Menno Moto

by Cameron Dueck

  Jacob’s shoulders were slumped forward as he sat on the bed. He looked like a victim. I tried to picture him creeping through the colony in the dark, magic spray in hand, raping women and children. It was a picture that refused to draw itself in my mind. Still…I found myself trying to weigh the facts, the versions, and my head ached with doubt.

  The other men were gathered in Peter’s apartment and Jacob suggested we join them. Peter, who had more money than the others, had a room three times as large as Jacob’s, with its own toilet. The men were lounging on beds and chairs when we entered, and the conversation soon slipped into the comfortable rut of complaint.

  “We’re here because the ones with money and power got scared, because they were afraid people would find out what they were doing. They were the ones who used the women. So this way they can say they’ve fixed the problem,” said Cornelius Thiessen, a ponderous man with dark, lank hair slicked back off a shiny red forehead. He was sweating in a pair of ill-fitting black trousers and a dark, long-sleeved shirt.

  “All those things that they said we confessed to, well, we had to because they tortured us,” Cornelius said. “I was hung by my arms for hours, and my shoulders still give me pain, they’ve never healed. I’m not even sure what I said to them, I just thought I was going to die there.”

  He was lucky not to have died. The men told me how Frank Klassen, a thirty-seven-year-old father of nine children on nearby Belize Colony, was not so lucky. When vigilantes came to his farm to arrest Frank he refused to confess. They strung him up from a tree by his arms and left him to hang for nine hours. Nine hours in the Bolivian sun. By the time they took him down, he was bleeding internally. They brought him to the hospital, where he died five days later. Lynched by his own people.

  “They did the same thing to me, but I survived,” said Cornelius, rubbing his shoulders for effect. He looked uncertain about whether or not he’d gotten the better deal. He had not hung long, the pain was too much, so he had confessed and agreed to everything the vigilantes accused him of. And that was the confession that was used in court and put him in prison.

  “Do you ever wish you hadn’t confessed? If you hadn’t confessed, you might not be here.”

  “Of course,” Cornelius said. “But…there was no other way. I thought I would die. I thought they were going to kill me, they were that angry. I wish I could have stood the pain more, but…”

  I listened, dumbfounded. In my mind, the balance of truth had just tipped in favour of the men. Surely, the fact they were tortured undermined the value of their confessions. But would the colony, and the leaders of the church, really go this far to cover their own tracks?

  Bitter accusations against community leaders served as a temporary salve for the men. Crude allegations embellished through boredom and desperation. Sins that were committed and covered up, sins that the jailed men said they were paying for, instead of the guilty.

  “John Neufeld, he fucked a cow,” Cornelius said, earning a round of snickers from the others. “And he was messing around with other women, Spanish women. Because of that he had a wife to spare so he shared her with others. He was banned from the church for a week, but he confessed and now he is back in the church.” Others chimed in with their own vitriol, stories that had festered and grown over the years, accentuating the injustices the men felt. Confirmations that came from someone who had spoken to someone who had heard something someone had once said to someone. The same rumour mill that had ballooned the rape story beyond credibility was easing their own consciences.

  “One of the leaders accused us of these things until it came out that his son had made his daughter pregnant. The baby died, and after that he wasn’t involved as much.”

  “Another one, a rich one, he owns a big schmiede. He said to someone that all of this was wrong, locking us up, but he was scared to step in because he was scared it would hurt his business if he did.”

  Each accusation was met with a round of nodding heads. It was so, for they had all heard it. Just as their own cases and stories became harder and harder to refute each time the accusations were repeated. No matter how mendacious the propaganda, if repeated often enough it became the accepted truth. They were angry but they also gloated over their victory. They had escaped colony life. The world outside the colony, albeit one behind prison walls, was a lot less intimidating than the preachers had said it would be, and now they knew something the others didn’t. They knew that weltmensch weren’t half the devils that they were made out to be, and that Christian faith was not the exclusive domain of the Old Colony Mennonites.

  But even behind bars, the men were not free of the colony’s clutches.

  “They say someone is watching us, from inside, but I don’t know who. Maybe it’s not true,” Jacob said, fear in his voice.

  “But on the colony, we were taught that the weltmensch are like cattle, that’s it. Just animals. And the preacher would say wearing these clothes makes me lost, that I will go to hell,” Jacob said as he tugged at his short-sleeved shirt. None of the men wore schlaub’betjse any longer. “Now I know that it makes no difference at all, as long as you dress properly, decently, it doesn’t matter what you wear.” “There was always the threat that if we disobeyed, or were caught doing something, or in possession of a phone or a radio, then we’d get locked out of the church. And that meant we’d get locked out of heaven as well. Now we know better, but my family still wears the old-fashioned clothes on the colony to keep peace, for now.”

  “There are so many rules on the colony, about rubber tires, the clothes you wear, listening to the radio, using a phone. You’re so busy following the rules you can’t even think about anything else in life,” Jacob said. “Here, no one bothers us. We just have to make sure we follow the rules and don’t get caught with a phone. You can’t use the phone outside, you have to be in your room when you use it, hiding.”

  “I guess that maybe it’s a little bit like the colony in that way, always up plietch,” he said, joining the others in laughter.

  These men were descendants of Russian Mennonite immigrants to Canada, like me. Their great-grandparents had left Canada and moved south. Some in giant leaps, others in fits and starts of church splits and crop failures. But Canada was still considered a distant motherland for many of them. This had piqued my interest in the case.

  “Are any of you Canadian citizens?” I’d asked. There was a round of head shaking, until I got to Jacob.

  “Ya, I have a Canadian passport because my grandparents came from there, but I’ve never been there. I always knew it was important, that it was worth something but…does that still count?”

  “Have you told the consulate, the Canadian government, that you’re here?”

  Jacob shook his head. “I was scared to tell the Canadian government about all of this. I thought if they knew maybe they would take the passport away.”

  “I don’t think so. I think they’d be interested to know that a Canadian citizen has already been in a Bolivian jail for years. This case, and all of you, were in the papers in the US and Canada. So you should contact them.”

  Jacob looked uncertain. “Well…I wouldn’t know where to start with all of that.”

  Instead, he gave me directions to his farm. “I’ll call my wife and tell her you’re coming. She knows where the papers are, she can show them to you.”

  The sun had sunk low in the sky, casting long shadows across the prison walls.

  “Na yo,” Jacob said as he stood up to walk me to the gate. The soccer game was still underway, but many visitors had already left, and the prison was much quieter than it was during the day. When we reached the gate, Jacob gave a small nod of recognition to the guard.

  “I have to stay here, I can’t go any farther,” he told me with an apologetic smile.

  My mind whirled with the quandary. Each man was utterly convincing in his testimony, passionate in his
claim that his was the true version of a story where the truth was long ago buried under hearsay, superstition, and gossip. They’d gained my pity, even if I didn’t fully believe them. I struggled to believe that Abram Wall and the rest of the colony would have orchestrated all this to protect its most powerful members. Maybe the truth lay somewhere in the middle?

  “Thank you for showing me around, for telling me everything,” I said, shaking Jacob’s hand. His eyes met mine. “Thank you for telling me your version.”

  “It has become more complicated with time, this story,” Jacob said. “You can’t believe everything you hear. Everyone has their side of the story.”

  I walked out into the street, a free man. But my mind was caged by the conflicting stories, by the confusion over what was true and what was false. Which bits were true because they’d happened, and which ones became truth because they were repeated and believed by so many? Was I becoming the latest captive in this suffocating web of doubt and suspicion?

  CHAPTER 14

  Bolivia

  Shunned by the Colony

  Otta was expecting me. Her screen door shrieked as she opened it for me. It had no handle, only a hole in the screen by which to pull it open, made grubby by countless fingers.

  As soon as I entered the house Otta disappeared into the bedroom and reappeared cradling a torn and creased envelope in her hands. She laid the envelope on a scratched Formica tabletop, so old its blue was worn white at the edges.

  I opened the envelope and shook its contents onto the table. A Canadian passport, a Bolivian identity card, and a few photocopied documents. Jacob Wiebe. Green eyes, born 1968, May 12. The same Jacob I had met in Palmasola. In the photos Jacob stared wide-eyed at the camera, the flash glaring off a forehead kept white by his ever-present cap.

  “The passport runs out in February. Does that mean it won’t work anymore?” Otta asked. “We didn’t know what to do with it. I thought, once, that maybe Canada could help, but then I thought, he’s never even been there…”

  I photographed the documents while Otta stood and watched. When I was done, I put them back in the envelope. Neither of us said anything as I did these things, and the silence was uncomfortable. I felt like I was invading, but I only wanted to help. She carried the documents to the bedroom and, as she returned, she stood in the doorway and held the curtain aside to show me. The bed was neatly made up with a yellow patchwork quilt.

  “This is where we slept when he was here. Now we all sleep upstairs. I felt so alone here so I decided to go sleep with the children.” Otta had a severe, drawn face. Her eyes were set in dark hollows. Her hair was pulled back tightly, a black kerchief tucked behind her ears. A dark dress with purple flowers hung loosely on her thin body. Her voice had a hard, persistent edge to it.

  “When the preacher married us, he said that no one should separate us until death. Now they’ve done that very thing,” she said.

  Otta stood before me, defiant but also resigned to the realities she could not change. “So, what do you think the Canadian government will do?”

  “I don’t know. There’s probably not much they can do, but still, it would be good to tell them.”

  I didn’t want to get her hopes up. Her eyes were hungry for answers.

  Otta insisted I eat and waved aside my protests as she pushed me towards a seat. They had already eaten, she said as she set the table. Her twelve-year-old son stood to one side and watched silently. He had completed his schooling and learned what he needed to know to continue in the old Mennonite ways. Whippet-thin with wide beseeching eyes that peered out from underneath a blond fringe, the little lad was now the man of the house.

  “Hello.” I reached out for a handshake. “What’s your name?”

  He stared at me for a moment, then gave me a shy smile and stuck out a narrow hand.

  “Tell him your name,” Otta chided.

  “Gerhardt,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

  The house felt empty, and too quiet. As if it were waiting, holding its breath. The main room held a small gas-powered refrigerator and a few sideboards with chipped dishes. There were wooden benches on two sides of the worn table. Thin curtains were tied back to allow more light in. A boldly branded wall calendar from the Manitoba Colony was the only decoration on the walls. Two small frilly dresses printed with bright flowers, and unlike anything I’d ever seen a colony girl wear, hung on the kitchen wall. I stared at them for a long time, confused as to why Otta would have such dresses, and why she would hang them in the kitchen. Then I realized the dresses weren’t meant for wearing, instead their many pockets bulged with ladles, spatulas, and sauce bottles.

  Otta’s three older sons were unable to get work on Manitoba Colony—perhaps due to the stigma caused by their father, Otta wasn’t sure. They had left the colony and lived in the nearby Mennonite community of Chihuahua—named after the Mennonite capital in Mexico. Her sons gave her some money to pay the bills, and she had sold some of their land to support Jacob in prison.

  I apologized for eating from her scarce resources.

  “Nah!” she scoffed. “We’re poor but there’s still leftovers. This is nothing special I have for you.”

  She set the table with reheated beans, cold egg noodles, slices of canned meat, pickled vegetables, home-baked bread, and a cup of powdered drink mix. She continued to talk as she set the table.

  “Ya, well. It was a Sunday, June 21. This was back in 2009, of course. They came on the yard, a big group of men, at four in the morning, and asked my man if he wanted to come along and see the boys that had been arrested. They were being held in the cheese factory. That’s all they said.

  “At first I got up when they came on the yard, and then my man got up, still in his nightclothes, and he told them, ‘Let me get dressed first.’ When he came into the house to get dressed he told me, ‘Maybe you should go to church with the children on your own, I’m not sure if I’ll be back in time.’ This was the first we’d heard of this whole story, when they came to our house. So I went off to church, happily, with no worries. I came home, made lunch, and he was still not home, so I lay down for my meddach’schlop. I left some lunch on the table for him, expecting him to return soon. I woke up at two in the afternoon, and saw he still wasn’t home and had not had his lunch, and then I became worried. It wasn’t until that evening that someone came and told me that they’d locked him up as well. And he hasn’t come home since.”

  Jacob had come under suspicion because he had been an apprentice to Peter, working with the colony’s livestock. He was accused of distributing the magic spray supposedly made by his mentor.

  “They came to the house once to search for the spray. I went outside, I told them I knew everything that my man did and that he had not done these things. I said I knew everything that was in my house, and that there was no magic spray, and that they need not came back. I turned around and went inside and they left.”

  Otta’s eyes narrowed and her chin thrust forward. She had sat down at the table with me as I ate. Now she stood up and walked to the kitchen, where she pushed a few pots around on the counter. Gerhardt’s big blue eyes were full of apprehension as they followed his mother’s nervous movement. He was at an age between being able to protect his mother and needing her protection himself, and their connection was palpable. Whenever Otta looked at him the lines in her face eased a tiny bit and the tightness of her eyes would relax. Then she’d begin to speak and the anger came back.

  She was as much a victim as the women who were raped, just in a different way. I had the overwhelming sense that without her breadwinner at home penury was just around the corner.

  “The leaders of the community, of the church, do they not look after you? I mean, you’re basically a widow. Isn’t that one of their responsibilities?”

  “They don’t help at all. Nothing. It’s very hard sometimes.” Otta’s voice took on a querulous
tone. “Ya, I’ve told the children, if there were expensive habits we could quit, it would help, but it’s hard to stop the habit of eating. But I’ve noticed that if we pray, there is help. Many times it’s felt like there’s no way forward, but then we pray again, and God listens and he helps.”

  “What do you mean he helps? How?”

  “Well, we still have food to eat,” she said as she gestured at my plate. “And he comforts me. I’d be very lonely otherwise.”

  Just like the rape victims themselves, Otta was badly served by the silence and refusal to properly clean out the wounds before bandaging them up. The real truth didn’t matter to the leaders, what was important to them was that the fragile balance of power was maintained. Digging deeper and showing some sympathy could only upset that balance by encouraging people to speak the truth.

  Single mothers with young children are a rarity in Mennonite culture, particularly on a colony. Divorce was unheard of when I was a child, much as it still is in Old Colony communities. I remembered Klaas and Greta on Spanish Lookout. Greta’s mother and Klaas’s father both passed away, leaving behind large families, and the two families soon became one as a matter of survival in a society where gender roles were clearly defined. Even if Otta had sided with the church, condemned her husband, and divorced him, the church would not have allowed her to remarry, and she would still have been branded with shame for life. But that wasn’t an option anyway, because capitulation wasn’t Otta’s style.

  “The colony shares meat when big animals are butchered. First one farmer, then it’s someone else’s turn. The poor, and those families without a man in the house, they always get meat, even if they don’t have a cow when it’s their turn to butcher. Well, the church came to me, and said they could see I no longer had a cow to give. They said that if I would alter my life, if I would do things the way they did them, then they would still give me meat.” Otta laughed, a dry cackle. “I said, for ten kilos of meat I won’t stoop to being part of those people who did those things, who made up these stories to put my man in jail.”