Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Dorothy’s fingertips hook tight in his; she says, “She’s still gone?”

  He feels blindsided, and slashed. Only a Mennonite relative would dare say such a thing without a word of courtesy. Dorothy’s face holds steady in the gentle tenderness it has in his best memories, but she also strikes him as so simple-minded that he cannot imagine what ridiculous teen longing could long to will itself to love exactly that in her: her directness blunt as a club down your throat.

  He manages to growl, “She’s not just ‘still gone.’ ”

  “Have you ever found anything?”

  “Not a trace.”

  “So how can you know?”

  “She bought a ticket on a ship that went from Patrai to Corfu to Dubrovnik and Venice, but she never got off anywhere.”

  “You followed up everything.”

  “Search files two feet high.” He is far too loud for this stupid veneer restaurant, its ridiculous palm trees protected from the chinooks by glass and skylights. “One thousand seven hundred and three days, you want the hours too?”

  “Adam.”

  “Even stupid me running around the Mediterranean and all over the world has to catch on: ‘Give it up, Dad, I’m dead.’ ”

  Dorothy does not flinch. She lifts her right hand open towards him and speaks as if affirming an oath:

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You just can’t think suicide.”

  “Is suicide easier than ‘Look, Dad, I don’t want to be found’?”

  “Why would she be that cruel?”

  “I don’t know,” Dorothy says softly. “But if it was suicide, why not leave her body where you could find it?”

  “Sometimes I can only pray it was an accident.”

  “Accidents are usually trackable.”

  Adam’s mind has turned to stone. “Don’t you think I know that too,” he says, getting to his feet.

  Three flat paper boxes. Adam lifts the lid of the longest, and he feels its edge worn to the grain by his mother’s work-flattened hands. Whenever briefly he came home in the years after his father’s death, at some point these boxes would appear on her kitchen table, rest there between meals of borscht or deep-fried hamburger Kotletten, the snapshots inside them heaped in no order except her last shuffle. Her Canada Wiebe family in her hands, mostly posed in their Sunday clothes though on rare occasions working, their life caught in positions she could at last contemplate in a way impossible while living it. But Adam now sits with the pictures at his sister Helen’s elderly chrome table. Helen “gone home” has left these random bits of family for whoever bothers to take them, as he is left with her husband Joe Tanguay in their seniors’ apartment. Joe seated across the table with his grizzled head bowed between his hands. Tough, short blacksmith Tanguay, who with his steady pacemaker may well live into the next millennium.

  The family midden. On top is his stocky mother, feet planted wide and arms crossed over her apron, leaning against a shoulder-high stack of Waskahikan firewood that stretches from one edge of the picture to the other; he himself sits on the woodpile, and on the ground below his feet Helen and Abram and Margaret rest on their heels; John must be taking the picture. Where is Helen’s son Raymond, her little daughters Julia and Grace? It is spring, Adam knows he is nine, it is the day Abram brought him home on the wondrous train from two weeks in the Edmonton General Hospital and an operation for the ruptured appendix that almost killed him, Dr. Coglan said, they were very nearly too long getting him to the hospital. But there Adam sits high on split poplar, his face overexposed into a white blur under a grey cap, the thick scar of clamps and sewn buttons, which will grow wider with his belly, slowly healing, hidden under a buttoned jacket. And to the right of his boots Margaret’s hair floats from her intense, open face, her arms rolled bare to her shoulders. He thinks again, as he always does: how could Mam let her be outside like that? Maybe it was just Margaret being so swiftly, aggressively healthy in the sun bright against the white wood, I don’t want to be sick all the time! But in less than a year the family surrounded by everyone in the church will stand around Margaret in her coffin, sentenced by rheumatic fever, incurable then. “Last night Margaret’s heart tore off,” he told Miss Klassen when she asked why he came to school so late, and she let him put his head down on his arms on his desk and the schoolroom was as quiet as if everyone had gone home. Until Olga, the other girl in grade eight, suddenly sobbed out loud. Fifty years this April in the Waskahikan Mennonite Cemetery, the church long ago pulled apart for logs and the floor collapsed into its cellar hole.

  Wonderful grace of Jesus,

  Greater than all my si-in;

  How shall my tongue describe it,

  Where shall its praise begin?

  Margaret, sixteen then, in the church choir, singing. Old enough to be buried in the row for women, between the men’s row along the outside fence and the children’s graves backed against the poplar bush.

  “Lots of times Helen would sit there, looking there,” Joe says between his hands. “She sure really liked the old pictures.”

  “I do too,” says Adam; and means it. The black Brownie box with the silver edges, a rectangle face of centred mouth lens that clicked on a spring and a smaller lens at each corner for eyes, you aimed that face, stared down into the viewer with the box steady against your stomach, found the shadows and between heartbeats flipped the trigger. When the mail came three weeks later there they were, eight instants that might fade thinner in the debris of your life, but not wear away completely.

  Unless you placed them in fire. Like martyrs, translated into air. That could happen too.

  Below the first layer Adam finds the posed image no Brownie ever captured, the one he brought back from Russia last year and gave Helen, a picture she could not remember ever having seen. Herself as a tiny girl in a long black dress and white, scalloped collar, barely old enough to stand on a chair, balanced by clutching the cummerbund of a young woman. “Yes, that’s your mother, with Liena, your sister,” ancient Elizabeth Katerina Loewen told him in Orenburg Susanovo, who had by God’s ambiguous mercy outlived the war and ten years of Gulag in Magadan and permanent exile in the mining towns of Kazakhstan—“Is it mercy if God won’t let you die living a life like mine?”—having subsumed the war, and subsumed Communism, and now outliving its “complete mess,” as she called it, as well.

  “My father, Alexander Wiebe, took that,” she told Adam. “He was a wonderful photographer, oh, if I only had them all. When your father was in Anadol in the Forstei during the First War and he’d never seen Liena yet, they sent your father that one. But he never got it, it was lost or stolen or thrown away somewhere but this copy was kept here, in the family.” She was adamant, “Yo, yo, daut es Liena,” and Young Peter affirmed it too. Adam knew that it could well be Helen, an unrecognizable tiny child, but at first he could not believe the young woman beside her: in black, her dress to the floor, tight on the wrists and high around the neck with an immovable sadness on her face, that could be his mother, certainly—but the large eyes, the long nose and wide, full lips, such a sharp, almost awesome Central Asian beauty? He thinks, again: For forty-eight years I knew every touch and wrinkle of her skin, why did I never see that? Left buried in the pain of Communist Russia?

  Was it there in Helen too, cute little Liena, fifteen years old when she arrived in Canada, his mother’s first and the only daughter who survived her? Had anyone—Joe?—ever seen it—perhaps focused in passion? Adam has tried to imagine his parents making love. What did he hear and not comprehend in that log house? It must have been possible, in the dark.

  Layers in the box. He shuffles Waskahikan bush and the shingled church with Abram and Leora in wedding clothes, grim as winter on the steps, clusters of family in Coaldale and Lethbridge parks, and cows in a field with the roof of the house where he lay under the rafters at night visible among distant poplars, and Firebag Lake with his brother John leading his new bride out of the water and another of himself at
six, laughing as he pretends to ride black Carlo—patient, tongue lolling—by sitting on his tail, behind them the flat sod roof of the barn that always dripped a day after the rain was over. Adam has seen all this, forever, it’s a bit stupid to sit here today, looking—if he digs much deeper he knows he’ll find Susannah and himself smiling on their wedding day. But Joe is immovably unspeaking, presence is all he can endure and Adam doesn’t yet want to read the letters Dorothy gave him, sixty years can wait one more day, and then among the greyish snapshots there appears a single sheet of a hymn he has not seen before. Page number 94, torn out, “Dearer Than All,” and he knows it, of course, completely from the high school choir, everyone sang, even the monotones like himself who knew they never could:

  Ye who the love of a mother have known,

  There is a love sweeter far you may own.…

  Very strange. He has always remembered that line ending “ … sweeter far than your own,” but it seems Alfred H. Ackley in 1915 actually versified an extra-sweet love far beyond mothers and available purely as private property, one might say “redemptive capitalism”:

  Dearer than all, yes, dearer than all,

  He is my King, before Him I fall.

  Okay peasant, flat on your face for king and love. Adam lifts the page to Joe. “Did Helen like this song? It’s in here.”

  Joe studies the sheet. He will need to shave before the funeral, but he was seated in his chair beside the table when Adam came in and he has not moved. Well, Raymond will be here soon.

  “No,” Joe says slowly, and tears well in his voice as he turns the sheet over, “it was this one she really liked.” Number 93, “Sweeter Than All:”

  Christ will me His aid afford,

  Never to fall, never to fall.…

  No falling flat for Christ in a song by J. Howard Entwisle. It was the favourite of all male quartets at the Coaldale Mennonite High School. If you could sing deep bass or high tenor in it you would be elected student president and were sometimes permitted to sit on the church podium with the row of grim preachers during a school program. But Helen never went to school a day in Canada. When they arrived she went to work on farms where she said the farmers and the hired men were grabbing you all the time anyway, so why not get married, eighteen was old enough, of course, Mam said, and she learned to read English when little Raymond brought home his readers in grade one, her life endlessly repeating itself in labour and children.

  “She sure really liked that one,” Joe says, and hums the last line: “ ‘Sweeter than all, sweeter than all.”’

  He is weeping. And Adam finds under his fingers one of the amazing photographs Elizabeth Katerina gave him, taken by her father long ago in Orenburg, Susanovo. It shows little Liena about two years old, standing on a bench under trees in an orchard and leaning forward, her tiny fists bunched on a table covered by a white cloth. To her right stands tall Mariechen. That’s your half-aunt, Young Peter tells Adam, she was worked to death in the Trutarmee, the labour army, in the Ufa coal mines during the Second War, she was the oldest child your grandfather David Loewen had with his third wife.

  And the boy on the left, hair cut tight over his head and mouth pursed, who’s that?

  That’s Mariechen’s brother, your half-uncle Heinrich.

  Heinrich?

  The one in the Red Army, Heinrich Loewen the Communist.

  Whose picture in spiked Red Army hat and Red Star uniform Adam has seen all his life, the cruel “artelistic” greetings signed with such a graceful flourish across the back. Adam asks his relations in Germany, in Russia, wherever he finds them, Why did Heinrich become a Communist?

  They all tell him he was the sixth and last of those Loewens. David Loewen never had any children with his fourth wife Lienchen Peters. That was my mother’s best friend, Adam says, she was the same age as my mother but Grandpa made her call her friend “Mama”; she could not forget that, even after fifty years in Canada. Yes, they say, that happened then, a young woman marrying an old man because he had a good house and land and grown children, if he was old enough you could outlive him, as Lienchen did; David Loewen was only fifty-four but those two had no children anyway. Adam asks, They were married the same year as my parents, 1914, and Mam called her first child Liena, why would she do that when she disliked calling her friend “Mama” so much? And some tell him, You should have asked her, and others, Maybe her father made her do that too, and others, Your father was the eighth son of Old Jakob Wiebe, not the sixth, and he fled with his family to Moscow with all those other thousands of Mennonites in 1929 and most of them were sent back to Orenburg by the GPU worse off than when they went, because they’d spent all their money and now the Communists knew they wanted to get out. But your family did get out, they even found Canada and not Paraguay. I know that, Adam says, I was born there—but Heinrich, did he ever marry, why did he become a Communist?

  Huh! Who knows, even when he was little he was always jae-jenaun, against everything. He was twelve and in school when Lenin sneaked back into Russia shovelling coal on a train into St. Petersburg, and then revolution and civil war and starvation and endless police and politics, they were building a new world so they had to burn the old one to ashes and kill everyone in it, it was the right time for the young to be jaejenaun, just against, against.

  But Adam insists, Why would the Communists do that, when the Mennonites always lived in Russia in more or less communal villages, working together and caring for their poor, surely Marxist teaching fit that?

  Why, why, you always ask why, there is no why with Russian Communists. Everything is the way they say it is and that’s the whole situation. Marx said there is no God and he wrote about factories and workers, almost nothing about farming and villages, so all the Bolsheviks could do was destroy everything and make it up different, most of them had never been on a farm, they invented new taxes and turned churches into dance clubs and pig barns, the more it scared people the better. Each Mennonite family once owned its house and certain fields outside the village for crops, and common fields for village pasture, but in only two years of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan they took that all away with impossible taxes, they had meetings and meetings until no one had time to work even when it was planting or harvest, they set up committees where the laziest and most useless who never knew what to do except follow orders were the highest bosses. And they obeyed Moscow to the letter though sometimes they couldn’t even read a word of the orders—regular taxes and special taxes and then the worst tax—the “volunteer tax” as they called it, a joke, where you voted how much extra you wanted to pay because you were such a wonderful citizen you wanted to do extra, but if you said ten per cent, Moscow wanted twenty-five and they would just keep declaring the meetings invalid and finally have the room surrounded by GPU, watching until everyone voted twenty-five.

  Weren’t your Big Bosses elected Big Bosses?

  Elected! There was never more than one nominated for any position, the ones who’d never held a shovel in their hands, just vodka bottles and not even glasses either. They’d sit at the big tables with forms and stamps, and a Mennonite would have to read word for word what the orders said because if you couldn’t read you’d certainly be elected the biggest boss in the local kolkhoz, and then you could go around every village with at least two GPU with guns looking at whatever you wanted and taking that as extra tax too, for yourself. No one, not the hardest-working farmer, ever had enough to pay taxes two years in a row.

  But Heinrich became a Communist, Adam persisted.

  Oh yes, Heinrich was David Loewen’s youngest, he would never inherit any land and maybe that saved him from arrest, but maybe also being jaejenaun—that was always useful to Bolsheviks, and at twenty-one he could certainly read and after Stalin chased Trotsky to death and had his first and second Five Year Plans, Heinrich was already an officer in the army. But to survive even in the army you did what Stalin’s political police, the GPU, “suggested.” Nobody in Russia asked for reasons then, whe
n they suggested anything you just did it; but to get permission to travel as far as Sakhalin, well, even for a soldier in uniform with papers in order, travel was very dangerous, and so far in winter! Yes, it was winter, Adam’s relations said, so who knew what iron you could carry sewed into your felt boots.

  But why, why would Heinrich kill his brother?

  Because, they say, that’s what Communists do.

  Ancient Elizabeth Katerina, standing bent but fiercely strong among the lilacs of the Susanovo cemetery, told Adam one more thing: “You come here once from Canada when I’m ninety-one, God already knows we won’t see each other again so we can say this aloud, no one will hear us here. I have written letters to the army, and the KGB. In Siberia I met an exiled officer who knew Heinrich Loewen in the army. He called himself Genrich Lvov, Russian for ‘lion’ like German ‘Loewen,’ and somehow he slipped through Stalin’s army purges in the thirties and in 1945 he was a colonel who helped overrun Danzig, but then in April a German sniper shot him on a street in BerlinBuch. I am writing letters, maybe I can find out more.”

  “Berlin-Buch,” Adam said slowly. “That’s where Hitler’s last bunker was.”

  Elizabeth Katerina broke off a sprig of purple lilac and held it to her nostrils. “I only got as far as Danzig in ’45,” she said, breathing deeply. “Only one side of the Marienkirche tower was left, and the big beak of the Krahntor, walls standing like broken chimneys, or posts. Oh, I could tell you stories—” She stops, looks across the cemetery and the village to the distant hills. “You come to Russia and we all tell you stories that are true—stories true for us.”