder who is telling the truth,” I said. “I’m guessing that when I go see the men in prison, they’ll say you’re lying. But who is telling the truth?”
“People that do those kinds of things don’t care about the truth. The truth has no worth to them, and they are willing to lie. It has nothing to do with money, with the poor or the rich. It’s only related to what they did. If rich people had done what they did they’d be sitting where these boys are sitting now. They deserve to be in jail.”
CHAPTER 13
Bolivia
Palmasola Prison
My taxi came to a halt in the middle of a large mud puddle. Above me towered a red-brick wall with a green gate. And over the gate, a sign in bold white lettering:
CENTRO DE REHABILITACION
SANTA CRUZ—PALMASOLA
About thirty people were crowded in front of the gate, and they all turned to look at me as I got out of my taxi. Women on the left, men on the right. Tired women with whimpering children clinging to their skirts. There were also women dressed in miniskirts and jeans so tight that I sucked in my own belly in empathy. One wore a scarlet top that showed off a smooth brown midriff and dizzying cleavage. She caught me looking at her and winked at me. The gate opened a crack and a guard poked his head outside. The women surged forward, shouting, petitioning. The guard stared at them for a moment, glanced at me, expressionless, and then pulled his head back and closed the steel gate with a decisive clang.
The waiting men looked much less exotic, less purposeful, than the women. They leaned against the wall, hands deep in their pockets, hats pulled low over their eyes. Many had bundles, tied up in ragged plastic bags, at their feet. The bags contained fruit, soft drinks, and loaves of bread. My own hands were empty, and I regretted not bringing something to offer to those inside.
I gave a small nod of greeting to the men who took notice of me and was about to join the back of the queue when a young man with spiky gelled hair waved me over to his spot near the front.
“You American?”
“No, I’m Canadian.”
“Is this your first time here?”
I nodded. He laughed.
“Ya, I could see that. My name is Eric. Stay with me, I’ll show you what to do,” he said. I was relieved and happy to comply.
Eric was there to visit a man whom he alternately described as a cousin and his sister’s boyfriend. I asked him what his cousin had done to land him in prison.
“You know…children,” Eric said, wincing and shrugging his shoulders to emphasize the delicacy of the matter. “Doing bad things to children.”
What? Another pedophile? Was rape really that common here? I looked at Eric, unsure how to react. Should I show sympathy that his sister’s boyfriend was despicable? Disgust? And then I realized I hadn’t considered how I’d react to the Mennonites accused of rape. Should I express my disapproval? Eric interrupted my anxious thoughts.
“And you? Who are you here to see?”
“The Mennonites,” I said.
“Menna—who?” Eric asked, looking confused.
“You know, Mennonitas. The gringos. There are eight of them.”
“Ahh yeah,” he said. “Are they your relatives or…?”
“No,” I said, cutting him off. I shook my head vigorously to make sure he understood. This was not one of those times when I wanted to be recognized as a Mennonite. “I’m just here to meet them. To interview them.”
After half an hour of watching a slow trickle of visitors enter the prison gates it was our turn. Immediately after stepping through the gates we were confronted by a guard who made us stand spread-eagled and patted us down. We were pushed through a narrow door into a small shed. Inside, in the stifling heat, sat another guard with dark circles under the arms of his tan uniform. Eric instructed me to slip ten bolivianos into my passport and hand both to the guard. The guard deftly separated them, slipping the crumpled money under his ledger before he recorded my details in clumsy handwriting. Then he scribbled X 51 34 on the inside of my forearm in blue ink, mixed up with what looked like a smudged postage frank. I felt like a steer being led to slaughter.
We walked across the large outer yard of the prison. It was a no man’s land of mosquito-breeding puddles and heaps of fetid rubbish. A herd of unbridled horses grazed at the patchy grass. Their coats shone in the sunshine, manes thick and untrimmed. They looked like they had stepped out of a poster on a teenage girl’s bedroom wall. Live free, like the wind.
At the inner wall yet another guard took my passport. He scribbled more letters on the inside of my forearm, which was now covered in multicoloured stamps and squiggles that formed some kind of code of visitor registration. I was patted down once more and then pushed towards the gate, which was crowded with men shouting greetings to the incoming visitors.
This wasn’t my first time in a prison. The first time—the only other time—was more than thirty years ago. All that remains of the memory is the clanging of steel doors, a fluorescent-lit room of shining linoleum, and the desire to
stay close to my father’s side. We were in Stony Mountain, a federal penitentiary not far from our home, there to visit prisoners as part of a church-organized outreach program.
Dad had been assigned to Andre Gilderbloom, a man I remember as lean, with dark stubble and slicked-back hair. Andre served a long sentence for armed robbery, and when he was paroled and in a halfway house Dad invited him to join us for Christmas. A whole weekend with a violent convict in our house! A real weltmensch! How exotic, we thought. Andre arrived—smelling of tobacco and aftershave and wearing a tan leather jacket—with a handcrafted gift: a miniature fireplace, complete with stone masonry, a wooden mantel, and a small light bulb instead of a fire. We sat down at the dinner table and began passing the dishes around, but soon there was an awkward silence. Andre was pocketing every serving spoon and fork before passing the dishes on to my brothers and sisters. When he saw that we saw—we were curious and surprised but too polite to say anything—he laughed.
“Oh, sorry! I’m so used to being in prison, where you grab anything you can get your hands on because you never know when you’ll need it.”
He stuck the spoon back into the mashed potatoes and retrieved a fork from inside his jacket and returned it to the sliced ham. It was probably a ruse he put on for our entertainment, but he’d just secured his legend with the Dueck children.
Years later my father would reminisce about his visits to Stony Mountain and pull his old visitor identity card out of his wallet to show to people. “Ya, I’ve got proof that I’ve done my time,” he’d joke, holding his thumb over the word Visitor. Everyone would laugh. Good joke. Of course he hadn’t been to prison, he was a good Mennonite.
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