It was a sad journey in many ways. For me, because I would soon be leaving these warm, essential people with their peculiar Ukrainian ways. For Heinrich, because he caught a glimpse of his past and saw it crumbling away. Despite all the snakes and smallpox and heat, he couldn’t remember a time that wasn’t happy, and in his mind, every detail was still fresh and brilliant. Osterwick meanwhile had faded.
We arrived in the late afternoon, when the grass was yellow and sleepy. The borachos were in bloom and the air was warm and fluffy with their down. A tractor was ticking along the great sandy drift that stretched through the village, gathering milk-churns. Most of the little farms were abandoned now, their orchards and white picket-fences feathered in weeds; their land engulfed by the ko-operatives. Heinrich stared at the debris of his farm in disbelief.
‘I had sixty acres of cotton and we picked it all by hand!’
We walked through the old yard. It had been home until 1984, a two-room mud-brick farmhouse with earth floors and a shed for the thirteen children. There were always rattlesnakes under this tree, said Heinrich, and this was the first cistern in Osterwick. The rainwater trap had now almost collapsed and the shutters were unbuckling themselves from the house. Funk, recalled Heinrich, was a useless builder.
Proximity to his old earth triggered other recollections. Heinrich remembered the first appearance of the Lenguas in 1929, wearing deerskins and bringing melons and meat for the hungry Mennonites. He remembered how the Chulupís arrived soon afterwards, threatening the Lenguas and their lencos – their ‘whites’ – with war. Then war itself came in 1932 with bi-planes and roads ‘green with soldiers marching’. The pacifists now found themselves crushed between two desperate armies.
‘We gave the Paraguayans eggs and bread. Occasionally, they stole from us.’
Surprisingly, only one Mennonite died. Abram Giesbrecht was shot by a trooper whose reasoning had been splintered by gunfire. The army hunted the soldier through the montes and executed him.
‘Poor Giesbrecht,’ said Heinrich, with startling, involuntary clarity. ‘The bullet entered his shoulder and burst out of his face.’
115
OSTERWICK HAS PROVIDED us with a riddle.
In 1975, Heinrich’s neighbour, Siemens, was digging his plot when a thick coin flopped out of the soil. It depicted Maximilian I in the year of his election as Holy Roman Emperor and was dated 1493. It wasn’t a valuable coin; a copper ‘hollow penny’, embossed on one side, indented on the other. Nor was Siemens’ coin the only one; two more Hohlpfennigs would be unearthed in different parts of the colonies. Eventually, they all found their way to the Filadelfia museum, where they now sit on tussocks of cotton wool.
Here’s the puzzle. How did these coins, minted in Augsberg five years before the discovery of South America, find themselves here, over four hundred kilometres into this desert? Even Asunción, which would become the nearest civilisation, was still nearly forty years off. Perhaps it was a hoax. But by who? The Mennonites held their land by contract and had no wish to advance a fanciful German ‘inheritance’ claim.
Perhaps the Indians brought them here, the fruits of trade or plunder? This still didn’t explain the fact that they were German. Why had no Spanish coins been found?
There’s no obvious answer, but in the annals of Maximilian’s family there’s a trail of clues. The Emperor’s son, Philip, married Juana the Insane of Madrid, uniting the courts of the Habsburgs and Spain in a formidable alliance. They produced a son, Charles V, whose adventures included the launch of Cortés and Pizarro. In 1536, he dispatched the massive River Plate expeditionary force, and among the ships was a company of his old countrymen, eighty Landsknechts from Nuremberg. Some of these squires, it seems, had embarked with pocketfuls of old Hohlpfennigs.
After the foundation of Asunción, the path becomes less clear. Some of the Germans stayed on. Ulrich Schmidel of Straubing was one of those who joined Irala’s last attempt to punch through the Chaco to Peru, and he provides us with energetic accounts of the ambushes and slaughter. Perhaps the pennies were lost on these Spanish routs.
Or perhaps the Landsknechts had launched excursions of their own? It is an intriguing thought: German conquistadors stumbling towards Osterwick and an imponderable fate.
116
I LEFT MENNO and went to the Fernheim colony and its main town, Brotherly Love, or Filadelfia.
Despite its cuddly name, Filadelfia was an unloved crust of a place, torn into strips by avenues: Unruh, Hindenburg and Industry. It was much as I imagined North Dakota towns had been before the arrival of asphalt and welfare: a wooden church, porches of tin, trucks ploughing the sand. The dust was like gas, bitter and excoriating, and was everywhere: in food, folded into plaid, tattooed into boots, creased into raw yellow faces. By noon, the Hauptstrasse was a long, wide welt of hot vapours, great feathers of dirt fretting up and down, mad for air. The Indians, always hovering for work, now hunched in thorny shade.
I soon realised that the colony was more than unloved, it was a source of perpetual reproach. Even in the name Fernheim – or ‘Distant Home’ – there was the constant reminder that ‘home’ was merely relative and that it wasn’t here. The Fernheimers were unable to understand the contentment of the Menno colonists and accused them of simplicity and a lange leitung, a circuitous wiring system. They said that, over in Menno, they were just Strooheed or ‘strawhatters’ (and, for their airs and sophistication, they themselves were the Schiltmetze, or ‘visorcappers’). Even now, the oberschulzes were forced to admit that, given the choice, every Fernheimer would up sticks tomorrow and head off for Canada or, better still, Germany. They’d never wanted Filadelfia and had never loved it.
I tried to find someone who could remember why they’d ever come here. I was taken to Cornelius Neufeld, water-diviner and slaughterman at the abbatoir. Although he was in his seventies, his face was full and red, like a parcel of knuckle and brisket, and every day he unzipped and dismantled a dozen cows. I watched as his Chulupís worked around him, impressive in all their blood and knives and growling at each other in Plattdeutsch.
A cold pink hand steered me through slaughter soup and cartridge cases to the office. Cornelius’ white rubber aprons squeaked as he packed himself into a chair.
‘I left the Ukraine seventy-one years ago …’ he began. His Spanish, like his meat, had been jointed and filleted. It was easy to follow.
It seems the Brauns had been right to leave Russia when they did. For the 100,000 that remained, the screw tightened. The Bolshevik Revolution of March 1917 brought the threat of collectivisation. The Kerensky regime was briefly sympathetic to Mennonites, but by October 1917, that too was swept away. From then on, the Mennonites were kulaks and the killing began. Some of the villages organised bürgerwächter, or self-defence, but their departure from scripture only opened wounds that have festered ever since. It also brought revenge. In the early days, a few found escape routes, but when collectivisation caught on, these bridges were burnt.
‘I was born in August 1929,’ said Cornelius. ‘Two months later my parents took me to Moscow.’
Thirteen thousand families undertook the same quest, to plead for deportation. All that winter, the Mennonites camped outside Moscow, tormented by the ice and secret police. Some died; most were herded back to the Ukraine. Only four thousand were given exit visas, including the Neufelds. They were moved to Leningrad and then by ship to Kiel. But despite the efforts of President Hindenburg, there was no home for them in Germany and they were forced on. There was only one place they could go.
Six months later, the Neufelds were riding the trencito to the end of the line. It moved so slowly that the children ran alongside. It then took several more weeks to get to their allotted land, ‘Fernheim’, where the naked Lenguas built them homes from mud and sticks.
‘The Indians called me Big Watermelon,’ recalled Cornelius, his laughter crashing away through the slaughterhouse.
Then came the grosse sterben, the �
�Big Death’, a typhus epidemic that killed ninety-seven of them. At last the Anabaptists found a use for the pot-bellied boracho trees: as coffins.
‘That’s how we came to Paraguay,’ finished Cornelius. ‘We had no choice.’
As the Fernheimers had never abandoned the hope that their town was only temporary, it had an artless, transitory feel, like a vast dressing-station in a long war. There were two colours, brown and clay, and no gardens. Some of the outlying hamlets didn’t even have names, just numbers like ‘Village Number Eight’ or ‘Freedom Field Five’. The town’s lumpy aspirations were carved into the town cross: Arbeit, Eintracht, Glaube! Work, Unity, Faith! Anywhere else, this might have sounded like hubris. In a town where everyone wanted to be elsewhere, it smacked of desperation.
‘The Nazis promised to get people home,’ recalled Cornelius. ‘My father led the resistance.’ In June 1944, the two factions fought an unedifying punch-up under the town cross. Order was only restored two days before the Normandy landings, with the arrival of the Paraguayan army. The Nazis were expelled to Nueva Germania, and with them went the last hopes of an exodus.
Against all its inclinations, Filadelfia had put down roots and institutions.
The Mennonite Hospital was the best outside Asunción, even though it was only wood and tin. A museum preserved all the hopes of the early settlers, their roubles and felt boots and Red Army hats. There was a library and a church hall, where weddings were celebrated, soberly, in coffee and pickles. There were bleak huts for the Gemeindekomitee – the council of elders – and tax machinery to punish the childless and indulge the fruitful. A radio station scattered announcements through the montes: prayer meetings, petrol pump times or the minutely prosaic.
‘Mr Duerkson has lost his watch on the road to Number Five …’
Of all their institutions, the one most eloquent of the Fernheimers’ beliefs was their sparkling supermarket. It was a co-operative, expressing not socialism but a community of capitalists: a man is valued by his efforts on Earth (although he must never excel, for that’s ostentation). It exemplified the rejection of the State; Mennonites could pay in scrip, not money. As in heaven, they could store up credit (although if they fell in debt it caused the till-alarms to ring).
But the guiding hand of the Gemeindekomitee was at its most insistent in the choice of merchandise. Alcohol was strictly forbidden. So too were any toys that offended pacifism: guns, Action Men, police cars, rockets, spacemen and even dinosaurs. Childhood was distinguishable from adolescence only by smaller seed-drills and bulldozers. Shelves were piled high with sobriety and godliness. There were pyramids of Bibles and barbed wire, bolts of canvas, spades, hymns on CD, charcoal irons, biblical tracts and dungarees. Other stuff was more marginal and I wandered the aisles pondering the theological debates that had raged over each new product. Who’d let ‘Froot Loops’ in? And Barbie’s Garden Party set? When I found ‘007’ aftershave, I began to wonder how long it could all last.
I walked on, to the edge of town.
Out there was another krankenhaus, for lunatics and alcoholics. The grounds were patrolled by tapirs captured in the wilds. They were pink and hairy and curiously officious, a komitee of buttocks.
117
BOBBY AND EVA Frick were Swabians and had been on the run from reality ever since abandoning their various marriages. They’d had an apple farm in Australia and had lived in a cabin on an ice-field in Alaska. Jack London was their inspiration. In 1984, they’d seen an advertisement in a German newspaper: ‘Settlers wanted, Fernheim, Paraguay’. They arrived three months later, shot all their neighbours’ dogs and waited to see where fortune’s currents would carry them next.
I stayed with them for much of my time in the colony, at Village Number Three.
Bobby was pleased that I was there because I might have an affair with Eva and then he could kill me. It wasn’t that he disliked me (he was less sure about Eva), he simply wanted to make a magnificent gesture. He was a powerfully built man covered in reddish bristles and scars gouged out by motorbikes and wild animals. He made a living as a plumber to the Mennonites and yet somehow the opportunities for expansive gestures kept eluding him. Most of this he blamed on the CIA. A loaded shotgun and Winchester Repeater always hung over the mantelpiece, in case things changed.
Eva’s world was less straightforward. A large quantity of seventies clothing had survived her wanderings, and she changed several times a day, as if she were several simultaneously disenchanted teenagers. She was angular and lean but more hungry than alluring. She kept four hundred cattle and visited them in heels and lip-gloss. No wonder Bobby suspected her itinerancy, but Eva was simply living in her parallel world. Despite the long search for wilderness, she’d yet to admit that she was just lonely. I imagined that that was why she took in lodgers.
‘Fifty dollars a day,’ she said but by the end of the week it was free.
The Fricks’ cabin was set in a deep tuft of quebracho trees and yellow blossom. I was surprised by how much I liked it and spent hours sitting on the veranda, book-ended by two giant dogs. I was vaguely aware of four children who came scavenging at mealtimes and who regarded their parents with deep scepticism. Most of the time they were out in the thorns, hunting parrots and ripping up the cactus with a tractor. There was virtually no water and the lavatory was only flushed three times a week. In the evenings, the family took long hikes into the montes, armed with crossbows.
Once I’d established the outer limits of the Fricks’ eccentricity, I became strangely fond of them. Every night we sat up drinking, first rum and then cartons of blackcurrant pig-wash. The first casualty was usually my command of English, but the Fricks babbled on. Sometimes I could even sense them talking to each other, using me as a sort of inert conduit of communication. At other times, Bobby’s stories of grizzly bears were so violent that they broke the chairs.
By then, I was having problems of my own. My jaw was now flapping around uselessly and hot, pyroclastic flows of alcohol and sauerkraut were billowing up from within. I gathered myself just enough to discover that the Fricks had found a common enemy.
‘The Mennonites are bastards …’
‘Shlursh …?’
‘… they don’t let us buy land, they charge us higher rates of interest …’
‘… they’re ignorant. Never been beyond Asunción …’
‘Thatsh shrurely …’ It was hopeless. Acute pig-washing had robbed me of forensic skills. The Fricks were now unstoppable.
‘They breed like cats …’
‘… inter breed …’
‘They drink …’
‘And fuck the Indians …’
‘Hypocrites.’
‘Cranks.’
By the morning, Eva had either mollified or thought of fresh lines of contempt.
‘… and I had the first pair of high heels in Filadelfia!’
I often accompanied her to the co-operative to buy provisions. She wore jeans and white stilettos and the Mennonites and their baggy wives regarded her with unrestrained fascination.
‘I have a bit of a reputation,’ said Eva needlessly.
I shrank away, terrified that, in the gossip that trickled through Filadelfia’s plumbing, Bobby would be a cuckold and I would be a lover – and a target.
I felt happier when we went out to Eva’s estancia, way off in the hinterlands. The foreman was an old Paraguayan, who wore pin-stripe trousers and lived in a wooden crate. He seemed to survive on rum and sugar and shot armadillos with his catapult.
‘Come in,’ he cooed. ‘My wife’s overslept.’
In fact she was long dead and the foreman was enjoying a joke. But he wasn’t pleased to see me. Eva was the only human being left in his world and he liked to have her all to himself. Instead, she made him get the horses. They had blood pouring down their necks and I must have winced.
‘Vampiros,’ grinned the foreman. Bats.
We rode out into a furnace of violet blossom and needles. The armoured
trees closed in around us and their cusps tore at my skin. In time, the rips would become raw and infected. Meanwhile, Eva had more unnerving news.
‘I lost four calves in here. Killed by the pumas.’
For the next hour, I was deeply troubled by the loss of little snags of meat but comforted by the thought that it could be worse. Then the vicious forest parted and we were before a long, wooden cabin.
‘This used to be our home.’
There were still skulls and snow-shoes nailed up on the veranda and books in the shelves, drifted in cobwebs. The sink was full of dirty dishes. A loyal fridge still hummed.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Bobby brought his mistress back here. I could never come back.’
Once again, the Fricks had simply jumped out of their lives.
Eva drove back to Number Three in silence. I made foolish attempts at jollity.
‘He beats me,’ she said softly. ‘With a club.’
There was a pause.
‘I’ve been to the Ordnungsmänner. Can you imagine telling those shit-heads that your husband is beating you? They look at me as though I am a witch.’
118
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the Indians and the Mennonites was more complicated than the blackcurrant blasts had suggested.
‘When we arrived,’ Heinrich had said, ‘we were very surprised to find Indians on the land.’
The Lenguas were no less surprised. Who were these very old people? Hard work seemed to have turned them completely white. They had faces like pineapples and voices loud enough to scare off a man’s ‘innermost’. But they were also gentle and had music and molasses. The nomadic Lenguas halted.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 40
