Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  “Both women ‘remained steadfast,’ so they went straight to God, in heaven.”

  Her kiss nuzzles him, tongue and lips at his nose. “What would it be like, to live such a life beyond doubt?”

  He cannot imagine. The words of the song, such direct, ordinary words—they came to him out of their archaic German into English as quick as stretched string—but somehow he cannot feel them. What if he could sing?

  She says, “My all-knowing off-by-heart lover.”

  Off his heart indeed. She runs ahead of him, along the wall of that neglected nunnery, past the locked and boarded chapel doors, past the square bell-tower towards the great trees of the woods singing to a much different tune.

  “Come run in the woods, come run in the woods … come, come.”

  Running away along the cloister wall. He needed a long mirror to see everyone in his life as they ran away. More often, as he himself ran. Only his mother remained fixed: on her knees singing her living prayer.

  He finally catches Karen. She has stopped under the beech branches where they spread over space falling away into the wide, wooded valley. He is gasping.

  “And there in the wood,” Karen sings, dancing before him, “a piggywig stood, With a ring at the end of her nose, her nose, With a ring at the end of her—”

  “Toes, her toes, come toes or come nose, we will come to blows.”

  “You blow or I blow?”

  “We’ll blow together.”

  “And come together.”

  “Can’t—it won’t rhyme.”

  “Rhyme schmyme.” She swirls that away with one naked arm flung over the earth. “Flow together, grow together, stagger to and fro together.…”

  The branches with their perfectly pointed leaves spin beyond her black hair against the sky, bits of light opening in his eyes like the elliptical movements of a starry night. There is a jagged branch thrust under him, he knows it with a quick stab of pain and he thinks, I’ll carry a scar on my ass for life. But he forgets that completely, in her marvellous, ineffably sensual movement coming over and down around him.

  It is visible in the bathroom mirror; he bends lower, backs up, looking ridiculously between his spread legs. Self-examination, a sharp red depression.

  “New angle on yourself?” she asks, suddenly there. “Physician, cure the pucker of your piles.”

  “I don’t have any.” Going to her.

  “I know that perfectly well. I’ve kissed your every pain away, all week.”

  “Not every pain.”

  “Oh, you poor darling.” She knuckles his head.

  “Yes, kissing should make me feel all better.”

  And she turns tables on him again.

  “Our kisses never will, will they?”

  She folds herself into the stuffed chair in that cavernous room and he kneels against her knees. He thinks later that if he had glanced back at the open bathroom door and the mirror, he could have seen them together and reversed, and for a short time longer they might have escaped together. But his face was in the fold of her thighs. Only she could have seen that mirror.

  Strangely, the double doors set in the cloister bell-tower open when he pulls at them. Open out together, like the library doors of his childhood.

  But there are no shallow shelves here. Rather a compact, dusty square scattered with straw, mouse and rat leavings, bird splatter. Pigeons, their beaks bobbing out from the high beams; brooding up there in the lengthening summer. Higher still in the cross-light they thump and scrabble inside the upper dome of the tower, where level light dusts more beams into existence.

  He climbs the ladder fastened onto the wall rung by rung; and rests, leaning on a dust beam as if it were oak, holding tight an iridescence of air. Kafkaesque indeed. At the thought, the white spot of Karen’s face appears far below him, rests on the roundness of her bare shoulders. As unrecognizable as his own face would be upside down.

  “Adam, don’t.”

  Her long call climbs the wooden ladder thinly; it reaches him, stretched into one transparent word:

  “ … d-o-o-o-n’t.”

  In his examination room his medical decisions were once sharp and instantaneous, but for himself he can never decide to go, break and be gone. That first turning away, others always had to do it. And did.

  He longs, overwhelmingly, to climb even higher, to see only the backs of the pigeons as they lift their dappled wings wide to escape. He wants her to be terrified with him.

  He climbs, hand and foot. Through the arched windows he sees he is lifting himself above the crests of the forest. There is no iron bell above him, only mortared stone and the wooden bell-beam. When the steps of the ladder reach the last oak beam in the empty dome of the cupola, he plants his feet on it and without a thought lunges up towards the higher centre bell-beam, flings himself out into air, grabs it and holds tight, body swinging like a wild clapper. But when he tries to lift his legs, curl up and hook his feet up over the beam, he discovers he can’t do it; his feet are too distant at the end of his suddenly too heavy body, the oak beam is now too far away below him. Hand-width by hand-width, the square beam cutting into his wrists, he pulls himself along it nearer the wall, then walks his feet up the wall until they climb onto either side of the beam and he can hang, fastened hand and foot like a sloth, over the deep column of space below him. He has climbed as high as it is possible.

  And realizes, with a jolt of supreme terror, That was my last move. My body will never pull itself up, it cannot lever itself over onto the top of this beam. I can only hold on till I fall.

  The stupidity of what he has done wraps him in a wondrous calm. He once lifted himself so easily, walked on two-by-four rafters of houses in the southern Alberta wind, or swung between the parallel pillars of scaffolds. This beam is straight rock between his straight arms. He does not dare look down. He will listen to the beat of birds returning below him, the air now a bed of needles; his clenched stomach and hooked feet and hands are locked on something, somewhere, but already they feel nothing, certainly not the edges of a beam older than Gothic, nothing. He is resting in freefall. Or possibly prayer.

  Your Bride has waited, oh so long,

  O Lord, for your appearing;

  When will you come, O Son of God,

  To wipe away her weeping?

  The Gothic arches of the bell-tower windows surround Adam. He hangs above the beech forest and the far clearings of German fields, bent roads, villages, the perpetual distant drone of the Autobahn. Beech is Buche, he is beamed like a bat above a Buchenwald. He knows he cannot get back to the oak beam beside the ladder, and it crosses his mind, suddenly, that rather than the Heimatleeda of Mennonites, it would be lovely to hear the cantor at a bar-mitzvah sing those much stranger songs of sorrow and dedication, of lament clear as human mystery. The words between Karen and himself, even the simplest like go or ahh, god or again or no never quite find them home. Not as completely as they desire, search as deep as they may.

  Or to hear the delicate medieval angels that sang for his one and only bride at his one and only wedding. The wordless memory of Susannah moves through Adam like ancient air. Perhaps that bridal song has been waiting here for him to climb into, floating here slender as the spin of spiders beyond the tips of the tallest trees, song without body, there will be no body at last, only tips of flame.

  “Adam.”

  Karen. On the oak beam just below him. One hand clutching the top rung of the ladder, her body stretched up as if groping blind to reach him. Her fingers point, they cannot quite touch him, but his one hand lets go and they grip each other and instantly his feet let go too, the maw of space swings up from under him and his heart lurches wauggh! as he thrusts himself towards her and he lets go of his beam completely as she hauls him across air and into her strong as steel.

  “You ass,” she gasps in his ear. “You-god-damn-ass.”

  His hand too grasps the rung of the ladder. The air, swaying, wraps them around one another, their brief summe
r clothes, skin, bones, hair.

  “You can’t run away up.”

  They are held on the beam by nothing but air and the wall ladder. They fold each other into each other’s fear, but their hands and arms, their implacable bodies tighten in the movements of love; imperceptibly she opens her thighs, imperceptibly he pulls her harder against himself.

  “Why Kafka, why not Rilke?” he whispers.

  “Too much Catholic misery.”

  “At least Catholics have the Virgin and Child.”

  “True. More merciful than Moses.”

  Air the sheet that hides them, for the moment, from the reversals of necessarily being alive.

  “We could look for Rilke,” Karen breathes against Adam’s cheek. “For Rilke too. Their lives overlapped, they lived in Prague, they never met.”

  “But Rilke wasn’t a Jew.”

  She is pulling him tighter towards the wall. “He didn’t have to be. Maybe he was a ‘defenceless Christian.’ ”

  “You think maybe Kafka was that too?”

  They sway gently, like the clapper of a bell, a memory too light to strike sound. Hold tight on the edge of falling, the lip of terror and ecstasy.

  TWELVE

  THE HOLY COMMUNITY OF THE BRIDE

  Pocatello, Idaho

  1941

  Samarkand

  1881

  “I KNOW YOU,” MY GRANDFATHER SAYS. His hair is as white as the hospital pillow on which his head lies, but bristly, thick; he has not lost a strand in seventy-three years. He peers up at me as I bend over, expecting an answer to what? Of course he knows me, I want to cry out, he and my grandmother Mamme raised me, over twenty years.

  “You have my name,” he adds, as if making a pleasant discovery. “Abraham Loewen, you were born April 4, 1914, in Bessie, Oklahoma. But you didn’t grow up there.”

  Mamme said to me, You have to go see him, the stroke mixed him up and his mind wanders, but he talks and talks so gentle now, you can just listen. You have to see him too.

  “Paupe,” I say, using the word he once liked, when I was little, “you live in Aberdeen, Idaho, you’re here in the Pocatello Hospital.”

  “Idaho”—his intense eyes sink from their study of my face into a distant bemusement—“but when we first came to the States we went to Oklahoma, the Herald Mennonite Church, all of us from Turkestan, Central Asia … yes, from Kaplan Bek and Aulie Ata too, Khiva … Khiva.” His eyes dart open at me. “We tried to build a village Gnadenthal in the mountains south of Aulie Ata, but we couldn’t really give those places our names,” he says. “When a place already has a name, you can’t change it, even if you don’t know what it is and think you can.”

  I can only mutter, “I was two when we moved, I don’t remember Oklahoma.”

  “We moved to Idaho, eleven families, to avoid the army”—his voice is different, but his mind seems to be gathering its old force—“we knew the States was going to war. The Great War they called it, huh! as if war could be great. The Worst War they should say. We were eleven families, there were even less, only ten families in the first wagon-train to Central Asia. I was twelve years old, I could drive the quiet horses. They thought then they would protect their sons from war if they moved into the wilderness, the sand wilderness. We Mennonites do that over and over.”

  “Mennonites move all the time.” I have heard this from him forever; it is what I got away from by removing myself—but with him lying in a hospital bed, so flat, “moving” now sounds strangely warm, almost homey.

  “Yes, move,” he says, “travel because of land, land and armies. You have to find a place where you can live and the Big Men will forget about you. A wilderness no one else wants to live in is best. Do you remember the train?”

  “The train … remember?”

  “Here in the States we sat so soft, and the Great Plains going past outside.” His eyes closed as if talking in his sleep. “They are great, such good land brushed green and flat by the hand of God.” He laughs slightly, only half his face moving. “No wagons or camels needed on these plains, brown rivers and trees leaning, going past outside the window.”

  My grandfather sounds not at all like he used to, factual, logical, demanding immediate and exact answers. Half paralysed on a hospital bed, he may be freed from farm drudgery and the rigid absoluteness of always “being the preacher.” Free perhaps to wander anywhere in his past.

  I bend over him; he can only move his right arm and leg a little, his heavy body so pathetically rigid under the sheet. But I want him to look steadily at me if he now feels easier somehow. And he does look, his bright eyes slowly consider every inch of my face. He tries to chuckle, and a bit more of his face moves.

  “Where have you been?” he asks, no accusation in his voice.

  I’ve been gone four years, I left him and Mamme with a long, accumulated anger that I certainly let them know about as I went, and now he is trying to chuckle. So helpless, so changed from my long memory of him, perhaps it’s more than just the stroke, perhaps he’s not so “mixed up” either, would he be completely different—warm, gentle, loving—if he were completely paralysed?

  “I didn’t go far,” I can tell him honestly. “Portland.”

  “Wandering?”

  “I worked there, in a garage.” No need to bother him with the “Bud Lyons” I’ve become, with the year of the Depression in California in hobo villages, or picking cotton and grapes. “I came back to see Mamme, and you too,” I tell him. “I didn’t know you had … this had happened.”

  “A man hides, but God guides,” he says into my face. Who is he saying this to, me or himself? It’s one of his favourite Mennonite preacher “Watchwords for Life,” a convenient “sermon in a second” and easily twisted to suit whatever purpose he had at that moment. Abruptly it sounds so much like what I once hated, and still hate, that I jerk away from him rigid as half a log, I’m outta here!

  But I glimpse his motionless head, his eyes rolled to their corners to see me, and his face twitching; amazingly, he is still trying to chuckle, right hand gesturing for me. And I take it.

  “All good Mennonites wander,” he says. “Not hunters following animals, no, we’re like God told Abraham, ‘Go to a land I will show you’ and we go, it’s usually because of armies, to stay away from them.”

  “I don’t want land, I’m a mechanic. I can fix any motor.” There is no need to mention Pearl Harbor, that the United States is now in all-out war and I’ve joined the Air Force and I have seven days’ leave before I’m gone, maybe forever. At least as far as he’s concerned, he’s wandering in his paralysed memory, wherever it leads him, let him go.

  But he says nothing, and I lean closer to him. “I even flew in a plane,” I say. “Whose motor I fixed. You see the whole world under you.”

  He breathes, rattling a little. “I’ve never been in the sky. The desert can be like sky, sometimes only two colours and sometimes you’re in it you can’t tell, they’re the same.”

  His eyes are adrift and his voice so thin he has no echo of the stubborn man I left, not at all. I can just touch him, and listen.

  “When you cross the Ural River at Orenburg,” he says, “you leave Europe. There the world changes. You see camel caravans, the Kirghiz nomads with their sheep and long-haired goats on the black sand of Kara Kum Desert around the Aral Sea, the water salt and blue as heaven. Three weeks we were among those sand hills so bright black the sun blinded us, heat like walking through melting iron, we had camels to carry most of our food and relays of horses to pull our wagons, if the Kirghiz people hadn’t guided us to their deep wells we would never have got across. Eleven children died, every child under four died, they could not drink the water. But I was twelve and strong, the Kirghiz showed me how to ride with my head wrapped in cloth on a camel.”

  This strange world, numbers, names rise from his dry lips into the warm hospital air. Against the winter darkening beyond the window, his memory burns; as if the city around us were on fire.
/>   “We ten families, we travelled together,” he says, “we buried eleven children. Thirty-eight pilgrims came to the fresh springs beside the Aral Sea, praising God.”

  “Praising God!” I burst out.

  His right hand tightens a little around mine. “Bigger treks came after us,” he says. “Over four hundred people, we were the first. My friend David Toews came with his family when the weather was better, but all our small children died in the loving arms of their family, we understood it was God’s will, dying then, and two were born by the Syr Darya River under the trees.”

  His story, the only story of his childhood, about that enormous, stupid madness of a trek of Jesus-Second-Coming-crazy Mennonites to the Turkestan Desert in 1880 has lain over my life like a blanket, trying to smother me. In his sermons he used heavy examples from it all the time, how to be faithful, obedient and perfect, how to avoid endless sins. Maybe here, at last, half dead now himself, mind wandering, he will have a plain, human answer for me.

  “So why?” I insist, but more quietly. “Why did they really do it? Sell their great estates in the beautiful colonies on the Dnieper and Volga Rivers and drag themselves into Asia, into Muslim deserts they knew nothing about, parents with helpless children, hauling wagons in sand—why?”

  His right hand is becoming a vise, but I won’t let it go so he can turn his head to look me in the eye. Anyway, he doesn’t need to do that. He can still, with the same calm, precise deliberation he gave me before I left—I can feel it coming—declare up into the stale hospital air:

  “Didn’t you listen? I told you and told you. ‘The Revelation of Jesus Christ, the vision which God gave to his servant John, for him to bear witness, as the time is near: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she being with child cried out, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.’ ”

  The words I certainly know, yes, I know them in the full majesty of the most incomprehensible book in the Bible. The Church as the Bride awaiting her Bridegroom, who will take her to Heaven. The Mennonites as the chosen Community of the Bride to follow their prophet, Claus Epp, who all by himself had made this amazing discovery and connection between Revelations and Mennonites, that the purest Mennonites must leave everything they had behind, “lay aside every weight of sin which does so easily beset us,” and go, go farther than they could think, search by faith for months stretching into years to find a desert in Asia where the Beast of Satan would be revealed and they could Await the Actual, Physical Second Coming of their Holy Bridegroom Jesus Christ to Lift them All into Heaven. Everything in capitals. My grandfather was a child then, but even as an old man on the other side of the world in Idaho he remained rigid as iron: a true believer is “married to Jesus”—say that around a hobo fire and you’d get more than you could handle, “Oh-ho, Bud, you’re sleepin’ with Jesus, hey, is he any good?” That’s why I love motors, anything you do either works or it doesn’t, and there’s always a solution you can figure out, exactly. None of these “Brides,” sun women in the heavens, grooms, love feasts—not even a stroke can hammer them into reason in my grandfather’s not-so-wandering mind.