by Rudy Wiebe
Adam says slowly, “I guess it doesn’t matter how far you travel, you always carry … things with you. But sacrifice children … such suffering? The ministers said it was from God?”
“All life comes from God, they said, and suffering because of sin.”
“But that verse about David, I think he sacrificed animals on an altar for something he had done wrong, I think he made God angry by lying with a woman or counting people, I don’t know exactly—but what big sin did you people here do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was our escape from the Communists, maybe we were supposed to pay here what our relatives were still paying in Russia.”
“Pay? My parents escaped too. Pay what?”
“For evil, pay for sin in the world. The sin of Adam.”
My cousin Adam from Canada stares at me, almost as if I had meant him! I say, “In the Garden of Eden, the snake and Eve.”
“I know,” he says. “But some people seem to ‘pay’ a lot more than others.”
“As my mother always said, who can argue with God?”
“If we were Jews we would.”
“Who’d want to be a Jew? They don’t believe in the New Testament.”
He makes a hard sound in his throat. “The New Testament says Jesus paid for all sin on the cross, so why do we still have to pay more?”
I don’t know what to say, nor, I think, would my mother, who certainly thought about this longer than I. If she knew, she never told me. I can only ask Adam:
“What do you pay for sin in Canada?”
“Hmm! Not much. Hard work; my family started in a log house no bigger than a granary, they worked like slaves—but no hunger or Communists, certainly not typhus or—” Then he laughs, and I hear his thoughts change in his laughter. “Maybe my debt is piling up interest, who knows how big it’ll be when I have to pay!”
We laugh a little, together, as people do when there is nothing to say about something that is not funny.
“But your brother,” he says, “that wasn’t typhus.”
No. Not typhus. In the ten days we are together I tell him our worst and best story, the one that started our life in Paraguay in 1930 when, we already had no father. Tell it in pieces, as I can bear it, even while we’re grinding along the narrow cactus and sand tracks that connect Menno Colony’s eighty villages, making sure, as he says, we don’t find any relatives among the six thousand people living there, their families with sometimes fifteen or even eighteen children.
At the water oasis of Boquerón, where two years after we came the Paraguayan and Bolivian armies fought in the terrible desert heat until they were both defeated, over three thousand soldiers dead, we spend a few hours talking about the Chaco Border War that ran over us before we even had our villages built. How our mothers gave bread they baked to soldiers on both sides for Christmas and they thanked them with volleys fired into the air and dancing, and our young men took their dying horses home and fed and watered them back to life so the army officers on either side could commandeer them again. You flee to the ends of the world, my mother said to me, and still the first thing you meet is war, fought over thorns and sand.
But Adam and I come back to my brother’s story: he won’t let me stay away from it.
I tell him my mother said Vanya’s will was unbreakable. He was the head of the family, he must work. Not the heat and bittergrass campos and thornbrush sand flats and mosquitoes or the endless labour of building a village out of nothing in a strange, desert world could stop him, by God’s grace we had escaped the Land of Terror and he would build our home again as our father surely would have if he had lived.
But my own small first Chaco memory is not of him working. I know that even before the paratodo tree in our yard burst all over yellow flowers like the flaming bush of God speaking to Moses, I saw my brother’s bandaged head lying on a mat in the terrible heat of our house tent, the strips of my mother’s cleanest, whitest sheets soaking blotches of blood around his neck and head crushed by a wagon yoke for oxen, a yoke of red quebracho so hard they called it “axe-breaker,” so heavy it sank in water like steel, and our village made a mistake sawing a yoke out of it, but they wanted the strongest, they said, and didn’t listen to the Canadian Mennonites in Menno Colony who after three years in the Chaco knew better. And that was what smashed Vanya, beat him to the ground behind the corral where we kept our cow, a Paraguayan beast so wild she had to be roped and tied up, head and foot, her back legs spread wide and tight against two posts to strip a small bottle of bluish milk out of her. Vanya did that twice a day, my mother said, the milk was for me and our third little Frieda, but that day before our first Christmas here, in the terrible summer heat when she heard him, she knew no cow would make him scream like that, she heard the thud! thud! thud! of red quebracho as she ran crying his name from our tent and around the corral.
“What?” Adam asks me, “what happened, what?”
For fifty years I have said nothing to anyone, nor asked, nor has anyone in Fernheim spoken to me of it. Mennonites know, they understand silence. Now this “lopsided double cousin” from Canada, a doctor with soft hands, so rich he can fly around the earth and probably talk to all those big men, too, who control the way the world is and have never heard of us or the miserable Paraguayan Chaco and how you work like an ox to just exist here, decade after decade even after the million-dollar credit from Mennonites in North America bought us machinery for growing cotton, and built a highway to Asunción so we no longer need the wagons and the narrow railroad and the filthy riverboats to take our cotton and peanuts to market, now there’s a paved highway straight to the bridge over the Paraguay River and the capital—why don’t you leave, they ask, go to Canada, there’s no police or Communists to stop you here, leave this Stroessner dictatorship like more people than live in Fernheim Colony have left in the last fifty years, left as soon as they could borrow or beg enough money from anyone. Take a bus and plane and in two days you’ll be in God-blessed Canada, or even less than a day in tropical Brazil, or Argentina, or Uruguay, why stay here?
Adam Wiebe comes out of the sky alone. He tells me nothing of his own family, although he has one, he wears a ring and is married but with only two children after almost twenty years, so he won’t have any more. He must know more about our families, running to Moscow even if he wasn’t born in Russia. He says if I tell him our stories he will remember, but how can he know so little? What did his family talk to each other about, year after year? His father is dead but his mother is still alive, he speaks Lowgerman as easily as I and listens to me, why come to this sand and thorns when he can sit in Canada and talk to enough Mennonites or travel anywhere in the world where it’s comfortable, not stand here sweating in our little shade, sucking oranges with his expensive shoes dirty?
In a few days he’ll be gone. He laughs a little about his debt to sin growing; children being sacrificed to pay it. Just words to him, I think, words, would he laugh if it was his daughter? Patricia, he calls her, fifteen years old, an English name, his wife is from the States, and a son Joel, a name from the Bible. The way he smiles sometimes, I hope none of them will have to suffer. Like our parents. But I don’t think even Canada is the heavenly Canaan yet. It comes when it comes.
Only God and forgiveness can end pain, my mother said on her deathbed. And each one forgives for himself; we cannot forgive for others. Though maybe in heaven we can do that too. There we’ll all be perfect, if we get there.
“David, what happened?”
Adam is peering at me so hard and Wiebe grey, as if he intends to find Vanya in my eyes. I could tell him I don’t look like my brother at all, that I have the long nose and heavy eyebrows of my Wiebe mother, he should look at my ears. In the one picture of our family in Number Eight Romanovka I know that both Vanya and I had our father’s ears, even as a baby on my mother’s lap you can see it, ears sticking straight out and so broad, if we were heads only we could fly away.
I tell him, “My brother’s nec
k and shoulder, the left side of his head was smashed. We had no doctor then in the Fernheim Colony, only Heinrich Unruh who had been a hospital orderly in the First World War. He knew how to bandage a wound. Such horrible pain in the heat boiling our tent, I remember his face wrapped up and soaking bloody. He died after three days.”
“God. With a wagon yoke?”
Quebracho wood. There were only two wagons then, my mother said, in Number Four Friedensheim, all lotted and planned for twenty-five farms and each farmer agreed upon in Mölln, Germany, when they finally knew which families Canada would not let immigrate there because they had eye trachoma and tuberculosis, one wagon in Friedensheim for those south of the school lot—there was no school yet, they started with houses—and one for those north, and they were still trying to break in the Paraguayan oxen to carry a yoke and pull properly. Vanya had just returned from taking his village turn tschmaking, as we called the wagon treks to Endstation on the railroad for freight from the riverboats before we had the Trans-Chaco Highway, two or three weeks’ labour on the two hundred kilometres of trail winding through desert and thornbrush and bittergrass—and bottomless mud too if it rained, as it could after months of forty-five-degree heat, rain like buckets pouring, a world always of extremes—and Vanya had finally gotten the oxen yoked under that unbreakable yoke and pulling together, he could quietly talk any animal into doing its proper work except that beast our first cow, my mother said. The yoke was still warm when that man lifted it up.
“Who?”
One of our village. Actually three of them came to argue and yell at Vanya, they were his age but only one stayed longer, he was so strong, to lift that red quebracho high enough. And angry enough to do it. What was the matter between them? I asked my mother as she lay on her last bed, tell me, you have never said anything and I heard the man is maybe dead now, he moved away to Uruguay after it happened and is maybe dead, please tell me. There is no more time left, why did he do it? Why?
She did not open her eyes, and she would not tell me. Perhaps she could not. God had given her the mercy of washing her worst memories clean in forgiveness. Even the name—who can deny their mother on her deathbed, who would force her, draw out what she has already left behind?—she told me only what I myself already knew. My dead brother lying inside the bulge of a bottle-tree log our neighbours had cut and dragged out of the thorn bushes, which is all our forests in the Gran Chaco are, and they had sawn the tree open, dug out with shovels and hoes the pulp in the big bulge of the stem where the tree stores its water, dried it out until the smell of it was almost gone in the sun and then the women laid him wrapped in a sheet down inside it and the men covered him over with the sawn slab so there was only the thorn-studded barrel of the dead tree left. It seemed to her, my mother said, as if they were sinking a piece of the thorny Chaco down, laying it back deep in the Chaco sand, trying to bury this terrible land into itself, but they never would be able to do that, get all the Mennonites quiet and buried and in no more pain, not even if they prayed and shovelled forever. And the poor man who had done it kneeling by the hole, weeping as they broke the edges of the hole in, and the sand flowed down over the bulging tree laid flat, as they filled the hole until it was heaping high on the far edge of the school lot next to our farmyard. She told me how the Paraguayan army captain who had met Vanya on his trip to the railroad came to the funeral with his soldiers and said to her he would deal properly with the killer, as Paraguayans do, but my mother forbade the captain his vengeance, no, she would hear nothing of it. She told him she must forgive the weeping man as Jesus had taught, and she invited the man to our tent and, crying, after a week she finally could do that with her whole heart.
And she told me again how that poor young man came to work for us then, walked every day from his parents’ yard at the south end of Number Four Friedensheim and helped her build our sleeping and cooking houses, cut the bittergrass for the roof and ploughed our land with that yoke of oxen, trained so well, and learned to plant kaffir and Paraguayan beans and sweet potatoes and cotton too because Menno Colony already had built a cotton mill. He helped us do our share of village work on fences and road and school, for three years, always bringing his own food for the day though he always ate it with us. It was he and our little family—I was five and getting bigger and I shovelled too—our family with my sister the oldest child left, barely sixteen, we tore away our first corral and built a larger one farther back on our lot for the Beast, our Paraguay cow, and planted our garden and years later, when we learned how, planted our Chaco orchard, apricot trees and berry bushes and, even later, lemon and orange trees here where our tent and our corral had first stood, where it happened.
My mother told me nothing more. For her what happened was gone. Heinrich Unruh was alive and only a little over eighty years old, he would certainly have remembered something to tell me, but why ask him? my mother said. On earth, if God is good, you can sometimes forgive a few things long enough so you don’t have to drag them after you all the way into heaven before the Throne of Grace. And anyway, she said, God already knows, He understands it all, why should we turn over and over in our hearts the little we know and the more that we don’t? Let it rest in the sand, there’s enough sand for all of us here.
Adam asks me, “Have you forgiven that man?” And then he says, very quickly, “I’m sorry. Please, forgive me.”
After a while he says quietly, “That’s really the second story in the Bible. The two sons of Adam and Eve.”
“I know,” I tell him, and his eyes are so calm now and grey, I know somewhere he knows about pain, or will soon. “I’ve read it so often, I still can’t understand why Cain killed Abel.”
“In the Bible it’s because of God, and something about fruit and sheep.”
“We don’t have sheep, and I like oranges better than cow meat!”
We laugh a little again. Nothing to be said.
“How about God?” he asks.
“I don’t think people need to kill each other about God. He can take care of Himself.”
We are under the orange trees again. Adam has the longish, square face of the Wiebes I have seen in pictures, but black and white doesn’t show those blue-grey eyes that turn a kind of steel when he looks at you long enough. I tell him we are standing where our first corral stood, our feet are on the spot.
He looks down at his polished shoes, dusty from Gran Chaco sand that grows every seed you plant into a miracle if only you can find enough water for it. A garden of Eden, if it had four rivers flowing through it. He says, finally:
“How could you live here, after that?”
“If you had come thirteen years ago, you could have asked my mother.”
He laughs, lifts his fine doctor hands helplessly; I see that when he wants to, he can be even more evasive than I. So I tell him:
“I’m very glad. You are the first relative to come so far, to the Chaco, and that’s good. Come.”
We walk away from that spot, between the orange and lemon trees and through the wire gate into the schoolyard. Under a giant algarrobo six blond children—I count them, four boys in shorts and two girls in skirts—are swinging their strong bare legs and arms among the giant pods, hanging from the branches like long, pale monkeys, laughing and shouting to each other in their Spanish tangle of Lowgerman. Four are my grandchildren.
Adam says, “My mother is old. It would make her very happy, if you came to visit her. And me too.”
“I think I have more relatives in Canada than you in Paraguay.”
He laughs. “You could visit them all, at least as many as you like.”
“We heard from Germany that the Communists are letting a few people out of Russia again. Maybe even some relatives.”
“Have you heard any names?”
“One letter said a Peter Wiebe family is in Germany, from Kazakhstan, but long ago from Orenburg.”
“Peter Wiebe from Orenburg!”
“It won’t be our uncle.”
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nbsp; We walk past the adobe school, which is also our church, and into the white blindness of December summer sun. East over the village pastures the vultures float high as they always do, riding the air on their giant wings. That’s good, if they weren’t up there we would know one of our cattle was dead. Beside us, in the field beyond the smooth fence wire drawn through holes in quebracho posts, five horses rest in the morning heat; a dapple grey mare suckles her foal. At the corner of the fence, between pasture and school, is the gravestone of my brother Vanya.
NINETEEN
BIRCH AND LILAC
Coaldale,
Lethbridge, Southern Alberta
1995
SUDDENLY NOW THE REMEMBERED river hills. The highway tilts beyond the hood of Adam’s car, cuts down through green coulee slopes, bends again and there is the Oldman River: with a new concrete bridge—gone are the three black iron arches interlaced with bolts—poised flat and grey and speed limit over the brown water.
For him as a boy this river, cut sharp into clay banks and dry hills, always opened like the Bible storybook to John the Baptist standing in desert water to his waist, raising his arms, crying, “Behold the Lamb of God!” And a blazing dove sailing circles above the head of Jesus where he comes down through a dip of coulee, the water thick as earth to walk on. “It is I,” says the numinous voice, “have no fear.” And Adam snagged on the barbed wire of such impossible longings, Do it, walk! knowing himself no possible Peter, he could never find that first step of daring not to sink.
But the spring river remains, still swirls heavy as paint with soil carried from mountains, foothills, prairie. Swooping towards it now in his powerful car, Adam can see its eddies circle against the banks taut as ever, like innumerable Oldmen spinning dances in the deceptive evening light.
In an instant the road bends back behind him as he pulls the rush of the car left into the last lean of it, the sound under him changes hollow as concrete on sudden air. Stop, he has to.