by Rudy Wiebe
“It’s simple,” she says. “I go to Calgary,” one coffee spoon moves to the left, “your father stays in Edmonton,” a fork to the right, “Trish, you’re in university residence in Edmonton,” a knife to the right in parallel, “and Joel…”
Her long fingers are on another spoon; her hand hesitates, but then she moves the spoon firmly to nudge the fork.
“Little Joel,” she reaches up to fondle his tall head bent above her. “You stay in Edmonton, and finish grade twelve.”
Joel mutters, “I already had four months alone with Dad.”
Susannah’s arm drops around his broad shoulders and for a moment, football tackle though he is, Joel is simply her boy, resting his head on her shoulder.
“You know it’s not good to break up your last year so late.”
“What’s the matter with a Calgary high school?”
“Sweetheart, not the last three months.”
“It’s just cramming for provincial finals, I can do them anywhere, easy.”
Trish asks, “Why are you moving to Calgary now? You said the job starts in September.”
Adam is staring out the floor-to-ceiling glass of the dining-room window. The North Saskatchewan valley covered in snow falls away deep and wide to the frozen river, and every tree, bush, park-path, bench and shelter is primed with hoar frost. The distant streets and bridges far below with the small cars edging along them and the glass and concrete highrises on the far bank, bristle, blaze thick silver and white in the morning sun against a cobalt sky. Every crystal of snow and ice is unique, every day the world he sees from his house—when he has time to glance at it—is different, changed superbly by changing cold.
And Susannah’s calm voice. She has thought through every detail, it all sounds so practical, sensible, obvious, most reasonable, rational and so painlessly practical … he ran out the words until she told him to stop it, he knew exactly what she was doing so just stop talking and face it, for once.
“The dean of arts called me,” she now explains to Trish, “he wants me to teach both spring and summer terms, spring term starts in May and I have to find a house.”
“I thought you were going to commute.”
“Three hundred kilometres one way? I’d still need at least an apartment there.…”
“It’s a lot simpler,” Adam says, to lay the facts on the table, though he keeps his voice absolutely reasonable. “It’s a permanent job and if she can find a house she likes right away, and we buy it, it’s an investment. Why pay unnecessary rent?”
“I pay rent,” Trish says. “Four hundred a month.”
“You want a house?”
“No, I don’t want a house.”
“If you want, I can buy a house near the university, and you can live in it and pay me the rent, it’d be simple as—”
“I don’t want to be a simple investment,” Trish says flatly. “I just want to graduate this spring and get out of here.”
“What happened to the tightwad?” Joel asks Adam. “You wouldn’t even get me a second-hand Datsun when I got my driver’s licence and now you’re buying everybody houses?”
“Listen,” Adam says, holding tight to the voice of calm reason. “Our family is changing. You’re both grown up and graduating this spring, your mother has a tenure-track position at the University of Calgary, the kind of job she’s so qualified for, after two books and fifteen years of sessionals here she should be the senior professor in that department—so, we’re changing, if you’re alive you change, and I want to explain something, that we can make good, reasonable decisions about what each of us does, and we don’t have to concern ourselves about money. There’s enough, I know, for all of us.”
Trish says, “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” Adam stops. He hears she is not asking about money, but he continues, “My father told me, if you ever have any money, buy land, land is good, it never goes away. But we both,” he gestures to Susannah, who is now in turn studying the glistening hoar frost outside, “both had lots of university bills to pay, we could only start with a small house for which Grandpa Lyons lent us the down payment, but when you were born, Trish, an old patient in the hospital told me, ‘If you can scare up a hundred dollars, put it into Xerox shares for your baby girl.’ So I did that, and when you were born, Joel—I could scare up a little better then—I bought five hundred dollars’ worth of IBM stock. By 1977 we had this house, and more. Plenty more, now.”
“You’ve got land too?” Joel asks, astonished.
“No, not land, and that’s lucky because the bottom fell out of Alberta land in 1981, but shares, especially technology … okay, there’s enough now for both your educations, including living costs, and a few long trips too, education as far as you want to go.”
“I want to finish high school,” Joel says. “In Calgary if Mom’s gonna work there all the time.”
Susannah does not look at Adam, but they agreed, it was part of their understanding.
“That’s okay with me,” Adam says. “And when you graduate, you pick out a new car.”
“What’s the max?”
“Depends on your marks. I’d say, first-class marks, first-class car.”
“All right! Okay, Mom?”
“I want you with me, but it will take more than a month to get a house.”
“But you have to be in Calgary to find it. And I can get a summer job in Banff. With a car I can commute there.”
“Washing dishes,” Trish says quietly.
“So what? I’ll be in the mountains every day.”
Adam says, “You don’t have to work. You can help your mother find a really good house, where you can see the mountains, every day.”
Joel is laughing. “What are you, a millionaire?”
Susannah says, “Your father and I have agreed, whatever we do, we all share and share alike, equally. But the money has to be used sensibly, and we don’t have to arrange everything this morning.”
Trish is staring at the cutlery; she says, still more quietly, “I’m beginning to wonder. What all are we arranging, so out-of-the-blue this morning?”
Susannah says, straight and calm, “I’ve had a very successful time in Europe, now I have to start work in Calgary.”
Trish says quickly, “I’m glad, Mom, you deserve a really good job, finally. But you both seem to…”
Adam says, into the intent, lengthening silence of both their children, “I’d like to take a long break this summer. Maybe Japan or Korea.”
He touches Trish’s left hand. “You want to come with me?”
Her fingers curl, and drift along his. Then she reaches across his arm and draws the two coffee spoons, the knife and the fork together and moves them around on the table, this way and that. Sometimes it seems she is shaping a circle, sometimes as if the cutlery radiated from a centre, were splayed out and flying away in the four cardinal directions.
TEN
CROSSING THE VOLGA
Herrenhagen, Prussia
Alexandertal, Russia
1863
I WAS BORN ANNA WIEBE on June 13, 1842, in the village of Herrenhagen, West Prussia. I know God has a particular call for an oldest daughter, but I never thought my hopes would turn to dust and water just before I was twenty-one. What will happen now? God knows. If I write down what I can, perhaps the thorns of separation will be softened.
Our mother died last year. I am her oldest daughter. Our family made the dikes to build Herrenhagen over 150 years ago, four Wiebe brothers moving up the delta from the villages near Elbing. But now Father says wars and kings change laws, no matter what their forefathers have sworn is forever. King Wilhelm has made Otto Bismarck his Chancellor in Berlin and there will be war, he says, more and more war. And our family has three tall sons.
Which is not many for Mennonites. But there is nowhere on the Vistula delta to make more land now, and if a man has no land he is drafted into the Prussian Army, Mennonite or no Mennonite.
“Let Hein
rich have the farm,” said Johannes, the oldest. I’m second, two years before Heinrich, and then Franz, and Käthe, only twelve, and small Margaret. “I’ll go to school in Berlin.”
“If they see you there, they’ll just grab you and shove a bear hat down on your face in the King’s Guard.”
Johannes said, “Not if I’m smart enough. Smart in university like Eduard Friedrich Salomon Wiebe.”
“So smart,” Father said. “And what about Franz?”
They were both too tall for the Prussian generals not to take them, both too strong. No Wiebes, Father said, have ever been lost in an army, not even when Napoleon made killers out of the whole world. We had to find new land, as Mennonites always have, for our faith.
So Father has sold our farmstead to young Hans Claassen with only one boy living and three girls. He sent 350 taler to the Russian embassy as a guarantee we will not starve on the road, and bought long wagons and bigger horses. We will leave with a trek for Russia. Elder Claus Epp is the leader and Aaron Ewert the wagon master.
I felt Frederich Ratzlaff of Heubuden was going to speak to Father about me, and I had hopes. But Father said, “Dearest Anna, you are the oldest daughter. If you don’t come and cook, how will we eat?”
June 3, 1862: The last night in our home. Lord, abide with us. A huge fire in our kitchen stove, burning, burning. Before bed I draw my “Daily Watchword” from its small box. The card gives me the First Commandment: Exodus 20:2—“I am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other gods before me.”
I memorized the verse in catechism, did it always say that? There are other gods?
June 4: Watchword, Galatians 5:16—“Walk in the Spirit, do not satisfy the lusts of the flesh.”
Käthe and I laid our last flower bouquet on our mother’s grave. Aunt Anna and I cried together saying goodbye. It is all too much, my heart feels so heavy. My only hope is to leave all hopes behind and carry my duty. The wagons were ready, the drivers too. Käthe and Margaret and I walked around the yard. The flowers bloomed bright like stars in heaven. But brother Heinrich was hard. “Time to go, silly girls, come, come!” We drove along the dike roads under the trees of the green Werder, all the villages and the people we know coming to their gates. Down the street of Heubuden too, but only little Liesjki waved at the Ratzlaffs.
Thorns and tears. Goodbye forever in this world.
June 6: Watchword, Romans 8:23—“All creation groans with us for the redemption of our bodies.”
Morning. Our wagons drove over the Nogat River towards the Castle at Marienburg on the railroad bridge. Horribly frightening, but solid. The wood and iron was black, with boards for horses. The horses had to be blindfolded and led. The castle like a black mountain over the grey water.
Johannes said our relative Eduard Frederich Salomon Wiebe designed and built that bridge. The whole railroad too, from Berlin six hundred kilometres to Eydtkuhnen on the eastern border. This Wiebe is now minister of public works for the Kingdom of Prussia in Berlin. Käthe said, “We’ve never seen him,” and that’s true.
I could not look, passing the castle. Over a year ago, a Sunday afternoon in April, I walked there with ER. Never again. I want to remember only the rusting bars across every stone slit, for shooting people. Johannes crawled into the wagon and told us about Josef von Eichendorf who visited Marienburg Castle sixty years ago. It was leased by a Mennonite then. “The great hall,” he wrote, “where the Teutonic Knights held their Round Tables for three hundred years now clatters and screeches with Mennonite looms weaving cotton.”
My little sisters laughed. It was not funny for me.
Johannes tells wonderful stories, but I hear only: You Must.
June 7: Watchword, Galatians 6:8—“He who sows to his flesh will of his flesh reap corruption.”
A good Prussian road. Over big fields near Elbing we saw the roofs of the Einlage villages among the trees across the river. Hundreds of our Wiebes, Johannes said, still live there, though many more have moved to Russia. Their dikes were built by Adam Wiebe and his sons over two hundred years ago. They have been opened only once, to see if Napoleon had taught his soldiers how to swim. He hadn’t.
June 8: Watchword, I Cor. 2:10—“But the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.”
I made breakfast coffee with hot water from the guest house where we stayed. This place was so dirty, worse than yesterday. I could hardly cook our beer-soup on their dirty stove. I slept alone in the wagon, they are guarded all night. Never seen such filth in a kitchen. The woman of the house, really a servant herself, screaming all the time at her sour-faced maid. Today the sun shone, black clouds along the horizon with lightning.
We passed Elbing early. Such church spires, like a city praying always. At night I cooked sweet plums for Pentecost and Elder Epp preached. He sits on a chair that folds flat.
Auguste Ewert sat on the ground with her two little children. We were closest friends before she married the Widower Ewert, his wife dead three weeks. She has four stepsons, the oldest a year younger than she or I. I stood near her. She looked up and smiled. Her Agnes has such beautiful golden hair.
June 12: Rain and mud. This guest house was quite clean. Father let the woman make breakfast. Someone was rude to me, but I feel safer and I told him what I thought.
We stopped in Eydtkuhnen, the last night in our homeland. I wrote a long letter I did not send. My sisters went with Johannes to the railroad station, which is very big but not yet finished. Käthe said, “That’s the last we’ll see of Eduard Frederich Salomon Wiebe.” Small Margaret said, “I‘ve never seen him yet,” and they laughed.
Johannes looks sad. Not even eldest sons can do what they most want.
June 13: Watchword, Hebrews 12:1—“Seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with patience the race set before us.”
A year ago today our loving mother’s eyes closed forever.
And we crossed the border, the last Prussian eagle, on my birthday. The border search was short, but made me angry. Such dirty hands digging in our things. Auguste Ewert let them, as if she didn’t care. All her careful bundles pulled open.
The hills shone in the distance yesterday, today the high churches shine over village roofs in the sun. Beautiful. But no good houses, everything is ugly, dirty, horrible disorder. Most of the people seem to be Jews. They swarm around us yelling we have to pay them border fees. Father threatened to call the guard and they disappeared fast as rats. Käthe sang a song from school, “All that is good, all that is beautiful, is in our Fatherland.”
I have had no time to go into any cemetery. But Johannes went to one we passed and brought me small red flowers. I pressed one between my Watchwords. I have our portable iron oven, I can cook better beside the road even in evening rain. No stinking kitchens.
June 14: Watchword, Galations 6:8—“He who sows to the Spirit will reap life everlasting.”
Rain on rain. From far away, towns shine with the pointed onion domes of Russian churches, but driving into them they are so ugly. I feel unwell. I cannot even walk into a cemetery we pass, though there is time. Streets full of mud and Jews yelling. We escaped around Marienpol without being robbed. Such filth, all so poor. Men scream to sell anything, young Jewesses run around in rags with nets over their bound heads. “O Israel, you foolish people of God,” as Jeremiah prophesied. We never saw so many on the Werder. They have rejected their Messiah, what else can they expect but poverty?
Father bought oats from a Jew. The road becomes sand and hilly, the horses labour. I walk behind in the rain. O Lord have mercy on us and our cattle.
June 15: Watchword, Psalm 9:20—“Arise, O Lord, put them in fear, that the nations know they are only men.”
Sabbath. I laid out our wet wash behind bushes to dry in the sun. Sat on a rock to write. My Watchword for today leaves no room for my thoughts, though they never leave me. Only men. Elder Claus Epp preached sitting under birch trees and we on the ground. I thought of Jesus and his
disciples. Only men—did women listen?
In the evening we sisters sat with Auguste in a meadow and sang songs. Then all the Ewert and Epp and Wiebe children came, Auguste’s little Benjamin and Agnes too, and it was noisy. They played, running, their voices calling each other. High and sweet as if they were at home.
“Now rejoice, poor, sighing creation. Soon your eternal Sabbath will dawn which no day of labour will follow.”
June 18: Watchword, II Corinthians 13:13—“The grace of Christ, the love of God, the communion of the Spirit be with you.”
Rose very early today. The wagons drove long before breakfast. I felt so unwell, but tried to walk to spare the horses. We want to reach Vilna. Very stony land and the sun hot.
Today I did walk in a cemetery. There were no gravestones, only wooden crosses rotting on the ground. Weeds, every grave sunken and deep, a picture of life collapsing. I wanted to write letters, but too many mosquitoes. Little Agnes Ewert leaned against me after I finished cooking and we ate. Her bright hair.
June 19: Heart, how long will be your longing?
Vilna rises so high on a cliff above the river, it frightens me. Always farther away. A Jew gave us directions, but his road turned to sand through a valley, our men furious. Lucky he was gone or Heinrich would have beat him and got us in trouble. But Father said the Jew sold us a good horse, which helped pull us through.
Father walked in to mail letters, Johannes and we sisters went to see the railroad station. High cut stone. Many oak trees, and fine, white Russian church towers with red and running green cupolas. Beauty without true faith. The cult of priests who stare at us as long and black as their clothes. We bought bread and two more good horses from Jews and drove on.
Toward evening Father pointed out a high, ruined castle. We sisters and brothers, except Heinrich, climbed up. No building, rough stones everywhere as if thrown by giant children. A ruin. There was no time, we had to run down and catch up with the wagons.