Sweeter Than All the World (43 page)

“ ‘The questions come at you at any time of any night, always after the middle of the night, and only the numbers are constant, solid as rock and the frozen spruce piled up like the dead waiting for spring to be buried.’ ”

Adam stops reading. He could follow the sound of Young Peter’s voice in his memory, but momentarily cannot see his words.

“That’s more than enough.”

Susannah says, “You’ve translated it beautifully.”

“That’s a problem, I think. Such a story, the better you tell it, the less horrible it seems.”

“Don’t philosophize,” is all she says. Then, “He did get back?”

“Very suddenly … I can finish that bit,” Adam says, shuffles paper and reads:

“… ‘the biggest men always die first, the women sometimes last a little longer, but I’m small, I work inside, I last seven years; until Stalin is dead. I get off the train at Platovka, different commune trucks give me rides and then I walk over the green Number Eight Hills till I see our Romanovka roofs low along the sky. I walk in the evening light, walk breathing the spring air and I reach the cemetery where lilac bushes are blooming with a perfume from beyond heaven. My mother is buried there under the lilacs,
no markers, only memory knows our graves. And then I walk to the centre crossroads of our village and open the door of our stone house, the same door where they took my father in 1937 and me three times. It’s a Wednesday again and Liese Peters, who is reading, stops. She gives me back my father’s Bible and I open it and read as if I had never left, aloud in that room crowded with the same silent faces, though I see that some are gone, read the words of Jesus, “They that abide in me and I in them, the same bring forth much fruit, for without me you can do nothing.”’ ”

Tears prickle in Adam’s nose, behind his eyes. Words so comforting, and, at the same time, so appalling. And it seems to him that the brief and quiet sorrow he has felt today for his sister, this dream of Susannah so near him at last, is growing like a tree in their midnight room battered by wind; that every branch, every root, every twig and family tendril is nudging under the beds and around the light bulbs and along the edges of the ceiling, sprouting leaves like pain and the room is stuffed tight, he and Susannah are being wrapped, closer, in the green, unstoppable growth of their ancestors’ suffering.

“ ‘You can do nothing,’ ” Susannah murmurs against his neck.

She is so close he could taste her; but he does not dare. He can only say, “Young Peter … there’s just the end, here … ‘That was my third return, but my father never came back once. They took him in 1937, and Stalin still lived sixteen years.’ ”

Susannah sighs. “That’s good. If they want to tell their stories, that’s very good.”

“Some can, when they’re old enough.”

She turns off the light. “Yes, when the pain’s leached out, a little.”

Anger turns in him, quick as tension breaking in relief. “Goddamn Dorothy, I could have strangled her in the cemetery.”

“Why? She’s a kind person, and thoughtful.”

“We’re in a graveyard already, why drag Trish into it!”

“She knows who we’re thinking about, she’s telling us, ‘I still have hope.’ ”

“Hope!”

Susannah says quietly, “She doesn’t pretend Trish never existed.”

“Good god, you think I do?”

“No. I think you’re honest, about her. But most people do pretend, it’s easier. Say nothing.”

“Well, we can’t think ‘nothing’ about her.”

“We both know that.” She shifts closer to him. “Tell me, about Young Peter’s father, your uncle Peter who was sent back from Moscow in ’29. He died in the Gulag?”

Her gentle breath; slowly Adam’s mind relaxes. “No,” he says. “They said he did, in 1960 the KGB sent the family a letter saying he died of a heart attack in a labour camp in 1944—imagine, sixteen years after!—but that was a lie.”

“Do they know what really happened?”

“In 1990 the KGB records were opened and a granddaughter wrote for information. They got a letter that said the 1944 heart attack of her grandfather Peter Wiebe ‘did not coincide with the truth.’ ”

“Did they say what did ‘coincide’?”

“Oh yes. He was arrested on February 13, 1937—which they knew, of course—and put on trial August 13, which they didn’t, convicted of working with a ‘counterrevolutionary fascist organization,’ sentenced to death and shot August 15, 1937. He
had never left Orenburg prison. And they even sent them a picture of him, taken at the trial.”

“God.”

“The KGB kept exhaustive records, always ‘cover your ass.’ ”

“Did they say where he’s buried?”

“No, but it’s obvious. Just across the Ural River from Orenburg, down in the wide valley there’s a city park now, a suspension bridge across the water, and tall trees. Young Peter and I walked over there with Elizabeth Katerina. In ’37 during the purge they took thousands of them into the valley at night to dig long, deep trenches, and then they shot them, into the trench.”

Susannah says, tears in her voice, “In the city park?”

“It was military land in ’37, then they made it a park. When the people found out ten years ago they’d been walking over bodies, they planted rows of birch trees, thick along the mass graves, and put plaques on each. Young Peter showed me his father’s name tree.”

“A birch tree. Growing.”

“A green forest of them. Elizabeth Katerina said, ‘It’s good he died here so soon. Heaven is the best place for him to wait for us.’ ”

Their awareness of themselves, together, in this anonymous hotel room washes over them. And they understand they are enclosed in a sadness too enormous to be endured, of bodies sewn together by suffering, by torture, by faith, by hunger, by Stalin, by God, by hope, by their daughter, their only daughter, and they can do nothing, they can only, they must, move closer together. The edge of her mouth feels like skimmed honey. She enters him as he enters her. “Slow … slow…” Her tongue silences his tongue, and he does that, a motionlessness beyond
memory or dream, they are discovering each other again as for the first time; but weeping.

The wind pummels the window. Susannah murmurs, “Adam.”

“Susannah.”

They lie on their backs; they are empty, profoundly comforted. In Lowgerman they could “walk from here and beyond the moon.”

Susannah offers, quietly, “I was in Saskatoon, at a Canadian lit conference. A woman there told me something about my father’s family.”

“Is it dreadful too?”

“No, nothing like yours.”

“What is it?”

“My dad’s ancestors were from Russia too. His name was actually Loewen.”

Adam lies still in amazement. If he had ever so much as dreamed Mennonite about Bud Lyons, he would have bumped into that Lions/German Loewen possibility—only last summer he heard that his Soviet uncle had turned Heinrich Loewen into Russian Genrich Lvov—all he can say to Susannah, foolishly, is:

“You and I may be related.”

“Maybe, ten or forty generations ago. This elderly Justine Toews told me her grandfather and my dad’s grandfather were friends in Russia, her grandfather was the David Toews who helped thousands of Mennonites immigrate here in the twenties.”

“David Toews, head of the Canadian Mennonite Colonization Board?”

“Yes—I thought you’d know of him.”

“He’s the main reason my parents got to Canada, he talked Prime Minister Mackenzie King and the CPR into it.”

“I keep telling you, Mennonites are good people.”

“Sometimes—at least to each other. How did she know David Toews knew your dad’s grandfather?”

“Letters. They wrote to each other in North America, all their lives. They were friends as boys, when their parents trekked into an Asian desert in 1880 to be ready to meet the Second Coming of Christ.”

Adam stares at the grey stucco of the hotel ceiling. Not in his bluest dream, as Young Peter would say, could he have imagined what she has said.

“Your Loewens followed that mad millennialist Claus Epp?”

“Mad? Who was Claus Epp?”

“Mennonite history has lots of strange stuff growing in the cracks. Have you gone to Idaho to follow this up?”

“No.”

“Well, the
Mennonite Encyclopedia
in the University of Calgary Library will tell you enough about crazy Asia Epp.”

“You think they were crazy, that Dad was hiding that?”

“No, no, please, most of the families left Epp, long before he gathered them on the hills for the minute he predicted Jesus would come, but never did of course.”

Susannah is silent, and Adam adds, “Want me to try and track your Lyons-Loewen family?”

“Leave it alone!” She twists in his arms, suddenly fierce. “Maybe I don’t want to know. My father had all his life to tell me what he wanted me to know. If he wanted his past to die with him, maybe, if I love him, I should leave it alone.”

“Okay okay. On the other hand, my mother would say, The
blessed dead are in heaven and there they know everything anyway—but it might help us, to know a little something on earth.”

“Did she ever say that?”

“No, but she believed in ‘the cloud of witnesses’ always in heaven, watching us on earth.”

“So that’s what you’re trying to do, snooping around so much, get the jump on heaven?”

Adam snorts. “I might not make it there, so I better know here.”

“I can’t stand your smart alec jokes.”

“I’m sorry.” And he touches her. She gives him back her elegant hand; it feels thinner now, but oh so marvellously warm in his. “My aged sister barely buried. But there’s so much, once you start—that’s just a bit about the Wiebes, and now your dad—I haven’t even dared read the letters about my Loewen uncles.”

Susannah says into the darkness, “Maybe you should start thinking about your mother. If she’s been watching from heaven, what has she seen you do?” And she stirs suddenly, sits up. She is clasping her knees through the bedsheet. “So many dead—I want to know how Elizabeth Katerina stayed alive!”

Adam can say nothing. She has given him such tenderness, so unexpectedly, but in the grey room her tone makes his long searches self-centred; a hounding of the ghoulish: is there something worse I can uncover? More lies? While avoiding my own.

“And that Peters,” she says, “and his village Susanovo.”

“You … want something named after you?”

“What are you naming?”

“Maybe the old homestead, at Waskahikan.”

“Oh. You always said you’d never go near ‘that backwoods mudhole.’ ”

“I changed my mind.”

“Really.” She is parallel and distant again in bed; she sounds almost sardonic. “So?”

“They’ve cleared it all off, the big hill is one bare field.”

“A bare hill. You could plant birch trees.”

For all the dead. Something else he had not recognized by himself.

“Yes,” he says. “Work, and hope.’ At last.”

Their arms and thighs touch. Her long, round body along his makes him shiver again. His erection brushes her thigh, but she does not move.

“Could I use your name?”

“For what?”

“The homestead. ‘Susanovo.’ ”

“Where you were born.” Then she adds, “I refuse to be dead.”

“Hey, that’s not what I…”

But it seems the lightness of her body along his helps his body understand what she is saying; before his mind can grasp it. Live as far apart as they may, for as long as they will, they can never fully fathom either their mutual, indivisible love or their grief unless they live through them together. If they dare.

She answers his thought. “Dorothy does not believe it.”

“She said that to me too.”

They have not made love for over eight years; he cannot reach for her again if she does not turn to him. Neither of them has ever been in this bed, in this impersonal, numbered room which is always, and only briefly, inhabited by strangers. Not even the sleeping clothes they moved aside are familiar: they are only as they know themselves and each other at this moment,
their bare bodies and the years of their life together so long ago, inside a cotton sheet and memory. So separate.

If he asked her, Why did you get into bed with me, she’d answer, Don’t make me regret this.

Susannah says, “The story of your sisters, it was lovely.”

“That silly minister … but I apologized later, he—”

“Shhhhh,” she says. So separate. But after a moment, “The Book of Common Prayer has ‘Forms of Prayers to Be Used at Sea.’ You three were always all over the world, so every day I said the one for travellers. But then I thought, we all travel on roads now, or air, so I made up my own.”

Her fingers touch Adam’s face, and he waits while they move along his eyelids, his nose. Her fingers reach his lips, and he feels her prayer as he hears it:

“O God our Creator, you are present in every place anyone can be. When you speak, the crooked is made straight and the waves of the sea fall still; you make the clouds your chariots, and you walk on the wings of the wind. O loving Creator, protect I pray these my dear ones who are far away, and travel. And bring each of us, wherever we may be, safe to our journey’s rest.”

If Susannah and Adam are together, they are sleeping.

I
WAS BORN ON
S
UNDAY
, J
ULY
25, 1965, in the maternity section of the University of Alberta Hospital, Edmonton. That gave me my most useful adult possession, a Canadian passport.

On my twenty-fifth birthday, which I didn’t celebrate, in the Turkish desert of Goreme, I finally made the decision I had pondered for years: I changed my name. Going from Anne Patricia Wiebe to Ann Patricia Wilson shifted me into a world of colourless English where unavoidable questions are never asked at border crossings, especially airports, and certainly none in snoopy conversations about ethnic Mennonite possibilities. Or, worse yet, questions about the blood spoor of relations fled and scattered in unexpected places anywhere on earth. Only Smith or Brown could have served me better, and I decided they both sound too easily assumed for simple, honest disappearance. “Wilson” moved me even closer to the end of the alphabet than “Wiebe”: in a list or demand roll-call I would have time to
consider various answers to inevitable questions as the final Ws approached.