Sweeter Than All the World (27 page)

Friday, October 4, 1863:

Onkel and Tante Heese took us to the Potemkin Palace, all decorated for the Czarevich. I saw my stone Czarina Katerina II where she sits so wide on her stone throne in the park. The Czarevich came riding on a white horse, he looked beautiful. Onkel Heese shook his white head, the Czarevich is too thin, the Romanovs are always too pale and thin. In the park walking he sang the whole song he had written for children during the Crimean War:

He sang and I did too, and Tante Anna and Mutta laughed. Foda looked only sad.

Oh, my twelfth birthday. Twelve. I was in Ekaterinoslav for the first and last time in my life because of my name and my birthday. Mutta said every child must have one special day in its life, baptism and wedding later didn’t count. And that was mine. Within two years the handsome Czarevich had died of poor blood. Perhaps it was a kindness to him in the end—he did not have to see his father Alexander II blown up in St. Petersburg by a bomb. He’d survived nine earlier attempts, and they say a great church was built on the bloody spot where it happened. His brother became Alexander III. They always said those pale Romanovs were good to the Mennonites, but they were all killed, one way after another. Sad Russia.

Today, Saturday, October 4, 1941, I have lived ninety years. Alone so long. Husband Benjamin Wiebe dead since the anarchy, 1919, three sons Aaron, Isaak and Daniel vanished by Stalin in 1937, all other children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren grown and gone. With two Ukrainian families—now fled—I have been allowed to live in a room of this old house we Aaron Loewens built, from parts of barns in other villages, when the Mennonites of Chortiza Colony bought land from Prince Repnin in 1872 and named this village of thirty-five families Gnadenthal, or in Russian Vodyanaya. Valley of Grace. No Canada, or Saskatchewan—whatever they mean in German or
Russian—for me, though not because I once didn’t want to. And Eli Stuppel is here.

Eli was the miller in Novovitebsk after his father died and all the drinking Reimers that were left moved to Canada. Village miller until 1928 when Stalin changed the world with his first Five Year Plan. Eli Stuppel is a little older than I—how much I don’t know because Jews are even more secretive than Mennonites about so many unnecessary things—and tonight Eli has come to visit me.

As he does once every year, at night. Often we talk a little about our fathers. They respected, maybe even loved each other, and both are dead now over fifty years. I have my box of small papers on my lap, I have been remembering.

But tonight Eli starts nothing about the past. He has no laugh about our childhood when we lived in the same row village but neither of us could know the other existed. Instead he says:

“I have heard, on September 19, two weeks ago, the German army entered the Kreshchatik in Kiev. Their generals immediately moved into the luxury Continental Hotel.”

There was no point asking how he knows this. He has always known what is necessary, even when they made him destroy the great stone mill because milk production, not grain, was the Moscow order for Gnadenthal Collective. Starvation or no starvation, those were Moscow orders. In the brutal years of the purges he always knew how never to be at home when the NKVD hammered unexpectedly on his door, front or back or both, day or night. Now German army curfew is at sunset, and he has come in the dark. We drink tea, the windows are shuttered and there is still a little oil in my glass lamp. If a German night patrol bangs on the door, he won’t be here.

The Kreshchatik. He is talking about the ancient centre of Kiev, the most beautiful city on earth, he says. Which I have never seen, high on the banks above the Dnieper. The village where I was born, Neuendorf, was twenty kilometres away from where the Dnieper River flowed, but twice I remember, after we moved to the Judenplan, our Loewen relations had a picnic under the great oak on Chortiza Island. Foda said, “The river flows all around us, it holds us in its arms,” and then Mutta fed us her golden zwieback with butter. Yes, like Eli says, it must be the most beautiful river.

“Last Wednesday,” Eli says, “when they were all nicely settled and happy in their looting, the first big bomb went off. The German command headquarters in the business block on Proreznaya Street blew up. The second bomb spread the Continental Hotel out in the air like a flower of garbage, the third…”

“The NKVD?” I ask.

“Of course.”

“Like burning Moscow for Napoleon?”

“Not quite. The NKVD didn’t warn anyone, they killed more Russians in the Kreshchatik than Germans.”

“Well, Stalin would say, if any of us are around there, we’re no patriots. We deserve to be garbage.”

“So?” He looks at me while he draws tea through his long teeth. He still has good gums, at least in front. His gentle tea hiss. “So what are you doing here? The Germans have been in Gnadenthal since August 16.”

“What are you doing?”

“Aha. And where am I?”

“I don’t know. Maybe here. Talking to a very old woman who still speaks German better than Russian.”

“Yes … yes.” His lean, ancient face—such good bones and
skin all these years for laughing—folds itself into a sadness deep as my father’s long ago. “On September 22 the last Soviet troops left Kiev, many of them running, most of them without weapons, and two days later the Kreshchatik started blowing up. It burned until the heart of the city was gutted, and then, on September 29, last Monday, they started shooting Jews. First they beat them together with clubs and rifles, then they ripped them naked and lined them up in rows of five, and they shot them so they fell back into the huge ravine by the Dnieper. Into Babi Yar.”

“Babiyar?” I have not heard of such a place.

“Babi Yar. Remember that name. The first day they shot seven thousand.”

An unimaginable number. People falling, piling up.

“Into a ravine, beside the Dnieper?”

He nods. “Every Jew in Kiev. But five at a time takes too long, there are only fourteen hours of daylight. Next day they had three rows of five and three shooting squads relieved every ten minutes. They could average five fives a minute, a row of five every twelve seconds, and seven officers with pistols in the ravine walking on the bodies to make sure. Total, twenty-one thousand.”

More maybe than there are Mennonites on earth. I have lived too long, the world is become unthinkable.

After a time he continues, “During the pogroms in Odessa and Kiev, when the Czar was still alive, the Hasidim always had one last prayer. ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has not made me a heathen.’ But I don’t know, now. Where has it got us, not being heathen? As our rabbi always says, being beloved, ‘God’s Chosen People’?”

I have to laugh a little. “Huh. Mennonites always want that
too. My Foda, all his life, praying to be forgiven his sin and be chosen, to do exactly what God wants and live in grace, be chosen.”

Suddenly, in the quiet house, it makes no sense any more. None whatever.

We are two old, old people drinking tea. Saying a few words but writing nothing down. Written words have become worse than bullets. Everything in the world we know is as quiet as my small lamp on the table, burning. And yet in an instant we could explode, like the Jacob Wielers. One bomb fell here in Gnadenthal, a Russian bomb from a Russian plane in retreat. While trying perhaps to hit the advancing Germans—who knows?—it fell on the Wieler house. Through the roof and onto the table where the family and those in flight they had taken in were eating. It tore them up so small, no one knew how many coffins to make, just gather three baskets full. Or worse than a quick bomb, a knock on the door will start something slow, something very slow and endless.

Eli slurps tea through his teeth from the saucer. And suddenly I feel I should greet him. As he greeted me when he came in, with a full Russian kiss on both cheeks. I get up, shuffle around the table, and do that.

We stand together. I am still holding his face between my hands, and his hands come up to hold my face too. His soft, grainy hands are swollen with arthritis, warm, strong, his black eyes look into mine. Slowly then we begin to laugh. Gently as we always do.

“For me,” Eli Stuppel says, “I’d be glad to share God’s love with you…” and he hesitates. “But I don’t know if you’re tough enough. You want at least to share as much of it as you can stand?”

A
LL LIFE, THEY SAY
, comes from the sea. It would seem reasonable then that all life must return to it. Reasonable. Adam sits alone under the palm trees, or sometimes on the incandescent sand under one of the tiny frond-thatched roofs. Sometimes he contemplates the two volcanoes floating high, far above the bay; or the sound of bare feet passing. Along the curve of reef paralleling the beach the swells heave, break, smash down in the continuous and interrupted rhythm of a wall toppling from left to right; heave up and smash down again, their beginnings and ends lost beyond light that he cannot distinguish. Sometimes he thinks: We thought we were so reasonable in 1987, when Susannah first moved to Calgary. Sometimes only the shadowed cones of one or the other volcano breaks through the clouds to insist on land somewhere; certain and reasonable there, beyond or above the water.

All seas are the same sea, and Trish is gone. Adam has run away to this sea that surrounds Bali because he and Trish were never here. The creatures appearing on the sea are always different, those in it always strangely the same. The spring and summer their family broke into shifting halves, into quarters—four years, isn’t four the natural cycle of return?—that summer the porpoises crossed the wake of their ferry between Honshu and Hokkaido again and again, and Trish saw them playing, as it seemed, beside the ship. Together she and Adam watched those dark shapes torpedo into the ship’s wake, back and forth, white bellies arching. The killer whales off Galiano Island revealed their glistening black backs once and then the sea swallowed them, but off Japan the porpoises followed as far as he could see, despite the ship’s turbulence—perhaps because of it?—that left them behind, while the several hundred Japanese students aboard in their navy-and-white, almost military uniforms gathered around Trish, testing their teen English. “What your name?” “What age you?” “Where you live?” until her blondness swam above their gleaming black heads. She was a celebrity signing schoolbooks, bits of paper, and he was in an eddy beside her. They were begging her to accept the trinkets they were taking back to their parents from their school outing, and soon the delicate girls reached for her with fingertips like leaves, her pale skin and golden hair, the grey porpoises riding unnoticed far behind in their wake.

Wake—because the sea was also asleep? Did ships, like intruding bodies, wake it? Four years he had been in self-indulgent sleep, thinking—when he did—We are all adults now, we are family, life has changed, we go our separate ways and life continues, IBM and Xerox produce more than enough for us all, stick to your budget and go to school and do what you please,
your brother and mother and I will do what we please. Oh, yes, he was pleased now, very pleased—when it was possible to fall momentarily asleep with a pill.

Two summers ago he and Trish travelled the arched coast of Wales. Among the massive ruins of Edward’s enslavement of the Welsh in the thirteenth century she had seemed no more preoccupied than he: their mutual melancholy a closer companionship than they had found together since the family separation. He thought then her occasional singing under her breath made her sound almost content; to him the sound of singing had always meant a touch of happiness, and he certainly could have done with a bit of that from her again.

“Oh, just a folk ballad, it’s turning circles in my head, you know, just the tune.”

But she did know words as well, at least one verse, and her sudden silence when the three young people, like medieval musicians, laid their instrument cases open in the inner ward of what was left of Aberystwyth Castle and piped the melody she had been humming, and the lean girl haltered in a peasant dress sang with aching sweetness:

“Hey!” he exclaimed, “that’s your … now you’ll hear the words.”

But her face went blank, momentarily it seemed broken like the wall against which they were leaning, a wall blown apart by Cromwell’s cannon destroying the last Welsh resistance in the very years when Wiebe Adams was pouring walls of earth to protect Danzig. The falling sunlight glanced up off the St. George
Channel, lit the tiny particularities of the face he had studied, cared for, adored since he held her in his arms within hours of her birth.

“Those are different words,” was all she said.

“How is this possible!” Susannah cried on the phone.

But in two months, even with all her languages and other private investigators, she found no more than he already had. In essence, nothing.

Wherever he may be looking makes little difference now. There is nothing to see but the inside of eyelids; arid tears finally. The endless roar of the reef has hardened on the wind into moments of crash as the tide falls steadily higher and higher up the beach.

“Another drink, sir?” A soft voice in his ear.

“A mixed juice.” Not opening his eyes.

He had grown to detest the very vapour of alcohol during years of smashed weekends on duty in the emergency room. If he pushed through that revulsion now he would never stop, would collapse drooling tears under the table. The waiter is gone without a sound, dark feet bleached in the livid sand. Without opening his eyes he hears his daughter’s wordless song float high like the cones of the volcanoes, now this one, now that one faintly visible in its bed of cloud. He should ask the waiter: if destruction comes, as it certainly will, how would you prefer that it come? From the solid flanks of the mountains you know are always there inside that mist, or from the great sea you can never not hear? From the flanks of mountains that sometimes adjust themselves, shrug once or twice in a generation and run fire and molten rock over you? Or from frightful people smashing through the white wash of the sea with no more warning than
the volcanoes: a thousand years ago the Hindus from India, then the Chinese, then the Arabs, each bringing in turn slaughter and new overlords and new religions, and then the ultimate invasions of unstoppable Christians: the Portuguese and Roman Catholicism, the Dutch and Calvinism, the English and Anglican capitalism, until finally the Japanese turned annihilation back to Asia again, killing for no apparent reason except power. Each in turn destroying and building, and destroying again in a millennium of invasion from the sea with knives and spears and arrows and cannon and machine guns and grenades and diving planes, until now, when incomprehensible space rockets and bombs hang over the world.