Sweeter Than All the World (31 page)

Her arms loosen; she whispers, “You could.”

She has understood the longing in my voice when I said that name. Long before the Great War, when I was barely a year and the world for Russian Mennonites was always summer and always light, my father travelled through Danzig on his way to Germany to study photography, on railroads, he said, first built by the engineer Eduard Frederich Salomon Wiebe, another possible ancestor. Now war has driven me to Marienburg, less than seventy kilometres from Danzig. I could walk there through the world of villages the Mennonites built after draining the delta marshes, and from which most have already fled. I could walk to Danzig in two nights and a day, with only two rivers to cross.

“The gauleiter,” Erika is whispering in my ear, “betrayed us, now you must save yourself.”

I could try. But my body lying on these stones seems to know more than I can plan now. My arms are around her strong body and so we hold each other as closely as two women can, breathing together. After a time, the prayers still rustling in the room, she can say to me:

“You were violated.”

And I can say it. “Yes.” And, saying it, I must go on. “In war men are brave and killed, women are brave and raped and killed, war and rape always slide off the tongue together, but we don’t need war to be brutalized, a girl can get beaten and violated and sodomized…”

I get myself stopped because Erika’s arms pull tighter around me. “Later,” she says in my ear. “Tell me, if I don’t resist, what?”

“For war they train soldiers how to kill, how to look at wounds and the dead without feeling, but no one trains women for this.”

“Ssshhh,” against my mouth, “not that, not now.”

And I hear, near us, Frau Heinrichs snoring a little, good, but in half our room the straw stirs with sleeplessness, prayers in various languages for mercy. O beloved Saviour only you can save us.

So I can begin to tell Erika, in my arms, “They will take turns, one after the other. If you struggle, try to resist, some of them will hold you down, sit on your face or break your legs wider apart or bend you over because if they sodomize you they think they … some will bellow like animals, their hands grab you anywhere, there’s nothing human about them, especially their laughing, you must pray to go away, go as fast and as far as you can, away.

“You’ll see it in their eyes, don’t struggle, don’t stiffen or brace yourself, it’ll hurt you more, make yourself limp, try, and you must do this right away: as soon as they grab you, as soon as it’s hopeless, try to pick a place where you can go, go away.”

“What … a place, to go?”

“Go away, a nook, a corner, if there’s a closet or a space
behind a stove, go there. Not a corner up in the ceiling because from there you’ll see. Any place where it’s dark, go.”

“Like … under berry bushes, in our garden?”

“Yes yes yes, good, under thick bushes, as far away and green as you can, go! You’re limp, you go fast, the stabbing pain will try to drag you back but don’t let it, concentrate, a name helps, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ if you can make yourself a little wet before it starts then maybe the pain won’t cut so hard.”

“Wet?” she whispers.

And I can’t stand this, I have to snort against her skin, this is so stupid. Trying to say words about what lives forever inside you like blood, like cancer, whispering as if you could prepare to be smashed by pain, your body left dead except for shame, this could only be your own fault, talking is so uselessly stupid.

“Elizabeth Katerina! Those soldiers were in this room!”

“And we did not bring them here!”

“This is war training, tell me!”

“All right! Where could you get it, wet?”

“Spit?”

“Maybe. But my mouth is so dry then, it’s useless.”

“Tears?”

“Yes, tears, or sweat, blood. Don’t fight, you’ll want to, but don’t, the faster they’ll do it. Remember, to them a woman is three holes, and they’ll use every one.”

“What?”

“Yes, three. If you have to swallow sperm, or piss, it doesn’t matter, vomit if you can but it’s not poison. Just go away.”

“O Lord”—her voice is suddenly broken—“please.”

“Erika.” I can only hold her.

“O Lord, Lord our God,” she gasps against my neck,
“you have been our refuge forever, before the mountains were born, before you formed the earth, from the ages to all ages you are God.”

I cannot join her. I have begun to weep, in the vice of memory, foreboding. Jesus, Jesus.

We awake from exhaustion into a blanket barrage outside. I do not dare venture out for water and, crowded into one room, we have so much we need to clean that the level in our storage barrel drops badly. Our storage room is still locked and filled: bread, dried noodles, canned fruit, a little smoked sausage, we do not talk about how long we can ration ourselves in a siege, we think of that but this is war and we do not think of that either, today is today and hopeless enough unto itself. And in the basement cubicle next to ours we need water to wash our waste into the open sewer; if that is plugged, Erika and I will have to carry everything onto the street by pail as well. The house shudders and creaks, bullets shriek, the world is breaking over us. But we clean, we eat, we pray long prayers, or moan them as we are able. Our shivering people settle closer together in the most protected corner of the room.

“Yes, close together,” Erika says, her tone quiet as if she were changing a night sheet, “then they don’t have to dig in so many places, to find us if the house collapses.”

Frau Heinrichs begins to sing, her voice light as a bird flying:

When she reaches the chorus, other voices are trying to climb with hers:

Onkel Johann’s lips move, though he makes no sound.

It is early afternoon when we hear the door upstairs crash open, a moment of silence, and then feet pounding in. Shouts, curses, then a barked Russian command and footsteps, bodies are crashing out again. We are so relieved we are almost breathing when, without so much as a step creaking to warn us, a fist pounds on the door and it falls open: an officer.

My heart jolts, for a moment I can only stare at his knee-high, polished boots. It is always the same, any, every Red Army officer could be Abel, the happiness and the horror that would be. But of course it is not, not my lost Communist Party brother.

Two soldiers with automatic pistols close behind him. He bends into the room and stands with feet apart, his uniform clean and smartly creased. In amazement I see him lift his peaked cap in a polite salute from his wide, bald head—does he shave it like Lenin?

“Does anyone speak Russian?”

We have planned this. Only Frau Heinrichs will speak, though half the room could. Sister Erika has rehearsed with each of them my warning not to reveal any knowledge of Russian, because the Soviet military has Stalin’s absolute orders: anyone found in Germany who has ever lived in Mother Russia can only be a traitor to the Great Communist ideal and is to be arrested immediately and sent back for punishment. But Frau Heinrichs volunteered. At eighty-seven, she said, what can they do to me?

We pray she is right. She does not hesitate to answer. I watch the astounding officer, with a little hope but no confidence in his apparent momentary decency. In the war business of cleaning German soldiers out of Marienburg house by house, should we be more useful to him dead than alive, we will be dead.

Major Malenkov assures us that they do not hurt old people. If we remain quiet and do not shelter German combatants, we will not be harmed. But Frau Heinrichs cannot help herself, she gestures to our cowering people and begs him—Last night seven soldiers broke in, see, the door, the ceiling—and I have to remind her in German not to ask or offer anything beyond what he said, only short answers.

Malenkov is looking at me too sharply. Both Sister Erika and I have pulled worn shawls tight over our hair, we stand as bent as sticks but we dare not overdo it, we cannot hide our skin or eyes. Then, his Russian so unthreatening and cultured that in civilian life he might well be a professor, he tells us he knows how we are suffering, war is horrible for everyone, and especially for the aged, but the front will have moved past in two days and we will be in the excellent care of the Red Army. They are unstoppable, and he will leave orders we are not to be bothered by anyone, not for food or anything else, nothing. He will post a guard at our door. Frau Heinrichs is overjoyed, she and all the others pour out their thanks as he gestures his two glowering, helmeted louts out ahead of him. When he turns to go, he smiles directly at me, and I’m certain my face betrays to him my knowledge and my great fear.

True, the louts are at the door when I venture out with my shawl and water pails. One even opens the door when I return, but I know their young, starved eyes have followed me every step as if
I, draped as I am, were a recovered memory, a village mirage in this filth and blood—look, a woman walking with water pails!—in the boredom and abrupt brutality they live day after day.

“We thank God, oh, we thank You for this safe day,” Sister Erika says at evening devotions, and immediately they all together begin to thank so deeply, so pathetically, even unknowing Taunte Gertrude, their frail voices staggering away into exhausted repetitions most of them have been sighing all day long.

“Our ancient Sisters and Brother of Perpetual Prayer,” Erika whispers to me on the floor. “God will answer them, certainly.”

We lie warm against each other; I cannot speak for fear. The water barrel is full but my shoulders and arms have lost every sensation except ache. Perhaps, like my father, an arm gone could still save me? Or better, a leg? No, no, a one-legged woman would be worse—no, if I could find words, could somehow explain to my father now, as he once explained to me the immense land of Russia, which since the eighteenth century gave us Mennonites shelter and allowed us to build our colonies into wealth and comfort. Russia, its incomprehensible variety and traditions of peoples, its long, violent history of unimaginable riches and beauty and power for a few and slavery for all the others.

Listen, Papa, a woman with one leg, two legs, no legs, any limb you have or don’t have means nothing. With a gun barrel in my ear I have seen babies and grandfathers and great-grandmothers sodomized by a regiment—listen, the brute beasts would not do what I have had to see men do. War drives men together, it drives them into violence beyond themselves. You can be killed in an instant, so when you have the power you carve it into the body of your enemy with every brutality you have
learned. Revenge. The Tatar who broke down our door knew that, straight from his Mongol ancestors who rode their horses from China to the walls of Vienna, piling human heads up in pyramids long before we Mennonites existed.

Yes, my father would say. Power forced onto, into your body. This soldier began by assaulting you with surprise, by threat and the explosion of gunshots. He clubbed you with the knowledge, “I will do what I want to do.” Then his officer comes in, polite, humane, and you think perhaps … but you know that Tatar learned those German words only because some educated officer like Malenkov taught him. Taught him to say what he has already known for seven hundred years: Violence breeds hate, and hate grinds slowly, but steadily, into fear, and fear driven by time grinds ever finer, into revenge. Do you understand, my dearest Elizabeth Katerina?

Yes, Papa. Now, please, can I see a picture?

Which one?

Of Enoch and Abel, my beautiful brothers. Not where they are four and six and looking from under broad, black-brimmed hats, their small hands clutching the railing of a fake bridge set over a stream that does not exist on your sunny studio floor; not the picture where they sit in a cardboard boat with sailor hats to sail across a paper-painted sea, no, show me the sweetest portrait of all, the one I watched you and mother arrange so carefully, together. There is a background of bushy shadow on the right, and wide scrolled and flowered steps leading upwards, left. Enoch, aged three, stands in his striped summer shirt and shorts looking into the distance while he holds the large china family chamberpot at his side. And just under his gaze, facing into the camera and bare to the waist, beautiful Abel, aged one, sits with
his chubby legs bent, on the smaller, rounder chamberpot that was first mine, then Enoch’s and now his, Abel’s eyes so enormous and his face as blank and perfectly sad as any small animal’s—O my brothers, O Enoch, O Abel, Abel, my lost brother Abel.…

The next morning, January 28, there are no guards at the door and the cloister across the street is on fire. When the elderly caretaker couple and their lay brother appear at our door with six girls in nuns’ habits huddled between them, Erika just says, “Come in, quickly quickly,” and leads them down into our crowded room. We have opened the two small windows that face back into the yard, the outside air is freshening the room a little, though it drives in the cold as well and our old ones cannot endure that for long. Erika crowds all nine newcomers into the corner opposite the door, and then arranges our people in a half-circle close in front of them.

Our dear ones sagging so close together on chairs, their old bodies swollen, twisted with labour and motherhood and age, shaking, some so sadly bewildered.

“Good,” Erika says to our hidden guests, “I can’t see you, nothing at all. But you must try to stop crying, you cannot make a sound, if someone comes in you must not cry.”

After some time they do. In fact, no one comes down the stairs all day, and from the sounds outside, the bombardment and return fire from the castle—even in the cellar I recognize the sound of each different weapon—the chaos of grinding war occupies everyone. We eat our small supper of bread and canned fruit. We light a candle and set it on the table. Sister Erika, our “dear angel from God” as Taunte Gertrude croons to her, lays her Bible in the warm yellow light and stoops over it, her hands folded against her forehead. My father and mother never designed a picture more moving.