Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  To You Nameless Martyrs Who Were Innocent

  and Shot in the Criminal Repressive Years of Stalin

  and Who Are Buried Here

  1937-38

  You Will Be Eternally Remembered

  Each white birch tree nailed to a name burned black Cyrillic into a brown board. They walked all afternoon deeper and deeper into the trees, and Young Peter transliterated Tumanov, Reimer, Brodsky, and finally his father:

  Wiebe Peytor Jakovlevich 20.6.1880-15.8.1937

  Thousands and thousands of trees shot through the back of the skull. Hauled here from Orenburg Prison, which was visible from the bridge over the river they had walked crossing from Europe into Asia. With one hand braced on the scrolled iron railing of the bridge, far from the Grey House where he was tortured, Young Peter could only point at the prison—the long roof and numberless tiny windows rising out of the trees—and the other Orenburg buildings that he had been inside three times, the first right after the GPU forced their family to return from Moscow to Orenburg and “Your parents got out,” he said to Adam. He was still a boy with a body smaller than a boy but he was the oldest son of a kulak who had tried to run. A giant prisoner adopted him, a vicious man sentenced to life for murder took him for himself, curled his huge, gnarled body warm around him so he could sleep, kept him safe from other prisoners; he did nothing to hurt him. Without him, Young Peter said, he would have been dead, certainly the man was a killer but also perhaps an angel, who knows how strangely God lets them come to us, he said, though he saw the prisoner smash a man’s head once and once with one kick crush another’s genitals into his belly. There was nothing but fear between criminals and political prisoners thrown together in a small cell where only twelve men at a time could lie in bunks and on the floor to sleep and fifteen had to stand packed between them waiting their turn, sleeping on their feet and sometimes collapsing on the others as if shot. The names of the innocent and weeping dead, killed for no other reason than being alive and unable to stand any longer, Young Peter said, are nailed and written here on the birches by those who remember them and believe so completely that by faith they see what they know is written on the white bark of the tree of life.

  Under the tall aspen that shroud the mouldering homestead cabin, Joel exclaims, “That’s Mom!” He shouts, “Mom!” and charges away towards the sound.

  And as Adam moves quickly to follow him he can only think, Susannah has never come looking for me … not in nine years, only that one marvellous night in Lethbridge … he shoves himself through the brush, out of the copse, holding the branches back for Alison crowding behind him, and he sees the two figures beyond his car. Susannah, beside her “one and only extravagance” the silver BMW, and Joel already there suddenly leans over the hood, his broad body folding down between his braced arms as if he had been slugged.

  “Susannah!” Adam shouts, running. “What? What?”

  Her mouth opens and she begins to run as well. To meet him, he hears her word, he sees her face shine as if she were speaking out of a blazing fire.

  Trish. Trish. It is all he can think, her name, Trish.

  “It was her, Adam, I know her voice!”

  She is on the 10:45 evening flight from Dallas to Calgary.

  “Four hundred twenty-five kilometres from here to—no, we charter a plane, Edmonton Municipal, thirty-three minutes’ flying and we—”

  “It’s still another five hours, we’ll just have to sit there and wait—”

  Joel lifts his head. “And all our cars in Edmonton, why not drive like hell, who gives a shit about tickets and—”

  Adam is running for Susannah’s cellphone, yelling, “I want to wait in the Calgary Airport! Sit there! Right there!”

  Adam is with Susannah pointed south on Highway 63, his Toyota with Joel and Alison in the rear-view mirror, a Learjet ready in Edmonton. The huge farmsteads hiding behind their square rows of shelterbelt whistle past.

  How can you look at someone returned from the dead?

  Will you see her walk through an airport double door?

  A rotting house sinks slowly to its knees in an open field, the running steel lines of railroad dip down into the setting sun. Adam sees himself with a shovel planting birch trees over the open hill and down to the creek below the cliff and along the northern swamp willows and around up over the hill again and down to the beaver ponds on the height of land—beavers let paper birch live—planting thousands of birch—not in straight rows like his Onkel Jakob in a regimented commune but in circles. He will burn all the names of every ancestor he knows into boards, buy a truckload of cedar and use every alphabet invented for any language so wherever on earth they lived or died their names will be read and understood, burn names deep in Egyptian hieroglyphics and Hittite and Mayan and Inca and Etruscan and every other shape of writing known to the dead until the names on the trees come around and round again as endless as a ring rolling.

  She is on an American Airlines jet. Hurtling towards Calgary, Susannah said.

  He says out loud, “How can I believe it.”

  Susannah says, “Have you told Joel about your Sakhalin uncles?”

  Adam stutters, “I told … him about them … and my names, yes.”

  She insists, “About Heinrich and Peter? Exactly what Elizabeth Katerina found out?”

  “Not very much, only that some of the story may not be true.”

  Susannah explodes with a cry of rage; if she were not driving, she might be beating him over the head. “You promised me! You promised me last summer, and every call since then, that you’d tell him the records show Peter Loewen died on Sakhalin after the war, three years after Heinrich was buried in Berlin! What is the matter with you? You promised.”

  “Take it easy, take it—”

  “Don’t you ever learn anything? How important something can be to someone else, beside yourself?”

  “It’s just so contradictory, the facts don’t make sense, what they say happened doesn’t—”

  “Just you tell Joel all the facts you know. If it’s important to him, let him make whatever sense he wants.”

  “Okay, okay,” Adam says. “Okay.”

  Susannah glances swiftly at him, then back to the coming, vanishing streaks of the highway. She drives as if she were threading a needle.

  Before the double double-doors opening and closing in the glass and concrete international arrivals area echoing with persons repeatedly paged but apparently never lifting a receiver to be heard by an ear waiting for a voice, to the right of the arrivals barrier in the Calgary International Airport, there is a circle of five people.

  If they were facing outward, they would resemble muskoxen of the High Arctic backed around young to confront their lifelong enemies. But these face in upon themselves: they are bending gradually closer together, intent upon the slowly tightening sphere they make, closer feet, rounded bodies, bowed heads. It could well be a family: a mother, a son, a father, a daughter- or son-in-law, one daughter or two. Between the slabs of echoing airport glass a globe of quiet gathers about them, it seems they are trying to look into each other’s eyes, to search out all of themselves at the same lasting instant while their hands and arms grope around and beyond the person pressed against them for the next. Trying to feel every bone in every individual body, and feeling at last their hearts beat the conviction of their enduring love.

  TWENTY-THREE

  A LADDER OF ANGELS

  The Einlage

  Danzig

  1652

  FROM THE MOMENT OF OUR BIRTH, dying carries us towards the moment of our death. I am close now, kneeling in this soft, black ground pulling out turnips one by one. An old man has time. Time to feel earth between his fingers down to its very dust. After all, my name is Adam.

  Ground sweet enough to place in your mouth, to taste and see it is good.

  For thirty-five years I was chief engineer of the fortress city of Danzig, but like all Mennonites, our family had no permit to live in its tigh
t stone buildings. Fortunately. In our row village of Neugarten, between the shadows of the Bishop’s and the Hagel’s Hill, we all had deep black soil for gardens, and though every army that besieged Danzig burned Neugarten to the ground while we fled inside the walls with a few possessions, my wife Anna and I agreed: a garden was worth it. A burned house can be rebuilt, but flowers cannot grow between cobblestones. Even when the city invited me, for my services, to build three houses inside the Wagon Gate for my family, we never lived in them. Then in 1637 our sons Abraham and Jakob received royal permission to dam and drain the floodplain of the Nogat River opposite the city of Elbing, and for the past fifteen years, while we continued working in both Danzig and Elbing as engineers, Wiebes have diked and ditched and drained the Einlage, as it is called. With other Mennonite families we have built both row villages and scattered farmsteads on raised mounds, as we built them long ago in Friesland. Once mostly wild water rushes grew here, but now the Einlage orchards and dike trees hide the spires of St. Nicholas and St. Mary in Elbing far across the river.

  Actually, I do not live only in the Einlage. The city of Danzig also permitted me to buy land and build a house at Pasewark, a village overlooking the dunes of the Bay of Danzig. But my Anna is gone home and I have come to live here with Jakob’s family for a little while. I like to pull up their fat garden turnips, which the grandchildren tell me are really only fit to be eaten by cows.

  I refuse to smile, I tell them cow milk is excellent, of course, but raw, crisp turnips help give you strong teeth. And I show them mine: squarely solid, at least in front, see, I’ve eaten garden turnips all my life. But Trientje, Jacob’s last daughter, does not believe mere words. Her quick fingers have to feel as far as they can inside my mouth.

  “Grousspau!” she exclaims. “Your hind teeth are all gone, where are they?”

  I fondle her ear and whisper they’re like hair, old men don’t need so many to look beautiful like little girls, and for a moment I can see belief widen her unblinking eyes. Touch and hearing, she is almost ten and I pray the dearest God she lives long; what a woman she will be.

  I am hunched on my heels in the rich delta garden, and I feel Trientje’s fingers brush the edge of my beard. “Why do you always plant turnips?” she asks. “Nobody likes them, just you.”

  My Anna, God give her peace, would have laughed with me to hear her; Anna didn’t much like cooking turnips either. She always insisted life was a feast we could enjoy with pleasure and great gratitude, that we personally had enjoyed so much that surely to describe life as a kind of “continual dying” was considering it from the wrong side of the table. And I said true, God in His mercy has given us much, but which is the wrong side? Burned villages are easily rebuilt, but children killed cannot be reborn.

  How do you know?

  Nor the memory of their agony and dying erased.

  Yes, Anna said then. That may be harder than being born once again.

  Trientje is nudging me gently. “Grousspau, why?”

  “Why … what?”

  “The turnips.” She is still too young to be impatient with me in my aging. “I asked you twice.”

  She turns her warm face to me as I draw her close; she gives a small grunt of happiness as we kiss. It is required that Mennonite grandfathers, especially those known in public, appear wisely dignified and distant; they cannot possibly kiss even their grandchildren—except when hidden by the trees in their gardens.

  I place the last clean turnip on my small pyramid. “Come, we’ll leave them here, these old things, your great-great-grandmother already ate turnips in Friesland.” And I use her sturdy shoulder to get to my feet. “We’ll find something different, something sweet for you.”

  “Yes yes!” she cries, skipping her hand into mine to the lilt of her voice. “Potatoes! Ohhh, the potatoes!”

  Oh, the dribble of stranded facts running in an old man’s memory, like the unruly dance of his grandchild on the ploughed earth around him as he walks. A new word, eadschock is what we call potatoes in Prussian Lowgerman, a neutral compromise for the many Dutch dialects we carried here over the last century, the very sound of which reminded too many of us of our endless Dutch disagreements. The word means “earth” and also “sixty,” I think, which is how these marvellous tubers seem to multiply into every possible shape in good soil. I’ve been growing them larger and larger from the tiny balls Jan Adriaenz Leeghwater first brought me from Holland in 1628.

  “These come from the New World,” he said, “from mountains too high to believe, but they will grow anywhere hidden in the earth, they’ll feed you even if the Swedish cannon smash every Danzig wheat ship and granary.”

  For years I had invited him to come and help me redesign our outdated bastions; we needed a second harbour channel and should enlarge our walls to include the Long Garden, so we would have more food to withstand the next siege. We were so endlessly beset by whatever army had a fleeting advantage in the Wars of the Polish Succession, complicated by the Thirty Years War of Religion and Holy Roman Empire, that we never had sufficient time to rebuild the bastions, leave alone extend our fortifications. But then, suddenly, Jan Adriaenz did arrive, as usual by an obvious miracle: he and his small potatoes were aboard the first Dutch ship to venture into the river after the immense spring floods of 1628 forced King Gustavus II Adolphus and his dreadful Swedish army to abandon their siege of Danzig. That very August, while Jan Adriaenz helped me design the new walls around the Lower Town and the Long Garden, we heard by sailors’ rumour that the largest warship ever built, the Vasa, had been launched for Gustavus Adolphus in Stockholm. It carried double-tiered bronze cannon that could fire twenty-four-pound balls over a mile, that is, it could destroy Danzig from the Bay without sailing up the river. But then, while thousands of Swedes cheered from the bank and every flag flew, the Vasa had barely moved past the royal palace when a cross-wind caught its huge sails and, top-heavy with armaments, it keeled over, water poured in at all its massive gun ports, and it sank before their eyes in the deepest trench of Stockholm harbour. Praise be to God.

  Jan Adriaenz said, “If Gustavus Adolphus had sailed those Vasa cannon to the mouth of the Vistula, how long would Danzig have held out?”

  “But he didn’t! Water swallowed them at the first puff of wind.”

  “In four months,” he said, “God has saved Danzig twice.”

  By water and by air; for the time being. As Danzig’s master builder, I had to ponder war: our independent city, a strategic and rich prize for any conqueror, was fixed in its place, set immovably on the earth inside the triangle formed on two sides by three rivers and on the third by the westerly line of hills anchored by the Bishop’s Hill. Beyond any walls we could build, our best defence was the water of the rivers; when we opened our control dikes and sluices, water flooded the approaches to the city on two sides to confound any attacking army. The strongest offence against us was, of course, ever more fire from ever-larger cannon, and for this our western hills, which before gunpowder were a fine defence as well, were becoming our greatest problem. For if a general attacked from the west and forced his way up to their tops, he was not only above the flood but also above the walls; the city lay below him, open to whatever destruction his cannonballs could wreak.

  The world was not only the water and air that saved us momentarily from the Swedes, it was also earth and fire. And all four must be controlled, together and in combination, for protection and peaceful shelter from our rulers’ unending war.

  An added lesson: not controlling three of the four elements destroyed Gustavus II Adolphus himself, the most devout Protestant and brilliant warlord of his age. In November 1632, at the battle of Lützen against the Roman Catholic Army led by Wallenstein, towards evening the gory field became obscured by drifting fog, and the impulsive King of Sweden may have lost his bearings; in any event, he galloped between the opposing battle lines of Wallenstein’s cavalry and the Swedish foot soldiers and he was fatally shot by his own expert muskete
ers.

  Water and air and fire in yet another unexpected, and deadly, combination. Only earth could save Danzig, Jan Adriaenz and I decided. Our thick bastion walls were built of earth dug out deep to create the moats, and faced with thin stone barged from the mountains. Under heavy cannon fire the stone would break, but the wide, exactly sloped dam of earth behind it would absorb the force of the cannonball without serious damage. Our fortifications facing the delta and the three rivers began at the north point of the hills, at the Corpus Christi Bastion, and curved around in an immense half-circle of fifteen bastions, in a line of fourteen curtain walls almost two miles long, to the hills at the Gertrud Bastion—a true stronghold.

  The problem was the straight line of wall from the Gertrud back to the Corpus Christi Bastion. That wall fronted the western hills that overlooked the city; it was almost a mile long and dangerously low because we had always counted on the hills to protect us. How could that wall be strengthened? There was so little usable earth along the Raduane Canal with its swampy, bottomless marshes. The Bishop’s Hill had more than enough earth, even boulders and rock, to build up the wall. The question was how to get that earth from the hill and across the marsh and canal to the wall.