by Rudy Wiebe
“You’re still here?” one called to us, and gestured with his machine gun. “Get away, hurry, the Reds are on our heels.”
“Please!” Sister Erika cried. “Please, as God is good! Find us a truck, a cart, anything—we have fourteen old people here who cannot walk to the end of the street!”
All three looked at us sadly, but they didn’t stop or even hesitate. The very youngest raised his right hand as he passed, palm up and wide open; it was no Hitler salute.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and I thought at first he was cursing, but then I understood, “the same yesterday, today, and in all eternity.”
“Amen,” said Sister Erika. She turned to me. “We must move them. Down into Frau Heinrichs’ room, behind the airraid shelter.”
For our evening prayers she has only her pocket Bible: everything else is upstairs in our rooms, where we dare not go. Sixteen of us crowd in a circle around the room, fourteen on chairs with the oldest, ninety-year-old Taunte Gertrude, and the weakest, Onkel Johann, who is seventy-four, propped on the sofa. As the panzer fire on the street thuds and rattles the building above us, the windows shatter, Sister Erika smooths back her black, springy hair and reads:
“When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion,
we were like them that dream.
Then our mouths were filled with laughter
like water brooks in the desert,
For those who go out in tears, carrying seeds to sow,
will return home with songs of joy,
bringing their sheaves with them.”
“Listen!” whispers Frau Heinrichs. “They’re upstairs!”
We hear them then, and in our stunned silence I understand their Russian yells, orders, as doors crash open. Before we can move, our door breaks inward off its locks and hinges and men burst in, one and another and another, so enormous with heavy fur hats and quilted uniforms. And the guns in huge, knobby hands. I have had to look at them too often, but now that blue circle like a pursed steel mouth is searching around the room in such hands—the leader glares, his eyes are barely slits in a livid face darker than any winter sun could burn off the snow and if I weren’t seated my legs would surely collapse.
It’s the surprise, I tell myself. What’s the matter with me, I should have expected this, a quiet year caring for old people and you forget that war always returns with more horror, over and over? And then, if his face hadn’t told me, the sound of his voice does.
“Germans, hear, you Germans,” he stutters each memorized syllable. “We not here for land, we have plenty land. We here for revenge!”
And quick as lightning the gun leaps in his hands and he fires into the ceiling, three shots that explode inside our heads, and screams a command. All the gawking soldiers blunder back out ahead of him; we hear them pounding, yelling up the stairs and through the air-raid shelter. They are gone.
“O dearest, dearest God in heaven,” Onkel Johann prays.
Sister Erika gets up slowly and moves to him. “Yes, of course, God will protect us,” she says. Her voice tries to find its unshakable calm. “See, shooting is very loud, but doesn’t hurt the ceiling, the beams are two hundred years old.”
“I’m ninety-one years old,” Taunte Gertrude explains again. I am thankful that she doesn’t comprehend.
We brace the broken door in place with chairs, spread sheets over the straw we have brought in and bed all our beloved old ones under the quilts and blankets we brought from the rooms upstairs. There is no electricity for light, but we still have a bit of gathered coal for Frau Heinrichs’ heater; if you look directly at it you see light flicker in its tiny slate window. The house no longer shakes, the night outside has grown momentarily silent. Sister Erika and I lie down together on the bare floor where the door opens, there is no straw for us but we have two quilts, one wool, one feathers, and one pillow between us. On that warm stone floor, breathing and ancient rustling all around me, I can almost imagine the world a place where one could sleep.
Not an instant! I reach in the darkness, touch Sister Erika’s face, her nose, with the tips of my fingers, her temple, and I turn until my lips are against her left ear.
“Tonight we can’t sleep,” I whisper. “We must tell each other everything.”
Her breath runs over my chin and throat. “Yes,” she says so low no ear but mine could have heard it. “I saw you. Did you know that Russian?”
“He’s not Russian, he’s a Tatar, from the Caucasus. They’re Muslims, and if anyone touches a Tatar woman … those dark, slant-eyed women hidden under veils, to the Wehrmacht in Russia they weren’t human, they ripped off their veils, used them like whores, like animals, anything they wanted they did.”
“Elizabeth!” She twists her head, hisses against my mouth, “What’s the matter, what?”
The room is warm but I am shuddering. It is as if the gunfire still hammers in the room; those blue mouths searching, those rifles so smooth and shining as if grown out of those terrible hands like steel trees, they make everything that has been impossible to say until now absolutely necessary. I have to say it:
“Have you ever been violated?”
“No … no.”
“Then listen,” I say, “may God have mercy but listen, you and I could flee, but our very old people … there are two things we can do. These are blooded soldiers, they’ve survived and killed, who knows what’s happened to them and their women in four years of invasion and counterattack—nothing has happened to you till now, but I was two months on the muddy trek, retreating before the Soviet advance from the Ukraine to the Wartegau and I know—these soldiers will take Marienburg building by building and the castle too, they broke in on us, we can’t hide and they’ll come back whenever they want, there are two things we can do: try to resist, or accept. It will happen so fast, like they broke in and he yells and fires into the ceiling, your mind goes white, gone, so you must think now, before it happens, two things, resist or accept—”
“Elizabeth—”
“Listen! We are women. In war, women are only one thing for soldiers. First try to talk … when he grabs you, talk, talk if you can as long as you can, even if he can’t understand you, a human voice and words, with one soldier alone it can be possible, but soldiers in a gang are not men, they’re a trained kill machine, they have no head, no conscience, no reason except fear and you can’t scare them. Listen. For a front-line soldier any woman is a hole to be fucked. When they knock you down and one is on top of you, and you’re still conscious, resist only if you can grab something you can kill him with, grab a gun or a knife or club and use it instantly, don’t hesitate, don’t think, grab it and hit the body, the head’s too small and hard, always the body, the best is the throat or under his arm or in the belly as deep as you can when he’s over you, but don’t hesitate, stab his eyes if you have a chance, that’s good … as hard as…”
I’m gagging, I have to stop. She lies against me, her heart beats steadily; doesn’t she understand?
I try to whisper more calmly. “Even if you stop one, kill one, alone, or even two, it won’t do any good. There are armies of them, they’ll only be more enraged and come and they won’t waste bullets, whatever they want to do, they’ll rip our old ones open with bayonets, fingers, cocks, they’ll blow…”
Erika turns completely, pushes her left arm under my neck and with her right pulls me against her. Tight, she is tenderness and warmth, my face held between her breasts—but I have to concentrate, prepare her!
“Shhhh,” she whispers, “that’s enough now. There’re two hundred German Wehrmacht in the Marienburg, if they can fight their way out, they’ll take us all west, over the Nogat.”
“Fighting for their lives, you think they’d carry fourteen old people four hundred kilometres to the Oder?”
“Danzig,” she says. “Ships are evacuating people from Danzig.”
The great city I have never seen. Which our ancestor Adam Wiebe once protected with a wall no army broke through i
n one hundred and fifty years. Our father told me and my brothers that the centre of Danzig is unbelievably beautiful. He said the tall, narrow buildings that line both sides of the Long Market have stepped façades like the houses that tower over the canals of Amsterdam.… Erika holds me, her voice quiet. In my thirteen months at the Home I have known her as a person of calm, superb organization, and unquenchable hope. And no fool.
I shiver. “Yes. You and I could reach Danzig.”
Her arms loosen; she whispers, “You could.”
She has understood the longing in my voice when I said that name. Long before the Great War, when I was barely a year and the world for Russian Mennonites was always summer and always light, my father travelled through Danzig on his way to Germany to study photography, on railroads, he said, first built by the engineer Eduard Frederich Salomon Wiebe, another possible ancestor. Now war has driven me to Marienburg, less than seventy kilometres from Danzig. I could walk there through the world of villages the Mennonites built after draining the delta marshes, and from which most have already fled. I could walk to Danzig in two nights and a day, with only two rivers to cross.
“The gauleiter,” Erika is whispering in my ear, “betrayed us, now you must save yourself.”
I could try. But my body lying on these stones seems to know more than I can plan now. My arms are around her strong body and so we hold each other as closely as two women can, breathing together. After a time, the prayers still rustling in the room, she can say to me:
“You were violated.”
And I can say it. “Yes.” And, saying it, I must go on. “In war men are brave and killed, women are brave and raped and killed, war and rape always slide off the tongue together, but we don’t need war to be brutalized, a girl can get beaten and violated and sodomized…”
I get myself stopped because Erika’s arms pull tighter around me. “Later,” she says in my ear. “Tell me, if I don’t resist, what?”
“For war they train soldiers how to kill, how to look at wounds and the dead without feeling, but no one trains women for this.”
“Ssshhh,” against my mouth, “not that, not now.”
And I hear, near us, Frau Heinrichs snoring a little, good, but in half our room the straw stirs with sleeplessness, prayers in various languages for mercy. O beloved Saviour only you can save us.
So I can begin to tell Erika, in my arms, “They will take turns, one after the other. If you struggle, try to resist, some of them will hold you down, sit on your face or break your legs wider apart or bend you over because if they sodomize you they think they … some will bellow like animals, their hands grab you anywhere, there’s nothing human about them, especially their laughing, you must pray to go away, go as fast and as far as you can, away.
“You’ll see it in their eyes, don’t struggle, don’t stiffen or brace yourself, it’ll hurt you more, make yourself limp, try, and you must do this right away: as soon as they grab you, as soon as it’s hopeless, try to pick a place where you can go, go away.”
“What … a place, to go?”
“Go away, a nook, a corner, if there’s a closet or a space behind a stove, go there. Not a corner up in the ceiling because from there you’ll see. Any place where it’s dark, go.”
“Like … under berry bushes, in our garden?”
“Yes yes yes, good, under thick bushes, as far away and green as you can, go! You’re limp, you go fast, the stabbing pain will try to drag you back but don’t let it, concentrate, a name helps, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ if you can make yourself a little wet before it starts then maybe the pain won’t cut so hard.”
“Wet?” she whispers.
And I can’t stand this, I have to snort against her skin, this is so stupid. Trying to say words about what lives forever inside you like blood, like cancer, whispering as if you could prepare to be smashed by pain, your body left dead except for shame, this could only be your own fault, talking is so uselessly stupid.
“Elizabeth Katerina! Those soldiers were in this room!”
“And we did not bring them here!”
“This is war training, tell me!”
“All right! Where could you get it, wet?”
“Spit?”
“Maybe. But my mouth is so dry then, it’s useless.”
“Tears?”
“Yes, tears, or sweat, blood. Don’t fight, you’ll want to, but don’t, the faster they’ll do it. Remember, to them a woman is three holes, and they’ll use every one.”
“What?”
“Yes, three. If you have to swallow sperm, or piss, it doesn’t matter, vomit if you can but it’s not poison. Just go away.”
“O Lord”—her voice is suddenly broken—“please.”
“Erika.” I can only hold her.
“O Lord, Lord our God,” she gasps against my neck, “you have been our refuge forever, before the mountains were born, before you formed the earth, from the ages to all ages you are God.”
I cannot join her. I have begun to weep, in the vice of memory, foreboding. Jesus, Jesus.
We awake from exhaustion into a blanket barrage outside. I do not dare venture out for water and, crowded into one room, we have so much we need to clean that the level in our storage barrel drops badly. Our storage room is still locked and filled: bread, dried noodles, canned fruit, a little smoked sausage, we do not talk about how long we can ration ourselves in a siege, we think of that but this is war and we do not think of that either, today is today and hopeless enough unto itself. And in the basement cubicle next to ours we need water to wash our waste into the open sewer; if that is plugged, Erika and I will have to carry everything onto the street by pail as well. The house shudders and creaks, bullets shriek, the world is breaking over us. But we clean, we eat, we pray long prayers, or moan them as we are able. Our shivering people settle closer together in the most protected corner of the room.
“Yes, close together,” Erika says, her tone quiet as if she were changing a night sheet, “then they don’t have to dig in so many places, to find us if the house collapses.”
Frau Heinrichs begins to sing, her voice light as a bird flying:
“We are on our heavenly journey,
To our blessed home above…”
When she reaches the chorus, other voices are trying to climb with hers:
“We’re travelling home,
we’re travelling home,
When our battle has been fought
we’ll journey ho-o-ome.”
Onkel Johann’s lips move, though he makes no sound.
It is early afternoon when we hear the door upstairs crash open, a moment of silence, and then feet pounding in. Shouts, curses, then a barked Russian command and footsteps, bodies are crashing out again. We are so relieved we are almost breathing when, without so much as a step creaking to warn us, a fist pounds on the door and it falls open: an officer.
My heart jolts, for a moment I can only stare at his knee-high, polished boots. It is always the same, any, every Red Army officer could be Abel, the happiness and the horror that would be. But of course it is not, not my lost Communist Party brother.
Two soldiers with automatic pistols close behind him. He bends into the room and stands with feet apart, his uniform clean and smartly creased. In amazement I see him lift his peaked cap in a polite salute from his wide, bald head—does he shave it like Lenin?
“Does anyone speak Russian?”
We have planned this. Only Frau Heinrichs will speak, though half the room could. Sister Erika has rehearsed with each of them my warning not to reveal any knowledge of Russian, because the Soviet military has Stalin’s absolute orders: anyone found in Germany who has ever lived in Mother Russia can only be a traitor to the Great Communist ideal and is to be arrested immediately and sent back for punishment. But Frau Heinrichs volunteered. At eighty-seven, she said, what can they do to me?
We pray she is right. She does not hesitate to answer. I watch the astounding officer, with a little hope but n
o confidence in his apparent momentary decency. In the war business of cleaning German soldiers out of Marienburg house by house, should we be more useful to him dead than alive, we will be dead.
Major Malenkov assures us that they do not hurt old people. If we remain quiet and do not shelter German combatants, we will not be harmed. But Frau Heinrichs cannot help herself, she gestures to our cowering people and begs him—Last night seven soldiers broke in, see, the door, the ceiling—and I have to remind her in German not to ask or offer anything beyond what he said, only short answers.
Malenkov is looking at me too sharply. Both Sister Erika and I have pulled worn shawls tight over our hair, we stand as bent as sticks but we dare not overdo it, we cannot hide our skin or eyes. Then, his Russian so unthreatening and cultured that in civilian life he might well be a professor, he tells us he knows how we are suffering, war is horrible for everyone, and especially for the aged, but the front will have moved past in two days and we will be in the excellent care of the Red Army. They are unstoppable, and he will leave orders we are not to be bothered by anyone, not for food or anything else, nothing. He will post a guard at our door. Frau Heinrichs is overjoyed, she and all the others pour out their thanks as he gestures his two glowering, helmeted louts out ahead of him. When he turns to go, he smiles directly at me, and I’m certain my face betrays to him my knowledge and my great fear.
True, the louts are at the door when I venture out with my shawl and water pails. One even opens the door when I return, but I know their young, starved eyes have followed me every step as if I, draped as I am, were a recovered memory, a village mirage in this filth and blood—look, a woman walking with water pails!—in the boredom and abrupt brutality they live day after day.
“We thank God, oh, we thank You for this safe day,” Sister Erika says at evening devotions, and immediately they all together begin to thank so deeply, so pathetically, even unknowing Taunte Gertrude, their frail voices staggering away into exhausted repetitions most of them have been sighing all day long.
“Our ancient Sisters and Brother of Perpetual Prayer,” Erika whispers to me on the floor. “God will answer them, certainly.”