Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  “Though we are unprepared,” Stalin’s voice thundered, “we will never surrender so much as one metre of our homeland! Now every patriot will fulfil double the prescribed work norms.”

  For Gnadenthal, whose collective farm is a large dairy, this meant delivering double our quota of milk. The patriotic Communist Party overseer, before he fled east, ordered the green-feed for the herd to be doubled, and our Mennonite workers in the barns of course obeyed. What else could they do? In a week, twenty-one of two hundred cows were dead of diarrhoea. The NKVD recognized this as obvious sabotage and the workers who didn’t run quick enough disappeared in Black Marias.

  Since the Glorious October Revolution, Mennonites had been called racial Germans. “German” is printed on the passport needed to travel inside the Soviet Union; no one travels outside. We can of course have no churches for Highgerman, but Lowgerman is still how we talk to each other. When we heard of the approaching army, who knew what to think? What would the soldiers do? Would they believe we were Germans? Could it mean we would be delivered from Stalin? From his endless police?

  The Jews thought for themselves faster than we. They began to vanish. In every direction, away from the coming German front.

  Tuesday, July 2, 1863:

  Today Foda came home with his new wife from Neuendorf, Chortiza. Judith Wiebe has not been married, she is three years older than Gerhard. She kissed us all. Now she is a Loewen too, we call her Mutta.

  Mutta was the best, most practical and organized mother any orphan family could have had. She bore six children in twelve years, all living, and cared for our father until he died in 1888. A few years later Mutta decided it would be better to immigrate to Canada where so many had already gone. Ten of us children went with her, married or not—all except me. I wanted to go, but my husband Benjamin Wiebe, her nephew, wanted to take over our farm. My sister Justina wrote me in 1919 that Mutta died at the age of seventy-nine years, seven months and twenty-seven days in a place called Saskatchewan. Of the flu spread by the war. War finds you anywhere, Justina wrote, even in the high, stony bush of Canada.

  Monday, August 11, 1863:

  Dearest God, Foda said, he and Mutta drove to Chortiza Saturday and a village there burned down. Ostwick, houses, barns, the new school, all the grain and feed. Over seventy buildings. Nobody died. Sunday he preached in an orchard on Peter 2: You are a chosen race, a holy nation, God’s own people. Mutta said everyone cried.

  We had such a terror of fires, and there were many. Houses and barns were built together, straw-thatched roofs and mostly wooden chimneys. And often great stacks of hay dried in the yard. But this “Great Fire” was the worst. The land was already burned by summer drought, and an east wind came up hard at noon. Mrs. Johann Tillitski was heating lard for pancakes, she climbed up under the rafters to get more flour and the pan on the stove caught fire. When she rushed down the room was already burning. The windstorm did the rest. Burning thatch flew the whole length of the village.

  I look up the verses in Peter 2, and I see the last words are: “Once you had no grace, but now you are in grace.” How like our innocent Foda, such a text at such a terrible time.

  Saturday, August 16, 1863:

  Heinrich Penner’s cow wandered loose. It was seized by Stuppel the Jew, then Peter Teichrow bought it from him for the pawn price. Mrs. Penner was so mad she hit Peter Teichrow with a whip, Foda settled the money between Penners, Teichrow and Stuppel. He said they were reconciled, all departed in peace.

  On August 16, 1941, the German army thundered into Gnadenthal. I heard the tanks rumble on the bridge and there they were, those horrible machines rolling at us on their own steel. The soldiers on motorcycles around them in strict order, staring at every yard and house. But the Russian soldiers and all working people were gone, we old German people still left stood in our gates on the street with white flags. An officer had his driver turn towards me; his gun was pointing into the sky and I spoke to him in Highgerman. I asked him please, don’t shoot anyone.

  “Don’t worry, Grossmama,” he said. He spoke as if he were a teacher reading from a book in school. “We have more than enough Russians to shoot.”

  In six weeks they’ve arrested seventeen people, but German soldiers haven’t shot anyone in Gnadenthal. Not yet.

  Thursday, October 3, 1863:

  Two days on the roads, so much dust, Foda and Mutta and I came to Onkel Heese’s house in Ekaterinoslav. The Czarevich Nicholas Alexander, heir to the throne, has come from St. Petersburg in his train. He rode a black horse with an arched neck to Prince Potemkin’s palace, thousands of people shouted hurrah. The arch over the street has so many lights it looks like blazing fire.

  Friday, October 4, 1863:

  Onkel and Tante Heese took us to the Potemkin Palace, all decorated for the Czarevich. I saw my stone Czarina Katerina II where she sits so wide on her stone throne in the park. The Czarevich came riding on a white horse, he looked beautiful. Onkel Heese shook his white head, the Czarevich is too thin, the Romanovs are always too pale and thin. In the park walking he sang the whole song he had written for children during the Crimean War:

  But Russia’s Czar is faithful,

  He fears no dragon’s raging.

  He draws his shining sword to…

  He sang and I did too, and Tante Anna and Mutta laughed. Foda looked only sad.

  Oh, my twelfth birthday. Twelve. I was in Ekaterinoslav for the first and last time in my life because of my name and my birthday. Mutta said every child must have one special day in its life, baptism and wedding later didn’t count. And that was mine. Within two years the handsome Czarevich had died of poor blood. Perhaps it was a kindness to him in the end—he did not have to see his father Alexander II blown up in St. Petersburg by a bomb. He’d survived nine earlier attempts, and they say a great church was built on the bloody spot where it happened. His brother became Alexander III. They always said those pale Romanovs were good to the Mennonites, but they were all killed, one way after another. Sad Russia.

  Today, Saturday, October 4, 1941, I have lived ninety years. Alone so long. Husband Benjamin Wiebe dead since the anarchy, 1919, three sons Aaron, Isaak and Daniel vanished by Stalin in 1937, all other children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren grown and gone. With two Ukrainian families—now fled—I have been allowed to live in a room of this old house we Aaron Loewens built, from parts of barns in other villages, when the Mennonites of Chortiza Colony bought land from Prince Repnin in 1872 and named this village of thirty-five families Gnadenthal, or in Russian Vodyanaya. Valley of Grace. No Canada, or Saskatchewan—whatever they mean in German or Russian—for me, though not because I once didn’t want to. And Eli Stuppel is here.

  Eli was the miller in Novovitebsk after his father died and all the drinking Reimers that were left moved to Canada. Village miller until 1928 when Stalin changed the world with his first Five Year Plan. Eli Stuppel is a little older than I—how much I don’t know because Jews are even more secretive than Mennonites about so many unnecessary things—and tonight Eli has come to visit me.

  As he does once every year, at night. Often we talk a little about our fathers. They respected, maybe even loved each other, and both are dead now over fifty years. I have my box of small papers on my lap, I have been remembering.

  But tonight Eli starts nothing about the past. He has no laugh about our childhood when we lived in the same row village but neither of us could know the other existed. Instead he says:

  “I have heard, on September 19, two weeks ago, the German army entered the Kreshchatik in Kiev. Their generals immediately moved into the luxury Continental Hotel.”

  There was no point asking how he knows this. He has always known what is necessary, even when they made him destroy the great stone mill because milk production, not grain, was the Moscow order for Gnadenthal Collective. Starvation or no starvation, those were Moscow orders. In the brutal years of the purges he always knew how never to be at home when the NKVD hammered unexpect
edly on his door, front or back or both, day or night. Now German army curfew is at sunset, and he has come in the dark. We drink tea, the windows are shuttered and there is still a little oil in my glass lamp. If a German night patrol bangs on the door, he won’t be here.

  The Kreshchatik. He is talking about the ancient centre of Kiev, the most beautiful city on earth, he says. Which I have never seen, high on the banks above the Dnieper. The village where I was born, Neuendorf, was twenty kilometres away from where the Dnieper River flowed, but twice I remember, after we moved to the Judenplan, our Loewen relations had a picnic under the great oak on Chortiza Island. Foda said, “The river flows all around us, it holds us in its arms,” and then Mutta fed us her golden zwieback with butter. Yes, like Eli says, it must be the most beautiful river.

  “Last Wednesday,” Eli says, “when they were all nicely settled and happy in their looting, the first big bomb went off. The German command headquarters in the business block on Proreznaya Street blew up. The second bomb spread the Continental Hotel out in the air like a flower of garbage, the third…”

  “The NKVD?” I ask.

  “Of course.”

  “Like burning Moscow for Napoleon?”

  “Not quite. The NKVD didn’t warn anyone, they killed more Russians in the Kreshchatik than Germans.”

  “Well, Stalin would say, if any of us are around there, we’re no patriots. We deserve to be garbage.”

  “So?” He looks at me while he draws tea through his long teeth. He still has good gums, at least in front. His gentle tea hiss. “So what are you doing here? The Germans have been in Gnadenthal since August 16.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Aha. And where am I?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe here. Talking to a very old woman who still speaks German better than Russian.”

  “Yes … yes.” His lean, ancient face—such good bones and skin all these years for laughing—folds itself into a sadness deep as my father’s long ago. “On September 22 the last Soviet troops left Kiev, many of them running, most of them without weapons, and two days later the Kreshchatik started blowing up. It burned until the heart of the city was gutted, and then, on September 29, last Monday, they started shooting Jews. First they beat them together with clubs and rifles, then they ripped them naked and lined them up in rows of five, and they shot them so they fell back into the huge ravine by the Dnieper. Into Babi Yar.”

  “Babiyar?” I have not heard of such a place.

  “Babi Yar. Remember that name. The first day they shot seven thousand.”

  An unimaginable number. People falling, piling up.

  “Into a ravine, beside the Dnieper?”

  He nods. “Every Jew in Kiev. But five at a time takes too long, there are only fourteen hours of daylight. Next day they had three rows of five and three shooting squads relieved every ten minutes. They could average five fives a minute, a row of five every twelve seconds, and seven officers with pistols in the ravine walking on the bodies to make sure. Total, twenty-one thousand.”

  More maybe than there are Mennonites on earth. I have lived too long, the world is become unthinkable.

  After a time he continues, “During the pogroms in Odessa and Kiev, when the Czar was still alive, the Hasidim always had one last prayer. ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has not made me a heathen.’ But I don’t know, now. Where has it got us, not being heathen? As our rabbi always says, being beloved, ‘God’s Chosen People’?”

  I have to laugh a little. “Huh. Mennonites always want that too. My Foda, all his life, praying to be forgiven his sin and be chosen, to do exactly what God wants and live in grace, be chosen.”

  Suddenly, in the quiet house, it makes no sense any more. None whatever.

  We are two old, old people drinking tea. Saying a few words but writing nothing down. Written words have become worse than bullets. Everything in the world we know is as quiet as my small lamp on the table, burning. And yet in an instant we could explode, like the Jacob Wielers. One bomb fell here in Gnadenthal, a Russian bomb from a Russian plane in retreat. While trying perhaps to hit the advancing Germans—who knows?—it fell on the Wieler house. Through the roof and onto the table where the family and those in flight they had taken in were eating. It tore them up so small, no one knew how many coffins to make, just gather three baskets full. Or worse than a quick bomb, a knock on the door will start something slow, something very slow and endless.

  Eli slurps tea through his teeth from the saucer. And suddenly I feel I should greet him. As he greeted me when he came in, with a full Russian kiss on both cheeks. I get up, shuffle around the table, and do that.

  We stand together. I am still holding his face between my hands, and his hands come up to hold my face too. His soft, grainy hands are swollen with arthritis, warm, strong, his black eyes look into mine. Slowly then we begin to laugh. Gently as we always do.

  “For me,” Eli Stuppel says, “I’d be glad to share God’s love with you…” and he hesitates. “But I don’t know if you’re tough enough. You want at least to share as much of it as you can stand?”

  FIFTEEN

  THE SHELLS OF THE OCEAN

  Sanur, Bali

  1991

  ALL LIFE, THEY SAY, comes from the sea. It would seem reasonable then that all life must return to it. Reasonable. Adam sits alone under the palm trees, or sometimes on the incandescent sand under one of the tiny frond-thatched roofs. Sometimes he contemplates the two volcanoes floating high, far above the bay; or the sound of bare feet passing. Along the curve of reef paralleling the beach the swells heave, break, smash down in the continuous and interrupted rhythm of a wall toppling from left to right; heave up and smash down again, their beginnings and ends lost beyond light that he cannot distinguish. Sometimes he thinks: We thought we were so reasonable in 1987, when Susannah first moved to Calgary. Sometimes only the shadowed cones of one or the other volcano breaks through the clouds to insist on land somewhere; certain and reasonable there, beyond or above the water.

  All seas are the same sea, and Trish is gone. Adam has run away to this sea that surrounds Bali because he and Trish were never here. The creatures appearing on the sea are always different, those in it always strangely the same. The spring and summer their family broke into shifting halves, into quarters—four years, isn’t four the natural cycle of return?—that summer the porpoises crossed the wake of their ferry between Honshu and Hokkaido again and again, and Trish saw them playing, as it seemed, beside the ship. Together she and Adam watched those dark shapes torpedo into the ship’s wake, back and forth, white bellies arching. The killer whales off Galiano Island revealed their glistening black backs once and then the sea swallowed them, but off Japan the porpoises followed as far as he could see, despite the ship’s turbulence—perhaps because of it?—that left them behind, while the several hundred Japanese students aboard in their navy-and-white, almost military uniforms gathered around Trish, testing their teen English. “What your name?” “What age you?” “Where you live?” until her blondness swam above their gleaming black heads. She was a celebrity signing schoolbooks, bits of paper, and he was in an eddy beside her. They were begging her to accept the trinkets they were taking back to their parents from their school outing, and soon the delicate girls reached for her with fingertips like leaves, her pale skin and golden hair, the grey porpoises riding unnoticed far behind in their wake.

  Wake—because the sea was also asleep? Did ships, like intruding bodies, wake it? Four years he had been in self-indulgent sleep, thinking—when he did—We are all adults now, we are family, life has changed, we go our separate ways and life continues, IBM and Xerox produce more than enough for us all, stick to your budget and go to school and do what you please, your brother and mother and I will do what we please. Oh, yes, he was pleased now, very pleased—when it was possible to fall momentarily asleep with a pill.

  Two summers ago he and Trish travelled the arched coast of Wales. Amon
g the massive ruins of Edward’s enslavement of the Welsh in the thirteenth century she had seemed no more preoccupied than he: their mutual melancholy a closer companionship than they had found together since the family separation. He thought then her occasional singing under her breath made her sound almost content; to him the sound of singing had always meant a touch of happiness, and he certainly could have done with a bit of that from her again.

  “Oh, just a folk ballad, it’s turning circles in my head, you know, just the tune.”

  But she did know words as well, at least one verse, and her sudden silence when the three young people, like medieval musicians, laid their instrument cases open in the inner ward of what was left of Aberystwyth Castle and piped the melody she had been humming, and the lean girl haltered in a peasant dress sang with aching sweetness:

  There is a deep valley, a valley so deep—

  “Hey!” he exclaimed, “that’s your … now you’ll hear the words.”

  But her face went blank, momentarily it seemed broken like the wall against which they were leaning, a wall blown apart by Cromwell’s cannon destroying the last Welsh resistance in the very years when Wiebe Adams was pouring walls of earth to protect Danzig. The falling sunlight glanced up off the St. George Channel, lit the tiny particularities of the face he had studied, cared for, adored since he held her in his arms within hours of her birth.

  “Those are different words,” was all she said.

  “How is this possible!” Susannah cried on the phone.

  But in two months, even with all her languages and other private investigators, she found no more than he already had. In essence, nothing.

  Wherever he may be looking makes little difference now. There is nothing to see but the inside of eyelids; arid tears finally. The endless roar of the reef has hardened on the wind into moments of crash as the tide falls steadily higher and higher up the beach.