Sweeter Than All the World (20 page)

He stops. Her face is as expressionless as only perfect concentration can be. He thinks, For a woman to be so physically stunning is sinful. And mutters, “Facts enough?”

“You must have been a superb doctor, such a fast, incredible memory. Okay”—and her tone shifts—“why, of all things, did you memorize that?”

“Because—” He stops before her steady black eyes. “I wanted to. I like it.”

“Because it has everything you avoid? Life in a claustrophobic village where everyone would know everything, and you couldn’t even get away to the next village? What would you do without cities? If you couldn’t disappear instantly from one faraway place to another?”

“Do we need this amateur psychology?”

But she reaches to touch his arm, suddenly gentle. “The root of ‘amateur,’ ” she says, “is Latin for ‘lover.’ ”

“That’s much better.” He lays his open hand on her leg folded under the other. “Lover talk.”

“You know all about mine, now, tell me yours.”

“My what?”

“Obsession.”

“What, my obsession?”

“Or whatever you call it: your thick ‘Bloody Theatre’ book. Torture as public spectacle, those overwhelming stories.”

“You like that title, don’t you,
The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only Upon Confession of—”

“Hush, I know that, it’s magnificent—now, quote me a story from it, word for word.”

“It’s all Dutch, I only know the translation.”

“Okay, you’re a lousy scholar, but you’re soaked in it, c’mon.”

“Which one … you want the Kafka parallel, a sentence being printed in blood into a prisoner’s skin? The cry of tender Eulalia when the iron ‘claws cut her sides to her very ribs, “Behold Lord Jesus Christ, thy name is being written on my body! With great delight I read these letters—”’ ”

“No no. One you haven’t told me before.”

“Well,” he says, abruptly calmed, thinking. “How about a martyr song? From the oldest Christian hymnal still in use, the
Auss-Bundt
, a song composed just south of here, in the castle of Passau?”

“There were ‘defenceless Christians’ on the Danube?”

“All over Europe. About sixty of them were imprisoned in Passau in the 1530s, but before they died they wrote songs so people could sing their stories, remember them. This is song number 17, its title—I translate freely—‘Another beautiful song and marvellous story of two women in whom God’s love over all things proved to be stronger than death. To be sung to the melody one sings to the King of Hungary.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“Each song was composed to a well-known tune, a folk song or ditty, even dance melodies, so when people sang these death stories they could still feel happy, in a way.”

“They sang their death—that’s profound.”

“I don’t know the ‘King of Hungary’ tune, and I couldn’t sing a note anyway … well, it begins:

“and tells in nine-line rhyme the long, tortured story of Maria and Ursella van Bechum. Two Dutch sisters, I’ll save you the communion theology, skip about forty verses:

Even as he recites his translation, Adam sees the aged-oak pages blotched with ink and mould of the
Auss-Bundt
he discovered on an Amish Mennonite flea-market table in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, bound hard in leather and signed in Gothic German: “This book belongs to me Amos M Yoder.” And he reaches up for the warmth of Karen’s shoulder. Which for a moment isn’t there, but then comes.

“They call that ‘singing with happiness’?”

“Both women ‘remained steadfast,’ so they went straight to God, in heaven.”

Her kiss nuzzles him, tongue and lips at his nose. “What would it be like, to live such a life beyond doubt?”

He cannot imagine. The words of the song, such direct, ordinary words—they came to him out of their archaic German into English as quick as stretched string—but somehow he cannot feel them. What if he could sing?

She says, “My all-knowing off-by-heart lover.”

Off his heart indeed. She runs ahead of him, along the wall of that neglected nunnery, past the locked and boarded chapel doors, past the square bell-tower towards the great trees of the woods singing to a much different tune.

“Come run in the woods, come run in the woods … come, come.”

Running away along the cloister wall. He needed a long mirror to see everyone in his life as they ran away. More often, as he himself ran. Only his mother remained fixed: on her knees singing her living prayer.

He finally catches Karen. She has stopped under the beech branches where they spread over space falling away into the wide, wooded valley. He is gasping.

“And there in the wood,” Karen sings, dancing before him, “a piggywig stood, With a ring at the end of her nose, her nose, With a ring at the end of her—”

“Toes, her toes, come toes or come nose, we will come to blows.”

“You blow or I blow?”

“We’ll blow together.”

“And come together.”

“Can’t—it won’t rhyme.”

“Rhyme schmyme.” She swirls that away with one naked arm flung over the earth. “Flow together, grow together, stagger to and fro together.…”

The branches with their perfectly pointed leaves spin beyond her black hair against the sky, bits of light opening in his eyes like the elliptical movements of a starry night. There is a jagged branch thrust under him, he knows it with a quick stab of
pain and he thinks, I’ll carry a scar on my ass for life. But he forgets that completely, in her marvellous, ineffably sensual movement coming over and down around him.

It is visible in the bathroom mirror; he bends lower, backs up, looking ridiculously between his spread legs. Self-examination, a sharp red depression.

“New angle on yourself?” she asks, suddenly there. “Physician, cure the pucker of your piles.”

“I don’t have any.” Going to her.

“I know that perfectly well. I’ve kissed your every pain away, all week.”

“Not every pain.”

“Oh, you poor darling.” She knuckles his head.

“Yes, kissing should make me feel all better.”

And she turns tables on him again.

“Our kisses never will, will they?”

She folds herself into the stuffed chair in that cavernous room and he kneels against her knees. He thinks later that if he had glanced back at the open bathroom door and the mirror, he could have seen them together and reversed, and for a short time longer they might have escaped together. But his face was in the fold of her thighs. Only she could have seen that mirror.

Strangely, the double doors set in the cloister bell-tower open when he pulls at them. Open out together, like the library doors of his childhood.

But there are no shallow shelves here. Rather a compact, dusty square scattered with straw, mouse and rat leavings, bird splatter. Pigeons, their beaks bobbing out from the high beams;
brooding up there in the lengthening summer. Higher still in the cross-light they thump and scrabble inside the upper dome of the tower, where level light dusts more beams into existence.

He climbs the ladder fastened onto the wall rung by rung; and rests, leaning on a dust beam as if it were oak, holding tight an iridescence of air. Kafkaesque indeed. At the thought, the white spot of Karen’s face appears far below him, rests on the roundness of her bare shoulders. As unrecognizable as his own face would be upside down.

“Adam, don’t.”

Her long call climbs the wooden ladder thinly; it reaches him, stretched into one transparent word:

“ … d-o-o-o-n’t.”

In his examination room his medical decisions were once sharp and instantaneous, but for himself he can never decide to go, break and be gone. That first turning away, others always had to do it. And did.

He longs, overwhelmingly, to climb even higher, to see only the backs of the pigeons as they lift their dappled wings wide to escape. He wants her to be terrified with him.

He climbs, hand and foot. Through the arched windows he sees he is lifting himself above the crests of the forest. There is no iron bell above him, only mortared stone and the wooden bell-beam. When the steps of the ladder reach the last oak beam in the empty dome of the cupola, he plants his feet on it and without a thought lunges up towards the higher centre bell-beam, flings himself out into air, grabs it and holds tight, body swinging like a wild clapper. But when he tries to lift his legs, curl up and hook his feet up over the beam, he discovers he can’t do it; his feet are too distant at the end of his suddenly too heavy
body, the oak beam is now too far away below him. Hand-width by hand-width, the square beam cutting into his wrists, he pulls himself along it nearer the wall, then walks his feet up the wall until they climb onto either side of the beam and he can hang, fastened hand and foot like a sloth, over the deep column of space below him. He has climbed as high as it is possible.

And realizes, with a jolt of supreme terror, That was my last move. My body will never pull itself up, it cannot lever itself over onto the top of this beam. I can only hold on till I fall.

The stupidity of what he has done wraps him in a wondrous calm. He once lifted himself so easily, walked on two-by-four rafters of houses in the southern Alberta wind, or swung between the parallel pillars of scaffolds. This beam is straight rock between his straight arms. He does not dare look down. He will listen to the beat of birds returning below him, the air now a bed of needles; his clenched stomach and hooked feet and hands are locked on something, somewhere, but already they feel nothing, certainly not the edges of a beam older than Gothic, nothing. He is resting in freefall. Or possibly prayer.

The Gothic arches of the bell-tower windows surround Adam. He hangs above the beech forest and the far clearings of German fields, bent roads, villages, the perpetual distant drone of the Autobahn. Beech is
Buche
, he is beamed like a bat above a
Buchenwald
. He knows he cannot get back to the oak beam
beside the ladder, and it crosses his mind, suddenly, that rather than the
Heimatleeda
of Mennonites, it would be lovely to hear the cantor at a bar-mitzvah sing those much stranger songs of sorrow and dedication, of lament clear as human mystery. The words between Karen and himself, even the simplest like
go
or
ahh, god
or
again
or
no
never quite find them home. Not as completely as they desire, search as deep as they may.

Or to hear the delicate medieval angels that sang for his one and only bride at his one and only wedding. The wordless memory of Susannah moves through Adam like ancient air. Perhaps that bridal song has been waiting here for him to climb into, floating here slender as the spin of spiders beyond the tips of the tallest trees, song without body, there will be no body at last, only tips of flame.

“Adam.”

Karen. On the oak beam just below him. One hand clutching the top rung of the ladder, her body stretched up as if groping blind to reach him. Her fingers point, they cannot quite touch him, but his one hand lets go and they grip each other and instantly his feet let go too, the maw of space swings up from under him and his heart lurches wauggh! as he thrusts himself towards her and he lets go of his beam completely as she hauls him across air and into her strong as steel.

“You ass,” she gasps in his ear. “You-god-damn-ass.”

His hand too grasps the rung of the ladder. The air, swaying, wraps them around one another, their brief summer clothes, skin, bones, hair.

“You can’t run away
up.”

They are held on the beam by nothing but air and the wall ladder. They fold each other into each other’s fear, but their
hands and arms, their implacable bodies tighten in the movements of love; imperceptibly she opens her thighs, imperceptibly he pulls her harder against himself.

“Why Kafka, why not Rilke?” he whispers.

“Too much Catholic misery.”

“At least Catholics have the Virgin and Child.”

“True. More merciful than Moses.”

Air the sheet that hides them, for the moment, from the reversals of necessarily being alive.

“We could look for Rilke,” Karen breathes against Adam’s cheek. “For Rilke too. Their lives overlapped, they lived in Prague, they never met.”

“But Rilke wasn’t a Jew.”

She is pulling him tighter towards the wall. “He didn’t have to be. Maybe he was a ‘defenceless Christian.’ ”

“You think maybe Kafka was that too?”

They sway gently, like the clapper of a bell, a memory too light to strike sound. Hold tight on the edge of falling, the lip of terror and ecstasy.

“I
KNOW YOU,” MY GRANDFATHER SAYS
. His hair is as white as the hospital pillow on which his head lies, but bristly, thick; he has not lost a strand in seventy-three years. He peers up at me as I bend over, expecting an answer to what? Of course he knows me, I want to cry out, he and my grandmother Mamme raised me, over twenty years.

“You have my name,” he adds, as if making a pleasant discovery. “Abraham Loewen, you were born April 4, 1914, in Bessie, Oklahoma. But you didn’t grow up there.”