Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  We have always moved earth, the City Councillors told me.

  Yes, by building roads and bridges and ramps, by hauling with sled, cart and wheelbarrow, by shoulder yoke and buckets.

  So?

  So. I had to decide. Carry the earth in endless tiny shovelfuls, drag every grain and clump of it over miles of ground the way the Children of Israel slaved for the Egyptians? Had we learned nothing about the placedness of earth, its possible motion, since the desert pyramids of Genesis?

  After he returned home, Jan Adriaenz sent me letters by ship. He told of the continuing voyages of sailors from Hoorn; of Adrian Block who had once wintered in Man-a-hat-a; of Willem Schönnen who was the first man to finally sail around the cold and storm-ripped tip of South America and named it after his home port, Cape Hoorn; of Peter Minuit who had settled twenty-four Dutch families, including four Mennonites, at Man-a-hat-a after he traded rights to the island from the Indians for goods worth twelve Dutch guilders, and renamed it New Amsterdam.

  “With such a name,” Jan Adriaenz wrote, “and land so deceitfully purchased, I think it impossible they will ever build a heavenly city.”

  I wrote back, “It is as well then that I sailed east.”

  He replied, “Or, perhaps, if you had gone west you could have prevented it. I hear now they are digging a harbour canal and building walls to protect themselves, I think, from the Indians who certainly know they have been betrayed.”

  I could only answer, “I struggle enough with our ‘Old Europe Christian’ walls and ditches, what would I do with walls for New World Indians?”

  His letter in return seemed sad: “Walls are always what they are, no more, no less. And so it should be also with Christian actions, wherever we are on God’s earth: caring and fair to others as we wish to be cared for.”

  Words of Jesus, seemingly as impossible in Dutch trade as they would be futile in facing Swedish cannon. If one dared utter them.

  “You are a brilliant engineer,” Jan Adriaenz concluded. “But still, I think, too little illogical. You once called me ‘the man who walks under water,’ well, I gradually discerned the diving bell when I stopped thinking only about water and pondered its relation to air. To solve the earth problem of your western wall, you need to think different; perhaps more about fire.”

  I tried, but in my case these two elements did not seem to link as co-operatively as the two in his. My problem was a relationship of motion, not stasis, and useful fire must be, I think, largely static; when it moves it usually explodes and is to that extent dangerously uncontrollable. Water, on the other hand, is always in motion and relatively controllable. The problem was earth. The base of the Bishop’s Hill must remain as it was, a solid anchor of our protection; therefore the earth for our wall must move down from its top—which, if it were lowered, would also lessen the advantage of enemy cannon placed there. A water sluice down from the top of the Bishop’s Hill, sloped on supports across the valley, marsh, canal and moat, would carry the needed soil down in the continuing wash of a stream. But how would you, for one, get the carrying water to the top of that great dry hill, and two, even harder, get it back up again after the soil had settled out? And three, the settling would take too long. Three problems for one.

  Water, water. The beauty of it moving, the drinking sounds of it under clear ice. Water is so heavy it always seeks low; over the high Bishop’s Hill there is nothing but air. We are not birds pointed like feathers to walk or drift on it; birds are too light to harness and men are too heavy, when we try to fly we merely fall and smash. The best we can do is build ladders to climb step by heavy step up, be there in the air momentarily, and retreat slowly down to earth again, stand ladders against the steep sides of the hill, one stream of people climbing up with yokes and empty buckets, a second stream with buckets filled coming down, in an endless circular motion on ladders, like the ladder Jacob saw as he slept with his head on a stone, and sleeping saw a ladder with its top reaching to heaven and angels going up and down on it and God there standing over him. A ladder set on the earth and leading up to the very gate of heaven, and down again. Angels moving up and down continuously.

  It was before dawn when I stood on the Gertrud Bastion, the southern anchor of Danzig’s curved wall where it turns straight north. I was staring across the valley at the Bishop’s Hill. Jacob in Genesis said when he awoke from sleeping on his stone, “Truly God is in this place and I never knew it.” It seemed to me then that even after twenty-six years I did not know this place either, nor what was in it, though I had built so much of it. I was asleep, but asleep somehow wrongly—perhaps I should ask our ancient stonecutter Jan Adam Wens for a stone on which to lay my head.

  November 13, 1642. The blazing rim of the early winter sun rose on the edge of the earth behind me. It was already so far south of east that, as I faced the Bishop’s Hill from the Gertrud Bastion, it laid the shadow of Danzig’s western wall all across the middle of the hill. The wall was too low, and much too thin.

  A bird perched beside me on the parapet of the bastion. A tiny bird, in the dawn light it shone on the grey stone like a star. Then it opened its wings, which were amazingly large for so tiny a body, and launched itself into the air of the valley, a spot of light lifting and lifting up in waves until it crested the tip of the Bishop’s Hill. Its flight like a string of light reaching across the valley.

  The next day we received the message that on November 13 our son Jakob’s wife, Ruth, had given birth to a daughter in the new village they were building in the Einlage. They had named her Katerina, in Lowgerman Trientje. Purity.

  When I first held her—her tiny face was closed, she was sleeping—they told me she was born at dawn, and I remembered the line between light and shadow that I had seen laid across the Bishop’s Hill. Level on the earth as only light can be at the instant of sunrise, and I realized it had revealed to me the precise difference in height between hill and wall, that I could measure it as exactly as I could the width of this tiny perfect nose.

  And I saw. The machine was already there, a machine like a line of light in air. I had been merely blind.

  Connect hill and wall with a string. Like the flight of the bird, like wool that sags and unwinds between the round ball of it and the continuous pull of knitting needles making mittens, here use a strong rope, unbreakably strong like the ship ropes Holland now twists out of the incredible sisal fibres it brings from the New World, connect a continuous circle of this rope from hill to wall and back up again, attach to that rope the necessary yokes of buckets, fill them with earth on the hill and the weight of the filled buckets will carry them down and across the valley marsh and up to the top of the fortification wall, because it always remains lower than the hill and at the same time the circle will be returning the empty buckets back to the crest of the hill. Human energy will be needed only to fill the buckets on the hill, and to tip them empty on the wall. The earth can be moved without pause, in buckets hung on a continuous rope.

  It took me a year to develop the right size of rope and work out all the problems of exact balance and bucket attachment, the rope and pillar supports. But once started, the aerial rope-train worked perfectly. All over Europe people heard of it and came to see Adam Wiebe’s “Jacob’s ladder” as they called it, came to stare and praise me, write stories in papers and books, even songs.

  And one morning, when the workmen arrived to begin their work, I stepped into the first empty bucket myself and, like the shovelled earth, swaying a little, I was carried slowly along the crest of the Bishop’s Hill and then, suddenly, dropped out into space; and then even more suddenly dropped from light into the twilight before dawn lying level across the valley. Moving steadily, riding the waves over the supporting pillars, I knew I was neither bird nor angel. I was a human being suspended in air and shadow approaching an earthen city. When I was lifted up again into the brilliant sunrise over the Wiebe Bastion that anchored the long Wiebe Wall (as the Council had now named them) and the workmen tilte
d me out, I found myself weeping for happiness.

  Trientje is gathering the purple potatoes as I lift them out of the soil with the shovel, rubbing them clean, piling them in small heaps. She has been talking, as she does endlessly, language such a charm and lisp between her small teeth, telling me, “ … this one is even bigger, oh look! Do you think, Grousspau, did Jesus dig up potatoes sometimes too?”

  “They didn’t…” But I stop, say to her bowed head, hair so neatly braided. “Where he lived, maybe they didn’t have potatoes.”

  “They would have,” she says confidently. “Jesus could dig up anything he wanted to, and when he…”

  Her voice sings on, the sky above the garden and orchard trees shines in a whitish mist, like a shroud of diaphanous wool woven to hide us; safe. War is coming, the twenty-six-year truce between Poland and Sweden—I think their kings are cousins, or perhaps half-brothers—is almost over. Across the river my son Jakob, Trientje’s father, is strengthening the walls of Elbing for the Swedes who under the truce have controlled it for a quarter of a century; in Danzig my daughter Anna and her husband, Abraham Jantzen, live in one of our houses inside the Wiebe Wall at the Wagon Gate and are growing very rich operating a brandy distillery. My oldest son Abraham works steadily for the Polish defence on Danzig’s second line of city fortifications, the high bastions and curtain walls connecting the Bishop’s and Hagel’s hills west above the city, which together with the Scottish Highland mercenaries—if they can hire enough of them again, with their bony knees and terrifying swords—will keep Danzig acting as if it were independent until the Swedes once and for all blow our walls to pieces. If they possibly can. In fact, most of Danzig’s surrounding villages are already blown up. To provide enough rubble to build the new walls on the ravines and slopes of the two hills, Abraham has torn down eight villages, including Mennonite Neugarten and Stolzenberg. He is now using the Jacob’s ladder, powered by horses walking around a wheel, to lift the village stones and timbers up to the tops of walls they are building even wider than I made the Wiebe Wall, because Swedish cannon are now even more powerful than we estimated. And their deadly pikemen are no longer needed in attacks; a knife called a bayonet can now be attached to every musket to make a pikeman out of every musketeer and every musket into a double killing machine: at long range by bullet, or body to body by stabbing.

  I dig. Trientje, on her knees, gathers. Her busy little fingers and mouth. When the winter storms and ice are past in late March, I will return to live in my small house at Pasewark, and walk on the dunes. The spring of the year, the Bible says, is the time when kings go forth to war. I will sit on the high sand there and look north across the Bay of Danzig to the sea, to watch for tall ships approaching. The redesigned Swedish warships, coming again. Perhaps God will be merciful to Danzig, perhaps the Polish army and the Dutch navy can drive them off. So many will be killed. Perhaps God will be merciful to me, and I will not be there to see them come over the water before the wind. Terrible with banners.

  At my feet Trientje exclaims, “Oh oh, you cut one.”

  And so I have. Cut it in half, the white meat of the eadschock like two precious coins shining in the black earth.

  But I have dug too long, and now straightened up too fast. Nausea uncoils in my head and stomach, spreads like the ancient warmth of desire I can still feel, sometimes, so easily remember when I see the shape of a bright body bend. The sky spins with it, a taste edging into my mouth; anchored on my shovel I lower myself deeper into it until I rest on my knees, tilt my face down to Trientje’s hands burrowing at the split potato, the earth and potato smell of it.

  She is Trientje now. When she is old enough to marry she will become Trien, and years later, God keep her safe and it please Him, somewhere in the world she will be Grossma Triena.

  “Here,” I say, and our hands grub in the earth together. We each nudge out one piece and hold it, touch them together like a toast. Our spring and autumn jubilee. I give her my pocket knife and she laughs; with her left hand she cuts a thin slice from hers and one from mine. Then we place them on each other’s tongue. Potato fresh from the earth, sweet and sharp as coming winter snow, moist together in our laughing mouths.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Parts of this novel, in very different form, have appeared in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Kunapipi, Malahat Review, More Than Words Can Say, and The New Quarterly. I thank their editors for first publishing this fiction. Also, I sincerely thank the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for originally commissioning a version of Sailing to Danzig as a radio play, and Carol Dyck of Edmonton for composing the music for the broadcast in August 1986.

  PERMISSIONS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  The first quote on this page is an excerpt from “You’re coming home again. What does that mean?” from Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems by Joseph Brodsky. English translation copyright © 1973 George L. Kline. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  The second quote on this page is from Journey to Yalta by Sarah Klassen. Copyright © 1988 by Sarah Klassen. Reprinted by permission of Turnstone Press.

  The quote on this page is from Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. Copyright © 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1954, 1958, 1971 by Schocken Books. Used by permission of Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc. “The Next Village” from The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir published by Secker & Warburg. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

  The quotes on this page and this page are from A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1936, 1973 by Graham Greene. Reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates.

  The quote on this page and the first quote on this page are from The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives by Lev Bezymenski, copyright © 1968 by Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg, English translation copyright © 1986 by Harcourt, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

  The first quote on this page and the second quote on this page are reprinted with permission from The Mind of Norman Bethune, edited by Roderick Stewart © 1977, published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Markham, Ontario.

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beyond the standard Mennonite history texts, the following books were particularly helpful.

  Auss-Bundt, Das ist: Etliche schöne Christliche Lieder, wie die in der Gefägnus zu Passau in dem Schloss von denen Schweitzer-Brüderen und von anderen rechtglaubigen Christen hin and her gedichtet worden…. Basel, Switzerland: n.d. [1550, 1838 (?)]

  Braght, Thieleman J. van, trans. Joseph Sohm. The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Saviour, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660. Mennonite Publishing House, Elkhart, Ind.: 1886; Scottdale, Pa., and Kitchener, Ont.: Herald Press, 1987.

  Cuny, Georg. “Die Maler Deneter und Seemann,” Mitteilungen des Westpreussischen Geschichtsvereins, 1913, pp. 48–54.

  Curicken, Georg Reinhold. Der Stadt Dantzigk historiche Beschreibung… 1645. Amsterdam and Danzig: Johan & Gillis Janssons, 1686.

  Epp, Jacob, trans, and ed. Harvey Dyck. A Mennonite in Russia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

  Friccius, Carl. Geschichte der Befestigungen und Belagerungen Danzigs. Berlin: Veit & Comp, 1854.

  Janzen, Anna. Eine Beschreibung der Ausreise von Deutschland nach Russfond. Baunatal, Germany: Manfred Sinning, 1995.

  Klassen, Peter. A Homeland for Strangers. Fresno, Calif.: Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 1989.

  Penner, Horst. Die ost—und westpreussischen Mennoniten. Weierhof, Germany: Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein, 2 v., 1978, 1987.

  Penner, Horst.
“Die Wiebes.” Mennonitisches Jahrbuch. Newton, Kans.: 1951, pp. 14–20.

  Rempel, John, and Paul Tiessen, eds. Forever Summer, Forever Sunday: Peter Gerhard Rempel’s Photographs of Mennonites in Russia, 1890–1917. St. Jacobs, Ont.: Sand Hills Books, 1981.

  Thiessen, Jack. Mennonite Low German Dictionary. Steinbach, Man.: Hanover Steinbach Historical Society, n.d. [2000].

  Visser, Piet, and Mary Sprunger. Menno Simons. Altona, Man.: Friesens, 1996.

  Rudy Wiebe, widely published internationally and winner of numerous awards, including two Governor General’s Awards, is the author of nine novels, four short-story collections, three books of essays and Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, which he co-authored with Yvonne Johnson. Rudy Wiebe is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and lives in Edmonton.