Sweeter Than All the World (11 page)

“Why?” I asked him then. “We keep killing each other—why?”

“Why.” The sun was gone and we were fading into darkness. “In all of Europe, now, God is every reason.”

“You think we wouldn’t drag that to this ‘New World’?”

“Of course, of course, it’s happened already, for over a hundred years. But … it sounds like a story in the Bible, so beautiful if it were far enough away, a hidden corner of earth. Man-a-hat-a.”

“Anyway, how long could you hide heaven?” I said, and I
knew the tinge of bitterness was in my voice, but I could not help it. I had been dreaming of all that might be built in a great city since the Danzig delegation came to Harlingen, after he refused them but suggested they consider me. “John in the Bible saw heaven. An immense city with very high walls.”

“The new Jerusalem,” Jan Adriaenz murmured. “I have read the Book of the Revelation often, and pondered it. Heaven is not shown as a garden, or a deep, hidden forest. The angel says to John, ‘Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife.’ ”

I looked at him; I did not remember that.

“Heaven is first of all a woman, the Bride of the Lamb. And after that it is also a city.”

All I could say was, “What can that mean?”

He smiled wanly. “You see why we studious readers of the Scriptures, we Menniste literalists will have problems between us forever. What I think is, these are all pictures, and on earth no one picture of heaven can be enough; we need many. For me, the simplest is heaven as a city—and that is complex enough—a huge city brilliant as jasper, square and hard … but also,” he added abruptly, “trees of life grow on the banks of the river that runs through it. If we built a beautiful city with a river…”

I said, into his silence, “A river runs through Danzig.”

On the Bay of Danzig our ship caught the morning wind off the Baltic Sea and under full sail moved slow as a procession between the sand dunes of the Wester Platte and up the bent throat of the Vistula River. The church spires and towers of Danzig—I counted more than thirty-seven—blazed in the sun standing low over the delta and outlining the three peaks of western hills, against which the city lay, and the tips of the masts of ships
anchored there from every ocean on earth—I saw twenty-two of them along the river quays, their wrapped sails glowing into a deeper brilliance as we moved between them. I thought of small, flat Harlingen, its houses squeezed between the four fingers of the van Harinxma Canal, its tiny fortress above the Wadden Sea. Danzig was huge, it was walled and bastioned below the hills a mile inland from the sea, and it stretched out farther than that. When we turned right from the Vistula and sailed into the Motlawa River and between the towers of the city walls, the harbour narrowed before us into a molten street of welcoming light. Our long bowsprit pointed between stepped Dutch houses on the right and the huge granaries along the left quays, between the silent men and women and children at windows and standing motionless watching us arrive in our tall blue ship. Verily, in 1616 Danzig seemed to me a city of beaten gold floating on the long, northern-summer light.

But my engineer’s eye recognized it had by no means “come down to earth adorned as a bride.” Its walls were not two hundred cubits high nor its gates made of pearl. The river was thick and sluggish, the gate irons rusted thin, the stone lintels and pillars cracked by age and cannonballs. Inside the low walls, as we bent away from the old, glowering castle, there were so many houses and markets and tight cobbled streets and granaries and immense wood and iron cranes so crushed together upon each other that not a single green tree could possibly have found a place to root, anywhere.

A most earthen, stone, and muddy water city. I had come to the heart of my life’s work.

“HAVE YOU EVER,”
S
USANNAH ASKS
, “seen a row of dead people?”

Adam looks past his nightly day-old newspaper; her profile as if dreaming against the low bedside light.

“I see enough bodies,” he says. “More than I want, alive and dead.”

“No, not one dead at a time, I mean a row of them, a long row.”

“A long … everybody dies, everybody runs to the doctor, you can never stop it for good … what is it?”

Susannah is staring immovably into space. “No. I mean”—her hand makes sharp chopping motions across the width of their bed—“people, laid out in rows one beside the other, full length on the ground, say hundreds of them, dead.”

“No, where would I?” Adam murmurs. “Yes, of course I have.”

“Where?”

“TV news, everybody sees it, practically every evening.”

“No, TV doesn’t count.”

“Not count? The first TV we bought, the first thing we saw was Lee Harvey Oswald shot between those Texas cops, live on TV, and now it’s twelve-channel reruns of news bodies, all the time.”

“I know, but television’s just an electric shimmer, like a voice on an answering machine, I mean human bodies, that’s what Dad said once, like this.”

She makes the chopping motion again, across into his paper; despite the elegance of her hand, the gesture strikes him as grotesque.

“What, your dad?”

But she continues, obliviously, “And your doctor training wouldn’t help, there’d be so many you couldn’t believe your trained eyes and you’d have to touch them, one after the other.” Her fingertips rest momentarily on his skin. “Every one dead human flesh.”

“The fact of touch, that’s proof, yes.”

“And the fact of smell,” she says.

“Oh, there’d sure be that, in no time.”

“Yes, that.”

Her quiet voice seems to have turned the bedroom light so dim they might be between candles in a chandeliered dining room again, her face a Pre-Raphaelite vision over the table, a face he can, for the moment, barely recognize in its incomprehensible beauty.

Adam has to look away; years ago they were like that, and not in bed reading either.

“Unless it’s very cold,” she says, “like February, bodies swell up, there’d be an extremely strong stench very fast.”

“And flies and maggots.” He hesitates, but her lengthening stillness is some consideration he must break. “A Dene from Fort Good Hope, I was sewing his knife cut, he told me a body even in cold water like the Mackenzie will come to the surface from stomach gases, you often can’t recognize the face after the fish find it but the body will certainly rise again.…” He laughs, realizing what he has said. “At least in water!”

“In Canada,” she says deliberately, “we see rows of bodies only in industrial disasters, like Springhill, or the Hillcrest coal mine in 1914….”

His long wards at the Royal Alex Hospital, suffering flesh laid out row on row and never permitted to simply die; it was worth your life in lawsuits not to multiply attaching, supposedly succouring, machines—Adam crushes the newspaper and drops it to the floor, but Susannah continues:

“ … one hundred and eighty-nine men in Hillcrest. When they brought them up from the exploded shafts inside the mountain they laid the body parts out in the mine washhouse and tried to reassemble them, arms, legs, heads, so relatives could identify—”

“Susannah,” he has to interrupt, “why are you talking about this?”

“We could drive to Hillcrest, five hours, it’s more or less a ghost town, and see all the graves,” she says. “A long double row with little pickets, hardly any tombstones or names, just Crowsnest Mountain and the lovely valley and grass sunk in like giant footprints, side by side.”

Her shoulders beside him are bare, and fuller, arms a bit shorter and hands much more worn, not quite the same as Jean—who would also never talk her way into an abstract reverie on bodies! He speaks quickly to avoid his betrayal:

“We drove through the Crowsnest, years ago. Why are you saying this?”

She touches him. “I remembered that beautiful graveyard, thinking about bodies.”

“Is it Cambodia, those horrible pyramids of skulls?”

“No, bodies. Laid out side by side, row after row.”

And his mind flips. “You said your dad”—he chops his hand across the bed, across her legs—“he saw this?” She nods. “About the war, he saw rows of bodies?”

“Uh-huh. Dresden. A Tuesday in February, 1945.”

“He was ground crew for Flying Fortresses, in France, how would he see Dresden bodies?”

She knits her fingers into knots. “And he said many were twisted together. One hundred and thirty-five thousand people burned alive.”

“He told you he saw them?”

Her endless father, his endless silence about “his” war. A new evasion?

It was so dark they could no longer distinguish each other’s face when they finally heard the beaver coming.

The sound of the creek running over stones played back to them from the cliffs in an endless lullaby and they stood motionless as trees against the birches, their shapes gone from dark into darkness. Adam was certain they would never meet anyone here. In this night silence they had no names, they had disappeared. They could simply stand with the length of their bodies touching, and wait.

And it seemed they had waited so long for that quiet splash, that imperceptible breaking of surface in the pond before them
that at first they did not recognize the sound: It seemed barely a skiff … white noise coming over the narrow water from the sandbar overgrown with willows, a small racket as if something were being dragged, perhaps a body being lugged through willows and alder brush, slightly louder bumping between birches. And then nattering as if, walking along a hospital corridor at night, a young technician and an older doctor were coming closer, anticipating what would now happen after a long shift. And then there fell into the indecipherable black sheet of water before them a plop! so clumsy, one seeming bellyflop and then another, that they nudged each other in astonishment: could this be the secret beavers no one ever saw, whose dams measured and tiered the creek in water steps around every bend, every rapid, where twenty-metre poplars lay as devastated as wheatstraw, mown down and hurled against others still, temporarily, standing? They strained forward, touching more lightly now, both anticipating and warning each other not to make a sound, and they saw on the still invisible, suddenly silent water a string of starlight slowly being drawn.

“There,” Jean breathed.

Adam felt her arm rise, a click, the black-green water surfaced in one spot of brilliant light. A beaver head, a small, pointed blotch quickly turning and gone, the black hump of back and tail flipping,
smack!
into a roil of water and gone, nothing but spreading ripples, Adam was cursing almost aloud but unable to finish an oath before the head again surfaced, the light centred on it,
crash!
the cliff pounded the tremendous sound back like a club and the water exploded, seemed to smash in pieces out of the yellow light. And then again, a beat too late, another
crash!
smashing the pieces further into pieces.

“Did I hit him?”

“I don’t—shhhh!” Jean hissed.

A head again, nose circling high in the broken water. Was it the first? Was it the partner? Stupidly nosing the naked light to smell its way into invisibility there?

Adam pulled the trigger and held steady: the tremendous crashes this time were almost simultaneous and so overwhelming that the clang hammered in their heads, on and on, while the light wavered, searching over the pond. Gradually the sound of the rapids returned to its gentle insistence. There was nothing on the stirred surface of the water.

Jean had her arms wrapped around her head. “Sweet Jesus and Mary, is that automatic?”

“Semi,” Adam said. “When I shoot, I want it dead, quick. You think I hit him?”

“Too loud to see. Could be a her.”

“Good, then her babies are finished too.”

“You’re a heartless man.”

“Not utterly.” His tongue in her ear tasted wild raspberries. “Only with dam-building animals.”

Jean eased her sturdy body tighter into his, while her light searched the restless water again. A dark green sheen, with seeming bits of white bobbing. They could be bleached late-summer leaves, or perhaps bone.

“A mine disaster isn’t massacre or war,” Adam insists. “A mine has a working civil order in place, rescue parties, doctors—”

“It’s no Final Solution,” Susannah concedes, “but—”

“There’s a living community, police, firemen, elected officials, whoever, families and relatives are there, the only dead are
the miners who know perfectly well every time they go down is very dangerous.”

“Knowing it doesn’t make them any less dead.”

“Okay, but
dead
is the given hazard of their job—like you, much milder, flunking students. Underground miners, in a mountain or under the sea, always work in danger.”

“Danger like being a citizen in Vietnam? Or an African country we haven’t heard about yet, or Chile? They’re just living too, trying to work to feed their children, and all of a sudden the world explodes, there’s fire falling out of the sky like water and they’re laying bodies out in rows. Since the forties it’s women and children and old people dead too, more than working soldiers.”

“That’s all different, that’s war.”

“I don’t think it’s so ‘all,’ ” Susannah says quietly. “It has to do with men walking a dangerous line, knowing people will get killed, and still they do it.”

“Oh, men,” he says. Discouraged already. He never has to argue women and men with Jean, especially in a sleeping bag.

“Yes,” Susannah says. “Men run the businesses where people have to work, they control countries and they kill to keep power.”

He deliberately pushes his right arm around her waist and nuzzles his head tight into her back; the warm smell is his sweetest and safest memory of her.

“Yeah yeah,” he says into cotton, “and men know best how horrible wars are.”

“Oh, they’re horrible all right.”

He hoists himself on his left elbow, still behind her. “All those men in all the wars, even good ones fighting fascists, your dad holding those Flying Fortresses together so his buddies
could drop bombs all over Germany, it was horrible, but they had to do it.”