Sweeter Than All the World (35 page)

The stout man and the gaunt woman behind their table are
saying this. In a thousand repetitious ways. Adam does not need to hear them, their motionless bodies a cipher of invisible words. The room he sits in is as blank as a room in any enormous city can be: a faint utterance of traffic, of plumbing, of heating: the white noise of twentieth-century indolence ending. Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail, nothing but tremors of sad memory. Avoid the worst, as always, as you can; find void.

Television lumbers on in its unstoppable chronology of bits and pieces. That is what Adam has always loved about books, their singular and un-timebound discreteness. Lovely to hold complete in your hand: beginning, middle, end, and return to any one, any time, anywhere, as you please. Totally here now, no mirrors necessary. Adam holds them, thus:

Wildfire Dreams:
 … what does an idiot romance know of fire? Not the cliché love image—the sheer fact of flame, a body searing into smoke and scream. Adam drops the book to the floor.

Adam places the “entertainment”—only in Greene-land would this book be called that—on the bed. He gets himself stiffly up from the rumpled counterpane and walks past the black, silent TV with all its trapped, unnecessary pictures—in which you can, nevertheless, still occasionally discover individuals who believe in planning their lives; who believe in responsible actions; who actually believe there are some decent people with some control of the world who know what they are doing and can make decisions. Who can somehow believe with their wavering Greek minds in a vaguely Hebrew god and hope for him too; hope he can help them decide for goodness.

The bathroom door, angled open, is all mirror. A man fills
it: the greyish tousled head, a white hotel dressing gown belted, two legs with feet slightly turned out.

Adam turns to the window behind him, and his hands—he knows them for certain—pull the curtains aside. All around him the stacked city burns in an unending light.

He thinks, This is safe. Like Greene’s Anne, he thinks, Oh, I’m home. He should have left the books in Bloor Street United Hall, should have walked up the steps into the church nave of high windows and wooden balconies curved all around, where he could have heard the bagpipes enter wailing the pibroch, heard a low voice read what should have been said over the flowers of Margaret Laurence’s memory:
How blessed are those who know their need for God, the kingdom of heaven is theirs;
heard the strange community of the tribe she drew together in her death sing “Come ye before him and rejoice.” Like Laurence’s Hagar he thinks:

Someone really ought to know these things
.

Twenty-seven storeys below him a shadow moves along the base of the building. I failed. It seems he can hear footsteps; there may be a knocking at the door. Oh, I’m so sorry.

He touches the window with the coiled surface of his ear. It is there, it is cool.

A
DAM
W
IEBE FROM
C
ANADA
is, as I tell him, my sort of lopsided double cousin: third cousin on the Loewen side, second cousin on the Wiebe. We laugh at that, and he tells me again he’s a good listener, he didn’t fly almost to the bottom of the world to hear himself talk. I tell him I’ve heard the world is round, and I think he’s farther north than I am south, maybe it’s he who lives at the bottom. We laugh again, there’s so much to tell, ten days will hardly get us started.

“I was named David for my Grandpa Loewen when I was born on November 25, 1925. A Sunday, my mother said, in the Mennonite settlement north of the Russian city of Orenburg, the Communists changed that to Chaklov. In the village we called Number Eight Romanovka in honour of the Czar, long before Stalin murdered his way to power and tried to rename the whole world. Stalin had changed his own name. He was a
Georgian called Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, and with a name like that maybe he would have lived as long as Georgians do, sometimes they say over a hundred years, but with the revolution and Moscow and power he only lasted seventy-three, not nearly long enough to murder and wreck everything he wanted, thank God; the air must be a lot worse in the Kremlin than in the Georgian mountain valleys. My mother, Maria, told me I was born so quick in the early morning my father would have had time to drive her and me to church in Number Five if they had still had a horse and wagon. Really, it was no wonder I came easy, she said, I was the last of eleven, though only six were living, including me.

“Orenburg Colony was once well-to-do, but after revolution and civil war, by the winter of 1925–26 no one in our villages had anything, my mother said, except empty bellies and dying children. There were too many of both, no one could have dreamed what the date of my birth would become for us in Paraguay. I don’t know if Orenburg Mennonites had ever heard of Paraguay then, maybe not even of South America, but here the Mennonites have made November 25 the anniversary for all we have been forced to flee, and we celebrate it as the Thanksgiving Festival of our escape from Stalin in 1929 and a memorial to the thousands we had to leave behind, like her
Jahonn
, our father John Loewen warm in our hearts forever, with deep sorrow and sudden tears.

“I have no memory of seeing my father. None. Though I have tried, staring at the one picture we have of him. My first memory of anything is so clear it must be from before he disappeared, and so strange too I wondered about it for years and could never say a word, not even to my Leinchi when she held
me in her arms, and still I thought about it. I finally recognized it when I sat at my mother’s bedside when she was dying. That first memory came together with a second memory, where I’m very little and I’m in front of a woman in a dark dress sitting in a chair. She is holding a baby, and it’s pressing its face against what I think is a smooth white melon that sticks half out of her open dress, and I ask her what the baby is doing and she says it’s eating like babies do and I wonder, how can a baby eat a hard melon that way, and in winter, I have never seen this before though I have seen many babies. We’re in the bedroom of our house with the winter coats of visitors piled on the bed, and I reach up and touch the top of the melon and it’s not hard like a melon would be, but soft, warm like the porridge I touch with my fingers, skimmed over and waiting for me in a bowl sometimes in the morning, oh, I thought then, if only we could have porridge every day! And I say to her, it’s you, the baby eats you! But she laughs, no, no, see, it drinks my milk, and she leans the baby’s shiny head away and I see her dark nipple, a drop of white on the centre growing pale blue as the baby bursts out a roar, its hands clawing frantically and she clasps it against her again and its cries choke, it gurgles, I see its mouth clamped there into fast sucking. And I recognized my first memory only when it and the ‘melon’ came together—why could I never see that before? Isn’t that crazy? My first memory was of my mother’s breast?”

Adam Wiebe, my cousin but a stranger from so far away, has a quiet, listening, doctor’s face. How can it be I have told him this, things no man would want to admit he could even think? But his expression, his eyes do not change, as if he understands there is more, and there is.

“Her breast, I mean my mother’s, was not full like the
young woman I saw, I remembered only the fold of her skin moving under my eyes and my fist, and the thump of my face against the fold of it bumping on her ribs, memories so sudden as she lay there. I held her hand and cried, I couldn’t explain myself with her on her last bed. You can’t say that, to your own mother.”

“Strange things,” Adam says, “people think of beside deathbeds. Often wonderful things that comfort us.”

His Lowgerman is all
n
endings like mine, a good Chortizer inheritance, but it sounds a little different, maybe that’s why—Lowgerman brushed with stranger English—we feel easy together.

“My old mother,” I say, “then talked mostly to me about their first year in Paraguay. She talked so much in the hospital, she never had before. But she wanted to tell me more, day after day, it was the heavy heat of January summer, 1967, but January in Orenburg was always cold, no one can imagine it living in Paraguay, with all the rivers ice and the ground hard as rock, and they were always hungry, those Soviet years before our father was gone. It was very heavy, what my mother had to carry over forty years and only silence could do it, she said. She tried to nurse me in Russia until I was almost two, tried with the little she had. The children before me, Peter and Anna, died before they were a year old during the civil war, and in summer 1925 our last cow died too and they had no money for another one, they could not even eat the meat, the cow was sick, so they gave it to the people who still had a pig to feed, and they had the last manure to dry and burn in the stove, and the cow leather that
mien
Jahonn as she always called him, ‘my John,’ and my oldest brother Vanya tanned and traded for grain they could grind into
porridge. That was what we ate that winter, oat and barley porridge and sometimes small cakes of it fried with a little fat.

“ ‘You would be the last one, I always knew,’ my mother said, touching my head, her hand so twisted by arthritis and endless work, and I, alone with her, strong and forty-two years old and married with healthy children and usually enough to eat here now, sometimes I couldn’t stand the thought of her leaving us—gone—I hid my face in her thin sheet so no one outside would hear me cry. ‘David, David, you were such a nice, heavy boy like all the biggest Wiebes and thick Loewens, when we married we trusted God would give us a strong family, and I told God He had to let you live, grow up like Vanya, our strong Vanya.’

“My oldest brother was, as they said, such a ‘Jahonn’ he was too much for a Mennonite name only, they had to call him something Russian too, happy and short. Vanya here, Vanya there, my mother said; nothing on earth could discourage him, he was so strong at fourteen. He and our father tanned cowhide for shoes and then for several winters they steamed and pounded old cloth and wool together into felt for boots and the summer before I was born they set up a press to make sunflower oil, first on a treadmill with neighbour horses walking and next spring Vanya drove a wagon to Orenburg and brought back a small steam engine press, and the summer after that they bought a threshing machine and then people planted more sunflowers and grain for our own food. The village and the whole colony too were slowly living a little better after years of barely starving, but Lenin was dead and then the collectivization planners came to Orenburg in 1928 with Stalin’s first Five Year Plan disaster. Well, by seeding time next year our father was gone, my twenty-one-year-old brother was left the man in the family and he came to her quietly
and said, ‘Mama, what do you think? Do we have to get out, try to go to Canada? Onkel Nikolai Wiebe thinks we should all try, and Taunte Tien and her Abraham think maybe, too.’ ”

“Were those my parents?” Adam asks me. “In 1929, they knew when to leave, for Moscow?”

“Oh, they knew, by July ’29 everybody knew. Your father Abraham Wiebe, my mother said, heard everything in the village and your mother could think quicker than a Jewish pedlar counting change. ‘Vanya! Vanya!’ my mother still wailed for her oldest on her last bed, though without a tear. Long ago she had cried enough forever in Paraguay, that was a knife through the heart, she said, but in ’29 there was nothing left to do but try to leave, escape if they could. But how could she leave and not know to remember the place where her Jahonn was thrown away in a grave, to pray there and weep?

“Stalin’s political police—the GPU—had come the night of January 3, 1929, and they hauled our father to Orenburg for questioning. And then he disappeared. Why? Even in those early days the Bolsheviks wouldn’t explain anything. After bringing the oil press and the threshing machine into our village he could never be anything but a Rich Kulak, but when they took him it saved our family from the worst the Soviet Collectivization Committee could do, they didn’t yet blame everyone in a family for what one person in it did, the way they did later. We would never be classified as the best, Poor Citizens, but with him gone and the oil press taken they registered us as Middle Citizens, which was not as bad as Rich Kulaks. But when we knew that’s what they had done, my brother Vanya went one fall evening to the head of the local committee and told him we wanted to go to Moscow where over three thousand Mennonites were already trying to get out of the
country. Vanya didn’t say the word
Moscow
, of course, or that our Anna and her husband with his whole Peter Wiebe family and your parents, Taunte Tien and Onkel Abraham, with their family were in Moscow already. Vanya just said, ‘You don’t want us here, give us papers and we’ll leave.’