Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Both my square hands are clenched on his single one; I get them unlocked but I can’t look into his eyes.

  “Paupe,” I say, quietly, across his body, “I have to leave for a long time. I came back, just a few days, to see Mamme and you.”

  He is silent, breathing drily. I lift the glass of water and he swallows as I pour, carefully, a little, into his open, slanted mouth.

  “Mamme and you cared for me, brought me up.…”

  “When Heinrich and Esther were killed, you were a miracle.”

  “You told me. Their horrible accident.”

  “The miracle was you, that you weren’t killed with them.”

  “You told me I was wrapped tight, and so little, when they were hit I just flew. It was just an accident.”

  “There was an accident, but you’re not a miracle?”

  “In the last second my mother probably threw me away.”

  His eyes are like bits of steel, so deep if his head was a motor I would have to drill them out to fix it.

  “They were driving their buggy,” I remind him. “Going home, and for less than a minute they happened to be in the wrong place.” His jagged face, that irrational trek. “They didn’t deliberately drive along the track for days until a train finally came along and ran over them.”

  And he understands I am talking about his childhood and mine. “You have thought about this,” he says softly.

  “Well, a wandering bum has plenty of time—I wanted to thank you. You cared for me.”

  “You must think rightly, understand. No one loves their children more than people on the way, travellers. When you leave your place and everything you own and every day you have to leave behind even more of what little you thought you couldn’t do without, but you have to, then children in your arms are your all in all.”

  “So … why did they go where so many died?”

  “Our fathers said it was for our children: we were going to save our grown young men from the Czar’s armies.”

  “Other Mennonites went to Canada and the United States, why didn’t you?”

  “We were also obedient to the desert vision of the Bride of Christ, the return of Jesus for His own.”

  And for that vision, I want to tell him again, you saved your young men and killed your small children. But he is lying so still, how can I assault him with that?

  “Children,” he says, as if he heard my thought. “God gives them, God takes them. Like your parents, given and taken, and we must still believe in Him.”

  No such “must” for me. But I don’t need to say it; even with one ear he would hear me no more than he ever did with two.

  “Dust and heat and the track goes on,” he murmurs, far away. “It led into earth villages, one after another and out again, we travelled all together, the first year we travelled six months. We stopped in Tashkent and wintered there and tried to grow gardens, but we had to go on next summer, 1881, to Samarkand and Bukhara, to Lausan, Khiva—three years trying to find the exact place, travelling on the way. And always we had our love feasts around the fire and Bible reading and sermons explaining what was happening to us, and sang Heimatleeda. We shared all our food, and when we stopped in a circle and the chores were done, David Toews and I played. Such wild land, mountains sometimes and rivers and a sea too, we had never seen anything but a fenced Mennonite street, he said my name was Loewen, which is German for ‘Lion,’ this desert was the place for me, and I said, Good, I’m Lion, you’re Toews, what is that? He said Toews means nothing, so he could be ‘Tiger’ and we played that in the sand or under the crooked, black trees beside the rivers. Tiger and Lion.”

  His right hand gestures towards the waterglass. I put it between his fingers and he takes it, lifts it towards his mouth. He doesn’t need me to drink: he tilts it into his mouth, holding a little before he swallows, and gives it back. His voice is stronger, with an edge, as if he was again in the pulpit of our small Idaho church.

  “Playing,” he says, in a tone of wonder; as if he liked the word, as if the memory of it made him, for the first time in his rigid life, happy. “Such strange things beside the road, animals, places. Every wagon was still Mennonite, dragging along so heavy, but in a street turbaned people would kneel and pray when the muezzin called on his minaret. They were very high, always leaning, as if about to fall but they never did—a world so strange you rubbed your eyes and thought it would be gone, but no, it was there. Even their holy Samarkand rising wide out of the brown sand, the Pearl of the Orient with marble stone walls and adobe houses, there were peaches and clear water running in little streams along the street and lamb shashlik and cucumbers and apricots. We heard say Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan rode there, all those unforgettable killers Claus Epp warned us, and Tamerlane was buried under the blue domes of a mosque, a huge slab of black jade over him. There we met the Chinese girl.”

  “A Chinese?”

  “Give me your hand,” he says. I give him both, and he moves them close to his eyes. Perhaps the stroke affected his sight as well, I may be a blessed blur to him. My hands lie in his pale bluish one; ingrained with endless grease.

  “You always had good worker hands, to hold and fix things,” he says. He turns his head away, but he does not let my hands go. He cradles them tight in his wide one, so thick and scarred by farm work, but the back soft, mottled as any old man’s must be. His touch seems thin and, I feel it, sad.

  “Maybe the Chinese were in Tashkent,” he says. “Maybe I remember it was Samarkand because of the mosque Tamerlane built to bury his Chinese wife. They say the builder fell in love with her embalmed body and Tamerlane sent his soldiers to kill him, but he climbed the minaret and flew away to Persia with the wings of an eagle, maybe Samarkand is where the Chinese should be. Anyway, we saw them because my sister Susannah begged your great-grandfather to let her walk and look a little, just see something, she was almost fourteen and without a face covering she would have disappeared without a whisper into a Muslim doorway forever, but my father finally gave in and told me and David Toews to walk on either side of her, we were both tall and twelve.”

  “Your father let you go?”

  “When our mother wasn’t there, Susannah and I could persuade him. It was such a beautiful city, clean, trees and clear running water, every day we drove in dust and heat—he wanted us to be a little happy.

  “We saw the Chinese shop, after we stood by the ruins of Tamerlane’s wife’s mosque. Yellow flowers sprouted between the blue and white tiles, everything was so bright, and on the street a Chinese girl sat in front of a shop. At first I didn’t know what she was, she was covered in swaths of silk, the colours burned our eyes, gold and blood-red and green like cobwebs and purple. We had nothing but dirty clothes and grey blankets that got dirtier on the sand every night. When I saw this was a girl, all colours, I thought she had descended from heaven with a shout, at the sound of trumpets and archangels. Susannah stopped too, we all stared, but the girl’s eyes and small nose widened as she smiled at us. She said in Kirghiz:

  “ ‘You like?’

  “She passed her hands over the silks on her shoulders and her folded legs, and under her hands the silk changed colour, like flames in a leaping fire. Susannah gave a little scream, it was so sudden and beautiful we were frightened.

  “ ‘Feel,’ the girl said. She lifted a deep purple that moved the other colours like feathers floating around her, it drifted around my fingers thick from pulling camel ropes and I couldn’t feel anything though it lay on my hand, I could see my hand dusted purple.

  “But Susannah took the silk from me, she raised her hands high above her head and began twirling herself into it—what had she ever seen that she could spin on her toes like that? She turned completely inside the silk, as if pointed at both ends, and still there was no end to it; we were laughing in amazement as my sister turned into a pointed, purple flame. If we blinked she would vanish into air.

  “And then I saw. It struck me like lightning: if the C
hinese girl had lifted the golden silk instead of the purple, my sister on this stone street in Samarkand would be the Revelation woman clothed with the sun.

  “I had to hunch down on the stones, I was so afraid. What would I tell Father who prayed and lived and preached Revelations every day, what could I say happened to Susannah? But David just laughed, completely happy, and he reached for Susannah to help unwind her. The long silk never touched the dusty stones, they folded it back in the Chinese girl’s lap. She was laughing too, urging them to buy, but all she could say in Russian was ‘Good! Good!’ and ‘Rubles twenty, rubles twenty,’ which was a quarter the price of a horse, and we had not even a kopeck between us.

  “Susannah lifted her feet out of the last purple silk, and the girl stopped smiling. Her face opened, I was hunched low, so close to her I could feel her eyes widen. And I saw she might be the Great Deception of the Evil One, her frightening beauty covered in flowing silk and strange folded eyes burning now, perhaps this was the Woman arrayed in Purple and Scarlet who sat on the Scarlet Beast in the Revelation of John the Apostle! ‘Long!’ she hissed in Russian, pointing at Susannah’s feet, staring, ‘long, long!’

  “But Susannah was happy, she sensed no possible Evil, she folded the end of the silk into the girl’s lap and lifted herself on her strong toes again and twirled another circle in her worn cotton dress, laughing. ‘Good, good,’ she said in Russian, ‘long feet, dance, come, dance me!’ She reached down for the girl’s hand, her fingers touched the girl’s pale skin, perfect skin so close to my eyes—how could she ever be Babylon, the Mother of all Harlots?—and the girl’s face broke, she shuddered and gave a little cry.

  “Susannah bent to her. ‘What?’ she said. ‘What?’

  “The girl did not answer. They were face to face, and slowly the girl’s hand moved down across the bright silk and touched my sister’s dirty Schlorre, the shapeless, worn cowhide that was all we had to save our feet from rocks and scorpions. Her hand reached out, David’s face came between the two girls facing each other and so very different, their skin and cheeks and hair. Then Susannah shifted, she raised both her hands to the girl’s shoulder and balanced, she moved her left leg forward so her weight leaned on her right leg only and I looked down, and I saw the girl’s right hand rise from her lap of crumpled silk, I saw Susannah’s foot lift and the girl pull the worn Schlorr off, and then she touched Susannah’s naked foot. Her fingertips moved along the sweaty straggle of dust, each finger tracing the arch and instep and toes as though drawing the veins, and Susannah’s long foot came up into her palm; the girl’s hand bent to cradle it, felt the whole length from the heel to the five toes in the slow, warm curl of her hand.

  “When I opened my eyes, Susannah’s hand was holding the Chinese girl’s foot. But there was no foot. Below her folded knee, at her ankle, her leg ended in layers of wound cloth coiled and tied tight around a square stub. I couldn’t understand: where was her foot? I looked at her face: her eyes were stretched shut now in a tight line clenched across her face, a slit where pain shrieked, where it would never be let out.”

  I am so hypnotized by my grandfather’s story that it is some time before I realize he is no longer speaking.

  “What was that, about her feet? What?”

  “Foot-binding. Chinese men believe the smaller a woman’s feet, the more beautiful she is.”

  “So they tie up her feet, to keep them small?”

  “No, they can’t tie it small, the foot has to grow, if the girl lives growing feet can’t be stopped, so at five or six years the toes are doubled under, the foot bones bent back, bent under towards the heel with tighter and tighter binding until the foot bones break and the toes and heel are forced to meet, folded back together into what they call the ‘lotus hook.’ It doesn’t look like a foot at all.”

  “They break the foot?”

  “The woman sit with their legs folded, that’s all they can do, some can hardly walk a step.”

  “Why?”

  “For a thousand years Chinese men have believed this is necessary for beauty. Wrapped stubs.”

  “Beauty? That’s torture.”

  “It is what it is. They say, for a husband to hold the lotus hook in one palm of his hand is his wife’s greatest beauty.”

  Beauty is a life of pain.

  The afternoon light has faded outside into December darkness. Abruptly a starched nurse rustles in beside us with a tiny glass of water. My grandfather releases my hand, reaches for the glass.

  “Careful now,” she says. “You remember, Reverend Loewen, we must be very careful about our drinking. We don’t want to have another little accident, now do we.”

  “We” indeed! I feel an urge to boot her directly through the window. While Grandfather silently drinks a little, lopsided, she reminds me, twice, that it is well after five o’clock and visiting hours are definitely over. I nod; if I open my mouth I’ll curse this harmless woman. She leaves at last and I get up.

  My grandfather looks very tired now; but he is open-eyed, staring up into the empty hospital air. “If there can be accidents,” he says, “there can also be miracles. Some people look for them all their lives.”

  The hundreds of stories about the Asia trek he used in years of sermons, but never a hint of Tamerlane’s tomb, of silk, of a tortured Chinese girl.

  I say, “You still wish Idaho was a desert, don’t you. You’re still waiting for Jesus to come out of the clouds.”

  “When you’ve left everything once, it’s not hard to leave it all again.”

  I want to yell at him. Even if you were only twelve? Even though so many died and Claus Epp went more and more nuts, and Jesus never came when Epp predicted he would, when you all went out to sit praying and waiting on the hill and Jesus never came? Even though your relatives in the United States persuaded you to come back at last, and paid for the tickets to haul you out of that desert, away from that madman—even after a lifetime you still think you want to leave everything?

  “We are still the Bride of Christ,” he murmurs.

  I want to tell him: And for that you need a desert, you need dead children. But I can’t shout at him as I once did. Not in this hospital. And I have no facts beyond what he has told me, no more facts than I ever had. Only anger, which after four years I know is no more useful than ignorance.

  But now he has told me this strange story, beauty and ugliness tangled together. His past, he has lived his life; for me the world is exploding into war.

  His right hand gestures, I give him mine to hold. His face half-hunches into what I know is a smile; his hand is amazingly soft. He always worked, farming or preaching, with the relentless, obsessed energy of a driven man who always knew he was absolutely right, and here he lies, so still and talking so quietly. I lean close to him.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow. I have to go away for a long time but I’ll come, with Mamme, tomorrow.”

  “You going away, to the war?”

  “Not the army, the Air Force. To fix motors.”

  “Ahhh,” he sighs.

  “Airplane motors,” I try to reassure him. “So when the pilots take off, everything is working perfectly and they can fly and nothing will break down, everything will work perfectly.”

  He appears to nod. He seems suddenly exhausted, almost asleep, or unconscious. I had better warn the nurse.

  I can ask Mamme, who is David Toews? Is he still alive, where does he live? And Susannah, Paupe’s sister Susannah, my great-aunt wrapped in purple silk, what happened to her? Why have I never heard a word about her, not even her name? Mamme wasn’t on that desert trek but surely she knows something.

  Did Claus Epp ever fly up to heaven? When?

  I am holding my grandfather’s hand between mine. He lies flat and motionless, but breathing. He must be asleep. What more can you want?

  He has told me what he wanted me to hear. I should just get outta here, go get my head inside an airplane motor. Leave him in peace.

  THIRTEEN

/>   EXCEPT GOD WHO ALREADY KNOWS

  Little Marten Lake, Northwest Territories

  1990

  ADAM IS WRITING IN HIS JOURNAL:

  The erratics wait on the skyline of eskers like memorial stones, in this land I’ve remembered nearly thirty years but can hardly believe. From the water you sometimes see sky under the stones, they balance on three or four others like a massive altar, the glaciers melted 12,000 years ago and they still wait there, as if for prayer—“The fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much”—rest in peace, Mother, I remember. The words at least. Now, through tent mesh I see only white water, this unnamed river grumbling along the Arctic Circle. We have rubbed out every mosquito inside the tent. We will sleep well.

  But suddenly Adam jerks erect—“Gronk!”—is that Eric’s grizzly noise-maker groaning, failing to work at the instant it should to protect them? He cranes at the tent screen away from the river—danger will come from there, not the water—the white sky shimmers in night brightness—“Gronk!”—certainly not the bear-horn, certainly animal, and so close outside the tent that he shudders despite the warmth of his sleeping bag hooked on his shoulders. He stares at the nylon beyond Joel’s sleeping body: claws will slash through there, a snaking head—