Sweeter Than All the World (26 page)

But Foda’s prayer about standing naked was perfectly clear. In prayer, or preaching, things that were sin if you actually did them were often reversed into wonderful salvation, like being washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb, though the blood spraying from the neck of a chicken whose head I chopped off made me anything but clean. So prayer to be covered with a robe from Jesus to make you both clean and naked was fine. But not Bigbelly’s cattle—that I didn’t understand then. It was winter, the frozen ground under snow, cows were not muddy. Or smeared with thin shit from spring grass so you got more than dirty when you were milking and they hit you with their tails. Anyways, Bigbelly Wiebe never milked, only Mrs. Wiebe and their girls. What was this?

I sit now with my box of little pencil papers in my lap. I look out of my window at the village street of Gnadenthal, Colony Baratov. Every day, seeing mostly trees. In the evening the glass reflects my old face, folded together by so much to remember, but I can look through it easily. I will not waste oil for a lamp to light up every wrinkle.

The trees are tall again, rows we’ve planted four times over
in my lifetime. During the horrors after 1918 we dug them down to the roots to burn in our stoves. Four armies overran us then, all at the same time, as they pleased. The Czar’s White Army, the Communist Reds, the Ukrainians’ Independence Army, Nestor Machno with his terrifying Anarchists. After the three united to destroy the Whites, they fought and killed and starved each other until the Reds had slaughtered the other two, and almost all our men, sons and fathers and husbands, including my Benjamin … I will not remember. Trees grow and get chopped down and grow again as they can.

Sixty-nine years in Gnadenthal, this so-called Valley of Grace. My relatives write me that the Mennonites have carried this village name with them hopefully all over the world—Siberia, Canada, the United States, even Mexico, Paraguay, Brazil. I don’t know, all the letters stopped when Stalin began dragging our men away in 1937. Over fifty years in this house. And for the twenty years before that in a Judenplan house, built exactly the same way. Foda said most Jews did not like to farm. Mostly they wanted to be pedlars or innkeepers; brandy was so easy to sell. The Mennonites were to teach them farming, but Foda himself had time for almost nothing except teaching and preaching and hearing Mennonite sins.

Poor Bigbelly Wiebe. He could hardly speak, tears running down his cheeks. A big man crying never happened except at funerals, and then at most the husband.

Those tears were strange to me then, overwhelming. Like the shudders you feel walking past the graveyard behind the school at night. In bright sunlight the memory of coffins sinking into opened ground, hell or heaven, feels different. I could not bear his weeping. Hidden on the oven, I wept too.

A man and a cow. Such a simple, you could almost say a “clean and private” sin. In ninety years what haven’t I faced, revolution, civil war, anarchists, starvation, Machno murderers, typhus, the God of Fear Stalin and his smiling police. Sometimes your spirit can pray only for swift and final massacre. Eichenfeld-Dubovka, seventy-nine men, three women shot in one night of October, 1919. And how many women and children violated.

The love of God and of family, I have known that too. I must not and will not forget that. So much, flowing even from the other side of the world in letters. Here in my box on my lap. From Saskatchewan, Canada, and once Fernheim, Paraguay.

Now war is come again. German war, like no one on earth, they say, has seen before. Faster than you can think, on the ground and from the sky. Beautiful Kiev is destroyed. Two months ago, on August 16th, I saw the first German tanks come down our street in this lost corner of the world. Into Gnadenthal. Around the clattering tanks, soldiers on motor-cyles, one steering, a second in the sidecar holding his machine gun in the air. Hitler’s hooked crosses on their round iron helmets. Pouring into Gnadenthal like ants.

Friday, February
1,
1863:

Mama too sick to get out of bed. Diedrich Wiebe died at midnight. Deacon Franz came to attach the Life Awakener to Mama. Its end is a round disc of long needles. I ran away into the barn.

I remember I hid in the dry hay above our cow and few sheep. But even in the darkness I still saw those needles. They used the Brauchscheidt Life Awakener, just brought from Germany, all
over the Mennonite colonies. Mama’s brother, August Wiebe, had studied in Germany and was a doctor in Chortiza. He called it stupidity, but people used it because so many people of all ages died and sometimes using it seemed to help. Foda agreed they would pray and apply it on Mama’s back because she could not breathe. It was a thick cylinder with a spring that you wound up with a handle, then released, and the spring drove the needles on the disc into the skin.

Mama’s whole back was needled black in big circles. She could not lie on it. After two days she was covered with yellow pus like a stinking cloth. Deacon Franz said that was very good because that would draw her sickness out. I had to help wrap her with cotton soaked in Brauchscheidt’s oil, so the sickness would rise out even faster. But she could sleep. She sounded weaker when she coughed.

Sunday February 17, 1863:

Widow Wiebe will marry Isaak Unruh. Thirteen people, eleven children, brought together. Anna won’t have to do all the work in the house any more. Foda preached Isaiah 43: I am the Lord, your Holy One, I make rivers in the desert to give drink to my chosen people. Mennonites are chosen, he said, we must be examples, not drink so much brandy at weddings and funerals. Mama lies under the blanket, she wants to work and she wants to die.

No adult would tell a child such things then, but, besides sickness, our Mama was also pregnant. Foda insisted that all life, in sickness or in health, was a gift from God. Such a great gift.

Friday, March 22, 1863:

We started to seed, our family was first on the land. Uncle Jacob’s Jewish workers helped us. At supper Foda said it was seventy-five years today, 1788, when the first Mennonites left Danzig, on the invitation of my namesake Czarina Katerina II. Grosspapa Loewen was eight, he told him many sad wandering stories. Foda said remember 1788, fifty Mennonites by oxcart went to Riga, and then Dubrowna for winter. In spring they and a thousand more from Danzig came down the Dnieper River to Chortiza, and there I was born sixty-three years later.

Uncle Doctor August came this afternoon. Mama’s back is a little healed. She moans, she does not move.

Monday, April 1, 1863:

Today Miller Abraham Reimer lay in the ditch. Abel saw him and told Foda. He was drunk, the innkeeper Lippen on Ekaterinoslav Road sells him brandy when he wants it.

Easter Monday, April 8, 1863:

Our Mama died. At last she is with Jesus and his angels. The Abraham Reimer buggy came around our corner fast and tipped and broke, the team ran away with the front end. The family, eight, fell in the ditch, and screamed. Mrs. Reimer hit him on the ground, that’s what you get for drinking. Foda said before God’s Almighty throne for our Mama there is no sin or death or sadness, only golden light.

Wednesday, April 24, 1863:

Foda sold our last wheat to the Jew Stuppel, Abraham Reimer’s partner. He settled a dispute about milling. Greta and I made
butter for Gerhard and Foda to sell at the market in Krivoi Rog. A letter came for us with eleven silver rubles in it.…

We had almost nothing to eat after Mama died, but Foda said the faithful Lord would provide. As I remember He did that mostly through our relatives, especially Uncle Jacob Loewen and also the Heinrich Heeses of Ekaterinoslav. Tante Anna Heese was Mama’s aunt. Onkel Heinrich was called “the Prussian” because he came to Chortiza as a Lutheran to live with the “defenceless” Mennonites, as he said, and escape Napoleon’s army. He was a better pacifist than most Mennonites, and a kinder, more gifted teacher too. He built schools to train teachers, but the old
Ohms
thought he taught students too much, it was better Mennonites didn’t know all that. So when he was already white-haired he moved his family to Ekaterinoslav. The rich Russian noblemen there paid him a great deal to teach their sons. He loved Russia and wrote poems for children in Russian, he taught us one of them when he visited Novovitebsk. It began with a lilt, we could sing it:

The first Russian words I knew. I was only six when the Crimean War started, but I remember the proud Queen of Great Britain, so young and already such a liar. “Victoria” Onkel Heinrich Heese called her.

Thursday, May
23,
1863:

Pentecost. Eleven boys and thirteen girls were baptized. We heard Bernard Klassen the widower wants to marry Maria, the
daughter of his second wife, who died. She is sixteen and not even baptized. Gossip is sin, Foda scolded us. The Ministers’ Committee will send her to relatives in another village.

Friday, June 21, 1863:

We harvested our oats, again we were the first. Not much, the summer is so dry. Uncle Jacob hired fifteen Jews to cut it in a day. He paid each half a pud of grain and the noon meal. Foda wrote down the names and numbers.

In those years on the Judenplan we harvested oats in June. This year in June we heard Germany had invaded Russia. Adolf Hitler, whom Stalin had praised so loud in every newspaper and radio speech, was now a “fascist bloodsucker.” He had broken the “eternal friendship” treaty in less than two years.

“Though we are unprepared,” Stalin’s voice thundered, “we will never surrender so much as one metre of our homeland! Now every patriot will fulfil double the prescribed work norms.”

For Gnadenthal, whose collective farm is a large dairy, this meant delivering double our quota of milk. The patriotic Communist Party overseer, before he fled east, ordered the green-feed for the herd to be doubled, and our Mennonite workers in the barns of course obeyed. What else could they do? In a week, twenty-one of two hundred cows were dead of diarrhoea. The NKVD recognized this as obvious sabotage and the workers who didn’t run quick enough disappeared in Black Marias.

Since the Glorious October Revolution, Mennonites had been called racial Germans. “German” is printed on the passport needed to travel inside the Soviet Union; no one travels outside. We can of course have no churches for Highgerman, but
Lowgerman is still how we talk to each other. When we heard of the approaching army, who knew what to think? What would the soldiers do? Would they believe we were Germans? Could it mean we would be delivered from Stalin? From his endless police?

The Jews thought for themselves faster than we. They began to vanish. In every direction, away from the coming German front.

Tuesday, July 2, 1863:

Today Foda came home with his new wife from Neuendorf, Chortiza. Judith Wiebe has not been married, she is three years older than Gerhard. She kissed us all. Now she is a Loewen too, we call her Mutta.

Mutta was the best, most practical and organized mother any orphan family could have had. She bore six children in twelve years, all living, and cared for our father until he died in 1888. A few years later Mutta decided it would be better to immigrate to Canada where so many had already gone. Ten of us children went with her, married or not—all except me. I wanted to go, but my husband Benjamin Wiebe, her nephew, wanted to take over our farm. My sister Justina wrote me in 1919 that Mutta died at the age of seventy-nine years, seven months and twenty-seven days in a place called Saskatchewan. Of the flu spread by the war. War finds you anywhere, Justina wrote, even in the high, stony bush of Canada.

Monday, August 11, 1863:

Dearest God, Foda said, he and Mutta drove to Chortiza Saturday and a village there burned down. Ostwick, houses,
barns, the new school, all the grain and feed. Over seventy buildings. Nobody died. Sunday he preached in an orchard on Peter 2: You are a chosen race, a holy nation, God’s own people. Mutta said everyone cried.

We had such a terror of fires, and there were many. Houses and barns were built together, straw-thatched roofs and mostly wooden chimneys. And often great stacks of hay dried in the yard. But this “Great Fire” was the worst. The land was already burned by summer drought, and an east wind came up hard at noon. Mrs. Johann Tillitski was heating lard for pancakes, she climbed up under the rafters to get more flour and the pan on the stove caught fire. When she rushed down the room was already burning. The windstorm did the rest. Burning thatch flew the whole length of the village.

I look up the verses in Peter 2, and I see the last words are: “Once you had no grace, but now you are in grace.” How like our innocent Foda, such a text at such a terrible time.

Saturday, August 16, 1863:

Heinrich Penner’s cow wandered loose. It was seized by Stuppel the Jew, then Peter Teichrow bought it from him for the pawn price. Mrs. Penner was so mad she hit Peter Teichrow with a whip, Foda settled the money between Penners, Teichrow and Stuppel. He said they were reconciled, all departed in peace.

On August 16, 1941, the German army thundered into Gnadenthal. I heard the tanks rumble on the bridge and there they were, those horrible machines rolling at us on their own steel. The soldiers on motorcycles around them in strict order,
staring at every yard and house. But the Russian soldiers and all working people were gone, we old German people still left stood in our gates on the street with white flags. An officer had his driver turn towards me; his gun was pointing into the sky and I spoke to him in Highgerman. I asked him please, don’t shoot anyone.

“Don’t worry, Grossmama,” he said. He spoke as if he were a teacher reading from a book in school. “We have more than enough Russians to shoot.”

In six weeks they’ve arrested seventeen people, but German soldiers haven’t shot anyone in Gnadenthal. Not yet.

Thursday, October
3,
1863:

Two days on the roads, so much dust, Foda and Mutta and I came to Onkel Heese’s house in Ekaterinoslav. The Czarevich Nicholas Alexander, heir to the throne, has come from St. Petersburg in his train. He rode a black horse with an arched neck to Prince Potemkin’s palace, thousands of people shouted hurrah. The arch over the street has so many lights it looks like blazing fire.