Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Her shoulders beside him are bare, and fuller, arms a bit shorter and hands much more worn, not quite the same as Jean—who would also never talk her way into an abstract reverie on bodies! He speaks quickly to avoid his betrayal:

  “We drove through the Crowsnest, years ago. Why are you saying this?”

  She touches him. “I remembered that beautiful graveyard, thinking about bodies.”

  “Is it Cambodia, those horrible pyramids of skulls?”

  “No, bodies. Laid out side by side, row after row.”

  And his mind flips. “You said your dad”—he chops his hand across the bed, across her legs—“he saw this?” She nods. “About the war, he saw rows of bodies?”

  “Uh-huh. Dresden. A Tuesday in February, 1945.”

  “He was ground crew for Flying Fortresses, in France, how would he see Dresden bodies?”

  She knits her fingers into knots. “And he said many were twisted together. One hundred and thirty-five thousand people burned alive.”

  “He told you he saw them?”

  Her endless father, his endless silence about “his” war. A new evasion?

  It was so dark they could no longer distinguish each other’s face when they finally heard the beaver coming.

  The sound of the creek running over stones played back to them from the cliffs in an endless lullaby and they stood motionless as trees against the birches, their shapes gone from dark into darkness. Adam was certain they would never meet anyone here. In this night silence they had no names, they had disappeared. They could simply stand with the length of their bodies touching, and wait.

  And it seemed they had waited so long for that quiet splash, that imperceptible breaking of surface in the pond before them that at first they did not recognize the sound: It seemed barely a skiff … white noise coming over the narrow water from the sandbar overgrown with willows, a small racket as if something were being dragged, perhaps a body being lugged through willows and alder brush, slightly louder bumping between birches. And then nattering as if, walking along a hospital corridor at night, a young technician and an older doctor were coming closer, anticipating what would now happen after a long shift. And then there fell into the indecipherable black sheet of water before them a plop! so clumsy, one seeming bellyflop and then another, that they nudged each other in astonishment: could this be the secret beavers no one ever saw, whose dams measured and tiered the creek in water steps around every bend, every rapid, where twenty-metre poplars lay as devastated as wheatstraw, mown down and hurled against others still, temporarily, standing? They strained forward, touching more lightly now, both anticipating and warning each other not to make a sound, and they saw on the still invisible, suddenly silent water a string of starlight slowly being drawn.

  “There,” Jean breathed.

  Adam felt her arm rise, a click, the black-green water surfaced in one spot of brilliant light. A beaver head, a small, pointed blotch quickly turning and gone, the black hump of back and tail flipping, smack! into a roil of water and gone, nothing but spreading ripples, Adam was cursing almost aloud but unable to finish an oath before the head again surfaced, the light centred on it, crash! the cliff pounded the tremendous sound back like a club and the water exploded, seemed to smash in pieces out of the yellow light. And then again, a beat too late, another crash! smashing the pieces further into pieces.

  “Did I hit him?”

  “I don’t—shhhh!” Jean hissed.

  A head again, nose circling high in the broken water. Was it the first? Was it the partner? Stupidly nosing the naked light to smell its way into invisibility there?

  Adam pulled the trigger and held steady: the tremendous crashes this time were almost simultaneous and so overwhelming that the clang hammered in their heads, on and on, while the light wavered, searching over the pond. Gradually the sound of the rapids returned to its gentle insistence. There was nothing on the stirred surface of the water.

  Jean had her arms wrapped around her head. “Sweet Jesus and Mary, is that automatic?”

  “Semi,” Adam said. “When I shoot, I want it dead, quick. You think I hit him?”

  “Too loud to see. Could be a her.”

  “Good, then her babies are finished too.”

  “You’re a heartless man.”

  “Not utterly.” His tongue in her ear tasted wild raspberries. “Only with dam-building animals.”

  Jean eased her sturdy body tighter into his, while her light searched the restless water again. A dark green sheen, with seeming bits of white bobbing. They could be bleached late-summer leaves, or perhaps bone.

  “A mine disaster isn’t massacre or war,” Adam insists. “A mine has a working civil order in place, rescue parties, doctors—”

  “It’s no Final Solution,” Susannah concedes, “but—”

  “There’s a living community, police, firemen, elected officials, whoever, families and relatives are there, the only dead are the miners who know perfectly well every time they go down is very dangerous.”

  “Knowing it doesn’t make them any less dead.”

  “Okay, but dead is the given hazard of their job—like you, much milder, flunking students. Underground miners, in a mountain or under the sea, always work in danger.”

  “Danger like being a citizen in Vietnam? Or an African country we haven’t heard about yet, or Chile? They’re just living too, trying to work to feed their children, and all of a sudden the world explodes, there’s fire falling out of the sky like water and they’re laying bodies out in rows. Since the forties it’s women and children and old people dead too, more than working soldiers.”

  “That’s all different, that’s war.”

  “I don’t think it’s so ‘all,’ ” Susannah says quietly. “It has to do with men walking a dangerous line, knowing people will get killed, and still they do it.”

  “Oh, men,” he says. Discouraged already. He never has to argue women and men with Jean, especially in a sleeping bag.

  “Yes,” Susannah says. “Men run the businesses where people have to work, they control countries and they kill to keep power.”

  He deliberately pushes his right arm around her waist and nuzzles his head tight into her back; the warm smell is his sweetest and safest memory of her.

  “Yeah yeah,” he says into cotton, “and men know best how horrible wars are.”

  “Oh, they’re horrible all right.”

  He hoists himself on his left elbow, still behind her. “All those men in all the wars, even good ones fighting fascists, your dad holding those Flying Fortresses together so his buddies could drop bombs all over Germany, it was horrible, but they had to do it.”

  “If he could only have stayed in Edmonton,” she says, abruptly inside the good memory her father can sometimes be now, after fourteen years dead. “Just kept his head inside a DC-3 engine. He said one day in 1942 over eight hundred planes landed and took off here, minute after minute, for Alaska.”

  “So what was in them? Milk for burbling Russian babies?”

  He feels a lurch of regret—too smart-ass sardonic again by half—but Susannah only shrugs; the length of her legs under the thin blanket remains warmly against his. She says, “Two years in Edmonton he could pretend he was just fixing engines. But then the U.S. Air Force sent him overseas.”

  “His luck it wasn’t the Pacific,” Adam says quickly, trying somehow to extricate them both from her father and his thoughts against her back into a bland generality. “That’s what I mean, when he was really in it, war, nothing but shot-up Flying Fortresses his buddies flew, all he said was they hated it.”

  “Oh, they hated it, of course. But … maybe they loved it too.”

  “Well, love…”

  “It was fun for them, finally. Years of boredom waiting in England, then the ultimate game, hunting humans. And they were so quiet when they came home, everyone at home knew the worst about war, today we’re supposed to hate it, and there was so much violent death, so they don’t dare te
ll anyone how much they liked about it.”

  Adam hunches up a little; in bed, silent Bud Lyons is one of several subjects they usually avoid. “Well … you know how Tom’s dad is.”

  “Yeah, Tom’s dad. He never says anything either, just goes to Remembrance Day parades with the other vets and cries and has a drink with his old buddies—flying over Germany at eighteen, you think he ever had that much living intensity again? Selling furniture in Eaton’s for forty years?”

  Try sixty patients a day repeating a cough or a bee sting or a sliver, or depressed by one smaller breast, an indefatigable wart, a penis limp once too often.

  Susannah pulls his arm tight across her stomach, never again so taut after Trish and Joel, but soft, surrounding as love. What kind of a stupid ass is he?

  She talks into the dim room, away from him. “Tom’s dad never tells what fun flying a Spitfire was for a prairie boy, in the air over the burning cities of Europe, and life-and-death dogfights and watching the bright streaks of bullets, his bullets, and seeing those Nazis falling, trailing fire and exploding when they smashed into the ground, monsters who shoved people into ovens.”

  “They didn’t know about ovens when they were flying.”

  “Don’t quibble, they knew it all later and it just made their memories better, their intensity more moral.”

  “Well, aren’t they right? They were doing a good thing, stopping unspeakable genocide. Many with their own death.”

  “But what ‘unspeakable’ did they do too? One Hitler, and millions of children.”

  “They had to. There was no other way to stop him.”

  “Oh? Listen, Bengjeltje,” Susannah says. Lowgerman she learned from his mother and always a caress, but under the blanket she is drawing away from him. “Don’t argue. You know it, women never get into situations where they have to do that to each other. War is the ultimate male business.”

  “Okay, okay … but fun? Tom’s dad is so gentle he’d never hurt a fly.”

  “Yes! And a man never wants his son to be in a war, I know, and yet in a way I think maybe he does. Comradeship, life-and-death terror, intensity together, the most paralysing fear and still knowing, if you live, that you found the courage to go through it. Together with someone. How can shopping till you drop at the mall, playing golf—for God’s sake!”

  He reaches, wraps his arms around her distant body too hard, too hard. She has boxed him in: he can only grope for a speakable moment. “Sometimes … when I’m pounding a chest, and suddenly I feel that, the heart beat, and beat—”

  She says gently, “You’re a good doctor.”

  “Hospital teamwork, when someone really is sick or injured, that’s intense enough.”

  “I meant,” she says, “who in our generation besides you medics ever sees a corpse? We lock the coffins, we sing ‘There is no death, though eyes grow dim,’ from the ridiculous Student Prince. There is no death!”

  “That’s the mourners, they’re in shock, they reach for anything from their happy past to help—”

  “Listen,” half turned to him, “Robert Graves wrote his major inheritance from World War I was ‘a difficulty in telling the truth.’ Tom’s father won’t lie outright, he just doesn’t tell anything.”

  Adam says, “Nobody needs a war to have ‘a difficulty in telling the truth.’ ”

  Susannah looks at him sharply, the upper slant of her eye. “Surely not,” she says slowly. “Not in your office.”

  “Oh my office, hell, that’s just S.O.A.P. ritual, scribble scribble sixty times a day SOAP!”

  Susannah laughs out loud. “It’s so cute! Your perpetual of cleanliness, S for subjective, ‘And how are we feeling today?’ O for objective, ‘Does this hurt when I press, here?’ A for assessment, ‘Now, there may be a heart murmur, or an ulcer…’ P for prescription, ‘An antibiotic—”’

  “It’s ridiculous. Your leg is broken, but there is order, I have to inspect your inner ear.”

  “How’s our whining friend Andy T with his ulcer?”

  “He’s okay. You know what they say, ‘Assholes live longer.’ ”

  “I know, but I think he wants more of him than that to survive.”

  They are laughing together, and for a moment lightness settles over them like intertwining sleep. But Susannah stirs out of it, as she always does. Once she’s started something, she can never leave it alone.

  “You remember,” she says, “Tom’s father hinted at a story, he escorted a bomber squadron and his best buddy from Thorhild was the pilot in one of the Lancasters? He got back okay, no dogfights, and then his buddy’s bomber returned all shot up and more or less crash-landed, with only the navigator alive, and then he died too before he could tell what happened. That’s the classic war story: never talk, and when you do, only about death. That way you tell nothing. It’s told to keep us, who weren’t there, ignorant. He’s saying, ‘That’s the way war is, it means nothing.’ ”

  “You think that’s why your dad never spoke?”

  “Nothing can mean anything.”

  She is talking about her father and war, but Adam senses she is talking men and women more; he feels her leading him along the high sharp ridge of what their life together is no longer; if either of them slips, they may fall, and split.

  “Did you ever ask him,” she persists, “sort of ‘between men’?”

  “He was always easy, he sounded so open, but he deflected things. I’d ask something and he’d explain the difference between a B-17 and a B-24, again. Never about loading bombs he knew would kill civilians. He couldn’t be pushed, I never heard him say ‘Dresden.’ ”

  “He told me 450 Flying Fortresses and 764 Lancasters flew that night, packed with 650,000 firebombs.”

  Adam feels a surge of emotion rise, twist in his throat.

  Susannah feels it too. “You loved him, I loved him.” Her hand brushes his face. “He talked even less after Mom died.”

  “I wish I’d known your mother.”

  “I knew yours, so good.”

  “I know, I know. Yours would have said I wasn’t good enough for her ‘golden princess.’ ”

  She hiccups, stirs in his loose arms. “That was just Dad, a joke.”

  “Well, whoever it was.”

  For once she does not pick up, thank god, on the opening for disagreement, perhaps argument, he has blundered into again. His arms are still around her, if he leaned lower he would hear her stomach gurgle as stomachs do, but as usual now she feels very far away and in one lurch he decides—he overwhelmingly wants to push her, out of or into what or where he is not thinking—and he reacts quick and deep as a kitchen knife turning.

  “You’re right, that’s the classic war story. Tell nothing and your life is a secret and—” Adam catches himself, his voice rougher. “Is that why he never said anything about Idaho, about Pocatello? He had some kind of personal ‘war’ there, is that why he said nothing? Just nothing? That’s an American past?”

  Susannah seems to be returning from some other place even as she shifts almost imperceptibly under the sheet. “I’ve told you,” she says calmly, “we never lived in Pocatello, that was just the hospital where I was born.”

  “A mother tells her child no more than a birth certificate? What about the green town you remember? The big lake?”

  “I was barely four when we left. I don’t know.”

  “How about,” and he says it fast, so he won’t think what this means, “you delay Europe a week, I exchange time with somebody and we drive to Hillcrest? Then through the mountains, all the golden fall leaves into Idaho?”

  “I told you, he liked Edmonton so much, when he got out of the Air Force he went back to Idaho, married my mother and brought us here.”

  “Where in Idaho, what lake?”

  “You know I don’t know.”

  “And you’d never met him, or seen him before he showed up in 1946 and married your mother?”

  “That’s what Mom told me.”

  “But he
was your biological father?”

  “That’s what Mom told me. I don’t remember meeting him, I was four and we lived here, in Edmonton.”

  “And you never looked at a map together? The only place is on your birth certificate?”

  She is staring at him so fixedly he cannot face her eyes. “Adam,” she murmurs at last, “he was my father, and they’re both gone. And next week we’ve been married twenty-five years.”

  “I know. God, I knew him eleven years and he never told me anything except motors.”

  “In Canada twenty-five years is a life sentence.”

  “Only in the Criminal Code. Your parents were immigrants from the States, and they just never talked about a past, not a word about family?”

  “Adam, why are you cross-examining me?”

  Her abrupt hardness, like a body tremor, jolts him. What if she were to cross-examine him? But even as her body straightens slowly under the sheet, her voice finds its habitual understanding. “You’re just so sick of that office, your hypochondriac patients, the only time you can even read the newspaper is falling asleep in bed—your obsessed keep-every-waiting-room-full, pile-up-the-money partners.”

  His stupid partners—his guilt can explode in defensiveness: “I don’t give a shit about them! How can you know nothing about your grandparents? Everyone has to have them. So okay, you’re not Russian Mennonite, they hear a name and they’re sniffing for relations way past the third and fourth generation, but Bud Lyons—what kind of name is that? Is it English?”

  “We’re not criminals.”

  “Was I implying that? War trauma can beat a person into silence—god knows in this century there’s enough—but he helped win the war for the good guys. So why? In Idaho are there any Jews?”

  “The trouble is,” she says slowly, “no fire ever burns clean. Not even the best firebombing.” Abruptly her body lengthens out straight and hard. “It’s been twenty-five years.”

  “And I’ve practised, as they say, medicine for twenty-four years and four months.”