Sweeter Than All the World (25 page)

Thunder. Thunderbird speaking out of the shadows surrounding Dogrib Rock. The open water before him leads straight to that overwhelming monolith. Which is surely also a Dene story he does not know.

Thunder again, echoing itself. Fear. Can Thunderbird speak to an
aufiefollna Mennist?
He may have fallen off, but he can balance his paddle and look back. Joel raises his wind-darkened face, grins, his nose wrinkles like Susannah’s. Behind
them Christina and Eric come on in that silent, timeless motion of human beings together in the intimate partnership of a canoe. For a moment there are no mosquitoes.

Carefully, Joel lifts himself from kneeling, sits back onto the thwart to ease his legs. “Over there,” he points with his dripping paddle, “left of the rapid, maybe a good campsite.”

Adam bends to the aerial picture under plastic in front of him. A detailed photograph exists for every inch of this gigantic country, and the deep roar of this white squiggle on the paper wavers in the bright night air; he feels warmth, then cold move over his face, his aching body.

Joel asks, “Rock garden?”

“Don’t think so—steep stone water,” Adam says. “Maybe too steep, maybe we can’t run it.”

“How long a portage?”

“About two, three hundred metres.”

Joel laughs, dismissing that. “Just find us a flat place to park the goddamn tent,” he says, settling down again, digging in.

Tiny trees bristle here and there, willow, black spruce, a shimmer of birch, at the knotting of lake and river. Adam thinks, We have almost reached the tree line; caribou trails will lead down a possible portage, perhaps past the bleached hair and gnawed, torn bones of a wolf kill. We are almost at Lastfire Lake. There I decided I was not afraid to marry Susannah. I thought I had the power to see my whole life, perfectly completed. How blind I was.

And he still is. At his oblivious, light anticipation of this summer journey with his son who is now twenty-one years old. As if rock gardens and rapids and tundra and standing waves and possibly dangerous animals and food were all one need prepare
for; as if words spoken into the wash of thunder, rain and cataracts about the travail of distant blood relations could simply end, far away, with those remembered relatives. All their days together and stupidly he anticipated nothing when, well past the middle of that Dogrib Rock night, after they had together cleared their small site among the stones by the rapids and were once again stretched out inside their tent, Joel asked:

“How many wives did your grandfather have?”

And he in turn asked, too easily, “Which one?”

“Grandma’s father, David Loewen. She had all those half-brothers and sisters.”

“Four. A lot of women died in childbirth, widowers had to have women to care for the children they already had. An older man usually had property, a young woman might like that. My grandpa David Loewen had four, never widows, Onkel David’s father’s mother was his first wife, my mom’s mother was his second.”

“Heinrich?”

“He was from the third.”

“Too bad more of the babies didn’t die,” Joel said, so flatly that Adam did not quite trust his ears. “Save them a murder or two.” And then continued, abruptly. “ ‘A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow because her hour is come.’ ”

“What?” Adam managed finally.

“I read that in a book. Jesus said it. Sorrow probably because of what’s been done to her, and all the mess this kid will bring with it, all this travail and sorrow.”

Travel/travail; Adam tried to anchor himself, but his mind seemed to be blocked. Then Joel rose beside him, on his elbow in the strangely chiselled Arctic light that can etch faces into skulls.

“So tell me, Father, where’s Trish? My gorgeous full sister
Patricia who I suddenly never see or hear from, now our nice little suburban family has been bust up for four years not because anybody died and without any help from the Communists and you stopped being a doctor because you had invested so well in copiers and computers and can run around the world, taking turns, sometimes with me and sometimes Trish, and mostly with serial girlfriends, who knows and I don’t care, what I want to know is where’s my sister? She doesn’t call, why doesn’t she even write me any more?”

The spray of the bow smashing into a standing wave in rapids was nothing compared to this drench of words.

“She doesn’t write you? I don’t know why … she’s travelling. You know that.”

“Exile travel?” Joel asked. Adam did not try to answer. “Like a woman taken in travail?”

“She’s not pregnant,” Adam said stupidly.

“Oh? Refugee?”

“She didn’t call me for two months either, I told you she called now, just before I flew to Yellowknife, didn’t she call your mother?”

“No.”

“She didn’t say she would, I just assumed … she told me she’s fine, she’s in Turkey now, going to those buried churches in Goreme, with friends, and then for winter to Greece.” Scudding rain ran over their tent, and the wavering roar of the final rapids receded. “She sounded fine. Like usual.”

Joel sank back and said something up into the tent which Adam knew he must hear.

“What, what did you say? Joel?”

In the wind’s hesitation of quiet, Joel said it again.

“The father”—his voice was as thin and distinct as though he spoke through clenched teeth—“is always a motherfucker.”

And then he added, “I read that too, in a book called
The Dead Father
. But I didn’t need to read it.”

They are almost at the tree line. Even if this beginning rain sharpens, they will carry the portage tomorrow, three trips each as usual on thin caribou trails around the rapids, and travel on in rain if necessary. Joel’s J-stroke will hold them steady in the current. And eventually the light will broaden over the open water of Lastfire Lake. It has always been exactly there, he remembers.

And for these moments, before he escapes into exhaustion and sleep, Adam can manage to scrawl on a page in his journal:

It is August ?? 1990—the sun does not yet quite set, tomorrow I will recognize what I have seen before
.

And believe it too.

T
UESDAY
, J
ANUARY 1
, 1863:

New Year’s Eve in church, Foda preached Ephesians 4:22 and 25. They announced Mrs. Isaak Unruh and baby died after she suffered 22 hours. She was married 14 years and nine children with four living. I knew she died. My friend Anna sat on the front bench by me and cried, she’s the oldest.

The first words I wrote in my diary. When you’re ninety, your own handwriting is like a story some stranger you once knew made up. Or like looking at an old picture, the only things you remember are what the picture shows, which anyone can see and it isn’t really remembering. But then, the longer you look, more begins to come back, until you have lots of bits and scraps and maybes. But they happened when you were a different person.

I was born ninety years ago today, October 4, 1851. Not in
this house of course, or even this village, but not far away. Neuendorf, Chortiza Mennonite Colony, Ukrainian Russia. They named me Katerina. I was the fifth living child and second daughter of Aaron and Esther Loewen.

My father Aaron, Foda we always called him, was born the second son, at last, after one son and eleven daughters. With only seven children living, Grosspa Loewen could have found a full farm for him in Chortiza as easily as he did for my uncle Jakob, but Foda liked reading more than sheep or grain. He became a village teacher.

Then the Czar’s government started the Plan for the Jews, the
Judenplan
Mennonites called it. It was to be a model colony of landless Jews settled in villages on government land learning how to farm. And Mennonites, considered such good farmers, were supposed to live and farm with them, to show them how.

Because Foda’s brother Jakob Loewen was an exceptional farmer, they appointed him Judenplan administrator. It was he who persuaded Foda to become the village teacher, but also to take a land grant as a model farmer in one of the four new Judenplan villages, Novovitebsk.

So we left Chortiza, and that’s when Foda started to keep a diary. Not just of weather and who came to visit, but the colony struggles too because being the teacher means you’re always poorer than the large estate landowners. You understand hardship, and you read the life of the village in the faces of children every day on the school benches.

Two years later Foda was elected to be the Mennonite minister too, and then he heard everything else that was happening in the village. He had to settle not only Mennonite school and church problems, but also the quarrels between people—the
Mennonites, the Jews, or both together. Foda heard and knew so much, and he could not lie. He could not stop writing it all down either. Often he had to find words that meant two different things, one good—in case anyone other than he ever read it—and the other at an angle, to help him remember what really happened.

The Judenplan Colony was started in 1852, two days’ travel by wagon west of Chortiza. I was less than a year old. We lived in three different Judenplan villages, until it became too difficult and we finally settled in Gnadenthal, a new village for Mennonites only laid out in the new Baratov Colony in 1872. I live here still, in 1941. Live and hope to die here in the house that we, Aaron Loewen’s family, built ourselves where its one street crosses the little bridge of the stream that runs in spring.

Foda sat at our big-room table writing, in both Novovitebsk and Gnadenthal, almost every evening. There was no table then in the corner-room where he and Mama, and later Mutta, slept. Too many children, too many chests and too much bedding. He wrote with a long feather he sharpened, dipping into the bottle of ink he made from soot. I liked the paper, folded open, the clean white growing blacker with twists and long strokes of Gothic script. I was learning to write Highgerman words from him in school. I heard Highgerman read aloud in church, but sermons were mostly in Lowgerman and that was all Mennonites spoke at home then, even the preacher’s family. With the Jews we used what Russian we had; we children were told the less we spoke to them the better. They were so different, they would only lead us astray.

To write I found bits of paper for myself. The paper felt so fine, so beautifully smooth. In school we wrote on stone slates. I never had a folded book such as Foda would fill, margin to margin, and only a pencil. I started that New Year when Anna cried
so much for her mother. Our mother was very sick too but I never cried out loud in church, nor did Foda when he asked them from the pulpit to pray for her. I always wanted to write down more, even when I misspelled most of the words. But I had no paper, and always I knew so little.

Seventy-eight years. I still have that first piece of paper. Like Foda, I wrote the date first. That helps to start: write a fact you know exactly. The piece is with the others in a small box at the bottom of my chest. An old woman doesn’t need to hide paper behind a brick in the wall any more, no one now knows about it anyway to want to see it. No one imagines living as long as I have. Nor I think, in Russia since 1917, would anyone want to.

But as the Jews say, Who tells God what to do? In ninety years I’ve told Him very little, but I’ve begged Him often enough. And even that…

Many of my diary sentences end like Foda’s,
with … ein Gedankenstrich
, he called it. A line sometimes to the edge of the page, a long streak of thought impossible to write out. Or wiser not to.

I find in my Bible what my father preached in 1863 in Novovitebsk. That Judenplan village was thirty kilometres from here, but after pogroms and civil war it’s all gone. A ploughed field along the Sheltaia River. Foda was always so sad at the beginning of a year, he warned everyone about sin. But never the Jews. As a child I could not tell whether the Jews actually knew, or cared, what hell was. It seemed to me the Mennonite sin that Foda preached would, if it possibly could, take every person alive down into hell to burn for all eternity but no, Foda said the Jews had to deal with God in their own way. It was not our way, we had the Mennonite duty to be honest and believe as Jesus taught.

There were always some Judenplan Mennonites who thought we should not only teach the Jews how to farm, but also how to be Christians. Foda always said that if we could just live like Jesus, that would teach them enough.

So Jews on the Judenplan came to him only about agreements that they said Mennonites had broken, or money, or property gone. But our people came to him from all four villages carrying their sin, telling him every one of them and going away happy. He grew sadder and sadder, but always asked for more. I read the verses he preached the first of January: “You must give up your old way of life. From now on there must be no more lies: you must speak the truth to one another, for we are all members of one body. Even if you are angry, you must not sin.”

I wasn’t a “body member.” I was barely eleven and not baptized, though I expected to be when I turned seventeen. What “old way of life” could I give up? Surviving childhood, as so many children did not? I wasn’t angry. I was a girl, fourth behind men, and boys, and women, and I could cook and milk cows and feed babies—they were sent from God and died according to His Will—the way my friend Anna Unruh, just fourteen, would have to do now, with her mother in her grave. I had never in my life dared to tell a lie. Must I start, so I could then be obedient and stop? What did I know, to lie about it?

Thursday, January
17,
1863:

Diedrich Wiebe came with Deacon Dietrich Franz. I heard Diedrich Wiebe tell Foda he is sick unto death and he dirtied himself with cattle. He was so sorry, for a long time. Foda prayed, Jesus son of David have mercy, cover us with your robe of righteousness so we can stand before you naked.

We were eight Mennonite families living in Novovitebsk with forty Jewish families. I had never heard anything when men came to our door, always two together and sometimes with their sons or even wives but never daughters. I wouldn’t have heard what Bigbelly Diedrich Wiebe said either, but I was washing the top of the oven in the big-room when they came in and shut the door. I shrank down still as a mouse. Diedrich Wiebe sat with his stomach spreading rounder than a washtub against the table. A big man crying, after a while he stuttered that. I wrote the words down—it was all so strange—and hid them behind the loose brick below my bed. What did that mean? I dirtied myself with cattle.