Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Adam holds the story of his tiny sister and Mariechen and Heinrich in his hand, the picture of them in the spring orchard. Nineteen seventeen, Orenburg Romanovka; austere children with not one discernible wisp of joy or anticipation on their faces. Letters that must be read. A past seemingly silent and motionless as a frozen river, but the current is always there under the ice. Though hidden, it flows relentlessly with time, distance, enduring ancestors.

  Not now. Now is the time to remember his loving sister.

  Sweeter than all the world to me…

  Sweeter than all, sweeter than all.

  He holds the old picture in both hands. His sister Helen’s round infant face with its button nose emerges from a white collar, so lovely and already so profoundly sad. Mariechen is long, slender, she looks calmly to the right across the heads of the two children beside her. Does she already see coal holes in the tundra? Heinrich, standing, is slightly taller than Helen on the bench. He’s seven, a face of fixed stone. As if predestined.

  And the old woman bent against the cemetery lilacs, her hands gnarled into hooks by freight trains on the Trans-Siberian Railway and Kolyma and gold-fields beyond frozen volcanoes, placed this picture in his hands. He finds he is crying.

  It is Susannah who walks beside him down the sloping aisle of Seventh Avenue Baptist Church. Together they follow in procession behind Helen’s coffin, Joe and Raymond leading, the other six children and their spouses with the grand- and greatgrandchildren, brother John and his new wife Emily, into the moan of an electric organ whining the Fanny J. Crosby joys of heaven. Despite that, Adam feels happiness well up in him: his sister freed at last from her human concern and body ache, and Susannah momentarily so close that her sleeve brushes his suit: this is their third processional in three years—it’s becoming our one, certain, annual ritual, eh? she said—beginning with his oldest brother Abram, then John’s first wife Erica, and now that they are three months past eight years into their separation, he thinks again they might soon negotiate some version of day parole visits. Parole, from the French parole d’honneur, “word of honour” she asked him on the phone a summer ago without so much as a ripple of humour.

  Why should we try to live together again?

  We’re married … we’re lonely.…

  Speak for yourself.

  I am.

  Well, tough. Don’t whine to me, I have great friends, excellent students, lots of work I enjoy.

  Be honest, don’t you still love me?

  Don’t you use “love” on me.

  Don’t you?

  Does “love” for you mean “live together”?

  It’s a decision too.

  How long might your decision last this time?

  Ahead of them in the church, past all the mourners, at the bottom of the aisle the coffin turns right under the pulpit platform, and stops.

  The pews are thick with people standing all around them, heads bowed, hands folded, and he feels Susannah nudge his hand. Three cool fingers, guiding him. Before him John turns, and Emily, into the pew reserved for them, and he follows.

  In the pulpit above them is one of those all-purpose-mellifluous “Pastor Bills”; he reads the standard Bible verses with odd interpolations, and leads every hymn by braying into the microphone (was that his name, Bill Brayer?), his loudspeaker voice overpowering the organ; a man cheerful as cabbage and with less ceremony than if he were cooking borscht (which would certainly be beyond this necktied goof)—god, such ridiculous thoughts.

  His sweet, venerable sister’s body lies in that burnished coffin beyond the pews. At each family funeral Adam remembers down to his fingertips the texture of Margaret’s flat, square box. It was covered with black cloth, every edge hand-stitched by Mrs. Aaron Heinrichs; Mr. Abram Fehr bevelled together the spruce boards cut at Mr. John Lobe’s sawmill, all corners mitred; the girls at Waskahikan School made the pink crepe-paper roses that covered Margaret’s bare arms and spilled over into the open grave when the men, with Abram and John at their head, lifted her unevenly onto the grave planks and then closed the lid, nailed it carefully down. The women of the sewing circle had puffed the satin ruffles up around her shoulders and face so devastated by her long dying. Her black hair lies curled against her shoulders: Adam feels the brush in his hand snag, she sits up for a few moments on the cot in the corner of the room where they live and eat, his scribbler lying in her lap, and he has just tried to show her how he does long division, the number he must divide is 227 and Margaret makes him explain it, step by step, exactly, and what happens to the number that is left over, and then like every evening he tries to brush out her long hair that gets tangled from lying all day, sweating and tossing on the pillow, he tries to do it without hurting her. Addie, Addie, careful. There’s a knot.

  “When the roll is called up yonder I’ll be there!” Pastor Bill bellows cheerfully over the quiet drone of the mourners; heaven is a one-room log school where you answer the roll every morning, Here.

  Susannah brushes against his left hand; he realizes it is clamped in the grey cloth covering her right knee, her bones so exact in the wistful longing of his fingers he did not notice.

  For God’s sake, Adam! Her anger crackled on the phone. Look at yourself. Why should I believe you?

  The minister is winding down a eulogy of little stories saccharine with Golden-Age hominess; Adam glances at the “In Loving Memory” program for the first time, and realizes the funeral is more or less over. This minimal enthusiasm produced by a presiding cliché is it: no one who actually knew Helen will say one loving word over her coffin. Exactly the same thing happened at Abram and Erica’s fanerais: the few personal stories were told later, around small tables in the church basement after what remained of their bodies was far away and buried. And suddenly he feels this is grotesque. Every eye he can see is dry, glazed, sinking into this tasteless porridge poured over a good and gentle life. A final song, P.A. Bill and the relentless organ are dragging the congregation through the last line of “What a day, glorious day, that will be,” and Adam touches Susannah’s thigh for an instant—he does not dare look at her—and then he hoists himself to his feet. Emily and John glance up, startled, but shift their knees and he has edged by them, is standing in the aisle. And he walks down, past the end of the coffin and up the podium steps.

  Pastor Bill is glaring at him, for once shut up. He bends a little, not surrendering anything, and Adam gestures, “Excuse me,” and leans past him with a black shoulder angling in.

  “Excuse me, I … I don’t want to disturb” (it is an excellent speaker system, he can talk quietly) “disturb anyone, but I am Helen’s youngest brother, Adam, and I feel … something should be said by family, about her … here, our good sister and wife and mother and grandmother, whom we loved. Like you can only love someone for a whole, long lifetime.”

  He almost makes the mistake of glancing at Joe’s white face looking up at him, he knows it is, and Raymond beside him, but he concentrates on the coffin between them, directly below, the sprays of flowers on the glistening wood, the silver handles.

  “Helen was born seventy-nine, almost eighty years ago on the steppes, near Orenburg, Russia, actually a village and colony built by Mennonites, Number Eight Romanovka they called their village. At fifteen she came to Canada, in 1930, in that ‘miracle escape’ over Moscow which our parents told us so often never to forget, even me who was born here in Canada, to always remember and thank God, all our lives. She was their first child, named after her grandmother Liena Loewen who had already died, and for me, born last, Helen was always an adult. And often when Raymond and I played together as little boys—we are the same age—it seemed his mother Helen wasn’t just my big sister but my mother too, only much younger and so much fun, because she would sit on the floor and play string games with us, and blocks and cars.

  “But what I … I want to tell you one memory of my big sister Helen; for me it’s sharper than any family picture. It is the middle of a winter night, early
March 1945, but all the kerosene lamps are lit in our house then, in Waskahikan, our homestead north of Edmonton. We are all crowded around our sister Margaret, in her cot in the centre room of the house, where she has lain all winter. My mother and dad, my brother Abram and I are there, and John sits behind Margaret, holding her upright in his arms so she can breathe easier. She flings her head from side to side, her long hair whips his face as she heaves herself around, she is burning inside and water runs down her face and out of her mouth, she screams in pain, weakly now, she has been burning up inside for hours, I think.

  “And Helen kneels in front of her, she holds Margaret’s hand tight between hers, we are all crying but she speaks so calmly, she is so strong, she repeats over and over Margaret’s favourite words from Jesus: ‘Do not let your heart be troubled; trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions, if it were not so I would tell you. I go there to prepare a place for you, and then I will come again, and take you with me, so that where I am there you will be also.’ ”

  Adam wipes his eyes, and finally he can look up. Faces blur into focus, the semicircular church is filled even to the narrow balcony, he has not imagined so many knew his quiet sister in her aging, there may be over four hundred people—and what does he know about her now anyway, decades of life gone by, she and Joe and their seven children with names like Tanguay, Wong, Lopez, Porteous and a solitary Loewen between them, those Russian stories ancient as piled stones, and several of her middle-aged children divorced and all their married-again spouses and twenty-two grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren, if you could trust the “In Loving Memory” card. All their eyes looking at him: why is this crazy uncle interrupting the funeral, so rich he never has to be a doctor though he was one once and doing nothing and always running around somewhere in the world and who knows who goes with him.… It’s for Helen, you witless nits, a few words over her body, the human being she was, you who knew her best, say it!

  “I didn’t mean to disturb anyone,” he says quietly, and feels the words whisper in every crevice of Seventh Avenue Baptist Church. Directly below him in the pews is one tearful face smiling, certainly smiling at the silly apology in his tone; it is Susannah, so he can add more firmly, “I wanted to say something personal, for Helen. Please excuse me.”

  Adam gets down into the aisle without a stumble, but an arm catches him up. His wordless nephew Raymond at the corner of the coffin, exactly as tall and as old as he is; putting his arms around him, holding him tight.

  Dorothy says, “My father’s grave.”

  Nicholai Aaron Loewen

  1906-1991

  Orenburg Russia Coaldale Canada

  Adam looks up from the grey stone: his mother’s father’s first cousin, which makes Dorothy his fifth cousin at best, or sixth. The cemetery flat as a shorn grain field to the far May shrubbery of Coaldale bungalows: he thinks, Ohm Jakob Wiebe should have lived here, then lilacs mauve and deep purple would be blooming wildly along paths and between stones, and tall Siberian birch burn spring green in this evening light, like those crowded in dazzling wildness over Jakob’s grave in Orenburg, Susanovo, no name markers anywhere to be found by pushing branches aside, the original boards rotted away to nothing; not even Young Peter could remember, only Elizabeth Katerina’s memory to show him the hollow place where he could have read the date easily and perhaps deciphered the Cyrillic letters: 1879–1962. Jakob Jakob Wiebe. In Mennonite Canada these power-efficient rows of stones designed for lawn mowers, and the great hulk of the neglected church across a parking lot, not forced to close by Communists but simply sold to the highest bidder. In Canada free enterprise can convert a church—even a Mennonite church built memorably and completely by community labour in two summer months in 1939—into a dog kennel faster than official atheists in Russia.

  Susannah between them says, “Nineteen ninety-one.”

  Her black pumps, black stockings over the slender arch of her feet; that year in her voice the memory of their sad daughter, gone with not even a flat stone possible.

  Anne Patricia Wiebe

  1965

  Edmonton, Canada

  No date or place to add; nothing here or anywhere, if ever.

  Dorothy’s hand finds Susannah’s, he sees them grip so hard their knuckles whiten. Dorothy says, “I told you, I don’t believe it. The world is too big.”

  Anger surges in Adam, but abruptly Susannah turns and takes Dorothy in her arms. It is no funeral reaction, Susannah is kissing her, one cheek, then the other.

  “Hmmm,” she murmurs against Dorothy’s hair pulled back over her ear, almost, Adam thinks, amazed, like the faint hum of her remembered lovering. “Where did your Mennonite parents find such a sweet name, ‘Dorothy’?”

  And Dorothy smiles, kissing her back along the turn of her chin. “It was my mother Hannah, they came to Canada in 1925 and when she finally got to go to school two years later she was so tall she insisted she belonged in grade five, and to prove it she taught herself English by learning to read The Wizard of Oz out loud!”

  They hug each other, laughing at this lovely story, while Adam stands with his mind splayed empty. He has never heard this from the woman whose obvious childhood he always thought he knew. And then he hears his name called, his home name.

  “Hey, Addie!”

  John leaning on his cane on the gravel path, his new and cheerful wife hooked into his other arm.

  “I forget,” John calls too loudly in his deafness. “Where’s Mam’s grave? And Dad’s, I want to show Emily, she’d like to see them, they’re around here, eh—where?”

  Adam has already joined them, gesturing, “This way,” and they limp across rows of gravestones together. Only moments before they all stood around the opened ground while Helen’s coffin was lowered, John’s head above all the bowed mourners, his eyes closed facing up to the sunny sky. Adam thought then, he’s thinking of his good Erica, her coffin sinking out of sight barely a year ago, and he says to his brother now, touching his cane arm, speaking directly into his hearing aid:

  “This is a tough day, for all of us … so, how are you doing?”

  And John laughs, an enormous gust of happiness bursting over the graves. “Oh, I can’t thank God enough! He gave me two such wonderful women to love me, first Erica and now Emily! I’m so thankful, Addie, you know, how thankful I am? I can’t even say it, Emily, she’s better than anything I deserve, God is so good!”

  His brother John, whom Adam in his childhood memory finds only grim, quiet and forever labouring at some drudgery: what has he missed, avoiding John in the past fifty years? They can simply laugh together, John and he, and Emily as well, quite obviously flattered, whom Adam has met only an hour before, very quickly, as the family gathered in the church vestibule to follow the coffin down the aisle, laughing all together in the cemetery of their mutual dead for seeming happiness in the mild May air, their sister’s grave still open somewhere behind them and cars starting up in the parking lot, rolling over gravel, away. He glances across John to Emily and says to her, “That’s wonderful, you’re so good to my big brother.”

  He sees her motherly face lined with more than he wants to know. “Oh, it’s not hard, he’s very good to me.”

  John nudges him, voice suddenly alert. “Hey, your wife, Susannah, she came too … that’s real good, are you together again, is it okay now, between you?”

  A question only a brother whom you see once in two years at funerals, never weddings, would dare ask, deafly oblivious and loud so that anyone following, like Susannah herself with Dorothy, cannot help but hear. Adam says, as loudly, “Susannah’s just behind us, she lives in Calgary, teaching at the university, and I live in Edmonton. Ask her.”

  Even short spring grass is difficult on a cane; John breathes heavily, it seems to Adam he can hear his mechanical knee creaking, surely he won’t probe any further—but then, not looking at him, his brother persists:

  “So, where does your boy stay?”

&
nbsp; Adam controls himself. “His name is Joel, he’s twenty-six years old and works as a computer programmer in Vancouver. Here. Here’s Dad’s place, Mam’s is three rows up, over there.”

  John looks down at the small grey stone, breathing hard; and then he speaks in a rush, as if he had stored up these words for Adam until this moment together, to pour them over the two decades of their father’s grave:

  “I guess God is just good to me, I barely got three years of school in Canada and I stayed stuck with raising cattle and pulling calves every spring, Erica was real good at that too, and our kids are all married now and serving the Lord with nice families living all around us and God gave me two such wonderful, loving women to care for me and Emily’s kids are all married too, and happy with good jobs—”

  “John,” Emily says, loudly.

  Adam, stunned as he is, can only think that John never dared say anything so thoughtless while Erica was alive—she’d have told him to stop bragging a lot quicker than Emily—though he certainly must have been thinking it all his life about me, who he thinks has made such a mess of my rich and easy life—maybe God is better to this self-satisfied bugger my brother than he knows, and he’s been so hard-working and believing the Bible word for word all his life that now he thinks he deserves his wonderful life—but if he mentions Trish so help me God—

  “I’m sorry,” John says quickly, touching Adam’s shoulder with his cane hand, “that sounded bad and I didn’t mean that, we all have pain, I’ve had pain, our whole family too, I’m sorry, I know the pain you’re feeling and I want to—”

  “John,” Adam spits in his plastic ear, “you know nothing about how I feel. Just praise God he’s so good to you and go feed your big, fucking bulls.”

  “Hey, Addie, you don’t have to swear, I didn’t…” But Adam gets past them both, over their father’s grave, and finds by instinct the black slab, the only one he really wanted to see.