Sweeter Than All the World (21 page)

Mamme said to me, You have to go see him, the stroke mixed him up and his mind wanders, but he talks and talks so gentle now, you can just listen. You have to see him too.

“Paupe,” I say, using the word he once liked, when I was
little, “you live in Aberdeen, Idaho, you’re here in the Pocatello Hospital.”

“Idaho”—his intense eyes sink from their study of my face into a distant bemusement—“but when we first came to the States we went to Oklahoma, the Herald Mennonite Church, all of us from Turkestan, Central Asia … yes, from Kaplan Bek and Aulie Ata too, Khiva … Khiva.” His eyes dart open at me. “We tried to build a village Gnadenthal in the mountains south of Aulie Ata, but we couldn’t really give those places our names,” he says. “When a place already has a name, you can’t change it, even if you don’t know what it is and think you can.”

I can only mutter, “I was two when we moved, I don’t remember Oklahoma.”

“We moved to Idaho, eleven families, to avoid the army”—his voice is different, but his mind seems to be gathering its old force—“we knew the States was going to war. The Great War they called it, huh! as if war could be great. The Worst War they should say. We were eleven families, there were even less, only ten families in the first wagon-train to Central Asia. I was twelve years old, I could drive the quiet horses. They thought then they would protect their sons from war if they moved into the wilderness, the sand wilderness. We Mennonites do that over and over.”

“Mennonites move all the time.” I have heard this from him forever; it is what I got away from by removing myself—but with him lying in a hospital bed, so flat, “moving” now sounds strangely warm, almost homey.

“Yes, move,” he says, “travel because of land, land and armies. You have to find a place where you can live and the Big Men will forget about you. A wilderness no one else wants to live in is best. Do you remember the train?”

“The train … remember?”

“Here in the States we sat so soft, and the Great Plains going past outside.” His eyes closed as if talking in his sleep. “They are great, such good land brushed green and flat by the hand of God.” He laughs slightly, only half his face moving. “No wagons or camels needed on these plains, brown rivers and trees leaning, going past outside the window.”

My grandfather sounds not at all like he used to, factual, logical, demanding immediate and exact answers. Half paralysed on a hospital bed, he may be freed from farm drudgery and the rigid absoluteness of always “being the preacher.” Free perhaps to wander anywhere in his past.

I bend over him; he can only move his right arm and leg a little, his heavy body so pathetically rigid under the sheet. But I want him to look steadily at me if he now feels easier somehow. And he does look, his bright eyes slowly consider every inch of my face. He tries to chuckle, and a bit more of his face moves.

“Where have you been?” he asks, no accusation in his voice.

I’ve been gone four years, I left him and Mamme with a long, accumulated anger that I certainly let them know about as I went, and now he is trying to chuckle. So helpless, so changed from my long memory of him, perhaps it’s more than just the stroke, perhaps he’s not so “mixed up” either, would he be completely different—warm, gentle, loving—if he were completely paralysed?

“I didn’t go far,” I can tell him honestly. “Portland.”

“Wandering?”

“I worked there, in a garage.” No need to bother him with the “Bud Lyons” I’ve become, with the year of the Depression in California in hobo villages, or picking cotton and grapes. “I
came back to see Mamme, and you too,” I tell him. “I didn’t know you had … this had happened.”

“A man hides, but God guides,” he says into my face. Who is he saying this to, me or himself? It’s one of his favourite Mennonite preacher “Watchwords for Life,” a convenient “sermon in a second” and easily twisted to suit whatever purpose he had at that moment. Abruptly it sounds so much like what I once hated, and still hate, that I jerk away from him rigid as half a log, I’m outta here!

But I glimpse his motionless head, his eyes rolled to their corners to see me, and his face twitching; amazingly, he is still trying to chuckle, right hand gesturing for me. And I take it.

“All good Mennonites wander,” he says. “Not hunters following animals, no, we’re like God told Abraham, ‘Go to a land I will show you’ and we go, it’s usually because of armies, to stay away from them.”

“I don’t want land, I’m a mechanic. I can fix any motor.” There is no need to mention Pearl Harbor, that the United States is now in all-out war and I’ve joined the Air Force and I have seven days’ leave before I’m gone, maybe forever. At least as far as he’s concerned, he’s wandering in his paralysed memory, wherever it leads him, let him go.

But he says nothing, and I lean closer to him. “I even flew in a plane,” I say. “Whose motor I fixed. You see the whole world under you.”

He breathes, rattling a little. “I’ve never been in the sky. The desert can be like sky, sometimes only two colours and sometimes you’re in it you can’t tell, they’re the same.”

His eyes are adrift and his voice so thin he has no echo of the stubborn man I left, not at all. I can just touch him, and listen.

“When you cross the Ural River at Orenburg,” he says, “you leave Europe. There the world changes. You see camel caravans, the Kirghiz nomads with their sheep and long-haired goats on the black sand of Kara Kum Desert around the Aral Sea, the water salt and blue as heaven. Three weeks we were among those sand hills so bright black the sun blinded us, heat like walking through melting iron, we had camels to carry most of our food and relays of horses to pull our wagons, if the Kirghiz people hadn’t guided us to their deep wells we would never have got across. Eleven children died, every child under four died, they could not drink the water. But I was twelve and strong, the Kirghiz showed me how to ride with my head wrapped in cloth on a camel.”

This strange world, numbers, names rise from his dry lips into the warm hospital air. Against the winter darkening beyond the window, his memory burns; as if the city around us were on fire.

“We ten families, we travelled together,” he says, “we buried eleven children. Thirty-eight pilgrims came to the fresh springs beside the Aral Sea, praising God.”

“Praising God!” I burst out.

His right hand tightens a little around mine. “Bigger treks came after us,” he says. “Over four hundred people, we were the first. My friend David Toews came with his family when the weather was better, but all our small children died in the loving arms of their family, we understood it was God’s will, dying then, and two were born by the Syr Darya River under the trees.”

His story, the only story of his childhood, about that enormous, stupid madness of a trek of Jesus-Second-Coming-crazy Mennonites to the Turkestan Desert in 1880 has lain over my life like a blanket, trying to smother me. In his sermons he used heavy examples from it all the time, how to be faithful, obedient
and perfect, how to avoid endless sins. Maybe here, at last, half dead now himself, mind wandering, he will have a plain, human answer for me.

“So why?” I insist, but more quietly. “Why did they really do it? Sell their great estates in the beautiful colonies on the Dnieper and Volga Rivers and drag themselves into Asia, into Muslim deserts they knew nothing about, parents with helpless children, hauling wagons in sand—why?”

His right hand is becoming a vise, but I won’t let it go so he can turn his head to look me in the eye. Anyway, he doesn’t need to do that. He can still, with the same calm, precise deliberation he gave me before I left—I can feel it coming—declare up into the stale hospital air:

“Didn’t you listen? I told you and told you. ‘The Revelation of Jesus Christ, the vision which God gave to his servant John, for him to bear witness, as the time is near: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she being with child cried out, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.’ ”

The words I certainly know, yes, I know them in the full majesty of the most incomprehensible book in the Bible. The Church as the Bride awaiting her Bridegroom, who will take her to Heaven. The Mennonites as the chosen Community of the Bride to follow their prophet, Claus Epp, who all by himself had made this amazing discovery and connection between Revelations and Mennonites, that the purest Mennonites must leave everything they had behind, “lay aside every weight of sin which does so easily beset us,” and go, go farther than they could think, search by faith for months stretching into years to find a desert in Asia where
the Beast of Satan would be revealed and they could Await the Actual, Physical Second Coming of their Holy Bridegroom Jesus Christ to Lift them All into Heaven. Everything in capitals. My grandfather was a child then, but even as an old man on the other side of the world in Idaho he remained rigid as iron: a true believer is “married to Jesus”—say that around a hobo fire and you’d get more than you could handle, “Oh-ho, Bud, you’re sleepin’ with Jesus, hey, is he any good?” That’s why I love motors, anything you do either works or it doesn’t, and there’s always a solution you can figure out, exactly. None of these “Brides,” sun women in the heavens, grooms, love feasts—not even a stroke can hammer them into reason in my grandfather’s not-so-wandering mind.

Both my square hands are clenched on his single one; I get them unlocked but I can’t look into his eyes.

“Paupe,” I say, quietly, across his body, “I have to leave for a long time. I came back, just a few days, to see Mamme and you.”

He is silent, breathing drily. I lift the glass of water and he swallows as I pour, carefully, a little, into his open, slanted mouth.

“Mamme and you cared for me, brought me up.…”

“When Heinrich and Esther were killed, you were a miracle.”

“You told me. Their horrible accident.”

“The miracle was you, that you weren’t killed with them.”

“You told me I was wrapped tight, and so little, when they were hit I just flew. It was just an accident.”

“There was an accident, but you’re not a miracle?”

“In the last second my mother probably threw me away.”

His eyes are like bits of steel, so deep if his head was a motor I would have to drill them out to fix it.

“They were driving their buggy,” I remind him. “Going home, and for less than a minute they happened to be in the wrong place.” His jagged face, that irrational trek. “They didn’t deliberately drive along the track for days until a train finally came along and ran over them.”

And he understands I am talking about his childhood and mine. “You have thought about this,” he says softly.

“Well, a wandering bum has plenty of time—I wanted to thank you. You cared for me.”

“You must think rightly, understand. No one loves their children more than people on the way, travellers. When you leave your place and everything you own and every day you have to leave behind even more of what little you thought you couldn’t do without, but you have to, then children in your arms are your all in all.”

“So … why did they go where so many died?”

“Our fathers said it was for our children: we were going to save our grown young men from the Czar’s armies.”

“Other Mennonites went to Canada and the United States, why didn’t you?”

“We were also obedient to the desert vision of the Bride of Christ, the return of Jesus for His own.”

And for that vision, I want to tell him again, you saved your young men and killed your small children. But he is lying so still, how can I assault him with that?

“Children,” he says, as if he heard my thought. “God gives them, God takes them. Like your parents, given and taken, and we must still believe in Him.”

No such “must” for me. But I don’t need to say it; even with one ear he would hear me no more than he ever did with two.

“Dust and heat and the track goes on,” he murmurs, far away. “It led into earth villages, one after another and out again, we travelled all together, the first year we travelled six months. We stopped in Tashkent and wintered there and tried to grow gardens, but we had to go on next summer, 1881, to Samarkand and Bukhara, to Lausan, Khiva—three years trying to find the exact place, travelling on the way. And always we had our love feasts around the fire and Bible reading and sermons explaining what was happening to us, and sang
Heimatleeda
. We shared all our food, and when we stopped in a circle and the chores were done, David Toews and I played. Such wild land, mountains sometimes and rivers and a sea too, we had never seen anything but a fenced Mennonite street, he said my name was Loewen, which is German for ‘Lion,’ this desert was the place for me, and I said, Good, I’m Lion, you’re Toews, what is that? He said Toews means nothing, so he could be ‘Tiger’ and we played that in the sand or under the crooked, black trees beside the rivers. Tiger and Lion.”

His right hand gestures towards the waterglass. I put it between his fingers and he takes it, lifts it towards his mouth. He doesn’t need me to drink: he tilts it into his mouth, holding a little before he swallows, and gives it back. His voice is stronger, with an edge, as if he was again in the pulpit of our small Idaho church.

“Playing,” he says, in a tone of wonder; as if he liked the word, as if the memory of it made him, for the first time in his rigid life, happy. “Such strange things beside the road, animals, places. Every wagon was still Mennonite, dragging along so heavy, but in a street turbaned people would kneel and pray when the muezzin called on his minaret. They were very high, always leaning, as if about to fall but they never did—a world so strange
you rubbed your eyes and thought it would be gone, but no, it was there. Even their holy Samarkand rising wide out of the brown sand, the Pearl of the Orient with marble stone walls and adobe houses, there were peaches and clear water running in little streams along the street and lamb shashlik and cucumbers and apricots. We heard say Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan rode there, all those unforgettable killers Claus Epp warned us, and Tamerlane was buried under the blue domes of a mosque, a huge slab of black jade over him. There we met the Chinese girl.”