Women Talking

by Miriam Toews

  I return Agata’s smile. I’ve longed for nothing else, I say. I have asked Ona many times over the years, asked for her hand.

  And she always said no? asks Agata.

  I smile again, call out to Ona: One last fact for you, Ona, I say … I will always love you!

  I hear Ona laughing, but I can no longer see her. She is leaving.

  Agata is climbing down, is almost at the bottom of the ladder.

  And she loves you, too, August, says Agata. She catches her breath. She loves everyone.

  *

  How will I live without these women?

  My heart will stop.

  I will try to teach the boys about Ona. She will be my Polaris, my Crux, my north and south and east and west, my news, my direction, my map and my explosives, my rifle. I will write Ona’s name at the top of every lesson guide. I imagine schoolhouses in all the Mennonite colonies in all the world, as the sun is disappearing, stealing away to share its warmth and light with other parts of the world, and everything belongs to everyone, and it’s time for the chores and for dinner and for praying and sleeping, and the children beg their teacher for one more story about Ona, who began as the devil’s daughter and became God’s most precious child. The soul of Molotschna.

  And the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.

  When the elders and bishops of the Mennonite colonies preach the story of Saul and his conversion, they will at the same time repeat and invoke and incant the story of Ona, with her messy hair and filthy hem and easy laugh and love of facts (dragonflies have six legs but can’t walk!) which, to her and maybe to all Molotschnans, are like dreams, when a man’s dream becomes for us the truth, when Menno Simons’ fevered vision is the word, when Peters’ angry interpretation is our narrow path and facts are in the world, the world we don’t belong in, or can’t belong in, or perhaps do belong in, and they are kept from us and the real facts take on mythical importance, awe, they are gifts, samizdat, currency, they are the Eucharist, blood, forbidden, and imagine this: a fetus can help to repair his mother’s damaged heart, or any organ, the brain even, by sending stem cells to the organ; and listen to this: the hearts of two women who suffered from heart weakness were later found to contain cells derived from the cells of male fetuses years after they gave birth to their sons … and so I invoke Ona’s love of precision but also of mysterious rivers and secret playing, and her embrace and her kindness and her unborn child and reparation and disturbing dreams, and her love of myth, of madness, of skipping ahead, of listening and solitude and fists raised to constellations, of rooftops and wash houses and shining eyes, eyes that shine as the story takes hold and cruelty becomes a weak flame, then is gone.

  Agata reaches up and pats my knee. I’m towering over her now, and I bend to touch her shoulder. She is descending, she puts her hand on mine. I remind her to hang on to the ladder with both hands.

  She asks me to stay in the loft and to wait for Salome, who will return here in search of the women.

  Tell her, says Agata, that we are gathering behind the schoolhouse.

  What about Aaron? I say.

  There is no response. The women have left the loft.

  *

  The list, as requested by Agata.

  Sun.

  Stars.

  Pails.

  Birth.

  The harvest.

  Numbers.

  Sounds.

  Window.

  Straw.

  Frint.

  Beams.

  Futility.

  My mother.

  My father.

  Language.

  Soft tissue. (Its resilience and ability to remodel even as it protects the hard tissue, the rigid endoskeleton of the human body. A colony. Often defined by what it is not. I can hear Mariche’s voice, mocking: Why do you talk that way, August?)

  A dream. (About small houses built of stones, easily dismantled overnight and carried off in wagons, to be rebuilt elsewhere, and then again dismantled, and in each dismantling the chalky substance of the stone erodes a little bit more until the house is so small that it’s not a house anymore. In my dream, Ona was put in charge of these houses and seemed always to be engaged in a public debate about whether the houses should be restored, preserved or allowed to erode to dust, as is their nature. If the houses are made to be dismantled, impermanent, and if by dismantling the houses time and time again they erode into dust, then mustn’t we let them? That’s what they’re made to do. If we don’t want our houses to erode then we must, in the first place, make them in a different way. But surely we can’t preserve houses that were built to disappear. Some people attending this public debate, in my dream, disagreed with Ona. They said: But it’s a question of heritage, or of a heritage site, an artifact and a physical reminder of what once was. And Ona would say, in my dream, smiling, Ah, but that’s something else!)

  Flies.

  Manure.

  Wind.

  Women.

  My list is listing, listless. The origin: liste, from Middle English, meaning desire. Which is also the origin of the word “listen.”

  But now I hear voices, and clambering on the ladder.

  The young women, Autje and Neitje, appear in the loft. They are surprised to see me. Hide, quickly, they say.

  JUNE 7

  August Epp, After the Meeting

  While I hid in a hay bale:

  The Koop brothers came to the loft. Their voices low, male, nervous, surprising. Autje and Neitje spoke with the boys, softly, laughing, stretches of breathing. I couldn’t hear well from inside the bale, straw in my ears. The boys and the girls lay down with each other in a corner of the loft, across from where I hid, beneath the lowest rafters. They kissed. The girls laughed. They murmured. Told the boys to close their eyes. Then it was silent. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see. Then I heard a familiar voice. It was Salome.

  I heard footsteps coming towards me. The straw was brushed away from my face. I saw Salome!

  She told me to get out of the bale.

  I climbed out of the bale on my hands and knees, afraid of what I would see.

  Autje and Neitje were standing beside Salome, watching me. They pulled straw from their hair. It was loose, wild. Their kerchiefs were tied around their wrists, stylishly, their white socks rolled down around their ankles. Behind them lay the Koop brothers, asleep or dead, not moving. I looked at Salome for an answer.

  She told me she had made them unconscious with the belladonna spray. She told me that she had instructed the girls, Autje and Neitje, to lure the Koop brothers to the loft with promises of intimacy, to make a considerable amount of noise so that she could enter the loft undetected. She told me that now the Koop brothers would not be able to go to the city to inform on the women.

  She told the girls to go to the buggies waiting behind the schoolhouse. It was time to leave.

  The girls waved goodbye to me, diffidently. Goodbye, Mr. Epp, they said, over their shoulders. They climbed down the ladder, then ran laughing, exuberantly, away from the barn, away from Molotschna.

  But where is Aaron? I asked Salome.

  She told me that she had found him, that he was already in the buggy, waiting.

  You convinced him to leave? I asked her.

  No, she said, I didn’t. I used the spray on him too.

  My eyes widened. I began to speak.

  I had to, said Salome, he can’t stay here. It’s just as though I had picked up a sleeping child in the night and carried him away from a house that was on fire.

  Is it? I asked. What if he changes his mind?

  Salome shook her head. It will be too late, she said, we will be gone. He’s coming with me. He’s my child.

  I nodded. She told me she had sprayed Scarface Janz also.

  I had to, she said again. She was planning to go to the city to tell the men.

  But does she know how to get there? I asked her.

  No, said Salome, of course not.

  Then it was an id
le threat, I said. There was no need to spray her.

  But I was afraid, said Salome, our warrior, our captain.

  I wanted to tell her that if Aaron were to run away from Salome again, to return to Molotschna, that I would keep an eye on him. I would walk beside him, as we have learned to say.

  But Salome was leaving. She asked me, rather, to keep an eye on the Koop brothers. To make sure they remained unconscious for seven or eight hours, long enough for the women to get away from Molotschna. She handed me a container that held the belladonna spray.

  Use it on them again if they wake up too soon, she said. But don’t let the elders find you with this in your possession. She laughed.

  Where did you find it? I asked her.

  She told me it had always been stored in Peters’ dairy barn.

  Peters’ barn? I asked. (Is it for good or for evil that Peters is the caretaker of the belladonna spray?)

  Salome had turned and was walking towards the ladder.

  Goodbye, August, she said.

  I asked her to wait. I went to her. I put my hand on the fleshy part of her arm, above her elbow. She didn’t flinch. She held my gaze.

  Please take care of Ona and her baby, I said.

  Salome nodded, promised that she would. Ona was her sister, her blood, and the baby too.

  She began to climb down. We really have to hurry, she said.

  But you’re not fleeing, I said. You’re not rats running from a burning building. She laughed again.

  That’s right, she said. We’ve chosen to leave.

  But not Aaron, I wanted to say. Salome, I said.

  What now, August? Haven’t you noticed how determined I am to go? She laughed.

  Don’t come back, I said. Don’t ever come back, any of you.

  She laughed again. She nodded, and told me she’d miss me, to be a good teacher, and that I had straw in my hair.

  Oh! Wait! I told her.

  August! she said, exasperated.

  I ran to the table, the piece of plywood, and picked up my notebooks, the minutes, and ran back to the ladder.

  Please give these to Ona, I said.

  But you know she can’t read them, said Salome. What will she do with them? Use them as kindling?

  Her child will read them, I said. Tell her to keep them, not to use them as kindling.

  Salome laughed once again. I hadn’t realized how much she laughed, like her mother, like all the women of Molotschna. Saving their breath for laughter.

  Unless we have nothing else to start a fire, Salome said.

  Yes, I said, unless that is the case. And I thought: For kindling, for warmth, the minutes would give life to the women as the women had given life to me. The words were futile, a document. Life was the only thing. Migration, movement, freedom. We want to protect our children and we want to think. We want to keep our faith. We want the world. Do we want the world? If I’m outside it, my life outside it, outside of my life, if my life isn’t in the world, then what good is it? To teach? To teach what, if not the world?

  For a brief moment I wondered if the Koop brothers had been telling the truth, if there really was a fire raging to the north of Molotschna. Perhaps it was possible for them to get wind of this before the animals, to know something the animals hadn’t yet sensed. If the fire is in the north and the men are in the south, in the city, and the prying eyes of the Chortiza and Hiakjeke colonies to the west and east, then where will the women go?

  But surely there can’t be a fire to the north. And now I must wait for the Koop boys to regain consciousness to find out whether it’s true or not.

  We’ll meet again, I said to Salome—our traditional farewell.

  We’ll meet again, she said to me.

  Salome took the notebooks. She descended the ladder.

  I went to the window and watched her running away from the barn. I could just catch a glimpse of the convoy of buggies lining up behind the schoolhouse.

  While waiting for the Koop brothers to wake up:

  I had planned to leave also, after the women left. I had planned to finally kill myself. Instead, I find myself watching over the Koop boys, making sure they remain unconscious long enough for the women to gain sufficient ground.

  Moments ago, I sprayed a small amount of the belladonna in the face of one of the Koop boys, the larger one named Joren—or is he Sibbe? This larger of the two Koop boys was calling out in his sleep and moving his legs as though preparing to stand up. He is quiet now.

  Both the boys are breathing regularly, deeply, their colour is good, robust, and their pulses are even. I have moved them both onto their sides so they won’t choke if they vomit. I have elevated and cushioned their heads slightly, by bunching up straw beneath them. Their hands, calloused and strong, are clasped in prayer position, the tips of their fingers grazing their chins. It is clear that neither of the boys has ever used a razor. They are facing each other, though oblivious of course, and in such close proximity their resemblance as brothers is striking. Perhaps they’re twins? Although the one, Joren, or Sibbe, is definitely larger than the other, taller and more muscular. His feet are bigger, at least by the look of his cowboy boots. Joren, let’s say, had undone his belt buckle and several of the buttons on his pants. I fixed that, redid his buttons and belt buckle. And Sibbe’s shirttail had become untucked. I fixed that also.

  What a quiet loft. The women are gone. I stood at the window and watched them leave. I thought: I have come to Molotschna as a last resort, for peace and to find my purpose, and the women have left Molotschna for the same reasons.

  There was some commotion at the front of the convoy, just before they began to move. One of the horses, likely neither Ruth nor Cheryl, who are too old and circumspect to act out, had reared up and shifted the axle on the buggy to a right angle, making it impossible to move forward. The axle had to be realigned and the horse made calm. But that passed and the teams and the buggies fell into formation, at least twelve of them or more, filled with women and children and supplies. They were far off, at least two hundred metres, and I wasn’t able to make out faces or individual forms.

  At first, I thought I heard the women singing but then I corrected myself, knowing that the women wouldn’t do anything to call attention to themselves in this moment, or possibly ever. It was only the wind making a whistling sound in the long grass outside Earnest Thiessen’s barn, not singing, not Ona’s clear, high soprano soaring. Or it was singing, but I was only imagining it, or remembering it.

  I stood at the window. Had a face peered out from around the front barrier of the fourth buggy in the convoy, and a hand lifted in farewell?

  I have a gun. I’ve had it all along. When Salome—or was it Mariche?—asked if the women had guns, I could have offered to give it to them, but I remained silent. Selfish. Why is there no word in our dying language for salvation? I wish I had given the gun to them. Agata and Greta and Ona and the younger women would have refused to take it but Salome, likely, or Mejal, or even Mariche, might have been convinced.

  Two days ago when I met Ona on the dirt path that runs between her house and the shed where I sleep I also had the gun with me, in my hand. The shadows were lengthening and we kept side-stepping into sunlight as we spoke, as I mentioned earlier, when I had wanted to ask, but failed to, if Ona considered me to be a physical reminder of evil. I had been crying, again, wandering around the fields outside Molotschna, determined that day to shoot myself. When I saw Ona on the path, I considered running off, or throwing the gun into the cornfield, but instead I froze and simply stared at her as she approached.

  She was smiling, almost skipping as she came near, and waving too. When we were face to face she asked me where I was going, what I was doing, and I told her nowhere, and nothing. She asked me if I was going hunting. I said no, not hunting. I glanced at the gun and said, oh, this, and mentioned that I was returning it to the co-op.

  But why do you have it? she asked me.

  I looked into her eyes and held my gaz
e. She stopped smiling. We were silent.

  She started to speak but then stopped. I hung my head. I didn’t want her to see me crying yet again. She took my hand and we made our first step towards the sunlight, outside the shadow that had formed around us. She put my hand on her pregnant belly and told me, as though she had been able to read my mind, that she had prayed for me, she had prayed that I would find God’s grace, and that I was a physical reminder of goodness and of hope, and of life after violence. She was referring to my mother, and to my father—not the man who raised me and then disappeared, but to Peters, the younger.

  My father wasn’t excommunicated because he showed colonists photographs of paintings by Michelangelo, or my mother because she ran a secret school for girls in the barn, during milking. We were sent away because by the age of twelve, as I approached the brink of adulthood, I bore a remarkable resemblance to Peters and I had become a symbol, in the colony, or at least to Peters, of shame and violence and unacknowledged sin and of the failure of the Mennonite experiment.

  Was that true? Could it be? Where is evil? In the world outside or the world inside? On the serene surface of the Black Sea or in the mysterious river that runs beneath it, that preserves everything, but only because there is no air, no breath. No movement. No life.

  When I was a boy in England, my mother was given a job at a library. We were alone. My father had left; he had driven himself to the airport and left the car in a parking lot. He hadn’t fallen asleep for a thousand years. He had boarded a plane.

  My mother took books home from the library. Books come home and home again, and fathers fly away. My mother explained to me that a French writer, Flaubert, who was once “Flobert,” wrote a story at the age of fifteen called “Rage and Impotence.” She read it to me in French and then in English, both broken, filled with pauses, if pauses can be filling, because neither one was her language, the dead language that she and I used to share secrets … Flaubert dreamed of love in a tomb. But the dream evaporated and the tomb remained. That was Flaubert’s story and perhaps, too, the story of the Mennonites of Molotschna.