Sweeter Than All the World (42 page)

“Our father’s oldest brother, Ohm Jakob they call him, worked in Orenburg Susanovo with a shovel till he was seventy-eight, planting birch trees. But in 1937 he was still in Number Eight Romanovka when Stalin decreed the New Constitution and then the purges began again, no more show trials, they just arrested people by the thousands, and one night the NKVD police came for Ohm Jakob. Their black cars always waited at
the edge of the village and when it was dark they drove slowly without lights down the street, the way they had already come and taken our Onkel Peter. They hauled Ohm Jakob south over the hills to the city of Orenburg, three Black Marias in a convoy filled with men and women from the Mennonite villages, it didn’t matter if little children were left behind without parents, they just had to fill quotas every night. Elizabeth Katerina told me black curtains covered the car windows but they knew when they drove inside the Grey Building that still stands on Kirov Street in Orenburg. She took me there last summer with our cousin Young Peter Wiebe, he and his family were with ours in Moscow, but he couldn’t take me near it alone—she had to come with us—because he was inside there so many times, later. Everyone in a Black Maria knew exactly where they were when the iron gates slammed shut. They lined them up in the hall, and led them away one by one to register, and that night there were so many Ohm Jakob finally sat down on a chair in the hall, praying and waiting, and nobody called him. He was on the ground floor, with offices and cells on the two floors above, and he could hear ‘interrogations’ as they called them going on in the basement under him, sometimes he heard such long screams he could only cover his ears. But no one came for him, the grey police kept rushing past him with papers while he prayed, and finally he started to move his chair inch by inch, closer to the outside door. After three hours he was still there, but beside the door. It was locked of course, and he almost fell over, so exhausted, and a man came from the basement and asked him what he was doing. He said he didn’t know and the man yelled, ‘You can’t sit here and fall asleep, out!’ and he opened the door.

“We stood right across the street from that door, and
Elizabeth Katerina told me Ohm Jakob didn’t know the man. Young Peter said to the end of his life Ohm Jakob believed that had been the holy angel of God.

“He walked away from the door in the free air, and the sun was coming up and people going to work looked away, no one said a word to him walking away from the Grey Building of the NKVD, the window shutters are never open even now, and the steel gates wider for trucks. In four days and nights he walked sixty miles back to Number Eight Romanovka, no one saw him on the steppe, he made sure of that, and next day he and his wife were gone. West over the Number Eight Hills to Orenburg Susanovo, where he grew a beard but kept his name, there were always four or five Jakob Wiebes in any Mennonite village. Every collective farm was ordered to plant trees, along roads and train tracks and between the huge fields, so the Susanovo Commune elected Ohm Jakob their head tree planter. Everywhere you go now, in the village and the fields and pastures and along the river there are birch trees, planted three or four rows wide along the wind side of roads and across the hills. Elizabeth Katerina and Young Peter and I walked there and sat under them when it rained. Some are two feet thick and as tall as cottonwoods.”

Adam gestures to the cottonwood skyline of Coaldale half a mile away, and stops. He sees a large cluster of people gathered with him around his mother’s grave; they seem to have been listening to this family story from the other side of the world. And he feels the perpetual wind that moves in southern Alberta: it is blowing a little harder, the air almost cool in the low, evening sun.

“Uncle Adam?” a girl’s voice says, and he recognizes one of the pall-bearers. Helen’s grandchild, Nicole Wong, her face like
an oriental painting. “You were in Russia, talking to your aunt Elizabeth Katerina?”

Adam laughs. “Yeah, thank God for Lowgerman! She isn’t really an aunt, a very distant cousin, but she was caught in the Second World War and afterwards the Soviet Army dragged her back from Danzig into Russia and she was sentenced to hard labour, and like Young Peter—he actually is my first cousin—she got her sentence cancelled after Stalin was dead and she…” He stops.

There is too much to tell; it cannot be spoken here in the open wind, too many people multiplied by all their living stories and he smiles at Nicole, her black, intense eyes. The faces around her are considering him with sad but also curious concentration. A family tells stories.

“Let’s go back,” he says, “to Lethbridge, and coffee, and I’ll tell you more about your relations in Russia.”

“Did you make a video?” A very young man, with a younger girl hooked on his shoulder.

“No, I took a camera, prints … come, I need coffee!”

And gradually, after they have all considered their great-grandmother’s stone, including its translation:

the tangled Canadian family of Katerina and Abraham Wiebe, who alone of all their close Russian kin escaped Stalin in 1929, drifts in small, shifting clusters through the cemetery to the parking lot. We should be caribou, Adam recognizes, seeing them move and talk; our wandering life on the skyline an eternal search for whatever food will sustain us, too bad we don’t have
shovel hooves or natural enzymes to digest grass and moss, we can’t smell Arctic lichen under snow; then nothing but good wolves would be pursuing us.

John limps close to him, and lifts the arm he doesn’t need for the cane up around his shoulder. Adam puts his hand up on his brother’s, feels it clasping him wide and strong, veined by heavy work, knuckles scarred by wrenches slipping, and for a short while they walk that way. The single mass of their shadow with its two heads reaches over the graves ahead of them.

Dorothy says beside him, “That Elizabeth Katerina Wiebe is about ninety, yes? And born in Gnadenthal, Ukraine?”

Adam tries to remember. “She said she was ninety-one, maybe she said Gnadenthal … there was probably one in every colony.”

“I started a genealogical tree,” Dorothy says. “I think her grandmother was a Loewen in the Judenplan Colony, married to a Benjamin Abram Wiebe.”

“One more Abram Wiebe!”

Susannah says, “One more exalted father of a multitude.”

And they laugh. “Just the two families,” Dorothy says. “Wiebe and Loewen, just births and places and marriages and deaths,” as if that would make the simplest story on earth. “I think I can find her ancestor connection with us, probably in Old Colony Chortiza.”

Dorothy gets into Susannah’s silver BMW; Susannah walks to the driver’s side, and Adam follows her.

“Will you stay for coffee?”

“It’s two hours to Calgary, I don’t drive in the dark.”

But he senses her hesitation, and before he can catch
himself he adds, “Best chance you’ll ever have, meet even more of my numberless delightful relatives.”

She glances at him. Her green eyes—they once would deepen into blue when they made love—tell him, You can be wonderful for a few minutes, but then you’ll crack a joke and run. Or lie. And he knows like a knife in his heart that they will never stop loving each other.

So he adds, dead serious now, “If it gets late, there’s two big beds in my hotel room. I use only one.”

She opens the door, sits down behind the steering wheel, and swings her black legs in. The motor starts as the door closes clipped as a sentence.

A
NOTHER HOTEL ROOM AT NIGHT
, but very different. The wind here drives up from the Oldman River coulees so furiously, determined to cave in the windows.

Adam says, “Young Peter finally did take me to Russia, it’s perfectly safe now. He was practically Helen’s twin, born the same day. His family had a big stone house in Number Eight, across from the school—‘Stone Wiebes’ they called them, though more for my uncle’s character I think than the house—Helen was born in my parents’ worker house at the end of the village. The stone house is still—”

“Listen to me,” Susannah says into the darkness of the room.

She had disappeared under the blanket of the opposite bed, curled for sleep as she always did, and Adam had finally fallen asleep reading. But then he was awake because she was in bed with him. Behind him, her fingertips at his shoulder as if to keep
him at a distance. He turns towards her, there are pyjamas and a sheet and half a metre between them.

She says, “Your Taunte Elizabeth, she lives in that place called Susanovo?”

“What are you doing?”

“Asking you a question.”

“Parole d’honneur?”

“Half-day funeral pass, close relative.”

“Correctional Services Canada never issues bed passes.”

“Relatively close relative.”

Adam thinks, Slowly, slowly; and speaks softly to her ear, “Her name is Elizabeth Katerina, a very distant cousin. She survived the German army retreat and the Soviet army overrunning them in Danzig.”

“That village, Susanovo?”

And he is even happier, he recognizes her inflection. “Yeah, really, a Mennonite village has a woman’s name. In 1911 an Orenburg Peters bought an estate on the steppe for his five sons and three married daughters, they were building the first farmhouse when his wife Susannah died. So, he named it.”

“Amazing,” she says.

“It’s strange, after fifty years it’s so easy to get there—one day. Fly to Orenburg from Frankfurt, hire a taxi over the hills for fifty dollars U.S. She has a little house made of railroad ties, it smells a bit like tar but that’s all they had to build with, she’s ninety-one and survived … you can’t believe what she’s survived.”

“Does she believe?”

“Prayer and God, she says, that’s why she’s alive. Nine years of labour camp because she nursed old people in Germany. She says she can now let her past be what it is.”

They lie motionless, their bodies parallel, quiet.

“There is mercy too, she says, though usually you can’t see it when you most need it.”

“ ‘The appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.’ ”

“Who said that?”

“A priest, in Graham Greene.”

“Ahhh.” Adam remembers.
“Brighton Rock
, the girl at the end.”

“Rose,” Susannah says. “Just before she walks into the worst horror of all.”

“ ‘Curse God and die.’ Elizabeth Katerina said she cursed, many times, but she never could die.”

“Why not?”

“Come with me to Susanovo, you can ask her.”

“I can’t speak Lowgerman.”

“I’ll translate, and you can watch her answer. She’s so strong, bent like curved steel, a gaunt, engraved … I’d say ‘holy’ face.”

“You can talk to your lost cousins in your own language.”

There is a surge, like a wash of sorrow between them, but he swallows hard, still so happy. “Mothertongue,” he says, “best of gifts. I even taped her and Young Peter telling stories, and translated some into English.”

“You have them here?”

“I brought one of his, for Dorothy.”

“Read me something,” Susannah says.

He says with a flip, “Reading could remind you of what we used to do in bed, out loud.”

Her response crackles like ice. “You want me to leave?”

“I’m sorry, no no…” He touches her bare shoulder,
“Please…” and reaches across her carefully for the folder. “It’s just so sad.”

“That fits, we’ve just celebrated a good funeral.”

Susannah’s irresistible ability to make connections: he has forgotten so much about them together, even while he has remembered a few things too incessantly. Companionship, a beautiful word, he feels her warmth even though she is lying so straight, so far away from him. But she came to lie beside him. He turns on the bed light and fumbles with pages, to tell her the story of slight Young Peter, standing again on that Orenburg street. “The corner of Kirov and Ninth of January, there it is.” Eighty years old and unable to look at the Grey Building. “I was in there,” he told Elizabeth Katerina and Adam, “on the third floor in 1930, and in ’41 and ’48. And in the cellar eight times too. Many small rooms, waiting your turn, you could hear what they were doing to people. And smell it.”

Adam finds the next place, and reads: “ ‘ … there was no such thing as “God” in Russia, and the NKVD—they kept changing their initials, first it was GPU, later KGB, but they always acted the same—the NKVD made sure we knew they watched us all the time, you can’t imagine how fear controls you, but our village closed the windows and met Wednesday evenings for Bible reading anyway. I had the Bible and the room was always tight full and I read in German, my father Peter’s Bible was the only one in Romanovka. In ’48, the night they came, I was reading aloud John 15: “I am the vine, you are the branches. They that abide in me…”

“ ‘And there was a pounding on our house door. As they always do. And of course it takes a while to get our door open, we always had the biggest men and women around the door so
they can’t get in too fast and when the pounding came I put the Bible back behind a stone in the wall and left the room, fast like I’d done two times before, but this time they are smarter: the two biggest ones are waiting outside the kitchen door when I open it. “We just want to ask you a few questions, nothing more, don’t worry, Citizen Justina, he’ll be back for night.” Of course, but which night? Five years later, when Stalin was dead, Khrushchev made the “Cult of Personality” speech, saying things we would not dare think in our bluest dream, and then he reviewed all the ten or eleven, maybe it was thirteen, million political prisoners’ records, and after almost seven years I was released just as quick, I could go not even into “free exile” as they call living anywhere except within five hundred kilometres of your home village, I could go, go home.

“ ‘I was still alive because I am small and because I can keep books. Even sitting on a stool in a heated room all day you got barely enough food to keep a body as small as mine breathing year after year, but if you had to labour in the mines or forests in the terrible cold, especially if your body is big like yours, you don’t last a month. Smaller people last longer, sometimes almost half a year, but me they would have stuffed with black bread gladly forever, sometimes even a fishhead in the soup, because every camp administrator has to have a bookkeeper to keep him ahead of the Boss who’s all of a sudden there to check the endless records that have to be kept in the camps to avoid arrest, every turnip peel weighed and written down, and to have a prisoner who can add and is honest, well, every Overseer I ever had kissed me and cried when they took me away. By God’s mercy, seven years into a twenty-five-year sentence and I am still alive, the food ration is the same to meet a quota for trees cut in waist-deep
snow or to add numbers all day, numbers like forests growing green in your head until your eye slides down numbers so exactly not even the inspector with his electric machines can do it faster, account books piled to the ceiling and thank the dearest God who gives you this year after year mind of numbers and denial, nothing more, “No, I did not … No, I never said … No, I know of no one…”