Sweeter Than All the World (29 page)

And they had stood there together as if content; they found they could speak this factuality more easily than a hockey score. Crowded together in the noise of the lobby they seemed close and understanding friends. And Adam remembered he had kissed Fred beside his ear; that they had held each other’s hand while they were stating those clear facts, things discrete and medical that mirrored nothing else, presumably, if they spoke them fast enough.

And at some point they both said, “Miracle.” Almost at the same time, now that he thought about it. Both of them blurted out that aberrant, old-fashioned word as if it had been lurking there all along under the logical science they pronounced in the loud lobby.

He has searched for a miracle. Eventually he knew that he would not find her without one. During that grotesque winter and spring he still cannot avoid remembering, he stacked up notebooks and files and police and translators and hired detectives and embassy and government reports, he searched the Adriatic coast from Patrai to Dubrovnik to Split to Trieste, even across to Bari or Ancona, to say nothing of Venice, a gathering confusion in winter rain of uncountable islands and inlets inhabited and killed over since before identifiable history, and harbours of tiered houses climbing up the hills filled with sympathetic or apprehensive, staring people who in two dozen different languages could say nothing more than
no, never saw, no
. The raw limestone cliffs, blazing white in rain or merciless sun, smashed everywhere and crumpling down into the sea.

He remembers the low spring light that evening. Perhaps it was that, and his exhaustion, as he turned his rental car away from the coastal road, up a twisting lane among minuscule fields scraped out flat between spines of rock, and the walled splotch of a village was suddenly there. The sand and blue curve of the deeper blue Mediterranean shone far below, to a horizon washed into sky. He got out, locked the car—which was useless, he knew, he had been stolen clean twice and everything that mattered he carried under his shirt or zipped in various pockets and backpack—and walked down into the village. The street that opened through its surrounding wall was so narrow between overwhelming whitewashed stone that if someone had been with him they would have had to walk single file.

He met no one. The cobblestones, rough and unworn as if gathered in a field yesterday, led him down into the day’s deepening twilight. It must have been the time of the evening meal, he
could hear voices, and kettles and pots banging through open windows too high to look into but letting in, at last, the evening coolness. He felt his skin loosen a little after the tremendous sun all day, and then turning a corner he saw what must be momentary people passing far below him, where the narrow street he was walking down crossed another. But when he got there, he was still alone.

A tiny intersection between houses; from five directions streets emerged out of their straight narrowness and circled their cobblestones around themselves. The tops of Adam’s feet felt suddenly cold in their sandals: as if along one of the radiating streets a breath had drawn up from the sea.

“May I take your photo?”

It was a moment before he understood that he had been spoken to; in unaccented Canadian English, after months of incomprehensible sound. A stocky man stood in the fold of a wall. Adam realized that must be the person who had spoken to him. A square camera—could it actually be wood?—stared at him, its black cloth partially draped over the man’s arm.

Adam said, a reflex brushing him away, “It’s too dark here for a picture.”

“No.”

That word, trailing him along this endless coast, slowing him farther into hopelessness; he jerked erect to glare, perhaps to curse, and he saw the single eye at the centre of the wooden face flicker even as he turned fast to leave.

The man’s left hand emerged, offered a piece of paper.

The paper was the picture. Adam saw himself in black and white, framed full-length between the house corners of the street he had just come down, his face unguarded and open: as always, running away. But even as he saw this, something else appeared
in the stony street behind his image, level, above his shoulders; he took a step into the low evening circle and clearly there was a shape behind him in the picture, long, stretched out, delicate arms and legs reaching as it seemed into the next stroke of water, and blond hair—certainly long and blond!—he saw that more and more clearly, hair streaming flat behind her, over bare white shoulders and black swimsuit, she is there! swimming down the rock street of the narrow village.

The world crashed so dark the street behind him was hardly discernible, but it was certainly motionless and empty. He could only stand there, barely trying to breathe.

The man was beside him, glancing at the picture in Adam’s hand. “No,” he said again, crouching back as if he wished to disappear into the wall. “It is not good, no.”

As if she swam in a layered sea of rock behind and above him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I did not really want to take it.” The man was contradicting himself in abasing apology, his face hunched with pain and his voice so deeply gentle, almost as though he were praying the Miserere.

The village was like hundreds of others on the cliffs above the Adriatic and Adam had never intended to come here; he had to get to Trieste, to ports where sea ferries landed, where officials guarding gangplanks had to be questioned, a twist of the key would carry him instantly, permanently to those places for disappointment. But here this picture lay in his hand.

“Where is she?” he demanded. If he had had a knife, it would have found the vein in the man’s throat.

He whirled around to stare up the street, then back again, both his hands opening to grab the man, but he was gone and the camera was gone and the picture had fallen away from him,
between the white buildings there was only gathering darkness and the empty stones circled under his feet. On his knees in the tiny intersection Adam searched, brushed his hands over every cobblestone and up into one after another of the radiating streets, and finally he scrambled to his feet and hammered on door after door. He had no words to explain himself, he acted out “flashlight,” then “camera,” leaped about “taking a picture,” but it seemed no one could understand the frenzy of his behaviour. He ran up the radiating streets until he found the one that opened to his car, he drove into Rijeka, found a librarian who spoke some English and rushed back. But flashlights revealed nothing on the cobblestones, the villagers insisted they had never seen such a thing as a wooden camera, leave alone a stocky man who spoke English. The librarian who translated this looked at him, as the villagers did, standing in the dim light of their doorways, with a profound and blank compassion.

He is standing on a reef in the Java Sea. Unbelievable coral ebullitions roil everywhere in it, reflect a pink surface scrolled in shimmers about his knees. What may be his own thonged feet ripple there, and a purple starfish inert on the sand. Through the water he sees his toe approach, nudge closer, flip it over. A skiff of drifting sand. It is certainly upside down now but still motionless: long before this sudden inversion it must have already been protecting its central mouth like that with its curling self; probably had done so all its life in hopeless anticipation of this unexpected and merciless Canadian.

The upside-down starfish does not move. Adam stares away over the vacant sea, avoids every faint shadow of wave or mountain and concentrates on the meeting of water and sky. Counts
slowly. After the third quick glance down he knows that the top left arm is beginning to curl. Under. At the tenth he sees a tiny ripple of water help bend the second arm. In eleven minutes the starfish has almost folded three of its arms back under itself, and then a sea surge lifts it upright and over, flat.

The water clucks around his hips. One flip is not enough. Another.

He lay on his hotel bed in ancient Husum, the Schleswig-Holstein town where Theodor Storm wrote
Der Schimmelreiter
, reading the novel in the new edition that included pictures of the latest movie made of it. When Trish came through the connecting door and sat on his bed, she barely nodded at the stupendous grey horse he offered her, rearing above a dike ripped through in vicious rain.

“You know I don’t like horses,” she said. She had not yet cut her hair short for travel.

“Joel doesn’t either. What’s with you, Albertans and you don’t like horses.”

“You don’t either.”

“Those were our homestead plugs,
Schrugge
, that I had to ride to school, but this is a beautiful
Schimmel.”

“If only the sea can make land,” she said, “we should have driven along every dike and watte and polder all the way down the North Sea coast.”

But his mind was lost in Storm’s sonorous German and the great farmsteads they had seen that day on their high, diked islands, coming up like ships out of the midst of the driving sea. It was only when she added, “If you think you can follow all your ancestors backwards through your
Martyrs
Mirror,”
that he understood she was talking about something quite different.

“What?” he said, apprehensive.

“You should go to The Hague, to Makkum, and Antwerp, the Frisian Islands too, to the places where the Wiebes started and burned.”

“We’ll get to Harlingen,” he said quickly. “Next time, and Danzig too, I promise.”

“And Russia?”

“Of course, I told you I just have to persuade my old cousin to come, show us everything in Orenburg, but he’s still afraid.”

“There’s Gorbachev now, nothing will happen.”

“But Young Peter had three arrests, you can’t blame him—” He stopped, abruptly happy. “You want to come with me, to Russia?”

“No,” she said. She was standing against the sheer curtain at the hotel window, and he could not see her face. “I’m sorry,” she said abruptly.

“Why?”

“Oh—” She gestured, tossing aside whatever they had said with a flip of her hand. “You said one ancestor was called Adrian. Where would they get such a name from? The Adriatic?”

“Maybe it’s Latin,” he said, puzzled. “I don’t know what it means.”

“It doesn’t matter … sorry.”

Sorry. Twice in one minute, when she rarely said it at all.

Adam thinks of that pale young Frisian explaining the watte—perhaps his name was Adrian—if he could find him again above the grey sea, they might both be hunched there; together, her fingers accepting the smear of mud and bony bits he offers,
they could be holding slippery hands. “In the next century,” Adrian would be saying, “we’ll grow wheat here where there was only sea. This land will grow everything.”

If war doesn’t happen, and flight.

But obviously the fire and brimstone of war does not concern her. She is holding specks of molluscs or bone in her hand, is rolling white specks ground roundly into powder between her slim fingers, the North Sea wind whipping her hair, grown long again, across her face.

“That’s easiest to do,” the young man says, “to try and build it straight. But the sea is always bending everything, of course.”

“Trish?” Adam asks. “Trish?”

But she is not listening to him. It may be she is laughing, like a Menniste Suzje.

Adam stands on the reef in the rising tide of the sea. Far behind him the narrow sand on the rim of land shades dark into palm trees, into high towers of hotels white against the magnificent jungle hills singing with insects and parrots and dipsidoodling monkeys; but he faces away from all that, looks ahead over the flat, reflecting surface. When he bows his head slightly, his chin and the tip of his nose are touched by the sea, the columns of his body, legs, his sandal-patterned feet are as precise as cut crystal bent among coral, gesturing fronds, creatures perhaps moving though seeming still as ash, a strange world so brilliant that at this moment he cannot recognize any bit of it, though his eyes are wide open. With time the sea will reveal everything, of course. Adam simply must know at what moment to look down into it like this, and remember.

I
WAS BORN ON
S
UNDAY
, J
ANUARY
28, 1903, in the village then called Gnadenthal, Colony Baratov, in the country whose name Josef Stalin later decided would be Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Elizabeth Katerina Wiebe. My mother, also Elizabeth, told me I was born long, so long I did not really uncurl, as she said it, until she had survived seven days of blood and fever, but she lived to bear two even longer children, sons Enoch and Abel, before her motherhood bled away into miscarriages.

I remember my mother always slender, and pale, she might have been a morning mist drifting through the house from the autumn orchard. And sometimes when she endured one, or sometimes two, of “my days” as she called them, in bed, when she lay with her head turned to the wall and her breath so low the blankets did not stir over her, the spread of her marvellous hair made me simmer, I felt myself humming with a happiness I could never quite feel looking at her beautiful, gaunt face.

I know my father, Alexander Wiebe, felt both the beauty and the pain from her as well. In the finest portrait he ever took with his large studio camera, she is half turned, half kneeling on a chair, her left leg almost doubling her long skirt under her and her arms crossed on the chairback; strands of her hair stray back down to her waist, and forward over the lace-trimmed blouse on her breast. She is looking right, serene as glass with the painted studio backdrop behind her, her eyes raised as if anticipating a vision from heaven; it is coming, yes. Her lips will open in adoration.

When I became a nurse, I understood she lived with a prolapsed uterus, her inner organs torn by inflammation and miscarriages. Many women suffered that in her time; she was forty-seven when she died. In 1931, just as Stalin’s freight trains began hauling “kulaks” and their families north to slave to death in the mines and forests of Vorkuta, a name we had not known before and soon could hardly whisper. Perhaps then my father’s missing right arm saved our family from arrest by the State Political Administration, a fancy name for political police, we called them GPU. If it saved him, he always said even a right arm was well worth the price of not having to tour Siberia in a cattle car. But he also insisted our mother’s affliction actually spared her life for a time, since it prevented more childbirth, and childbirth, he said, could be as dangerous for a woman as war service for a man. He thanked God that they had been given three strong children and twenty-seven years of love and care together.