Peace Shall Destroy Many (18 page)

But he had now tangled himself in the coils of his memory and he could not escape by forcing his look to the thick-erupting bundles. It had been for his son, after all. It was not for himself or his wife or Elizabeth or anyone: it was for his son who had been so long, so d
espairingly long, in coming.

The irony of Peter Block’s existence was, though he would rather have suffered death than participate in war, the World Wars of his time had shaped his life. He recognized this, yet, but for one stumble, the fact had never overcome him. Ironically too, it was the cruelty of his professed “brethren in the faith” that jarred him into consciousness that as an individual he was not sufficient to himself.

It began in the forests of Siberia where he had been sent as a conscientious objector in World War One. Knowing about the initiation to which the Mennonites of Forstei groups, in a desperate attempt at amusement during month-long isolation, subjected newcomers, he drew his iron determination about him and wordlessly faced the veterans on arrival. That evening at supper a kindly older man whispered to him, “Just give in quickly—they will not do much then,” but when in the middle of the night he was jerked awake and hoisted, blanket-muffled, from his bed, he disdained capitulation or resistance.

He felt himself drop sharply; he flung out his arms and almost choked in the wall of water that seemed to collapse on him. He splashed out of his wrappings in the slive
red ice of the horse-trough and, returning to the absolute quiet of the bunkhouse, shivered to sleep under his coat. Morning brought only their wordless stares; after the forenoon’s work he knew not a man on the crew could stay with him, stroke for stroke, except the long-jawed leader Heinz. At dinner they seemed to have accepted him, for several solicitously and quite needlessly advised him on sharpening his axe, but that afternoon, as he caught a moment’s breather on the clearing’s edge, his arms were abruptly seized from behind: the ring of them faced him. The wolf-jawed leader, now seated on a stump, ordered, “Get
on your knees—here!” As he was hurled forward, Block barely got his foot up to kick aside the leg stuck swiftly before him; he stumbled sharply but ended upright before the monarch. “Smart one, eh,” murmured Heinz, staring into silence the low laughter of the gang at their comrade’s bruised shin. Block returned no word. Heinz studied the expressionless granite of his face. “Okay,” he rapped, “the hard way.”

He was forced arm-breakingly to the stump. Heinz stood now, eyes afire: “No,” he growled, “no blindfold.” They pried his head face-down to the stump; at the last gleam of sunlight on the fir-dark above the crowding heads, he glimpsed the axe-blade glint swinging aloft. “
Count to five, Jake. Slow.”

The whipsaw-dust sweet in his nose ground down on the fir-stump as the count tolled above him, he did not believe it. At “Five!” he heard the swish of descent and that second such fathomless terror seized him that he almost twitched his head. The jerk and thud crashed through him grovelling on the stump-face. He was kneeling there with no hand to hold him.

The wolf-ring stared in the lonely clearing as he pushed erect, only his legs betraying. He deigned no toss of his head to clear the hair-straggle from his face. He looked at Heinz, then at the stump where the half-buried axe drew the wide diameter of his black hair’s half-moon. His hand lifted involuntarily to the hairline of his throbbing scalp. The stubble was about a centimetre long.

“Good with the axe,” his voice steady.

Then he saw his own number on the handle. With a one-handed heave, he jerked it out; they scattered like chaff as he swung about. With no more regard than if they were stumps, he strode to his place of work. Slowly the terror oozed from him as he chopped, doggedly.

That night as rats scrabbled under the bunks of the snoring men, his son-necessity hammered through him. Little Elizabeth was not enough; she would help form someone else’s family. He, the lone survivor of thirteen children, was a mere vacancy without a son. If that unerring axe had slipped—the answer was the first in his life he could not face. And for the three unending years of Forstei duty, he knew himself clamped in the relentless fist of God; he could but read of the promise to Abraham and pray to live.

Yet, following Russia’s abrupt withdrawal from the war, the relentlessness ground down more obviously than ever. He returned home as the Civil War stamped into their community on the western fringes of the Ural foothills. To either Red or White army they lost, one by one, horses, stock, wagons; their lives balanced on the sword-tip of a captain’s temper. Into the anarchy of 1921 stalked famine. Once-prosperous Mennonite village
s formed food-pools to feed the flights of beggars until they themselves had but ground-wheat and water to stir together for one midday meal and roast-barley “prips” to drink. Horses, cattle, dogs were long since gone; the granaries swept clean. As winter advanced, children lay limply abed while the mother huddled beside a scrap of brush-fire and the father drooped in his cavernous barn, not opening the door to the skeletons of Russian and Bashkir frozen on the village streets.

Suddenly for Block, in this climax of seven years’ harrowing, there flamed the hope of a son.

When in spring of 1921 he knew his wife was with child, despair vanished. Work for his son was the only religion. He surrendered to the government requisition barely enough grain to avoid suspicion; that other villagers would be forced
to make up his deficit he cared not at all. All summer he heaved water from the creek-trickle to save a corner of his burning grain. When in fall the village food committee questioned him concerning the two scrawny cows they knew he had butchered, he gave them a partly spoiled front quarter. “We ate the rest before that happened in the heat. I’ll share the few bushels of wheat I winnowed.”

John Esau, head of the committee, his fourteen children like a millstone chained to his neck, gazed heavily to him. Block thought savagely, May my soul be damned if I lose my one son to feed his eight! After they filed out, he bolted the barn-door and turned to stare steadily at the horse-stall where they had stood. Fifteen feet below their foot-sole lay the narrow slabs of salt-crusted meat, enough for one thin broth a day for the winter. He stood in the aisle, trying, in the stifling silence, to hear the cows breathin
g at night and the horses shifting their weight as they dreamed. But God’s grim irony could not crush him. He
would
have a son.

Before the new year fourteen Mennonites had died in the village. Almost all were grown men. Without lamentation, they were carried to the graveyard, box unopened. Almost a quarter of the neighbouring Russian and Bashkir villagers were dead by the last day of 1921 when the midwife emerged into the kitchen where Block was pacing. Swaying gently, the woman crooned as she held up the curled red body, “Cry, you darling little heart—you don’t know all the reasons you have to cry.”

Block did not hear her. He was looking at his only son.

Robbers descended on the desperation of 1922. Since the Mennonites were known to have pooled their resources and were openly non-resistant, more and more the slender caches
vanished in the night. Driven beyond endurance, the younger men of the colony banded together to prevent the depredations; they beat unmercifully whoever they captured. A few faithful protested such aggression, but the church-elders did not even raise their heads. Life was one unending stomach-gnaw.

On the last day of January, when a letter was read in the village promising relief by spring from the Mennonites of America, Block discovered the hole gaping in his horse-stall. All within was bare, save a trickle of mouldy wheat in one corner.

Numbly he walked through into the kitchen where his wife sat by a tiny fire; Elizabeth was drawing designs on the stove with a dampened finger. Little Peter slept in hi
s cradle. As Block looked down at him, a soundless belch formed on his lips.

“Did you hear anything in the barn while I was gone?”

Her look jelled into fright, “No, not until you came—what?”

“They got it all—every bit.”

“What—who—?”

“The Bashkirs.” He was too weak for rage. “There’s no bit of food left in the barn.” He sank to a chair in a long silence.

“There’s a sack of wheat behind the stove.”

“Yes. We’ll eat wheat-soup with the rest.”

She said, strangely, “I’m glad they got it. Pretending to have only flour and a few potatoes when we really had some meat: it wasn’t right. When others have nothing.”

“The American food won’t be here till the end of March. We had just enough—”

“We can live. Perhaps now we can even believe God will help us again. We’ve nothing to lie—”

He heaved erect. “How do you expect to feed him on mouldy wheat?”

“Mrs. Dick has—”

“He’s two years, and almost dead! The Bargen baby died yesterday—three months old and never a drop of milk. He can’t live!”

“God will help.” Nothing, not even her child, mattered. Only God.

Block looked down at the rosy face. He had seen babies starving: seen the arms that lay like twigs; heard the thin cry that slowly stretched away. His fists balled as he turned to his wife, as Elizabeth stared fearfully from behind her skirts. “Someone’s helping them. They wouldn’t just know how to get in like that.” He buttoned his shag
gy coat, black beard jutting over the collar. “I’m going to Heinrichs.”

“Peter, don’t!” Her plea was a meaningless movement of air.

“Go to bed.” He went out and closed the door. Down the cold-barren street, past the feeble lights of a few windows, he strode toward the house of the protective association leader.

On the night of February 12th they caught two Bashkirs prying at the barn-door of the village Elder.

In the lantern-light of a long-deserted barn, both faces bulged swollen in the final stages of hunger. Block rapped in Russian, “Who helped you in the village? A Mennonite?” The boy looked at his older companion, who said nothing. Block gestured. Gaunt faces gleaming like savages, the Mennonites ripped off the thieves’ tattered coats, trussed them solidly against the barn pillars while their flung shadows leaped grotesquely across the wall. Animal-eyed they circled the older man, only Block’s authority restraining them. Block
raged, “Who helped you?” The boy quavered from the gloom. “It won’t help. Tell him.”

The Bashkir said nothing.

They took turns beating with ropes, for they tired quickly. After the man gasped out that John Esau had told them of prospects in turn for a share of the booty, they be
at the boy. Names of Bashkirs came as the night ebbed. When morning dawned they left the senseless thieves roped rigid in the barn and marched to Esau’s yard.

Leaving the others outside, Block and the two oldest banged on the door, then crashed it open against its bolt. Five boys, oldest perhaps seventeen, lying in the large “summer-room” into which they burst, peered out from among the rags of the beds, faces glazed in terror. Block bellowed, “Esau, come out!” The flurry in the next room ceased. After a long moment, as the three hunters stared at the door and the boys huddled away, their skeletal bodies sinking out of sight in rags and straw, Mrs. Esau appeared, wrapped in a bare-worn sheep-skin, bent, shivering. She said, pathetically, “Please, John is very weak—”

Block’s scar flamed livid in the morning gloom. “We’re three. We can carry him—but he comes!”

Her face broke soundlessly, then, “No.”

Her eyes flew to the children, then she stepped back into the other room. As Block filled the doorway she said, her back to him, “He’ll come. Wait.”

When he came at last, wearing the same coat, they clamped his arms and pushed him out to the waiting men. There was no sound in the barren house as Block yanked the door shut.

By noon, after having beaten Esau into confession in Pretoria, the colony administrative centre, Block stood in the
only sleigh left in the colony, driving the two Bashkirs to Suworowka and the Russian authorities. In dead cold the plains stretched white and empty to fade into the horizonless day. He felt his body consuming itself, cell by cell,
as if each nerve quivered erect, longing, searching. Reeling slightly, he turned to look: the two Bashkirs crumpled behind him, and two Mennonites crouched half-sleeping at the rear of the sled. He said, “We’ll stop at Klassen’s in Number Three. The horses will drop if they don’t eat.”

One of his companions looked up. “So will we.”

“Yah.” Block thought of his son, without milk for a week, wasting visibly. The American relief seemed as remote as ever. His numbed mind rolled with fury unabated at Esau’s alliance with heathen. Then, in the village, as the farmer led the horses around to shelter and the three Mennonites pawed by the sleigh, the older Bashkir jerked erect in a frenzy, leaped down and beat Block in the face with his bound fists. The two men wrenched him away, but something burst in Block. He had lashed the thieves with ropes, as was the judicial custom, but now he sprang at the man, seized him away with a strength that knew no source save madness, and smashed the crook-nosed head back and forth, his frozen hide mitten like a club on his hand. The Bashkir collapsed to the hard snow with barely a moan when Block hurled him back. The three men stalked into the house.

When they returned, potato soup sloshing in their stomachs, the Bashkir still lay there by the sleigh. With his worn boot, Block poked at him. He was dead.

In the coolness of the Canadian autumn twilight, the Deacon’s face glistened in sweat while the four fat horses hoofed their
steady pace and the binder chewed at the field. He drove mechanically, knowing nothing but the remembered horror.

Only after he returned to the village, as day after day there was nothing to be done but sit and feel his body tearing itself, did his action edge into meaning for him. Not the inhuman brutality of the Mennonites towards their enemies when once they cut themselves from their convictions, nor the condemnation of the church stirred to activity by their Moscow representative, not even the ten Bashkirs dying under beatings, and Esau’s starvation in prison, affected him. These happenings were too far removed from himself. What overwhelmed him was one scene. And on an evening when the American relief had come and both children slept, contented, in their room, with a convulsive movement he buried his head in the blankets beside his wife and cried like a child. It was the remembered way the Bashkir’s whole body had squeaked over rigid on the snow when he prodded it with his foot, the thread of spittle frozen across its swollen face. With his own hand he had killed him.