Sweeter Than All the World (39 page)

They are no longer at a restaurant table in a hotel in Lethbridge; they are bent over an atlas and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in the narrow library of Coaldale Mennonite High School and she’s already reached the tip of South America while he’s still reading Uruguay and so he can ask her:

“Why do they call it Tierra del Fuego?”

“ ‘Land of Fire.’ ” And she smiles. “The earth burning at the last place on earth, maybe the Spaniards thought it was hell!”

“No, no, Magellan was sailing around the world, why?”

“The Yaghan people who lived there wore almost nothing, but they kept big fires burning on the beaches, and had wood fires in their canoes when they fished, the women dived in the icy water for shellfish. It really scared Europeans, the English too after the Spaniards, narrow straits and mountains covered with snow falling straight into the sea, and such naked people, their bodies shining with seal grease and fire.”

He can now only look at Dorothy, the plain Loewen fourth
or fifth cousin he once, for a year at least, tried crazily to imagine he wanted to marry and live with forever. That was what “marry” meant, then.

“You’ve gone there, haven’t you,” he says. Her hair is pulled back, gathered in a knot. Like my mother, he thinks. Trish never cut her hair like that.

Dorothy speaks into his thoughts. “I couldn’t resist, when I was in Paraguay with Mennonite Missions. I took off two weeks and flew to Ushuaia, it’s a green city on the blue Beagle Channel surrounded by white mountains. It’s beautiful.”

“ ‘Beagle’ as in Charles Darwin?”

“Yes, the great Charles whom Old Riediger tried all through high school to avoid. In 1834 he said the difference between the Yaghans and Europeans was greater than that between wild and domestic animals.”

“Hey,” Adam says, and they both bend forward, smiling at each other. “Do you still read the all-English and white-superior
Britannica?”

“Not much.” She laughs a little. “The University of Lethbridge Library is better. The Yaghans are like the Newfoundland Beothuks, all dead. Disease and hunting.”

“Hunting?”

“Business and good sport. The English said they raided their sheep farms, so they paid a bounty of one pound sterling for each pair of Yaghan ears, matched.”

“Shit,” is all he can say.

“Only the wind blows forever’ is one of their few sayings that’s still known,” Dorothy says, and drinks a long swallow of cool coffee. “The wind’s worse there than here in Lethbridge. An English missionary, Bridges, worked his
whole lifetime on a Yaghan dictionary, 34,000 words, the last people on earth.”

“Can anyone speak it?”

“No. I was reading a map, like we used to. Guess what I noticed, about Ushuaia, Argentina.”

It’s the old line of their old game; he grins at her, but for some reason he suddenly feels too sad for this, and much too ancient.

“I’ve lost all my guesses.”

Her eyes catch his longing. “Latitude,” she says. “It’s halfway between 55 and 54 degrees south.”

“Oh. The opposite of Waskahikan, ‘home’ in Cree, Miss Hingston wrote that my first day in school, that’s 54.4 degrees north.”

Dorothy smiles. “Too bad I wasn’t there that day. I would have hid under your desk with you.”

They both laugh at the memory of his English beginning with the terrifying planes. She lifts the last bit of eggs Benedict to her mouth as the waitress appears with a coffee pot and dips refills into their cups. Outside the May wind ripples long, dead stems over the coulees down to the Oldman River and the cliffs beyond, over the green grass sprouting where streets of whorehouses once waited for miners and cowboys and all the city men with their hats bent down to their noses.

Their silence together now is as empty, as easy as friends smiling; but then Dorothy disrupts it.

“David Loewen sent me two letters from Paraguay.”

“I keep writing I’ll send him a ticket,” Adam says, “telling him to come to Alberta, come visit once more, but he says he’s too old and I say, what’s old, one day flying? He says now the only way he wants to fly is go to heaven.”

She lays an envelope beside his plate. “He’s heard more about the David Loewen brothers, and Sakhalin Island, from some relatives in Russia.”

“He? Elizabeth Katerina told me she was trying to find out more from the KGB now, but she’s said nothing in her letters, not about them.”

“I think maybe they heard some lies.”

“Lies? She would never lie.”

“No no, not her—you read these. I made you a copy.”

His fingers touch hers as he reaches across, their fingers curl together. Her grey eyes contemplate him with such, he recognizes it, profound concern. These letters will tell him another bit of that story and he will fly there, walk through the prisons Chekhov saw a century ago, and consider the outline of Sakhalin’s burning hills his name-uncle could see from his cell window when his half-uncle Heinrich—he would have been Joel’s age then, twenty-six—Heinrich the Communist, travelled four thousand miles to find him.

Dorothy’s fingertips hook tight in his; she says, “She’s still gone?”

He feels blindsided, and slashed. Only a Mennonite relative would dare say such a thing without a word of courtesy. Dorothy’s face holds steady in the gentle tenderness it has in his best memories, but she also strikes him as so simple-minded that he cannot imagine what ridiculous teen longing could long to will itself to love exactly that in her: her directness blunt as a club down your throat.

He manages to growl, “She’s not just ‘still gone.’ ”

“Have you ever found anything?”

“Not a trace.”

“So how can you know?”

“She bought a ticket on a ship that went from Patrai to Corfu to Dubrovnik and Venice, but she never got off anywhere.”

“You followed up everything.”

“Search files two feet high.” He is far too loud for this stupid veneer restaurant, its ridiculous palm trees protected from the chinooks by glass and skylights. “One thousand seven hundred and three days, you want the hours too?”

“Adam.”

“Even stupid me running around the Mediterranean and all over the world has to catch on: ‘Give it up, Dad, I’m dead.’ ”

Dorothy does not flinch. She lifts her right hand open towards him and speaks as if affirming an oath:

“I don’t believe it.”

“You just can’t think suicide.”

“Is suicide easier than ‘Look, Dad, I don’t want to be found’?”

“Why would she be that cruel?”

“I don’t know,” Dorothy says softly. “But if it was suicide, why not leave her body where you could find it?”

“Sometimes I can only pray it was an accident.”

“Accidents are usually trackable.”

Adam’s mind has turned to stone. “Don’t you think I know that too,” he says, getting to his feet.

Three flat paper boxes. Adam lifts the lid of the longest, and he feels its edge worn to the grain by his mother’s work-flattened hands. Whenever briefly he came home in the years after his father’s death, at some point these boxes would appear on her kitchen table, rest there between meals of borscht or deep-fried
hamburger
Kotletten
, the snapshots inside them heaped in no order except her last shuffle. Her Canada Wiebe family in her hands, mostly posed in their Sunday clothes though on rare occasions working, their life caught in positions she could at last contemplate in a way impossible while living it. But Adam now sits with the pictures at his sister Helen’s elderly chrome table. Helen “gone home” has left these random bits of family for whoever bothers to take them, as he is left with her husband Joe Tanguay in their seniors’ apartment. Joe seated across the table with his grizzled head bowed between his hands. Tough, short blacksmith Tanguay, who with his steady pacemaker may well live into the next millennium.

The family midden. On top is his stocky mother, feet planted wide and arms crossed over her apron, leaning against a shoulder-high stack of Waskahikan firewood that stretches from one edge of the picture to the other; he himself sits on the woodpile, and on the ground below his feet Helen and Abram and Margaret rest on their heels; John must be taking the picture. Where is Helen’s son Raymond, her little daughters Julia and Grace? It is spring, Adam knows he is nine, it is the day Abram brought him home on the wondrous train from two weeks in the Edmonton General Hospital and an operation for the ruptured appendix that almost killed him, Dr. Coglan said, they were very nearly too long getting him to the hospital. But there Adam sits high on split poplar, his face overexposed into a white blur under a grey cap, the thick scar of clamps and sewn buttons, which will grow wider with his belly, slowly healing, hidden under a buttoned jacket. And to the right of his boots Margaret’s hair floats from her intense, open face, her arms rolled bare to her shoulders. He thinks again, as he always does: how could Mam let her be outside like that? Maybe it was just
Margaret being so swiftly, aggressively healthy in the sun bright against the white wood, I don’t want to be sick all the time! But in less than a year the family surrounded by everyone in the church will stand around Margaret in her coffin, sentenced by rheumatic fever, incurable then. “Last night Margaret’s heart tore off,” he told Miss Klassen when she asked why he came to school so late, and she let him put his head down on his arms on his desk and the schoolroom was as quiet as if everyone had gone home. Until Olga, the other girl in grade eight, suddenly sobbed out loud. Fifty years this April in the Waskahikan Mennonite Cemetery, the church long ago pulled apart for logs and the floor collapsed into its cellar hole.

Margaret, sixteen then, in the church choir, singing. Old enough to be buried in the row for women, between the men’s row along the outside fence and the children’s graves backed against the poplar bush.

“Lots of times Helen would sit there, looking there,” Joe says between his hands. “She sure really liked the old pictures.”

“I do too,” says Adam; and means it. The black Brownie box with the silver edges, a rectangle face of centred mouth lens that clicked on a spring and a smaller lens at each corner for eyes, you aimed that face, stared down into the viewer with the box steady against your stomach, found the shadows and between heartbeats flipped the trigger. When the mail came three weeks
later there they were, eight instants that might fade thinner in the debris of your life, but not wear away completely.

Unless you placed them in fire. Like martyrs, translated into air. That could happen too.

Below the first layer Adam finds the posed image no Brownie ever captured, the one he brought back from Russia last year and gave Helen, a picture she could not remember ever having seen. Herself as a tiny girl in a long black dress and white, scalloped collar, barely old enough to stand on a chair, balanced by clutching the cummerbund of a young woman. “Yes, that’s your mother, with Liena, your sister,” ancient Elizabeth Katerina Loewen told him in Orenburg Susanovo, who had by God’s ambiguous mercy outlived the war and ten years of Gulag in Magadan and permanent exile in the mining towns of Kazakhstan—“Is it mercy if God won’t let you die living a life like mine?”—having subsumed the war, and subsumed Communism, and now outliving its “complete mess,” as she called it, as well.

“My father, Alexander Wiebe, took that,” she told Adam. “He was a wonderful photographer, oh, if I only had them all. When your father was in Anadol in the
Forstei
during the First War and he’d never seen Liena yet, they sent your father that one. But he never got it, it was lost or stolen or thrown away somewhere but this copy was kept here, in the family.” She was adamant,
“Yo, yo, daut es Liena,”
and Young Peter affirmed it too. Adam knew that it could well be Helen, an unrecognizable tiny child, but at first he could not believe the young woman beside her: in black, her dress to the floor, tight on the wrists and high around the neck with an immovable sadness on her face, that could be his mother, certainly—but the large eyes, the long nose and wide, full lips, such a sharp, almost awesome Central Asian
beauty? He thinks, again: For forty-eight years I knew every touch and wrinkle of her skin, why did I never see that? Left buried in the pain of Communist Russia?

Was it there in Helen too, cute little Liena, fifteen years old when she arrived in Canada, his mother’s first and the only daughter who survived her? Had anyone—Joe?—ever seen it—perhaps focused in passion? Adam has tried to imagine his parents making love. What did he hear and not comprehend in that log house? It must have been possible, in the dark.

Layers in the box. He shuffles Waskahikan bush and the shingled church with Abram and Leora in wedding clothes, grim as winter on the steps, clusters of family in Coaldale and Lethbridge parks, and cows in a field with the roof of the house where he lay under the rafters at night visible among distant poplars, and Firebag Lake with his brother John leading his new bride out of the water and another of himself at six, laughing as he pretends to ride black Carlo—patient, tongue lolling—by sitting on his tail, behind them the flat sod roof of the barn that always dripped a day after the rain was over. Adam has seen all this, forever, it’s a bit stupid to sit here today, looking—if he digs much deeper he knows he’ll find Susannah and himself smiling on their wedding day. But Joe is immovably unspeaking, presence is all he can endure and Adam doesn’t yet want to read the letters Dorothy gave him, sixty years can wait one more day, and then among the greyish snapshots there appears a single sheet of a hymn he has not seen before. Page number 94, torn out, “Dearer Than All,” and he knows it, of course, completely from the high school choir, everyone sang, even the monotones like himself who knew they never could:

Very strange. He has always remembered that line ending “ … sweeter far than your own,” but it seems Alfred H. Ackley in 1915 actually versified an extra-sweet love far beyond mothers and available purely as private property, one might say “redemptive capitalism”: