Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  “I have no memory of seeing my father. None. Though I have tried, staring at the one picture we have of him. My first memory of anything is so clear it must be from before he disappeared, and so strange too I wondered about it for years and could never say a word, not even to my Leinchi when she held me in her arms, and still I thought about it. I finally recognized it when I sat at my mother’s bedside when she was dying. That first memory came together with a second memory, where I’m very little and I’m in front of a woman in a dark dress sitting in a chair. She is holding a baby, and it’s pressing its face against what I think is a smooth white melon that sticks half out of her open dress, and I ask her what the baby is doing and she says it’s eating like babies do and I wonder, how can a baby eat a hard melon that way, and in winter, I have never seen this before though I have seen many babies. We’re in the bedroom of our house with the winter coats of visitors piled on the bed, and I reach up and touch the top of the melon and it’s not hard like a melon would be, but soft, warm like the porridge I touch with my fingers, skimmed over and waiting for me in a bowl sometimes in the morning, oh, I thought then, if only we could have porridge every day! And I say to her, it’s you, the baby eats you! But she laughs, no, no, see, it drinks my milk, and she leans the baby’s shiny head away and I see her dark nipple, a drop of white on the centre growing pale blue as the baby bursts out a roar, its hands clawing frantically and she clasps it against her again and its cries choke, it gurgles, I see its mouth clamped there into fast sucking. And I recognized my first memory only when it and the ‘melon’ came together—why could I never see that before? Isn’t that crazy? My first memory was of my mother’s breast?”

  Adam Wiebe, my cousin but a stranger from so far away, has a quiet, listening, doctor’s face. How can it be I have told him this, things no man would want to admit he could even think? But his expression, his eyes do not change, as if he understands there is more, and there is.

  “Her breast, I mean my mother’s, was not full like the young woman I saw, I remembered only the fold of her skin moving under my eyes and my fist, and the thump of my face against the fold of it bumping on her ribs, memories so sudden as she lay there. I held her hand and cried, I couldn’t explain myself with her on her last bed. You can’t say that, to your own mother.”

  “Strange things,” Adam says, “people think of beside deathbeds. Often wonderful things that comfort us.”

  His Lowgerman is all n endings like mine, a good Chortizer inheritance, but it sounds a little different, maybe that’s why—Lowgerman brushed with stranger English—we feel easy together.

  “My old mother,” I say, “then talked mostly to me about their first year in Paraguay. She talked so much in the hospital, she never had before. But she wanted to tell me more, day after day, it was the heavy heat of January summer, 1967, but January in Orenburg was always cold, no one can imagine it living in Paraguay, with all the rivers ice and the ground hard as rock, and they were always hungry, those Soviet years before our father was gone. It was very heavy, what my mother had to carry over forty years and only silence could do it, she said. She tried to nurse me in Russia until I was almost two, tried with the little she had. The children before me, Peter and Anna, died before they were a year old during the civil war, and in summer 1925 our last cow died too and they had no money for another one, they could not even eat the meat, the cow was sick, so they gave it to the people who still had a pig to feed, and they had the last manure to dry and burn in the stove, and the cow leather that mien Jahonn as she always called him, ‘my John,’ and my oldest brother Vanya tanned and traded for grain they could grind into porridge. That was what we ate that winter, oat and barley porridge and sometimes small cakes of it fried with a little fat.

  “ ‘You would be the last one, I always knew,’ my mother said, touching my head, her hand so twisted by arthritis and endless work, and I, alone with her, strong and forty-two years old and married with healthy children and usually enough to eat here now, sometimes I couldn’t stand the thought of her leaving us—gone—I hid my face in her thin sheet so no one outside would hear me cry. ‘David, David, you were such a nice, heavy boy like all the biggest Wiebes and thick Loewens, when we married we trusted God would give us a strong family, and I told God He had to let you live, grow up like Vanya, our strong Vanya.’

  “My oldest brother was, as they said, such a ‘Jahonn’ he was too much for a Mennonite name only, they had to call him something Russian too, happy and short. Vanya here, Vanya there, my mother said; nothing on earth could discourage him, he was so strong at fourteen. He and our father tanned cowhide for shoes and then for several winters they steamed and pounded old cloth and wool together into felt for boots and the summer before I was born they set up a press to make sunflower oil, first on a treadmill with neighbour horses walking and next spring Vanya drove a wagon to Orenburg and brought back a small steam engine press, and the summer after that they bought a threshing machine and then people planted more sunflowers and grain for our own food. The village and the whole colony too were slowly living a little better after years of barely starving, but Lenin was dead and then the collectivization planners came to Orenburg in 1928 with Stalin’s first Five Year Plan disaster. Well, by seeding time next year our father was gone, my twenty-one-year-old brother was left the man in the family and he came to her quietly and said, ‘Mama, what do you think? Do we have to get out, try to go to Canada? Onkel Nikolai Wiebe thinks we should all try, and Taunte Tien and her Abraham think maybe, too.’ ”

  “Were those my parents?” Adam asks me. “In 1929, they knew when to leave, for Moscow?”

  “Oh, they knew, by July ’29 everybody knew. Your father Abraham Wiebe, my mother said, heard everything in the village and your mother could think quicker than a Jewish pedlar counting change. ‘Vanya! Vanya!’ my mother still wailed for her oldest on her last bed, though without a tear. Long ago she had cried enough forever in Paraguay, that was a knife through the heart, she said, but in ’29 there was nothing left to do but try to leave, escape if they could. But how could she leave and not know to remember the place where her Jahonn was thrown away in a grave, to pray there and weep?

  “Stalin’s political police—the GPU—had come the night of January 3, 1929, and they hauled our father to Orenburg for questioning. And then he disappeared. Why? Even in those early days the Bolsheviks wouldn’t explain anything. After bringing the oil press and the threshing machine into our village he could never be anything but a Rich Kulak, but when they took him it saved our family from the worst the Soviet Collectivization Committee could do, they didn’t yet blame everyone in a family for what one person in it did, the way they did later. We would never be classified as the best, Poor Citizens, but with him gone and the oil press taken they registered us as Middle Citizens, which was not as bad as Rich Kulaks. But when we knew that’s what they had done, my brother Vanya went one fall evening to the head of the local committee and told him we wanted to go to Moscow where over three thousand Mennonites were already trying to get out of the country. Vanya didn’t say the word Moscow, of course, or that our Anna and her husband with his whole Peter Wiebe family and your parents, Taunte Tien and Onkel Abraham, with their family were in Moscow already. Vanya just said, ‘You don’t want us here, give us papers and we’ll leave.’

  “The head of the village soviet, the kolkhoz they called it, looked at him across the table, my mother said. Vanya didn’t have to tell him anything more. He was our cousin Nikolai Wiebe, the same age as Vanya, twenty-two, we always called him our Kolya. They were friends, they grew up and went to village school together when there was one. Kolya was often a day worker in our oil press. He was as smart as any Wiebe ever was, the second son of the eighth son of old Foda Jakob Wiebe who was for twelve years the elected head of the whole Orenburg Mennonite Colony, and now Kolya was really lucky: his family was so very poor, but under the Communists he was named to a place on the other side of the big table, with all the heavy s
tamps and papers on it.”

  “So,” Adam says slowly. “In ’29 a Kolya Wiebe was head of the Communists in Number Eight Romanovka?”

  “Yes, of the kolkhoz. The son of your father’s youngest brother, Nikolai. Your first cousin.”

  “They knew how to break up families, didn’t they.”

  “Better than anyone. They were really smart, like devils.”

  Adam is squeezing the orange I gave him from the tree under which we are standing in our orchard. At first he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing: a tree with shining new leaves that also had bright flowers and little green oranges and large yellow ones ripe enough to eat growing on it, all at the same time. I told him Paraguay offers very few miracles, but luckily those few have to do with things you can eat. He is quiet so long, I finally ask:

  “Did your parents tell you how they went to Moscow? How they got out in ’29?”

  After a minute Adam says, “I don’t remember very much, those stories, I’ll talk to my mother again. I know two of my Wiebe uncles and their families were sent back from Moscow, back to Orenburg.”

  “Yes,” I say when he stops. “Peter Wiebe and Nikolai Wiebe.”

  “Yes, I think so, but my father never spoke about them. He didn’t want to. Once he said my older sister, Margaret, she was the baby then when they got out to Germany and the German refugee camp, she was always sick and no one could understand how their family was always stamped ‘healthy’ every time the Canadian doctors came around … though maybe they told me more, maybe I was too stupid to listen. I’ll ask my mother now.”

  “Sometimes, in their old days, people can talk more.”

  This Adam Wiebe, only ten years younger than I, was by the grace and mercy of God born in Canada, and became a doctor. He has so much education and is so smart and rich he could probably be president of the whole country someday if he wanted to, they’ve never had a dictator like Paraguay. We hear Canada is very good for refugees, if you’re smart and aren’t lazy, they say, it’s all easy there, just work.

  “Those Canadian doctors must have been in Mölln,” I tell him, “the refugee camp where the German and Canadian government people sorted them out, before the ships in Hamburg.”

  “You were there, you remember that?”

  “I was four and always nice and sick for the Canadian doctors too, my mother said, I…” And I have to laugh. “But no miracle like your sister Margaret! I made it easy for the doctors to say no, not into Canada. If I remembered any of that, fifty years of Chaco sun fried it out of me.”

  A good Mennonite joke and Adam laughs with me, he sometimes has a warm, even friendly face, if he wants to. He bites a small opening in the top of the orange he has softened and squeezes the juice into his mouth, sucking.

  “This is really good,” he says, “sweet and sharp. So, David, our cousin Kolya Wiebe was a Communist in ’29, and all of a sudden he’s the big Soviet boss in Romanovka?”

  “I don’t know if he was a Communist in his heart, but he worked for them. Lots of people did, what else could they do? Kolya was Nikolai Wiebe’s son, and maybe he was the reason the Nikolai family got sent back to Orenburg from Moscow in ’29, why they couldn’t get away. In the summer when Kolya and my brother Vanya were schoolboys, they often herded the village cows far out on the Number Eight Hills that began south of the cemetery, the open steppe where there’s nothing between the grass running in the wind as far as you can see all around you and blue heaven above. Maybe in the clouds they saw ships, or trains, or mills like Mennonites had always built, with giant sails turning in the wind to pump water over dikes or grind grain to feed everyone they knew in the twenty-three Orenburg Colony villages. Maybe they saw double-winged airplanes they thought they’d someday fly like birds in God’s free air, but there was nothing Kolya could do about those heavy stamps he had to use. The orders that came with the bosses from Moscow were no better than boulders in the Little Uran River—if you couldn’t find a way to flow around or between, you smashed into them.

  “ ‘I have no stamp that goes to Moscow,’ Kolya told my brother.

  “ ‘Then give me a paper to visit our father’s grave,’ Vanya said, ‘for the whole family.’

  “My mother had been told that our father had been convicted of being a kulak and sent away. Just wait, Maria Abramovna, you’ll hear how you can write to him. But we already knew from the families of two men in prison with him, one from Number Seven and the other Number Five, that they had both recognized our father’s bloody face one morning in the Grey House on Kirov Street in Orenburg, where a sheet had fallen off one of the tables. In the cellar, they said, in the morning bodies often lay under sheets soaked with dried blood.

  “I was three, and I can’t remember him, nothing. We have only one small picture from Number Eight Romanovka. My father sits on the right and Vanya on the left, and between them are Mama and we four younger ones—the oldest, Maria, is not there, she’s already married—with me, a little bald-head, sitting on my mother’s lap. My father is fifty and almost as bald as I, only a line of hair above his ears, but my big brother has black hair cut so heavy it bristles thick as fur all over his long, gaunt head.

  “Over the table Kolya said to Vanya, ‘Only the GPU know, and they’ll never tell you where the grave is.’

  ‘“Is there one?’

  ‘“My word, Vanya, I don’t know. And I can’t ask, especially about a relative.’

  ‘“Then give me a paper.’

  “ ‘I told you, there is no place I can put on it.’

  “ ‘Well,’ Vanya said, ‘then we can look anywhere for the grave. Just write, The John Loewen family, mother Maria Abramovna Loewen née Wiebe, and her five children, six persons in all, has permission to visit the grave of their father, John Loewen. Just stamp and sign it, that’s all, no one can read your signature.’

  “ ‘The stamp says Orenburg, and a gun will stop you.’

  “ ‘So, the worst a gun can do is shoot us.’

  “ ‘No,’ Kolya said. ‘The worst is shove you all on a train going north to the Mezan River in the Vologda forests. Or worse, Vorkuta.’

  ‘“You maybe too?’

  ‘“Who can say.’

  “In September, 1929, young Nikolai ‘Kolya’ Wiebe already knew so much, too much, and the stories we heard twenty years later from the refugees coming after the Second World War could only be true: before he was twenty-five, he had disappeared too.”

  “But,” Adam says to me in my Paraguay orchard, “he gave your brother the papers to go?”

  “He must have, we were in Moscow, and got out to Germany.”

  “And Kolya’s family went too. Was he with them?”

  “No, my mother said he wasn’t. She never heard how the Nikolai Wiebes got there, but before November 25, the GPU sent them back to Number Eight Romanovka.”

  “The Peter Wiebes too.”

  “Yes.”

  From his face, suddenly, I know Adam knows more than he will tell me about our families. Like every one of us. After a moment he asks:

  “And Vanya, how old did he get?”

  “Not as old as Kolya. December 24, 1930, twenty-two years, eleven months, one day.”

  “But then you were already here, except your father, all safe in Paraguay.”

  “Safe from those Communists, yes, but there is still everything else on earth.”

  He says, strangely, “Always enough ‘everything else’ for Mennonites to keep on suffering.”

  I don’t understand his tone. “It was typhus,” I tell him. “In our first year in the Chaco fewer than three hundred and fifty families buried ninety-four people, forty-four of them children.”

  “Ninety-four deaths, in one year?”

  “My sister Maria’s two children too. Heat and dysentery, and forty-three of typhus. One whole family died out, parents and three small children, and all the orphans … they said the Chaco was too dry for typhus, but we brought it here, with us.”

  “Ah-h-h
,” Adam says. He is looking at the empty orange skin between his long fingers, fingers so pale and soft it could be he has never, in his whole life, so much as touched a shovel. Suffer? He looks up and smiles a little, so I tell him:

  “There was no doctor in the Chaco. After a month of dying they brought one from Asunción, and he said people on the river-boats coming from Argentina sometimes had it.”

  Adam nods. “Epidemic typhus, carried by lice, aided by dirt and bad water.”

  “Our ministers could only pray and read the Bible, my mother said, it was all over again what the conservative Mennonites from Canada found here in 1927. They had come to the Chaco to get away from the big world, and have their own schools for their children and live in villages as they wanted to, but what they got here at first was mostly graves in the bittergrass.”

  Adam says, “I haven’t been to their colony yet, should I visit them?”

  I laugh a little. “If you’re looking for really faraway relatives, I can take you to a few living there, really stubborn Wiebes and Loewens who already left Russia by the shipload over a hundred years ago.”

  “No no,” he says fast, laughing with me. “But they had typhus too, when they came?”

  “Those Mennos call it their ‘Great Dying’ to this day, in a few months of waiting in grass huts to move here into the Chaco from the Paraguay River, over a hundred died, fifty of them children under two—even more than with us. It all comes from the hand of God, the Canadian Mennonites in the Chaco always say, health or sickness. At our funerals in 1930 our ministers preached that too, though often they broke down crying when they said it. My mother remembered the one verse they always read: ‘And King David built an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor, and sacrificed burnt offerings and peace offerings. Then the Lord answered the prayer for the land, and the plague was stopped.’ Russian or Canadian Mennonites, we certainly aren’t kings, my mother said, but after our long, hard journeys to reach the Gran Chaco, we did sacrifice, all of us, until the plagues finally stopped, they truly did.”