Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  And all three of them would have been weeping. Their minds unable to imagine a Sakhalin, but knowing enough of pain for it to suffice; their bodies dragged around the world and destroyed by labour and poor food and care and ultimately cancer, hunched together in prayer, may they rest at last, precious God have mercy. The Alberta sunlight caressing them with gentle, bitter mockery.

  But his father was dead when his mother told David from Paraguay that story. And Adam thinks again: my mother named me Peter after her dead brother, but my father once named me officially “Heinrich.” After her half-brother, the Communist? Why?

  How long had his parents known of that fratricide? Did his mother know when she named him? And his father? Why would he do that? His father died without a word, his mother told only a cousin whom she saw once, for a day, fifty years after they left Russia: why him? To bury it as far away on the earth as she could imagine, in the sand of the Paraguayan Chaco?

  “Listen…” The Arctic wind catches its breath again over the tent and suddenly Adam longs to tell the story he has never told anyone about his names—he need tell only the simplest, clearest strand of it to his son who lies so motionless on the permafrost. “Your Grandma told me my second name Peter was for that brother, because I was born just after they heard he died in exile. In the Sakhalin prison camp. But she never explained anything else, not even when we looked through the albums when she was last in the hospital. After Grandpa died she hardly spoke, when we’d drive somewhere in the car, you remember, she just sang a little, off key because she was deaf, or recited words from the Psalms—‘the cattle on a thousand hills’ driving into the foothills in summer, ‘the heavens declare the glory’—she never even cried again, and then in the hospital she smiled, just said everything was fine, don’t bother. She never said a word about this fratricide, not one word to me.”

  Joel stirs, sits up. “Where’d you put the blue bottle?” he asks, so quietly Adam can barely understand.

  “There,” he gestures. “You piled your clothes on it.”

  They laughed when Eric first told them the use of the blue bottle, but they discovered that no matter how fast one drew the tent zipper closed around the other’s body, they could not get out or in without mosquitoes somehow whining in with them, a horde that must be squashed before they could expect to sleep.

  “Shit,” Joel mutters.

  “Spill?”

  “A bit … how do you…?”

  “It’s better on your knees I think, keep it upright.” Adam shifts himself noisily. “Hey, leave some space for me before morning.”

  Joel snorts. “Good luck!”

  “You filled it?”

  “It’s just a litre.”

  They are both laughing a little then. Joel reaches to the screen at his feet and stretches back. It is almost two a.m. There is a warm trace of urine, a whiff of body intimacy in the cool, bright air of the tent. Adam cannot remember when the wind stopped abusing them, but if it remains quiet he knows Eric may be up at three-thirty and they will be paddling Little Marten Lake before five, along the shore headland to headland, in all possible calm. If the whitecaps stop running, crashing on the rocks.

  “The czars,” Adam says, “already used Sakhalin Island as a penal colony. Mostly for murderers and political prisoners.”

  “Like Britain used Australia?”

  “Exactly, but this is an island off the Russian coast, a strait just wide enough not to swim. Anton Chekhov went there in 1890, and wrote that when he first looked across the strait, he saw a horrifying scene, the silhouettes of mountains, and smoke, flames and fiery sparks, so fantastic. Monstrous fires were burning, and above them a red glow rose over the mountains. It seemed to Chekhov all Sakhalin was on fire.”

  Joel does not move. Adam continues, slowly, “I sometimes think maybe our uncle Peter saw such fires.”

  Joel says, “Maybe our uncle the Communist wanted to end his brother’s suffering.”

  “Yeah. But he would have to get past the guards of that camp—very dangerous.”

  “Well … maybe he had to, Stalin’s orders.”

  “That’s possible, but … Peter Loewen was just a statistic, being killed by work anyway. Why bother?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.” Joel is suddenly loud. “I’m just a Canadian city kid driven to school and hockey and piano lessons his whole mixed-up life living with his single-parent mother, and his dad travels all over the world to find relatives and all he ever talks about is suffering when he does none himself, what the hell would I know about suffering!”

  Adam tries to skate over that with a quick joke: “Just a bit of tundra suffering, two-kilometre portages, sixty-kilo canoe?”

  “Oh, yeah, and you pay thousands so I will. Scheduled, three weeks of summer suffering, complete with freeze-dried food.”

  “Don’t knock who you are.”

  “Why not? Dad”—Joel is suddenly up on his elbow, looking at Adam in the green night light of the tent—“we sit in airplanes, fly over everything, you have so much time and money you take Trish and me wherever we want, or take anyone else you want … but Grandma and Grandpa, your relatives in the Soviet Union, they suffered, they really did. And still do I bet, the ones who got out to Germany. Remembering their bodies and heartache. So why were they tortured?”

  “Your Grandma would say, there’s suffering and death in the world because of evil. Sin, and its punishments.”

  “Okay, but there’s evil in Canada—according to Grandma you and I sure sin, did your relatives sin so much more than us they have to be punished so much more?”

  “Life isn’t a system of equitable justice, I mean, how many lifetimes would a Stalin have to live to—” Adam hesitates, confronted by the obvious necessity of his mother’s everlasting hell and heaven.

  But Joel pushes on: “Why isn’t it equitable? Grandma always kissed me and whispered, ‘God loves you, Joel, remember.’ Doesn’t He love everybody? If He did, He would be fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair.” Adam can say it again, knowing with a jolt that he is exploiting his own unfairness with every breath he takes. And adds, evading the issue, “We both can thank God it is unfair.”

  “Yeah, that’s easy. So what do you say to your relatives, you so rich and hüach jeleat?”

  “You remember that, and the tone of it, ‘learned so high’?”

  “Onkel David made you translate it for me.”

  “He was laughing.”

  “Sure he was, but he meant it too. Why didn’t I meet him when he came to Canada?”

  “He was in Alberta only three days, and I drove him to Coaldale. You were at summer camp.”

  “Summer camp, trying to ride some stupid horse!” And Joel, in his usual way, reverts two subjects back. “Doesn’t your Wiebe cousin ‘Young Peter’ in Germany know about these Loewen brothers?”

  “I didn’t know the knife story at first, to ask him. I’ll ask. I’m trying to persuade him to take me to Russia, but he’s still afraid, if he goes back, they’ll keep him.”

  “The Soviet system has collapsed now.”

  “I know, but he still doesn’t trust them. But he did say once that Peter Loewen was the schoolteacher in Number Eight Romanovka … so maybe he was a Communist too.”

  “What?” Joel says, startled.

  “To be a teacher in the thirties you probably had to be a member of the Party, or at least a sworn atheist.”

  “Would they arrest a Party member?”

  “All the more. Stalin wiped out his closest friends. But how would they accept Peter Loewen as a Party member? He was a Mennonite, spoke German; to prove himself reliable he’d have to do so much dirty work for the Party, otherwise how would he convince them?”

  Joel says slowly, up into the tent, which is shuddering again under the wind, “His half-brother Heinrich Loewen the Communist was a Mennonite too. Maybe that’s why he travelled to Sakhalin. To prove himself.”

  Oddly, Adam had not thought of that.

  A
long island shaped like a knife. Which end was the haft? What did it matter, throughout Russia’s bloody history a Russian hand was always closed on some blade aimed at its own heart or throat. As perhaps Peter’s hand momentarily closed on his brother’s blade also, when he understood why Heinrich had brought it. On that double-pointed stone dagger of an island, barely separated from the Soviet coast by the glacial sea.

  In the bow of the canoe Adam digs his paddle steadily into the white bronze of Little Marten Lake. His banned uncles would not have understood this unrequired labour, would have found such travel, forced by nothing but personal whim and weather, insane. However, that their own labours were decided by the infinitely blacker, ideological madness of a dictator could not have escaped either the Wiebe brothers, somewhere in the Kolyma mines, or the Loewens on Sakhalin. But gold, coal, timber, asbestos—whatever technicality together with cold or starvation killed them—perhaps in the end they felt it did so with the massive impersonality of weather; even Heinrich Loewen, travelling for weeks with a knife to reach a brother who perhaps had once pretended to be a Communist in order to stay alive and keep his job, to feed his family, a brother whose bed he had shared in childhood—even Heinrich became merely inevitable. The way Young Peter Wiebe in Germany talked, after ten years of Stalin it was no longer possible to say “I will do this” or “I will not do that” or ask “Why?” any more than, once you had been pushed off a bridge, you could at some point decide to stop falling.

  Thunder rumbles over Little Marten Lake; their bodies, Adam’s and Joel’s, grind on in the implacable rhythm of driving their canoe.

  Before them, south over the bronze water, Dogrib Rock humps like a granite loaf between the angles of two eskers spaced by distance. For two days they have lain in the lee of the tiny island, hammered by the wind that bent and finally split their nylon tentpoles before they realized they would have to take the tents down to save them. But the second night brought a sudden quiet, an eerie calm, to the breakers as if a hand had been laid over them, and they packed and started to paddle south quickly across the waveless lake, over the long, unbreaking swells that now gleam under the level sun resting directly north behind them on the horizon. Here the lake narrows between rocks, darkens imperceptibly into the base of high cliffs. Adam recognizes, as if it were framed, the picture young Robert Hood sketched, with John Franklin on his first disastrous expedition to the Polar Sea: An Evening View of Marten Lake, 29–30 August 1820. That strange tumble of rocks on the right like an immense temple toppled by giants against a pyramid: Hood painted that. But in the painting the cliffs were also crowned everywhere by erratics and artistically spaced caribou, their antlers like lyred fronds, animals contemplating the great voyageur canoes passing.

  Adam feels the narrow canoe surge beneath his knees, driven by his son’s powerful stroke. He thinks, We are travelling, together.

  Travel, travail. Really the same word: a journey; a laborious torment, suffering or painful effort. Adam knows that this Arctic journey he and his son have chosen for their time together is both. So why did they choose it? Their journey lies over one of the enormous remnants of prehistoric Lake McConnell, formed from the melting of the Wisconsin Laurentide ice sheet which for millennia covered the eastern half of North America; the eskers they pass mark the leavings of its sub-glacial rivers. Sometime, somewhere to the north and west, when the ice lay here kilometres thick, Asiatic peoples traversed Beringia and travelled south along the narrow corridor of glacial drift between the eastern and western continental ice sheets. What Moses with what rod parted those frozen waters for them, piled mountain oceans of ice into walls on either side so that they could walk safely through the midst of that sea on dry ground? What Yahweh, what God of Wandering and the Journey, of Unending Travel/Travail, His habitation a movable tent, His altar a rock in any barren valley, always promising meat, water, quiet and safety for their children, and yet always leading deeper into some holy desert. This arctic desert, with less rainfall than the Sinai, preserved water in its folds only by the immeasurable blessing of cold, for when the glaciers turned to water and melted back into the oceans, the Plano Indians eight thousand years ago conceived canoes and travelled the streams and lakes of that melting north again. Always with hunger, always with fear, the two poles of all living things; hunger and fear bound together by travel/travail.

  Thunder. Thunderbird speaking out of the shadows surrounding Dogrib Rock. The open water before him leads straight to that overwhelming monolith. Which is surely also a Dene story he does not know.

  Thunder again, echoing itself. Fear. Can Thunderbird speak to an aufiefollna Mennist? He may have fallen off, but he can balance his paddle and look back. Joel raises his wind-darkened face, grins, his nose wrinkles like Susannah’s. Behind them Christina and Eric come on in that silent, timeless motion of human beings together in the intimate partnership of a canoe. For a moment there are no mosquitoes.

  Carefully, Joel lifts himself from kneeling, sits back onto the thwart to ease his legs. “Over there,” he points with his dripping paddle, “left of the rapid, maybe a good campsite.”

  Adam bends to the aerial picture under plastic in front of him. A detailed photograph exists for every inch of this gigantic country, and the deep roar of this white squiggle on the paper wavers in the bright night air; he feels warmth, then cold move over his face, his aching body.

  Joel asks, “Rock garden?”

  “Don’t think so—steep stone water,” Adam says. “Maybe too steep, maybe we can’t run it.”

  “How long a portage?”

  “About two, three hundred metres.”

  Joel laughs, dismissing that. “Just find us a flat place to park the goddamn tent,” he says, settling down again, digging in.

  Tiny trees bristle here and there, willow, black spruce, a shimmer of birch, at the knotting of lake and river. Adam thinks, We have almost reached the tree line; caribou trails will lead down a possible portage, perhaps past the bleached hair and gnawed, torn bones of a wolf kill. We are almost at Lastfire Lake. There I decided I was not afraid to marry Susannah. I thought I had the power to see my whole life, perfectly completed. How blind I was.

  And he still is. At his oblivious, light anticipation of this summer journey with his son who is now twenty-one years old. As if rock gardens and rapids and tundra and standing waves and possibly dangerous animals and food were all one need prepare for; as if words spoken into the wash of thunder, rain and cataracts about the travail of distant blood relations could simply end, far away, with those remembered relatives. All their days together and stupidly he anticipated nothing when, well past the middle of that Dogrib Rock night, after they had together cleared their small site among the stones by the rapids and were once again stretched out inside their tent, Joel asked:

  “How many wives did your grandfather have?”

  And he in turn asked, too easily, “Which one?”

  “Grandma’s father, David Loewen. She had all those half-brothers and sisters.”

  “Four. A lot of women died in childbirth, widowers had to have women to care for the children they already had. An older man usually had property, a young woman might like that. My grandpa David Loewen had four, never widows, Onkel David’s father’s mother was his first wife, my mom’s mother was his second.”

  “Heinrich?”

  “He was from the third.”

  “Too bad more of the babies didn’t die,” Joel said, so flatly that Adam did not quite trust his ears. “Save them a murder or two.” And then continued, abruptly. “ ‘A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow because her hour is come.’ ”

  “What?” Adam managed finally.

  “I read that in a book. Jesus said it. Sorrow probably because of what’s been done to her, and all the mess this kid will bring with it, all this travail and sorrow.”

  Travel/travail; Adam tried to anchor himself, but his mind seemed to be blocked. Then Joel rose beside him, on his elbow in the strangely chiselled Ar
ctic light that can etch faces into skulls.

  “So tell me, Father, where’s Trish? My gorgeous full sister Patricia who I suddenly never see or hear from, now our nice little suburban family has been bust up for four years not because anybody died and without any help from the Communists and you stopped being a doctor because you had invested so well in copiers and computers and can run around the world, taking turns, sometimes with me and sometimes Trish, and mostly with serial girlfriends, who knows and I don’t care, what I want to know is where’s my sister? She doesn’t call, why doesn’t she even write me any more?”

  The spray of the bow smashing into a standing wave in rapids was nothing compared to this drench of words.

  “She doesn’t write you? I don’t know why … she’s travelling. You know that.”

  “Exile travel?” Joel asked. Adam did not try to answer. “Like a woman taken in travail?”

  “She’s not pregnant,” Adam said stupidly.

  “Oh? Refugee?”

  “She didn’t call me for two months either, I told you she called now, just before I flew to Yellowknife, didn’t she call your mother?”

  “No.”

  “She didn’t say she would, I just assumed … she told me she’s fine, she’s in Turkey now, going to those buried churches in Goreme, with friends, and then for winter to Greece.” Scudding rain ran over their tent, and the wavering roar of the final rapids receded. “She sounded fine. Like usual.”

  Joel sank back and said something up into the tent which Adam knew he must hear.

  “What, what did you say? Joel?”

  In the wind’s hesitation of quiet, Joel said it again.

  “The father”—his voice was as thin and distinct as though he spoke through clenched teeth—“is always a motherfucker.”

  And then he added, “I read that too, in a book called The Dead Father. But I didn’t need to read it.”

  They are almost at the tree line. Even if this beginning rain sharpens, they will carry the portage tomorrow, three trips each as usual on thin caribou trails around the rapids, and travel on in rain if necessary. Joel’s J-stroke will hold them steady in the current. And eventually the light will broaden over the open water of Lastfire Lake. It has always been exactly there, he remembers.