Of This Earth (4 page)

The south wall of that CPR house on the knoll was the background for the first photograph of our entire family.

Angled against the logs so as to face into the light, Mam and Pah sit on high-backed chairs whose carved rungs are visible between their legs. We seven children circle around and between them under the overhang of the pole-and-slab roof. The slab door of the kitchen stands open behind my sister Helen’s left shoulder, beyond her face squinting into the evening sun. The heavy shadow of the photographer—someone who seems wrapped in a heavy cloak—is thicker than any of us; the shadow reaches across the bare foreground and up the right side of the picture, it cuts a black angle through Helen’s legs just above her ankles and the shapeless bump of its head blots the corner of her skirt. Helen will be the first of us to die, in late March when World War II in Europe is at last coming to an end, and thirty years before our father seated beside her, who will be next. The shoulder bulge of the long shadow barely misses Pah’s left foot so close to Helen’s right, but his large worker hands lying on his knees are already balled into fists, and ready.

The click of a box camera exposed my slightly unfocused family in a place and position no memory could retain so absolutely. An image to fit in your palm, several aged cracks across its surface. All proper in our Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church best, Pah and Abe and Dan in suits and ties, Tina, Mary Helen and Liz in dresses and stockings, Mam
in a flowered dress with triangular dark collar and a black cloche hat whose buttons shine above her forehead lifted high into the sun. No one faces the low light as openly as she.

I stand at her knee. Or it may be I am being held tight against her knee, because my mother’s right leg is angled against my chest, her right arm tight around my back, her right hand grips my right elbow and her left hand holds my right hand down on her thigh as if, were she to relax for an instant, I would vanish. Aus du tjleen weascht, she often told me, when you were small you never crawled; you walked, you ran before eight months.

In our meagre photo collection from various times on two continents, this is the first in which I appear. It must have been an important event—someone’s first box camera?—because we have four photos taken on the same spot on the same day.

In the other three photos, all without the shadow, I have been released, small me, to stand on one of the
ornate chairs. Once I am flanked by Abe and Dan, who are so tall that my head barely reaches the crooks of their elbows; then again I am surrounded by six girls, three of whom are my youngest sisters but the other three I do not recognize. All the girls look into the camera, except Helen, who is exactly my height on the chair and looking at me, her mouth open. Perhaps she is already telling me a story.

In the fourth photo taken that day, I stand alone on the chair. My mouth is opening, my right arm rising as if I am about to orate. Compared to the standard height of a chair, I could be seventy-five centimetres—thirty inches—tall. How old is that?

I contemplate the four photos; gradually I am drawn to my oldest sister, who appears only once, in the picture with the shadow. Tina stands at the back, so slender between Abe and Dan, her face tilted down and it seems her eyes are closed. Or it is possible, to judge from the angle of her head, that she is looking down over Mam’s shoulder at me, and it comes to me that memory in these images is like the ineffability of the love she and I gave each other, oldest and youngest, always separated except for a few days, or a few hours, of visit year after year; a love we felt that needed no comment or overt demonstration.

There were either twenty or nineteen years between us: twenty if you accept the “1914” written on Mam’s February 1930 German refugee camp identity papers, nineteen if you accept Tina’s personal word. “Anyways,” she shrugged, “what does it matter, a year so far back?” She was simply Katerina and Abram Wiebe’s first child, born in Village Number Eight, Romanovka, Orenburg Mennonite Colony, near the Ural Mountains in eastern European Russia, and I, their last child, was born in a place that
was nameless but profusely numbered, the southwest quarter of Section 31, Township 52, Range 17, west of the 3rd meridian in Saskatchewan, Canada. Born on the same latitude, 53.5 degrees north, but on opposite bends of the globe, she October 25, 1914, and I October 4, 1934.

And there is, as well, a photograph of infant Tina standing on a chair. But taken in a studio, in Russia. She balances herself, not as I do against the chair back, but by hooking her right hand into the cummerbund of a woman who stands beside her in a floor-length dress trimmed with white lace, her hair and eyes black, her face calmly beautiful, someone I would never recognize as my careworn mother. But when I receive this picture in 1997 from the aged daughter of Mam’s half-sister, who has lived out her Soviet exile life in “stony Tajikistan,” as she calls it, she declares that this sweet, elegant woman truly is my mother at twenty, and the tiny girl on the chair my oldest sister.

Tina herself was staggered by the photo. She saw it for the first time in her memory the year before she died at the age of eighty-four. When we together pondered where our mother might have gone to get such a studio portrait—it must have been in the city of Orenburg over a hundred kilometres away, a journey possible only by horse and wagon—Tina thought it likely was taken to send to Pah, who served out the First World War in the Forstei, the Czar’s forestry service, and who had never yet seen his first child.

The young, handsome woman and man in these photographs were my parents, married in Romanovka on January 19, 1914; Tina was born there in October 1914, and she married Gustav Fiedler on January 15, 1934, in stony bush Canada. I was born the following October, so my mother must have conceived me about the time of Tina’s wedding. Seven children in twenty years, all evenly spaced with never a miscarriage or infant death: how did my mother,
working ceaselessly and often ill with stomach, leg and teeth ailments, manage that? Most of her contemporaries who survived middle age gave birth fifteen times in twenty years with barely half their babies living past infancy. Mam was not one to talk about such things as birth control: the birth of children was not “controlled,” they were “a gift from God,” and after I became a parent myself and jokingly told her I thought that nevertheless she had had quite a bit to do with it, to say nothing of Pah, she turned to the potatoes frying on her stove with a curt, “Jung, sie doch jescheit.” Boy, do be decent.

Even Tina had no explanation when we talked about our varying ages years after our mother’s death. She did not remember Mam nursing any baby very long in Russia—there was never enough good food, and she knew she held the bottle for baby Abe when she was three, she thought, or at most four—but she did have one particular memory about me, from before I was born. The summer our mother was pregnant with me, Mam was ashamed.

“What?”

“Ashamed to go to church, to be seen. Here I was, her daughter, young and married seven, eight months and still thin as a stick, nothing, and here she was, an old woman and sticking out”—Tina’s hands shape an impossible mound over her lap—“you ’were big!”

“Old? She just turned thirty-nine.”

“It’s true.” Tina laughs high and quick. “So we had to get going.”

Gust snorts happily. “And we caught up, seven kids too!”

Tina’s smile fades a little. After a moment she says, “That wasn’t so easy. Five children under fifteen and then all of a sudden two more in a year and a half, when I’m close to forty.”

Gust’s elbows are propped on the table, his head in his hands. “Always good kids though,” he says quietly, “all seven.”

Tony was the first, born in late August 1935, nearly eleven months after me. But he is not in the family picture, nor is his father; only slender Tina standing between our broad brothers, her hair pulled severely back, her body angled away from the shadow reaching across the ground.

Judging by my size and the height of the ornate chair, I believe those first family pictures were taken in the spring or early summer of 1936, when I was one and a half years old. Gust clicked the camera—he would have bought it—in the low evening light and baby Tony perhaps nine months old, was somewhere behind the window curtains thankfully already asleep.

S
askatchewan tried, wherever possible, to ensure that all its children between the ages of seven and fifteen had access to a public school within three miles of their home, and so our cul-de-sac community off Highway 4, still being chopped as farmsteads and fields out of the forest, was divided into two school districts. The boundary between them was the east–west township road allowance: everyone living south in Township 52 attended Jack Pine School, while those who lived in Township 53 went to Speedwell School four miles north (see map, p. vii). Each school was a one-room building for grades one
to eight, together with space for a playground, a horse barn for students driving or riding to school and a small teacherage where the teacher could live if she or he chose not to board with a local family.