Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  We carry within us the wonders we seek without us: there is all

  Africa and her prodigies in us.

  The full white goodness of Sir Thomas theological Browne. Adam sees his own pale hand gesture and she shifts slightly, aside, and with long fingers (the plastic still gripped between the thumb and finger of the right) widens the pantyhose elastic out at her waist, slides them down over her hips, down her long legs, together with the shoes off her feet, first left then right. Is there anything else?

  Her endless skin laid it seems against his very eyes. He tries to tilt back, to see her face and she is towering so valley and hill over him that he cannot decipher his thoughts—nor does it matter since she is already doing what he would want to imagine were he capable of it: an ineffable movement of her arms lifts both her hands to her breasts, pushes them up so that the nipples beak forward, and her breasts are so full and her neck so long that if she bowed her head over him she could curl her moist tongue around either nipple, whichever she chose, it is as if she spoke these impossible possibilities into his very eyes, numbered them in his ears.

  Everything else?

  His senses stagger, perhaps he is tilting, but her hands continue to push her breasts up, and they are completely distorted now, they are being lifted from her ribs, she is slipping them up past her face like a knitted sweater, over her head and she drops them behind her without a sound, her hands quick as water flowing down her skin and stripping off her hips and buttocks, the hollow between her thighs, the backs of her legs (that little safety plastic flickering) and her hands rise to her belly, her groin, the black centre of her curled mons, which ever since she turned to him has always been there and a tongue-length from his face, and it is gone: she is become the thing itself. And once her dreadful hands reach her exquisite face, who could say she is there at all. This poor, bare, forked animal.

  “Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

  She stands at the door. It may be that Adam shakes his head. When the door sighs and clicks shut he glances at the bed for whatever she has stripped off and left behind. Nothing.

  On the screen of the cupboard TV the woman and the man still sit motionless and silent, though talking. The electrical box can offer Adam any number of backs, faces, breasts, hands, bunched buttocks, nipples, knees, cunts, elbows, hair, thighs—in Canadian hotels all possible human parts are now available except entering cocks and assholes—bodies in whole or in part moaning with relentless endurance hour after hour, airbrushed colour nothing at all like these patterns of shade and density that solidify Blondi’s German shepherd corpse, the dog that belonged to the German Shepherd, their leader, guide, chief, commander—god. Following the six white and grey and black Goebbels’ children: Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, Heide, Helga, all H in honour of His Inexpressible H-ness and falling into their last sleep with the Third Reich prayer caught in their teeth:

  Händchen falten,

  Köpfchen senken,

  Und an Adolf Hitler denken.

  Fold your little hands, Bow your little heads, And think of Adolf Hitler. No rhyme or reason in English. All the parts of the children so carefully dissected by Soviet forensic officers, two lieutenant-colonels and three majors: each child brain, tongue, lungs, heart offering up the smell of bitter almonds.

  And glass splinters in every small mouth. A few corpses among those European mountain millions, the few he has himself held living and dying; his own. These six so harmless, and with four inexpressibly harmful adults proving what everyone already knows: that a human body will burn only badly and in part, unless placed, or piled if necessary, inside a scientifically designed and properly fuelled oven. Or chained individually over or inside carefully stacked, carefully split and tended wood.

  Adam’s stomach heaves, a pathetic exorcism of bile and revulsion. He is staring at the other bed, folded triangular and crisp to its white sheet.

  Under the other books, beside him, lies the biggest: the one he inadvertently carried away from the church hall. Susannah would say, That’s you, your subconscious would pick up the glowering, almost devilish book-face of Norman Bethune: a man vaguely known to some as good, though continually and throughout his life an egotistical bastard. Well, Adam would respond, not according to Chairman Mao. What did Mao know, he only met Bethune once and never answered a single letter he wrote. Okay, but he did sacrifice himself when no one, not even a state, demanded it of him, rich as he could have been. Maybe because he knew he was dying. We all know that. I mean, he was sick. Maybe, but that’s better than becoming worse, the way men usually do when they face death, apparently he became better and better as his blood circulated rot through his body from the gangrene that entered at the bare tip of his finger. That’s the official record, it could as easily have been the bare tip of his cock, would you say if a man is in pain and dying at his farthest extremities long enough, slowly enough, does gathering goodness at last become a possibility, mould you eventually into a good wholeness? Not a Hitler, he came apart piece by piece, hair, teeth, brain, and he just got worse. All that, with only one testicle to begin with, are you having death pains?

  Stretched on the bed, Adam has to laugh; he could tell her no, not in his testicles. Nor anywhere else, not yet, though it’s inevitable. Pain, in the enervating comfort of a Toronto hotel where a tall woman has just turned down his bedding and left him two exquisite chocolates: he feels blank and alone, but—unfortunately—he knows from long experience this is no pain unto death. Nothing possible at his fingertips in this oblivious room will make him, or anyone anywhere, any better. But if Susannah were actually here, stretched on this bed with him, or humming in the bathroom—or Trish in the connecting room, or Joel—there are people he knows in Toronto, women and men, but this trip, however many days it may be, is simply one of his blank moves, to keep it that way he should have gone to a musical, or a comedy. A ridiculous movie with John Candy. Or run to China.

  He could have, he should have run to China himself for the Great Leap Forward, and shown Chairman Mao what another dedicated Canadian doctor could do in a Revolution, cultural this time, summer 1965. He was exactly the right age for the sixties, not yet thirty, he could have been politically and medically ready—but he was married, Susannah was about to give birth to Trish, he was creating a life’s career out of medicare. A liberated Mennonite choosing culture and revolution when he might be working like a dog to make himself rich? Trish once asked that, almost.

  Lucky Bethune. Inheriting class and wealth, plenty of lovers, smart, a failed marriage quickly over, no children, three highly acceptable revolutions to escape to in a decade, Russia, Spain, China, all of them marvellously far from home and family, on opposite turns of the globe actually, and in languages you fortunately cannot speak: you feel good about “saving lives,” so called, treat as many wounded soldiers as possible and send them off healthy enough to kill again. Then from the isolated Wu T’ai Mountains of China, August 21, 1938, you can write at last:

  I don’t think I have been so happy for a long time. I am content. I am doing what I want to do. Why shouldn’t I be happy—see what my riches consist of.… Here are found those comrades whom one recognizes as belonging to the hierarchy of Communism—the Bolshevists. Quiet, steady, wise, patient; with an unshakeable optimism; gentle and cruel; sweet and bitter; unselfish, determined; implacable in their hate; world-embracing in their love.

  Write so peacefully about trained and blooded killers; whose hatred and love, gentleness and cruelty conceived dreams to rule the world and all the people in it. Chairman Mao at their head, with no more discernible a trace of conscience than Genghis Khan. Abruptly the deftness of Bethune’s scalpel is so temporary, his disordering of the alphabet too masterfully contrived, as any doctor would recognize: “How beautiful the body is; how perfect its parts; with what precision it moves; how obedient; proud and strong. How terrible when torn.” When burned, beautiful? “The little flame [!] of life sinks lower and lower, and, with a flicker, goes out.…
Like a candle goes out. Quietly and gently. It makes its protest and extinction, then submits.” Huh!

  … Four Japanese prisoners. Bring them in. In this community of pain, there are no enemies. Cut away that blood-stained uniform. Lay them beside the others. Why, they’re as alike as brothers!…

  What is the cause of this cruelty, this stupidity? A million workmen come from Japan to kill or mutilate a million Chinese workmen … Will the Japanese worker benefit by the death of the Chinese? No, how can he gain? … Then, in God’s name, who will gain? Who will profit from it? How is it possible to persuade the Japanese workman to attack … his brother in poverty; his companion in misery?

  God, gain, profit. Even Bethune dying could not escape that prayer of excuses. As if Bethune already anticipated Mao’s coming manias when he at last totally controlled the Chinese, his behaviour thirty years later indistinguishable from any horror the Japanese perpetrated. Well, distinguishable perhaps because it was worse, since no stranger, no matter how sadistic, can ever hurt a race—or a family—as deeply as one of its own members.

  But of course in spirit Bethune can insist all men are brothers, so he can go to China and be good enough to die, can go there and be good enough to watch: what is happening there is not happening to him though of course he understands and sympathizes so deeply—Adam sees himself briefly in Illinois that convulsive November, 1963, and knows in a rasp of sarcasm he is rethinking himself—from far away I can always write lone-somely home even though when I am home I cannot endure half the silly bastards who imagine they are my friends simply because they knew me once, but cannot imagine what I am become. If, now, I am any more than bits and pieces of something at any given time. And I can run anywhere I choose in the world, to the Wu T’ai Mountains of China, now that I have heard of them, but I can’t drive down the highway from Edmonton to Calgary and knock on the house door of the woman to whom I am still legally married, and when she opens it, touch her, with either a word or a gesture.

  The electronic shimmer of her voice, my voice, occasionally meeting. No touch. Our son left, our daughter gone; the mirrors of the past refuse to break.

  What is the matter with me?

  The TV mouths move without visible emotion, still presumably explaining why a weak-minded man like Lee Harvey Oswald, who in a short life had been used by everyone he ever met—and by so many organizations, both illegal and official, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union and perhaps even in Cuba and Mexico—how such a slight man, acting alone, could not possibly have conceived and carried out the assassination of the most carefully guarded man in the world with such brilliant and untrackable success. The fact that he happened to be working, temporarily, on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository was as unlikely as his being able to fire three shots, or four, with such accuracy at a target moving away from him, from a bolt-action rifle in less than six seconds, the last shot blowing John Kennedy’s head apart so that Jacqueline Kennedy’s first instinctive reaction, her mouth open in unutterable scream, was to scramble onto the trunk of the Cadillac and gather up the bloody pieces. The scientific question was: would those skull pieces land on the trunk behind them if the killer bullet came from behind the car?

  The stout man and the gaunt woman behind their table are saying this. In a thousand repetitious ways. Adam does not need to hear them, their motionless bodies a cipher of invisible words. The room he sits in is as blank as a room in any enormous city can be: a faint utterance of traffic, of plumbing, of heating: the white noise of twentieth-century indolence ending. Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail, nothing but tremors of sad memory. Avoid the worst, as always, as you can; find void.

  Television lumbers on in its unstoppable chronology of bits and pieces. That is what Adam has always loved about books, their singular and un-timebound discreteness. Lovely to hold complete in your hand: beginning, middle, end, and return to any one, any time, anywhere, as you please. Totally here now, no mirrors necessary. Adam holds them, thus:

  The Death of ADOLF HITLER:

  The corpse is that of a girl appearing to be about 15 years old, well nourished, dressed in a light-blue nightgown trimmed with lace. Height: 1 m. 58 cm. [5 ft., 1.6 in.] Chest measurements on the nipple line—65 cm. [25.4 in.]…. No signs of use of violence on the body surface.… In the mouth … glass splinters.

  The Mind of Norman Bethune:

  Comrade Bethune’s spirit, his utter devotion to others without any thought of self, was shown in his great sense of responsibility in his work and his great warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people.… I am deeply grieved over his death. Now we are all commemorating him, which shows how profoundly his spirit inspires everyone. We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. (Mao Tse-tung, Yenan, December 21, 1939)

  Wildfire Dreams: … what does an idiot romance know of fire? Not the cliché love image—the sheer fact of flame, a body searing into smoke and scream. Adam drops the book to the floor.

  A Gun for Sale:

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve said it before, haven’t I? I’d say it if I’d spilt your coffee, and I’ve got to say it after all these people are killed.…” She began to cry without tears; it was as if those ducts were frozen.…

  “All the same,” Anne said, as Raven covered her with his sack: Raven touched her icy hand: “I failed.”

  “Failed?” Mather said. “You’ve been the biggest success,” and it seemed to Anne for a few moments that this sense of failure would never die from her brain, that it would cloud a little every happiness; it was something she could never explain: her lover would never understand it. But already as his face lost its gloom, she was failing again.…

  Adam places the “entertainment”—only in Greene-land would this book be called that—on the bed. He gets himself stiffly up from the rumpled counterpane and walks past the black, silent TV with all its trapped, unnecessary pictures—in which you can, nevertheless, still occasionally discover individuals who believe in planning their lives; who believe in responsible actions; who actually believe there are some decent people with some control of the world who know what they are doing and can make decisions. Who can somehow believe with their wavering Greek minds in a vaguely Hebrew god and hope for him too; hope he can help them decide for goodness.

  The bathroom door, angled open, is all mirror. A man fills it: the greyish tousled head, a white hotel dressing gown belted, two legs with feet slightly turned out.

  Adam turns to the window behind him, and his hands—he knows them for certain—pull the curtains aside. All around him the stacked city burns in an unending light.

  He thinks, This is safe. Like Greene’s Anne, he thinks, Oh, I’m home. He should have left the books in Bloor Street United Hall, should have walked up the steps into the church nave of high windows and wooden balconies curved all around, where he could have heard the bagpipes enter wailing the pibroch, heard a low voice read what should have been said over the flowers of Margaret Laurence’s memory: How blessed are those who know their need for God, the kingdom of heaven is theirs; heard the strange community of the tribe she drew together in her death sing “Come ye before him and rejoice.” Like Laurence’s Hagar he thinks:

  Someone really ought to know these things.

  Twenty-seven storeys below him a shadow moves along the base of the building. I failed. It seems he can hear footsteps; there may be a knocking at the door. Oh, I’m so sorry.

  He touches the window with the coiled surface of his ear. It is there, it is cool.

  EIGHTEEN

  MY BROTHER VANYA

  Number Four Friedensheim,

  Fernheim Colony, Paraguay

  1980

  ADAM WIEBE FROM CANADA is, as I tell him, my sort of lopsided double cousin: third cousin on the Loewen side, second cousin on the Wiebe. We laugh at that, and he tells me again he’s a good listener, he didn’t fly almost to the bottom of the world to hear himself talk. I tell him I’ve heard the world is
round, and I think he’s farther north than I am south, maybe it’s he who lives at the bottom. We laugh again, there’s so much to tell, ten days will hardly get us started.

  “I was named David for my Grandpa Loewen when I was born on November 25, 1925. A Sunday, my mother said, in the Mennonite settlement north of the Russian city of Orenburg, the Communists changed that to Chaklov. In the village we called Number Eight Romanovka in honour of the Czar, long before Stalin murdered his way to power and tried to rename the whole world. Stalin had changed his own name. He was a Georgian called Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, and with a name like that maybe he would have lived as long as Georgians do, sometimes they say over a hundred years, but with the revolution and Moscow and power he only lasted seventy-three, not nearly long enough to murder and wreck everything he wanted, thank God; the air must be a lot worse in the Kremlin than in the Georgian mountain valleys. My mother, Maria, told me I was born so quick in the early morning my father would have had time to drive her and me to church in Number Five if they had still had a horse and wagon. Really, it was no wonder I came easy, she said, I was the last of eleven, though only six were living, including me.

  “Orenburg Colony was once well-to-do, but after revolution and civil war, by the winter of 1925–26 no one in our villages had anything, my mother said, except empty bellies and dying children. There were too many of both, no one could have dreamed what the date of my birth would become for us in Paraguay. I don’t know if Orenburg Mennonites had ever heard of Paraguay then, maybe not even of South America, but here the Mennonites have made November 25 the anniversary for all we have been forced to flee, and we celebrate it as the Thanksgiving Festival of our escape from Stalin in 1929 and a memorial to the thousands we had to leave behind, like her Jahonn, our father John Loewen warm in our hearts forever, with deep sorrow and sudden tears.