Sweeter Than All the World (36 page)

“The head of the village
soviet
, the kolkhoz they called it, looked at him across the table, my mother said. Vanya didn’t have to tell him anything more. He was our cousin Nikolai Wiebe, the same age as Vanya, twenty-two, we always called him our Kolya. They were friends, they grew up and went to village school together when there was one. Kolya was often a day worker in our oil press. He was as smart as any Wiebe ever was, the second son of the eighth son of old Foda Jakob Wiebe who was for twelve years the elected head of the whole Orenburg Mennonite Colony, and now Kolya was really lucky: his family was so very poor, but under the Communists he was named to a place on the other side of the big table, with all the heavy stamps and papers on it.”

“So,” Adam says slowly. “In ’29 a Kolya Wiebe was head of the Communists in Number Eight Romanovka?”

“Yes, of the kolkhoz. The son of your father’s youngest brother, Nikolai. Your first cousin.”

“They knew how to break up families, didn’t they.”

“Better than anyone. They were really smart, like devils.”

Adam is squeezing the orange I gave him from the tree under which we are standing in our orchard. At first he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing: a tree with shining new leaves that also had bright flowers and little green oranges and large yellow ones ripe enough to eat growing on it, all at the same time. I told him Paraguay offers very few miracles, but luckily
those few have to do with things you can eat. He is quiet so long, I finally ask:

“Did your parents tell you how they went to Moscow? How they got out in ’29?”

After a minute Adam says, “I don’t remember very much, those stories, I’ll talk to my mother again. I know two of my Wiebe uncles and their families were sent back from Moscow, back to Orenburg.”

“Yes,” I say when he stops. “Peter Wiebe and Nikolai Wiebe.”

“Yes, I think so, but my father never spoke about them. He didn’t want to. Once he said my older sister, Margaret, she was the baby then when they got out to Germany and the German refugee camp, she was always sick and no one could understand how their family was always stamped ‘healthy’ every time the Canadian doctors came around … though maybe they told me more, maybe I was too stupid to listen. I’ll ask my mother now.”

“Sometimes, in their old days, people can talk more.”

This Adam Wiebe, only ten years younger than I, was by the grace and mercy of God born in Canada, and became a doctor. He has so much education and is so smart and rich he could probably be president of the whole country someday if he wanted to, they’ve never had a dictator like Paraguay. We hear Canada is very good for refugees, if you’re smart and aren’t lazy, they say, it’s all easy there, just work.

“Those Canadian doctors must have been in Mölln,” I tell him, “the refugee camp where the German and Canadian government people sorted them out, before the ships in Hamburg.”

“You were there, you remember that?”

“I was four and always nice and sick for the Canadian
doctors too, my mother said, I…” And I have to laugh. “But no miracle like your sister Margaret! I made it easy for the doctors to say no, not into Canada. If I remembered any of that, fifty years of Chaco sun fried it out of me.”

A good Mennonite joke and Adam laughs with me, he sometimes has a warm, even friendly face, if he wants to. He bites a small opening in the top of the orange he has softened and squeezes the juice into his mouth, sucking.

“This is really good,” he says, “sweet and sharp. So, David, our cousin Kolya Wiebe was a Communist in ’29, and all of a sudden he’s the big Soviet boss in Romanovka?”

“I don’t know if he was a Communist in his heart, but he worked for them. Lots of people did, what else could they do? Kolya was Nikolai Wiebe’s son, and maybe he was the reason the Nikolai family got sent back to Orenburg from Moscow in ’29, why they couldn’t get away. In the summer when Kolya and my brother Vanya were schoolboys, they often herded the village cows far out on the Number Eight Hills that began south of the cemetery, the open steppe where there’s nothing between the grass running in the wind as far as you can see all around you and blue heaven above. Maybe in the clouds they saw ships, or trains, or mills like Mennonites had always built, with giant sails turning in the wind to pump water over dikes or grind grain to feed everyone they knew in the twenty-three Orenburg Colony villages. Maybe they saw double-winged airplanes they thought they’d someday fly like birds in God’s free air, but there was nothing Kolya could do about those heavy stamps he had to use. The orders that came with the bosses from Moscow were no better than boulders in the Little Uran River—if you couldn’t find a way to flow around or between, you smashed into them.

“ ‘I have no stamp that goes to Moscow,’ Kolya told my brother.

“ ‘Then give me a paper to visit our father’s grave,’ Vanya said, ‘for the whole family.’

“My mother had been told that our father had been convicted of being a kulak and sent away. Just wait, Maria Abramovna, you’ll hear how you can write to him. But we already knew from the families of two men in prison with him, one from Number Seven and the other Number Five, that they had both recognized our father’s bloody face one morning in the Grey House on Kirov Street in Orenburg, where a sheet had fallen off one of the tables. In the cellar, they said, in the morning bodies often lay under sheets soaked with dried blood.

“I was three, and I can’t remember him, nothing. We have only one small picture from Number Eight Romanovka. My father sits on the right and Vanya on the left, and between them are Mama and we four younger ones—the oldest, Maria, is not there, she’s already married—with me, a little bald-head, sitting on my mother’s lap. My father is fifty and almost as bald as I, only a line of hair above his ears, but my big brother has black hair cut so heavy it bristles thick as fur all over his long, gaunt head.

“Over the table Kolya said to Vanya, ‘Only the GPU know, and they’ll never tell you where the grave is.’

‘“Is there one?’

‘“My word, Vanya, I don’t know. And I can’t ask, especially about a relative.’

‘“Then give me a paper.’

“ ‘I told you, there is no place I can put on it.’

“ ‘Well,’ Vanya said, ‘then we can look anywhere for the
grave. Just write,
The John Loewen family, mother Maria Abramovna Loewen née Wiebe, and her five children, six persons in all, has permission to visit the grave of their father, John Loewen
. Just stamp and sign it, that’s all, no one can read your signature.’

“ ‘The stamp says Orenburg, and a gun will stop you.’

“ ‘So, the worst a gun can do is shoot us.’

“ ‘No,’ Kolya said. ‘The worst is shove you all on a train going north to the Mezan River in the Vologda forests. Or worse, Vorkuta.’

‘“You maybe too?’

‘“Who can say.’

“In September, 1929, young Nikolai ‘Kolya’ Wiebe already knew so much, too much, and the stories we heard twenty years later from the refugees coming after the Second World War could only be true: before he was twenty-five, he had disappeared too.”

“But,” Adam says to me in my Paraguay orchard, “he gave your brother the papers to go?”

“He must have, we were in Moscow, and got out to Germany.”

“And Kolya’s family went too. Was he with them?”

“No, my mother said he wasn’t. She never heard how the Nikolai Wiebes got there, but before November 25, the GPU sent them back to Number Eight Romanovka.”

“The Peter Wiebes too.”

“Yes.”

From his face, suddenly, I know Adam knows more than he will tell me about our families. Like every one of us. After a moment he asks:

“And Vanya, how old did he get?”

“Not as old as Kolya. December 24, 1930, twenty-two years, eleven months, one day.”

“But then you were already here, except your father, all safe in Paraguay.”

“Safe from those Communists, yes, but there is still everything else on earth.”

He says, strangely, “Always enough ‘everything else’ for Mennonites to keep on suffering.”

I don’t understand his tone. “It was typhus,” I tell him. “In our first year in the Chaco fewer than three hundred and fifty families buried ninety-four people, forty-four of them children.”

“Ninety-four deaths, in one year?”

“My sister Maria’s two children too. Heat and dysentery, and forty-three of typhus. One whole family died out, parents and three small children, and all the orphans … they said the Chaco was too dry for typhus, but we brought it here, with us.”

“Ah-h-h,” Adam says. He is looking at the empty orange skin between his long fingers, fingers so pale and soft it could be he has never, in his whole life, so much as touched a shovel. Suffer? He looks up and smiles a little, so I tell him:

“There was no doctor in the Chaco. After a month of dying they brought one from Asunción, and he said people on the river-boats coming from Argentina sometimes had it.”

Adam nods. “Epidemic typhus, carried by lice, aided by dirt and bad water.”

“Our ministers could only pray and read the Bible, my mother said, it was all over again what the conservative Mennonites from Canada found here in 1927. They had come to the Chaco to get away from the big world, and have their own schools for their children and live in villages as they wanted to,
but what they got here at first was mostly graves in the bittergrass.”

Adam says, “I haven’t been to their colony yet, should I visit them?”

I laugh a little. “If you’re looking for really faraway relatives, I can take you to a few living there, really stubborn Wiebes and Loewens who already left Russia by the shipload over a hundred years ago.”

“No no,” he says fast, laughing with me. “But they had typhus too, when they came?”

“Those Mennos call it their ‘Great Dying’ to this day, in a few months of waiting in grass huts to move here into the Chaco from the Paraguay River, over a hundred died, fifty of them children under two—even more than with us. It all comes from the hand of God, the Canadian Mennonites in the Chaco always say, health or sickness. At our funerals in 1930 our ministers preached that too, though often they broke down crying when they said it. My mother remembered the one verse they always read: ‘And King David built an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor, and sacrificed burnt offerings and peace offerings. Then the Lord answered the prayer for the land, and the plague was stopped.’ Russian or Canadian Mennonites, we certainly aren’t kings, my mother said, but after our long, hard journeys to reach the Gran Chaco, we did sacrifice, all of us, until the plagues finally stopped, they truly did.”

Adam says slowly, “I guess it doesn’t matter how far you travel, you always carry … things with you. But sacrifice children … such suffering? The ministers said it was from God?”

“All life comes from God, they said, and suffering because of sin.”

“But that verse about David, I think he sacrificed animals on an altar for something he had done wrong, I think he made God angry by lying with a woman or counting people, I don’t know exactly—but what big sin did you people here do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was our escape from the Communists, maybe we were supposed to pay here what our relatives were still paying in Russia.”

“Pay? My parents escaped too. Pay what?”

“For evil, pay for sin in the world. The sin of Adam.”

My cousin Adam from Canada stares at me, almost as if I had meant him! I say, “In the Garden of Eden, the snake and Eve.”

“I know,” he says. “But some people seem to ‘pay’ a lot more than others.”

“As my mother always said, who can argue with God?”

“If we were Jews we would.”

“Who’d want to be a Jew? They don’t believe in the New Testament.”

He makes a hard sound in his throat. “The New Testament says Jesus paid for all sin on the cross, so why do we still have to pay more?”

I don’t know what to say, nor, I think, would my mother, who certainly thought about this longer than I. If she knew, she never told me. I can only ask Adam:

“What do you pay for sin in Canada?”

“Hmm! Not much. Hard work; my family started in a log house no bigger than a granary, they worked like slaves—but no hunger or Communists, certainly not typhus or—” Then he laughs, and I hear his thoughts change in his laughter. “Maybe my debt is piling up interest, who knows how big it’ll be when I have to pay!”

We laugh a little, together, as people do when there is nothing to say about something that is not funny.

“But your brother,” he says, “that wasn’t typhus.”

No. Not typhus. In the ten days we are together I tell him our worst and best story, the one that started our life in Paraguay in 1930 when, we already had no father. Tell it in pieces, as I can bear it, even while we’re grinding along the narrow cactus and sand tracks that connect Menno Colony’s eighty villages, making sure, as he says, we don’t find any relatives among the six thousand people living there, their families with sometimes fifteen or even eighteen children.

At the water oasis of Boquerón, where two years after we came the Paraguayan and Bolivian armies fought in the terrible desert heat until they were both defeated, over three thousand soldiers dead, we spend a few hours talking about the Chaco Border War that ran over us before we even had our villages built. How our mothers gave bread they baked to soldiers on both sides for Christmas and they thanked them with volleys fired into the air and dancing, and our young men took their dying horses home and fed and watered them back to life so the army officers on either side could commandeer them again. You flee to the ends of the world, my mother said to me, and still the first thing you meet is war, fought over thorns and sand.

But Adam and I come back to my brother’s story: he won’t let me stay away from it.

I tell him my mother said Vanya’s will was unbreakable. He was the head of the family, he must work. Not the heat and bittergrass campos and thornbrush sand flats and mosquitoes or the endless labour of building a village out of nothing in a strange, desert world could stop him, by God’s grace we had escaped the
Land of Terror and he would build our home again as our father surely would have if he had lived.