Sweeter Than All the World (32 page)

The street door crashes open above us. The couple, the six girls and the lay brother sink to the floor as we shove our chairs closer around to shield them. But we need not have scrambled so fast; whoever has entered, and there are at least ten or twelve of them, they are first destroying what is left of the upper house. They come down the steps and we shrink together in terror, but someone smashes the door to our cellar food storage and we hear them laughing, yelling, glass shatters, shelves crash. Sister Erika looks at me with a little hope; perhaps in stuffing their bellies they will forget us. But I am cursed with Russian, I understand their obscenities.

They are in our room, yelling as if drunk, our food dribbling out of their hands and mouths and drunk on themselves, shoving each other aside with a violence that cannot wait to hit another body. And there is a leader, there always is one who can beat the others into silence. He is the one who first bellows:

“Woman, come here!”

An essential element in Red Army training for invasion: to say those German words. Say them not like sounds that are memorized, but horribly. The way a man who with fists and feet has beaten a woman to the edge of senselessness will lean down and say, “Now I’m gonna fuck you.” Trained to say them as often as they can, in any circumstance, until, when the war is finally over, the uncomprehending children of tens of thousands of mothers enduring in refugee camps will play at what they have seen so often, as naturally as they play at washing clothes or making mud pies or church singing. “Woman, come here!”

We had only one mercy: there were no children in our room. But the girls who had once prayed to be nuns were there, and our old ones’ desperate attempt to shield them with their
ancient bodies did not last through the second night. The next morning at daybreak, the elderly couple led the girls out onto the street as massive air bombardment began smashing the castle. They had come, they had been violated, they were gone in the hopeless ways of war.

But their lay brother, Karel, remains with us. He carries in water and charred wood from ruins for our stove; no soldier accosts him. Our old ones are more loving than ever, though not even Frau Heinrichs has a voice to sing and some can barely murmur prayers. They lie twisted with age and despair on straw beginning to rot, but several are strong enough to help us clean. Those who can do no more than sit form circles of chairs so that Erika and I can wash and wash ourselves behind their backs. Warm, clean water, when a handful of it touches you for an instant you feel and remember nothing, white as snow. Frau Heinrichs untangles our hair, and coils it into clean, tight knots the way Gnadenthal Grandma Katerina always wore hers; I brushed it for her when I was little and when I was grown, she was so patient as I brushed it to the long curls that fell below her waist. Erika and I tie our shawls tighter and work, work. We can no longer fall into the brief oblivion of sleep.

“What is Russian for ‘kill me’?”

“Ubeyte menia.”

We both say it, but they won’t. Every evening and any time in the afternoon the soldiers come with their horrible mouths and raw, pointed bodies. In the cold, early morning darkness of the floor our skin can endure no touch, we can only tell each other everything we promised a lifetime ago, our lives as they reappear to us splintered, remember, we talk and listen at the same time, she about her golden summer life growing on their
Herrenhagen estate which the Wiebes first dammed and built out of the marshes between the Nogat and the Vistula, and I about my family millennia ago in Russia, green Gnadenthal and the bright studio and the terror of the flight to Moscow and the return, the village of Susanovo, Orenburg, and collective farms and purges where not even my father’s missing arm could save him, nor Enoch either, and to Gnadenthal again, me alone with Grandma Katerina, alone in devastated Gnadenthal after the Wehrmacht tanks came and the Ukrainians and Russians fled. But we Mennonites were Germans, we welcomed them.

Erika clutches me, beyond terror now.

“Did you have a child?”

“It was dead. It will always be dead.”

My grandmother’s flowing hair, the stone-and-wood bridge on our village street, over water running clear between tall grass and over stones like glass, there is more than can ever be said. We understand each other’s stories, which we have never heard before, as clearly as if we were falling into a lake of warm, clean water, which is all we long for, warm, clean, hidden.

Father, show me a picture.

Which one, sweetheart?

You know, you know.

You made me laugh, he says, laughing. So hard I shook the camera under the hood. You and Greta Isaak were perfect slender young men in trousers and tied cravats, flat-brimmed hats, pince-nez and twirled moustaches, superb, she in black, stood leaning towards you in grey, seated in the round-backed chair with your left leg perched at the ankle on your right knee, each of you with a long cigarette elegantly between your fingers, rolled paper actually, such beautiful young men.

Greta Isaak. If Sister Erika Wiebe, our Herrenhagen cousin seven or eight generations removed, had known of us to visit in Gnadenthal in 1917, she could have been the third, slightly younger young man in the picture.

But this is 1945. I pray that Greta Isaak, now Penner, is somewhere safe in Germany with her four children, but our “dear angel from God” grew too gently into caring middle age on her family’s estate; for her to endure, my few whispers of war training could not be enough.

On the fourth night, a man’s sudden scream. Twisting into a howl, Russian bellows, a shot. Someone has been stabbed, cut deep. Someone tears himself out of me. Boots pound, blunder away. When I can, I crawl through the destroyed house, feeling through the debris until I find her bloody body. I touch a bullet hole high in her temple, and her face below her eyes crushed as if a tank had ground into it. Or boots.

Frau Heinrichs brings me sheets, still warm, and I wrap her body, and myself. Karel helps me carry her into our room. We huddle against her, weeping. It is some time before we realize Major Malenkov is watching us from the doorway.

I tell him in exact Russian that we need none of his soldiers to dig her grave. But the ground of the convent churchyard is frozen too hard for us: Karel and I can only cover her shroud with rubble in a corner of the burned ruins.

The next day two carts pulled by six bony horses hitched Russian-style were at our door, with a single driver. It was the young Tatar. He said he had orders to move us, the Red Army front was coming through. In bitter cold we loaded our old people and what food and bedding we could, but two were
unconscious even before we crossed the Nogat River in a rowboat. There were no bridges left, and when we reached Damerau on the east bank of the Vistula two days later, four of them had died.

The Tatar drove one team, I the other, and even in the destroyed, flooded and frozen country of the Werder he was very good at keeping starving horses alive. He had Malenkov’s orders to take us where we wanted to go, so in Damerau I told him we were turning north to Danzig. He laughed at me, the city was still held by the Wehrmacht!

Exactly, I said. And if you get rid of your uniform, I’ll help you disappear among a million refugees, you can leave Stalin’s paradise and find a new life, that’s what war is for, so young men can see the world and escape to America.

He laughed again, but differently. I knew he could not believe a world existed where no one would order his obedience, but what he said was why would he desert his comrades, with whom he could kill Germans and fuck their women? So I said tomorrow he should help me drive our wagons as near to Danzig as he dared—the city was only thirty kilometres away—and then he could go back to his regiment. In return, he could fuck me all night.

That puzzled him. “Why would I do that?” he said. “I know you.”

There were no bridges left undestroyed over the Vistula either, but we found a Pole with a scow and a long oar and we traded him the two best horses for it. As the current caught us, we saw Onkel Johann hunched up high against the top board of the scow and the Tatar and I scrambled to help him. When I took his arm, he said, “No … no.” His eyes were shut, he had seen enough of the world, so I touched his soft, wrinkled cheek and we turned
away. When I looked down again, he was gone, and in the February light the wide river seemed to be grey ashes, boiling.

Karel disappeared in Danzig, but I and six of the Marienburger women, including Frau Heinrichs and Taunte Gertrude, survived all the “friendly” and “unfriendly” bombing—there was no difference in what they did—until the Soviet army finally overran the city on March 29. By then we were far from the main front and out of the city, behind a disintegrating wall of Wehrmacht backed against the Bay of Danzig where tens of thousands of us refugees were crammed along the sandspits. Ships could still reach the temporary docks and boats there, to try and ferry us to Denmark. On April 16, the
Goya
, the fastest ship on the sea, they said, returned for her fifth evacuation. We watched two Russian planes attack her coming in, and she was hit, but the planes were driven off and the fires put out. Loading began immediately. I got my six dear women hoisted aboard, and within two hours saw the ship cast off with thousands of people packed tight on every level and hunched shoulder to shoulder on the deck. Two minesweepers formed her convoy and we watched as she rounded the peninsula of Hel and disappeared, thousands of us left behind, crying aloud in despair.

For two months I had scrounged for food while Danzig was destroyed. The spring weather had warmed into a fiercer assault of unfound bodies rotting along the footpaths worn between and over the ruins, the collapsed, roofless walls of the Long Market, the Church of St. Catherine, the old docks along the Granaries. Only the massive tower of the Church of St. Mary and the beaked harbour crane at the Krahntor stuck up high into the air, but you dared not walk near them, stones and slabs of brick would unexpectedly come hurtling down. For centuries Danzig’s
walls had defied attack from land and sea, but attack from the air was too much; the stone ruins stood like broken sticks, crushed paper along the very slopes of the Bishop’s Hill. In all my searching I found nothing of Adam Wiebe’s original walls. The great city had been smashed, the thousands of dead beneath the rubble drifting away as stench in the spring air.

The ruins of Marienburg Castle on the Nogat were, of course, occupied by the Red Army when I returned, but there were more than enough cellar holes in the town to shelter me. It was after I had uncovered Sister Erika’s body and reburied it properly in the earth of the churchyard that I heard the rumour: at midnight on April 16 two Russian submarine torpedoes had hit the
Goya;
it sank in seven minutes. Fewer than two hundred people were recovered alive from the icy Baltic Sea, over seven thousand drowned in the worst marine disaster in history.

I stand at the grave of my friend and speak the names I know aloud over it:

And I remember the Vistula scow. The river will have taken him down to the sea as well, and I say:

Tomorrow I will go in search of Herrenhagen, if it can be found on the flooded Werder. If there are dikes visible above the water, it will be no more than twelve kilometres. If the Tatar survives to march through the rubble of Berlin with his comrades, he is certain to be arrested and shot for helping us, briefly, escape. And the implacable Russian comrades will very soon discover me, and I too will be arrested. I may yet, as my father said, make a tour of Siberia in a cattle car. Or of frozen Vorkuta.

Carefully I smooth the surface of Erika’s grave out of existence. Under my hands the soft, enduring earth. Then I take out her small Bible, which I took from under her shroud, hold it tight and say aloud, as well I can:

Father, show me a picture.

The summer picnic on the banks of the Dnieper River. Mother, on the right in her broad hat and long white dress, leans back against the cliff; your five friends lounge on the grass and against the rocks between you; and you sit on the left by the basket, the picnic blanket and the samovar. Everyone except you holds a glass, lifting them towards you as if in a toast. Father, why are you holding a guitar, the fingers of your right hand curled as if you were playing it? Did you, could you ever, play the guitar? Sing?

But he does not answer me. Finally I must continue for myself. I tell him: I am in the picture too, even if no one—not you, perhaps not even Mama—knows it. I am there below her heart, hidden, untouchable, safe.

O
N THE TELEVISION SCREEN
between the opened cupboard doors a gaunt woman and a very stout man are explaining why John F. Kennedy could not have been killed in the way the Warren Commission reported he had been. Adam is, as usual, clicking through the channels to avoid boredom and himself when this passing image—such an amateurish home video, two motionless people pinned behind a table scruffed with papers, talking—stops him in mid-click. He is already three channels past when those two plain faces twitch him back, a memory of a word, their—what is it?—their TV-unnatural normality?

A diagram fills the screen: a side view, a line of dots plotting the flight of Magic Bullet. That is its name now, the man’s voice-over explains, “Magic Bullet”: it was the first bullet—not the actual killer bullet—fired from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle, and it must have gone in six different directions, first through Kennedy and then through Texas Governor Connelly, to end up resting in
Connelly’s left thigh, though it was not found there. The dotted line shows it caroming about, thud thud thud—off what, political flesh hardened into high-office stone?—and then the camera shifts to an overhead view of the necessary trajectory: the bullet, moving from president to governor, ignoring completely the tender proximity of the presidential lady, must also have hunched itself sideways at least 1.7 feet to orchestrate all those wounds—seven in total, entrance and exit—before bursting from the two men, and gone.