Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Die Sünde Adams! That was Big Thursday Peters, weeping and blowing his nose like a trumpet-blast into an enormous blue-striped handkerchief, thundering God’s eternal damnation and endless grace all at the same time. But it was Lowgerman that quickly betrayed Adam’s thinking; after only a year of learning to read English in school he was no longer aware of what language he thought in, nor even how he dreamed, and looking up from the church bench and seeing the setting sun flicker the fine spray of Big Thursday’s mighty words into intermittent, visible rainbows around his mouth, he was convicted in his heart that Sind was too close to sin for a simple English escape. Especially with his name.

  Adam Peter: “ground,” “rock.” Adam realized his names were basically the same, one merely a more stubborn form of the other. And Sind or Sünde or sin were of course all one too, abominably everywhere, in any language; as his mother steadfastly reminded him.

  Four summers later Aaron Voth’s overloaded truck hauled them away from their bush homestead, two days of gravel roads south to the irrigation prairie town of Coaldale, Alberta. There his names, including Wiebe, were not at all unique. At school recess the descendants of twenty different races and religions, including Mormons and Mennonites, Czechs and Chinese, squabbled and fought and played themselves into uneasy games and sometimes friendship, but the shifting alliances of grade school became even more complicated when Adam entered Coaldale Consolidated High. There a smart-alec Anglican, who remembered his catechism, swore at him, “You’re just plain dirt and filthy sin, you big shit A-damn!”

  All the other guys with English surnames howled and hooted, and it didn’t help when Adam yelled back, “You’re just as much dirt as I, shithead!” because no one laughed.

  Few as the English were in that flat Alberta of immigrant farmers and itinerant sugarbeet workers, they considered themselves the ruling class of the school and no Mennonite would play first-string basketball if they could help it. The coach, who was Japanese Canadian exiled from Vancouver by the World War, had other ideas; Adam was too tall and strong not to include. But the “A-damn” stuck whenever it suited anyone and until grade twelve, when he went to the small Coaldale Mennonite High School north of town—as his mother had begged him to do for two years—he had more time than he wanted to consider his first name. How he liked and also hated it; how it so easily shifted into a curse.

  He realized then it did not fit with their family names anyway. Adam’s father was Abraham Jakob Wiebe, which in the Russian Mennonite tradition of naming meant that his father’s name before him was Jakob, and so his oldest brother, who was born in the Orenburg Mennonite Colony village of Number Eight Romanovka in Eastern Russia, was named Abram Abraham, his second brother John Abraham, the John coming from their mother’s father David John Loewen. So where did his come from, Adam Peter?

  His mother looks up at him without a hesitation in her knitting. Though he has never before asked her anything directly about their past, she shows no surprise at Adam’s question. As a child he had overheard endless Russia stories when their Waskahikan neighbours came to visit, and in Coaldale there were more than enough Mennonites talking about themselves and their history, all the time, hundreds of them, with three different churches for them to be happy or to disagree in.

  She says, without hesitation, “Actually, you weren’t Adam Peter. In the government papers in Edmonton, or wherever they have them, your name was Heinrich.”

  “Heinrich?!”

  “In the papers, yes, and Abraham your second, like always. You were Heinrich Abraham Wiebe.”

  “I’m not Adam?” He’s seventeen and his mother is finally telling him his real name?

  “Of course you’re Adam,” she says calmly. “That was just those government papers, then. When you were born we were living so far in the bush it was seven weeks before your father got to Boyle and then he registered your name, ‘Heinrich Abraham.’ ”

  Across the kitchen table Adam’s father continues to study Die Mennonitische Rundschau; his reading glasses, bought at a counter in Eaton’s in Lethbridge, tilt at the end of his long, almost patrician nose. He sits this way every Sunday afternoon, the only day of the week he does not have to feed cattle on the farm where he will work as a hired man until he is seventy, another eight years, never able to find the one Canadian dream he has ever had: a job where he can work inside and be warm all winter. He refuses to speak now, though they all know Adam’s mother’s teasing irony will eventually prick him into a response.

  “He had the day wrong, too.” She smiles suddenly. “He remembered it was a Friday, but he got your date wrong a whole week, and when we got the registration when he was going to become a citizen, then Lena Voth said to me, ‘My Willm was born the same day as your Adam, the midwife came from you to me, how come your day is wrong?’ and then I noticed that, too.”

  “It was eight weeks after, not seven,” his father mutters finally, as if correcting her small mistake would balance his gross one.

  “Eight weeks, and you didn’t know my name yet?”

  He seems particularly intent on the Nachrichten column. He will never understand more than a few words of English, and it is in the weekly Rundschau that he learns the minimal news he knows of the turmoil in the world.

  “Aaron Voth wrote the names in right then,” his mother says. “ ‘Adam Peter.’ And so we corrected both the date and your names too.”

  “When was this?” Adam asks.

  “Na Pa, when was it you became a Canadian citizen?”

  “Nineteen forty-three. You want my registration number too?”

  Adam’s mother is knitting and ignores his growling, easily. A sagging red line connects her unstoppable hands with the thick skein of wool looped over two chairbacks. Adam knows that when his father at last saw his name on the Certificate of Canadian Citizenship, he memorized the number 44988 immediately, in case he was ever forced across a border again; thirteen years before, when they reached the harbour of Saint John, New Brunswick, from Hamburg on February 24, 1930, and finally Waskahikan, Alberta, by train on March 14, he vowed he would never leave Canada of his own free will; and he never has.

  “But you always called me—”

  “Yes, we always have.”

  “Why did you call me that, Adam?”

  “Oh,” his mother looks up from the ritual movement of her knitting. She seems dreamy; Adam will contemplate that same look on his daughter Trish’s adult face many years later, something of both distant past and future, like a former anticipation that is already there, an aching present of much more to come.

  “You were our first and last in Canada,” his mother says. “I thought, something new after all that old … oh, so much, of everything … and there was a little Wiens, our neighbour’s, he was born here too but Katya Wiens told me he was started on the ocean, he was a little Adam he was so beautiful, always singing and only four and so good, laughing in the children’s room in church and playing with all the babies to make them laugh. It was so sad when he fell into the slough behind their barn. He sank away in the moss and swamp water, he was gone there, they couldn’t see him, only the dog jumping and barking. Just before you were born—such a nice name, he was a little Adam, and so good.”

  “ ‘So nice and good,’ ” Adam says bitterly. “Well, you tried your best, at least with the name.”

  “Adam,” his mother says softly, reaching to touch him. And for an instant it seems her voice and fingers will find tears behind his eyes.

  His father says in his gravel voice, “Where did you find him, this old Adam Wiebe you say was in Danzig, Poland?”

  “Where do you think? In a book.”

  “Books, books, all your books they’ll ruin you.”

  Adam thinks: Old man, just give me the chance—and what’s ruined you? All his life he has heard his father’s laments and excuses: born in 1889 in Russia, a Mennonite hauled into the Czar’s forest Forstei instead of compulsory military service, he had barely done his four years and c
ome back to his village to marry Katerina Loewen in 1914 when World War I erupted and he was dragged back again, a second four years, or three rather because the glorious October Revolution finished everything, they got so busy killing themselves, all those Bolsheviks, and chasing him forever, what could anyone do but do what he was told? But finally, when he was forty, he did do one thing: he left what little he had, they were poorer than Russian meadow mice living at the worker end of Number Eight Romanovka, and with his wife and four kids went on the train to Moscow to try and get out of there. Forever. Astonishing indeed that he did one thing, after a Mennonite patriarch and four older brothers and seven years of the Czar’s Forstei and then ten years of Communists tearing the world apart, oh, those Communists, he had learned to do what he was told.

  His father’s brown hands hold the newspaper as if they don’t know how, knuckles scarred, broken by worn tools slipping: abruptly Adam feels his thoughts are petty.

  “The teacher, Frank Bargen,” he tells him, “he gave me this book. When he saw a man in it had exactly my name, in 1616. Here, you can read it, it’s German.”

  “Now you read German?” As if he has forgotten all the Coaldale Saturdays he made Adam walk to German school in the church.

  His mother says soothingly, “What was this Danzig Adam?”

  Adam/Peter—names surely heavy enough to sink anyone in the deepest swamp—Adam/Peter/Abraham meaning ground/rock/exalted father of a multitude, dear God, more than enough even in Lowgerman, all earth and exaltation too, with Wiebe, as he has now read in the book Mennonite Yearbook, 1951, a variant of the Frisian Wybe. Whatever that meant, probably mud. The article did not say, but it did explain his ancestors were not originally German as he—and most Mennonites—always assumed; they were Frisians, who for two hundred years in the Polish and German worlds of Danzig had spoken Dutch in their church services and their own Frisian language everywhere else, a people stubborn and implacable as the water they had learned to live with on the lowlands along the North Sea. The tightly detailed article, “Die Wiebes,” by Horst Penner, which Adam could only plod through by translating word after word, informed him that the first Wiebe Adams, as he signed himself, Wiebe son of Adam, sailed from Harlingen to Danzig in 1616 because that powerful Hanseatic League city needed a water engineer to drain its delta, and at that time the Frisians understood more about water than anyone in the world. An engraving of Danzig in 1644 illustrated the Yearbook article: a long, low skyline, with the City of Danzig’s coat of arms in the top left corner, and on the top right a head-and-shoulders portrait of Adam Wiebe himself.

  “Look,” Adam points it out to his mother, and reads around the portrait’s scrolled edge for his father’s benefit, since he will not look up. “ ‘Wybe Adam von Harlingen,’ he’s right over the picture of Danzig, a real big shot, see. And he signed his name, big Gothic script, ‘Wiebe Adams.’ ”

  “Na oba,” his mother exclaims, and points with a free needle, “look, that’s Pa’s nose too, heh?”

  Strangely enough, she is right. But a higher forehead, heavier eyebrows in a narrow face surrounded by a trim crown of hair to the nape and a full, patterned beard; an unstoppable genius who served Danzig for thirty-four years and before he died had streets and squares and a huge bastion anchoring the city wall named after him.

  “Where’s my long nose?” Adam asks her.

  His father snorts. “It got lost for a turned-up Loewen, her family.”

  “Does this book have pictures of a Loewen?”

  Thirty years later Adam will remember his mother asking him that while she knit red mittens for children’s winter relief on a hot August Sunday in Coaldale, Alberta. He will remember with longing and grief, and think of all he could tell her in 1983 if only she were still alive: that the Loewens were Flemish Mennonites from the great seaport Antwerp, most likely jewellers. Perhaps their shop stood in the wedge of narrow stepped buildings pressed between the Grand Square and Our Lady of Antwerp Cathedral, whose Brabantine Gothic, with the tallest tower ever built in the Low Countries, dominated the great roadstead on the Scheldt River from which wooden ships then sailed to all known and explorable worlds. With so many ships coming and going, it was probably not difficult for her ancestor Loewens to escape the massive persecution of the Spanish Roman Catholics or the coming Calvinists by emigrating to Danzig; in fact, they probably arrived there decades before Adam Wiebe. In 1983 he could also tell his mother of the beautiful modern town of Harlingen, still so compact inside its labyrinth of dikes and canals thrust out in alternating loops of earth and water into the grey sea; or tell her of the long blond girl named Wiebke den Hoet he and his daughter Trish had met, whose father was the dikemaster on Ameland in the North Sea and who invited them to come, see how the Frisians still make land with the sea; or tell her of Het Steen Castle—now an innocent maritime museum—where in the 1560s the Inquisition chained the “defenceless Christians” in dungeons until they convicted them of heresy and led them out to burn.

  All the facts Adam knows later, all the places of the ancestral past he will visit, all the family members scattered in the world he will talk to—but rather than parade the intermittent, infinite details of history he has excavated over years, he will then think only: I should have asked her to sing.

  Her beautiful soprano, vivid forever in the folds of his memory. Any of the songs she sang when the leaves came out, green as frogs in the Waskahikan slough and poplar May, and she began to cook in the outside “summer kitchen” to keep their low log house dark and cool for sleeping. It would have been a song from the Dreiband, their pocket-size hymnal without notes, but of course a person who sang in a Mennonite church then knew at least three or four hundred songs from memory, truly “knew them by heart” as English expressed it so profoundly. And his father across the farmyard somewhere within earshot would have answered her in tenor harmony, their voices floating like lovers hand in hand high in the bright air. By some genetic shift more drastic than his nose, the musical rock of Flemish Loewen and Frisian Wiebe has faulted into Adam’s tunelessness: though he can recognize any melody, he cannot reproduce or mirror one either close or at a distance. Not even the overwhelming choir of twenty-six Peter Wiebe descendants he will discover in West Germany in 1983 will help him to one consecutive tuneful sound, those two dozen Peter Wiebe children and great-grandchildren finding hours of harmonies in a tiny apartment, their heads filling endlessly with identical words and running notes, their bodies leaning together like one body.

  “Peter Wiebe?” If Adam’s father hears that name spoken, he will certainly raise his head from Die Rundschau, and glare. “That was my brother, the rich one, with us in Moscow in ’29.”

  “Leave that old story,” his mother says quickly, as she always does.

  But once the story of the Great Mennonite Flight over Moscow is hinted at, Adam’s father is not stoppable, he can only rush on:

  “In October ’29 my oldest brother, Jakob, the one who inherited the stone house and one full farm, he and his big sons and all his workers were threshing in the front yard when we drove down the street with our little wagon, and you remember, Tien, what I said, I told him, ‘Come, it’s Moscow now or never!’ And he, with his threshing fork high: ‘Yes! yes! I just have to finish my barley.’ Huh! He was still thinking money would get him out of Russia.”

  Adam’s mother nods sadly. “His wife never got any buns roasted to go.”

  “Of course not!” His father is triumphant. “And the Collective with Kolya Wiebe who was still too young to get married but the Communists of course made him kolkhoz boss, Kolya had to take all his grain away from him too, but my brother Peter—”

  “Stop it,” she pleads. “Don’t start with that.”

  “But that Peter,” the weight of his remembering rolls over her, “my second brother, he had inherited our second full farm and he had his money sacks tied up and the travel ham smoked, he had three teams of horses harnessed and train tickets bought ahead from Platovka, and
his whole family—”

  “We have to forget such things!” Adam’s mother interrupts, very loud, her head bent; her needles in the sagging wool no longer move.

  “Forget!” His father’s worker hands crush Die Rundschau. “You can forget? When your own brother who’s as rich as the dead Czar says to you all the way to Moscow, ‘How do you think you’ll get out to Germany, you with your sick Tien and four kids, you don’t have three kopecks to rub together?’ How do you forget that?”

  “Abraham, we know God needs money for nothing.”

  “And the Communists don’t either, thank God.” Adam’s father laughs, sardonic with his own wit. “Having money in ’29 was the end of any going, no beginning.”

  His mother’s steel needles are flying again, as if red wool in her hands could knit the splintered world into goodness. She murmurs, “So forget that old story, it—”

  But if Adam could have told them this story, he would have had to interrupt her. “This wasn’t your brother Peter, Pa, it’s his son. He was in Moscow with you too, a boy then, he survived over fifty years in Russia and just got out now.”

  “Peter Wiebe is in Germany? He bought his way out, now?”

  “Not your brother, Pa, his oldest son.”

  “I remember his oldest son in ’29, we always called him ‘Young Peter,’ ” Adam’s mother would have said if she had heard. “He was fifteen then, short, thin, and bright eyes. Such an open Wiebe face.”