Sweeter Than All the World (40 page)

Okay peasant, flat on your face for king and love. Adam lifts the page to Joe. “Did Helen like this song? It’s in here.”

Joe studies the sheet. He will need to shave before the funeral, but he was seated in his chair beside the table when Adam came in and he has not moved. Well, Raymond will be here soon.

“No,” Joe says slowly, and tears well in his voice as he turns the sheet over, “it was this one she really liked.” Number 93,
“Sweeter Than All:”

No falling flat for Christ in a song by J. Howard Entwisle. It was the favourite of all male quartets at the Coaldale Mennonite High School. If you could sing deep bass or high tenor in it you would be elected student president and were sometimes permitted to sit on the church podium with the row of grim preachers during a
school program. But Helen never went to school a day in Canada. When they arrived she went to work on farms where she said the farmers and the hired men were grabbing you all the time anyway, so why not get married, eighteen was old enough, of course, Mam said, and she learned to read English when little Raymond brought home his readers in grade one, her life endlessly repeating itself in labour and children.

“She sure really liked that one,” Joe says, and hums the last line: “ ‘Sweeter than all, sweeter than all.”’

He is weeping. And Adam finds under his fingers one of the amazing photographs Elizabeth Katerina gave him, taken by her father long ago in Orenburg, Susanovo. It shows little Liena about two years old, standing on a bench under trees in an orchard and leaning forward, her tiny fists bunched on a table covered by a white cloth. To her right stands tall Mariechen. That’s your half-aunt, Young Peter tells Adam, she was worked to death in the Trutarmee, the labour army, in the Ufa coal mines during the Second War, she was the oldest child your grandfather David Loewen had with his third wife.

And the boy on the left, hair cut tight over his head and mouth pursed, who’s that?

That’s Mariechen’s brother, your half-uncle Heinrich.

Heinrich?

The one in the Red Army, Heinrich Loewen the Communist.

Whose picture in spiked Red Army hat and Red Star uniform Adam has seen all his life, the cruel “artelistic” greetings signed with such a graceful flourish across the back. Adam asks his relations in Germany, in Russia, wherever he finds them, Why did Heinrich become a Communist?

They all tell him he was the sixth and last of those Loewens. David Loewen never had any children with his fourth wife Lienchen Peters. That was my mother’s best friend, Adam says, she was the same age as my mother but Grandpa made her call her friend “Mama”; she could not forget that, even after fifty years in Canada. Yes, they say, that happened then, a young woman marrying an old man because he had a good house and land and grown children, if he was old enough you could outlive him, as Lienchen did; David Loewen was only fifty-four but those two had no children anyway. Adam asks, They were married the same year as my parents, 1914, and Mam called her first child Liena, why would she do that when she disliked calling her friend “Mama” so much? And some tell him, You should have asked her, and others, Maybe her father made her do that too, and others, Your father was the eighth son of Old Jakob Wiebe, not the sixth, and he fled with his family to Moscow with all those other thousands of Mennonites in 1929 and most of them were sent back to Orenburg by the GPU worse off than when they went, because they’d spent all their money and now the Communists knew they wanted to get out. But your family did get out, they even found Canada and not Paraguay. I know that, Adam says, I was born there—but Heinrich, did he ever marry, why did he become a Communist?

Huh! Who knows, even when he was little he was always jae-
jenaun
, against everything. He was twelve and in school when Lenin sneaked back into Russia shovelling coal on a train into St. Petersburg, and then revolution and civil war and starvation and endless police and politics, they were building a new world so they had to burn the old one to ashes and kill everyone in it, it was the right time for the young to
be jaejenaun
, just against, against.

But Adam insists, Why would the Communists do that, when the Mennonites always lived in Russia in more or less communal villages, working together and caring for their poor, surely Marxist teaching fit that?

Why, why, you always ask why, there is no
why
with Russian Communists. Everything is the way they say it is and that’s the whole situation. Marx said there is no God and he wrote about factories and workers, almost nothing about farming and villages, so all the Bolsheviks could do was destroy everything and make it up different, most of them had never been on a farm, they invented new taxes and turned churches into dance clubs and pig barns, the more it scared people the better. Each Mennonite family once owned its house and certain fields outside the village for crops, and common fields for village pasture, but in only two years of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan they took that all away with impossible taxes, they had meetings and meetings until no one had time to work even when it was planting or harvest, they set up committees where the laziest and most useless who never knew what to do except follow orders were the highest bosses. And they obeyed Moscow to the letter though sometimes they couldn’t even read a word of the orders—regular taxes and special taxes and then the worst tax—the “volunteer tax” as they called it, a joke, where you voted how much
extra
you wanted to pay because you were such a wonderful citizen you
wanted
to do extra, but if you said ten per cent, Moscow wanted twenty-five and they would just keep declaring the meetings invalid and finally have the room surrounded by GPU, watching until everyone voted twenty-five.

Weren’t your Big Bosses elected Big Bosses?

Elected! There was never more than one nominated for any
position, the ones who’d never held a shovel in their hands, just vodka bottles and not even glasses either. They’d sit at the big tables with forms and stamps, and a Mennonite would have to read word for word what the orders said because if you couldn’t read you’d certainly be elected the biggest boss in the local kolkhoz, and then you could go around every village with at least two GPU with guns looking at whatever you wanted and taking that as extra tax too, for yourself. No one, not the hardest-working farmer, ever had enough to pay taxes two years in a row.

But Heinrich became a Communist, Adam persisted.

Oh yes, Heinrich was David Loewen’s youngest, he would never inherit any land and maybe that saved him from arrest, but maybe also being
jaejenaun
—that was always useful to Bolsheviks, and at twenty-one he could certainly read and after Stalin chased Trotsky to death and had his first and second Five Year Plans, Heinrich was already an officer in the army. But to survive even in the army you did what Stalin’s political police, the GPU, “suggested.” Nobody in Russia asked for reasons then, when they suggested anything you just did it; but to get permission to travel as far as Sakhalin, well, even for a soldier in uniform with papers in order, travel was very dangerous, and so far in winter! Yes, it was winter, Adam’s relations said, so who knew what iron you could carry sewed into your felt boots.

But why, why would Heinrich kill his brother?

Because, they say, that’s what Communists do.

Ancient Elizabeth Katerina, standing bent but fiercely strong among the lilacs of the Susanovo cemetery, told Adam one more thing: “You come here once from Canada when I’m ninety-one, God already knows we won’t see each other again so we can say this aloud, no one will hear us here. I have written
letters to the army, and the KGB. In Siberia I met an exiled officer who knew Heinrich Loewen in the army. He called himself Genrich Lvov, Russian for ‘lion’ like German ‘Loewen,’ and somehow he slipped through Stalin’s army purges in the thirties and in 1945 he was a colonel who helped overrun Danzig, but then in April a German sniper shot him on a street in BerlinBuch. I am writing letters, maybe I can find out more.”

“Berlin-Buch,” Adam said slowly. “That’s where Hitler’s last bunker was.”

Elizabeth Katerina broke off a sprig of purple lilac and held it to her nostrils. “I only got as far as Danzig in ’45,” she said, breathing deeply. “Only one side of the Marienkirche tower was left, and the big beak of the Krahntor, walls standing like broken chimneys, or posts. Oh, I could tell you stories—” She stops, looks across the cemetery and the village to the distant hills. “You come to Russia and we all tell you stories that are true—stories true for us.”

Adam holds the story of his tiny sister and Mariechen and Heinrich in his hand, the picture of them in the spring orchard. Nineteen seventeen, Orenburg Romanovka; austere children with not one discernible wisp of joy or anticipation on their faces. Letters that must be read. A past seemingly silent and motionless as a frozen river, but the current is always there under the ice. Though hidden, it flows relentlessly with time, distance, enduring ancestors.

Not now. Now is the time to remember his loving sister.

He holds the old picture in both hands. His sister Helen’s round infant face with its button nose emerges from a white collar, so lovely and already so profoundly sad. Mariechen is long, slender, she looks calmly to the right across the heads of the two children beside her. Does she already see coal holes in the tundra? Heinrich, standing, is slightly taller than Helen on the bench. He’s seven, a face of fixed stone. As if predestined.

And the old woman bent against the cemetery lilacs, her hands gnarled into hooks by freight trains on the Trans-Siberian Railway and Kolyma and gold-fields beyond frozen volcanoes, placed this picture in his hands. He finds he is crying.

It is Susannah who walks beside him down the sloping aisle of Seventh Avenue Baptist Church. Together they follow in procession behind Helen’s coffin, Joe and Raymond leading, the other six children and their spouses with the grand- and greatgrandchildren, brother John and his new wife Emily, into the moan of an electric organ whining the Fanny J. Crosby joys of heaven. Despite that, Adam feels happiness well up in him: his sister freed at last from her human concern and body ache, and Susannah momentarily so close that her sleeve brushes his suit: this is their third processional in three years—it’s becoming our one, certain, annual ritual, eh? she said—beginning with his oldest brother Abram, then John’s first wife Erica, and now that they are three months past eight years into their separation, he thinks again they might soon negotiate some version of day parole visits. Parole, from the French
parole d’honneur
, “word of honour” she asked him on the phone a summer ago without so much as a ripple of humour.

Why should we try to live together again?

We’re married … we’re lonely.…

Speak for yourself.

I am.

Well, tough. Don’t whine to me, I have great friends, excellent students, lots of work I enjoy.

Be honest, don’t you still love me?

Don’t you use “love” on me.

Don’t you?

Does “love” for you mean “live together”?

It’s a decision too.

How long might your decision last this time?

Ahead of them in the church, past all the mourners, at the bottom of the aisle the coffin turns right under the pulpit platform, and stops.

The pews are thick with people standing all around them, heads bowed, hands folded, and he feels Susannah nudge his hand. Three cool fingers, guiding him. Before him John turns, and Emily, into the pew reserved for them, and he follows.

In the pulpit above them is one of those all-purpose-mellifluous “Pastor Bills”; he reads the standard Bible verses with odd interpolations, and leads every hymn by braying into the microphone (was that his name, Bill Brayer?), his loudspeaker voice overpowering the organ; a man cheerful as cabbage and with less ceremony than if he were cooking borscht (which would certainly be beyond this necktied goof)—god, such ridiculous thoughts.

His sweet, venerable sister’s body lies in that burnished coffin beyond the pews. At each family funeral Adam remembers down to his fingertips the texture of Margaret’s flat, square box. It was covered with black cloth, every edge hand-stitched by
Mrs. Aaron Heinrichs; Mr. Abram Fehr bevelled together the spruce boards cut at Mr. John Lobe’s sawmill, all corners mitred; the girls at Waskahikan School made the pink crepe-paper roses that covered Margaret’s bare arms and spilled over into the open grave when the men, with Abram and John at their head, lifted her unevenly onto the grave planks and then closed the lid, nailed it carefully down. The women of the sewing circle had puffed the satin ruffles up around her shoulders and face so devastated by her long dying. Her black hair lies curled against her shoulders: Adam feels the brush in his hand snag, she sits up for a few moments on the cot in the corner of the room where they live and eat, his scribbler lying in her lap, and he has just tried to show her how he does long division, the number he must divide is 227 and Margaret makes him explain it, step by step, exactly, and what happens to the number that is left over, and then like every evening he tries to brush out her long hair that gets tangled from lying all day, sweating and tossing on the pillow, he tries to do it without hurting her. Addie, Addie, careful. There’s a knot.

“When the roll is called up yonder I’ll be there!” Pastor Bill bellows cheerfully over the quiet drone of the mourners; heaven is a one-room log school where you answer the roll every morning, Here.

Susannah brushes against his left hand; he realizes it is clamped in the grey cloth covering her right knee, her bones so exact in the wistful longing of his fingers he did not notice.

For God’s sake, Adam! Her anger crackled on the phone. Look at yourself. Why should I believe you?