Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  “It’s still a life sentence.”

  Adam’s memory is reeling back; he peers at her staring up, as it seems, into a beyond. So close he smells her, but indecipherably far away. It will be some time yet before he understands what he has been hearing; what has happened before his very eyes while he was so carefully protecting his “this-has-nothing-to-do-with-her” life. His secret life, lived not previously like her father’s, but parallel.

  “Am I,” he says with particular care, “am I supposed to be getting this? You don’t want to serve a longer ‘life sentence’? With me?”

  Susannah does not move. She seems to be looking down the length of her body under the thin cover, at the twin peaks created by her feet.

  “You know that’s a mirror question,” she says. “Do you, with me?”

  Under Adam’s quick knife the inner body of the beaver slowly revealed itself. It was a knifepoint unzippering, the gradual removal of a rich fur coat to expose a glistening, pale yellow nakedness.

  “You ever see a seal lying on a rock?” he asked. “In a zoo maybe?”

  Jean was looking intensely at the body and his curved knife with a certain abhorrence. She said nothing, as usual, but Adam sensed the slight shake of her head, which might be little more than a suppressed shudder.

  “They’re a lot bigger, but they have the same fat-layered, seemingly boneless body,” he explained. “Water mammals. When I was a kid, north of here, there were no beaver at all, now they’re ubiquitous pests, dams and houses everywhere, and look. An inch of fat, turning beautiful trees into lard, the bugger.”

  Jean said nothing. His left hand, clenched in the roll of greasy fur, was trying to tear it aside over short slashes of the skinning knife. Both his hands were thick with fat and blood.

  “ ‘I’d rather be in Idaho,’ ” he sang in his monotone, ‘“than any other place I know, in Ida-Idaho…”’

  He had worked his way around to the head, more carefully now, slicing to leave the tiny ears in the fur, and towards the eye. “See,” he pointed with the knife-tip, “transparent eyelid, they can see perfectly under water. And here,” he lifted the mouth wide behind the two enormous cutting teeth, “a second set of lips too, behind these daggers,” he tapped them, like steel on steel, “so they can carry wood or stones between them under water and never get water in their mouth. That’s real evolution, millions of years of purposeful—”

  She interrupted him, “You cut a hole in it, there.”

  “Ugh! Good thing I never tried to be a surgeon.” Adam’s hands stopped and he looked up. Stocky body, but that face could sell any man TV toothpaste—and he ducked his head, ashamed of his thought. “You’re too close,” he said, “watching me.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Maybe you don’t like it. Anyways, trappers always cut the head right off, this fur’s no good for anything.”

  “So why leave it on?”

  “I’m not a trapper.” And added, suddenly annoyed with her, “Don’t you think even a skinned animal deserves a face?”

  For a moment only the sound of the creek, and a movement of air as if it had turned to ice below them, rising. Adam covered up quickly. “I always hated skinning. I was on a caribou hunt once, a century ago, up north with the Dene, and all I could do was pack out the butchered meat.”

  “Being a doctor hardened you?”

  He guffawed without humour. “Oh yeah, killer medicine.” And he returned his knife to the opened stretch of the hide. Why was he here with her?

  “It’s just a tiny cut,” he said, “not like the bullet hole here. That won’t close, but I’ll stretch the hide out tight and you can sew this nose nick shut with two stitches. When it’s cured no one will notice.”

  “What makes you think I’d touch it?”

  “It’s woman’s work, the Dene teach that, sewing … and when it’s stretched dry you have to scrape it and then chew it, for days, human spit is part of the curing, till it’s chewed all soft and cured and we can wrap it around our feet, keep warm at night.”

  “Seven years of braces to chew a beaverskin?”

  He laughed out loud. “What are beautiful teeth for?” and saw her baring hers at him.

  Sure, Eric said, use the cabin. And the rifle’s locked in the chest, do something useful with it—if you have time on your hands. So to speak.

  Jean pulled her sturdy legs up against her breast, wrapped her arms around them. Her chin found the notch between her knees.

  “Would your wife chew it?”

  She surprised Adam, but only for a hesitation.

  “My wife is going to Europe, to the archives in Madrid, Toulouse and Milan. Working on an obscure literary subject.”

  “One a lab technician wouldn’t understand.”

  Adam snorted. “I’m not sure I do.”

  “She speaks all those languages?”

  “And a few more. It’s useful for a professor of comparative literature.”

  “Which language does she still speak to you?”

  “What?” he said, intense. “What is this in aid of?”

  “Me.”

  “What language do you speak, to other men?”

  “Any they understand.”

  “Okay. My wife’s going to Europe for four months.”

  “Did you or did she decide that?”

  “It’s professional research, there’s nothing to ‘decide.’ ”

  Jean was doubled and wrapped about herself, staring across the brown water at the high, eroded cliffs, the coal seam a thick black stripe holding the grey clay and bushes and poplar trees in the sky. Seated woman in landscape, brooding on the approach of winter. Adam reached out, almost touched her rusty hair with his fat-smeared, bloody hand, but resisted.

  “Listen,” he said as gently as he could, “this skin will cure softer than layered silk, you’ll see, this inner fur’s so soft … have you ever made love on beaver fur?”

  “I’m not sure,” she replied carefully. “I don’t know if I could make love to a beaver.”

  “That’s not what I meant. That is not what I meant at all.”

  They both chuckled a little, but not together. He lifted what was left of the skinned beaver from its hide and laid it on its back, beside the others in a row under the pale birches that leaned over the slipping edge of the creek. They looked like no animal that could have lived, not even a lab specimen; they were four elongated sacks of bruised fat sheared with uncountable cuts. But through half-shut eyes Adam saw them change, strangely, into yellowish, bloated children … each with two enormous buck teeth and black gaps for nostrils, their small, naked arms folded high over their distended bellies in a prayer of desperation, please … please … and his mind flipped. What am I doing, I’m stupid, what have I done, just turned fifty and hiding in the bush with a woman I pass in a hall ten times a day, what an idiot, what am I doing—

  The row of beaver bodies laid out on the mud changed yet more strangely; in the level evening light glancing off the creek and the blazing birch leaves they were gradually, one by one, catching fire.

  Adam struggled to twist himself into his standard every-waking-hour oblivion. He grumbled in his monotone: “ ‘I’d rather be in Idaho a’eatin’ baked potatoes! Oh, I’d rather be in Idaho than any other place—

  “Marilyn Monroe!” Jean exclaimed. “In her first famous picture as a model, she wore a Idaho potato sack.”

  He shook his head. Famous dead Marilyn. “Would you believe it, I’ve never been there? It’s just a silly song running in my head. What do we do,” he gestured, “with these?”

  “They’ll be gone overnight,” she said. “The coyotes will take them.”

  “Good. Coyotes. Four-legged vultures of Alberta.”

  The bodies were again what they had been, four greasy, skinned beavers.

  “Look,” he said, getting back into it and pointing with the knife, “the tiny anus, a very special evolutionary adaptation there. Because the beaver can’t digest bar
k, though that’s what it eats. Bark and wood fibre have to be broken down by bacteria, and the bacteria that do this can live only in the beaver’s lower bowel, so every day it has to nuzzle its anus until certain faeces containing the bacteria come out. Then it eats the faeces to get the bacteria into its stomach, to break down the bark, so it can absorb the nutrients in the wood, and not die of starvation. Great, huh?”

  Jean’s carefully made-up eyes were incredulous. Adam continued, “Canada’s national beast, it’s survived forty million years because it learned to build wood and mud and stone dams to protect its houses. And to eat its own shit, every day.”

  She tilted to him, tried to wrap herself around his head, but he got one arm up between them. They stared at each other.

  “I mean, you do what you have to, to survive.”

  She does not blink. “Will you please shut the hell up.”

  The bed feels so huge, they might as well be lying in separate rooms. Adam knows Susannah is no more asleep than he, though he has hopes his exhaustion will submerge him soon. Then she speaks, without moving.

  “Have you read anything in your Martyrs Mirror lately?”

  “When would I have—” he begins, but stops. “Not for years.”

  “You remember the Cathari believers, of the thirteenth century?”

  “Not much. They were in southern France, sort of Waldensians?”

  “Yes, but stricter. They ate no meat, never married, tried to live absolutely moral lives. Real goodness was a bad example for the clergy, and Innocent III organized a crusade against them.”

  “I don’t remember a Cathari martyr story.”

  “They’re in the survey chapters. One of the worst was 1243, when Pope Innocent’s army drove over two hundred of them out of their castle near Toulouse into a village. But then the soldiers didn’t want to kill them because, they said, how could they distinguish between Christian and heretic? So the Bishop decided. He ordered, ‘Kill them all, God will know his own.’ ”

  Adam’s eyes are wide open, it seems he is in a strange night room, perhaps a hotel, he has been awakened by the sound of footsteps in the hall, approaching, and instantly he thinks, The telephone is going to ring.

  How did you know I was here?

  Why did you answer?

  Whom were you calling?

  “Sometimes,” Susannah says from the far side of their bed, “I think Churchill and Bomber Harris with all his planes made a decision like that bishop.”

  “What about Hitler and Hermann G?”

  “There’s Truman too, and Colonel Tibbets flying the Enola Gay to Hiroshima.”

  Aren’t you there?

  Where are you?

  “And Stalin,” Adam says, much too loudly. “But he sure as hell didn’t bother with God deciding.”

  “How do you know? He studied four years in a theological seminary. They prayed twelve times a day.”

  “Then that did it to him for sure, for life!”

  But Susannah does not respond to his throwaway cynicism. Rather, in a voice irrefutable as a needle she opens the mantra they first discovered together between the mirrors of the University of Alberta Tuck Shop.

  She says, “Love is disposition, desire, delight.”

  And Adam must respond, “Love is also a decision.”

  How did you know?

  Because you answered.

  In the high glass and concrete international departure area of an airport echoing with arrivals and leavings, with persons repeatedly paged but apparently never willing to lift receivers waiting for a voice, there is a small circle of people. If they were facing outward they would resemble muskoxen of the High Arctic backed around young to confront relentless enemies, but these face in only upon themselves: they are bending gradually closer and closer together, intent upon the slowly tightening sphere they make, close feet, rounded bodies, bowed heads. It could be a family: a mother, a son, a daughter, a father. Between the slabs of echoing airport glass a film of quiet gathers about them; it may be that the son or the father is leaving. Certainly none of them has the worn, devastated skin of someone recently hurled for hours along the edges of space. Perhaps the daughter is leaving, and they are trying one last time to look into one another’s eyes, to search out, as they may never have before, all of themselves at the same lingering instant, while their hands and arms reach around the person pressed closest to them for the next, trying to feel every bone in every individual body they know they love with the overwhelming conviction of their own fingers stretching to touch themselves.

  “Trish,” the woman says. “Joel.”

  They tighten slightly, as if they long to become hollow globes, every surface inside and outside every one of each other touching.

  “Have some fun,” the girl says. “Archives in Europe never run away.”

  The boy shuffles tighter. “Right about now,” he murmurs, “if Grandma was here, she’d be saying a long prayer.”

  The man says nothing. The woman is leaving.

  EIGHT

  LEFT-HANDED WOMAN

  London

  1744

  WHEN WAS I BORN? In The Dictionary of Art, New York, 1996, volume 28, page 352, I am listed as: “b. Danzig [now Gdansk, Poland] c. 1694; d. London March 1744. English painter.” The “Danzig” is close, but the “c. 1694” isn’t.

  My Grossma Triena knew the exact date; she was the midwife at my birth. But she always told me not to be bothered by careless or deliberate ignorance.

  “Enoch,” she would say, “you paint. Everyone was born sometime, but you, you are a painter.”

  “English painter” would for her have been laughable. “A cat moves into a cow stall in the barn and turns into a cow?” Nor would the Dictionary’s statement that “Enoch Seeman maintained his position in the second rank of portrait painters” have disturbed her. She often said to me:

  “You are who you are. You just work hard, like your father and grandfather and brother, and when you paint a good portrait, that remains. It’s like you’re never tired, you never need to sleep—you paint someone’s family and you’ll have four or five, maybe six more friends forever.”

  At first I did not understand what she was really telling me: that worlds end. They don’t change, they keep ending all the time, and children especially are aware of it. When we sailed the length of the Baltic and North Seas to England, after our painter family troubles in Danzig and Warsaw and Dresden, I felt what it was she said: this is truly an end. Though when I saw the Thames River opening into greater London I realized it might be a beginning also. As it was.

  My first major commission came in England in 1708. I painted Colonel Andrew Bisset and His Family, which remains in the family Castle Forbes, Grampian, in the easternmost corner of rocky Scotland. The Dictionary calls it “an ambitious group portrait of somewhat uneven quality in the manner of Godfrey Kneller.” “Somewhat uneven” indeed—what else would you expect, since according to their date I was barely fourteen when I painted it? And certainly Godfrey Kneller, that silly sop, had nothing to do with my style: it was my father, Enoch Seemann the Elder, who taught both Godfrey and me as much as we, with whatever talent we had, could put into practice.

  My father told me, “When you paint something you’re not ashamed to show the world, declare it. In your own hand.”

  When I showed Grossma Triena the painting, I asked her again, “What day was I born?”

  “Yes,” she said, “now you should know. This portrait will last longer than a baptism record in the Amsterdam Mennonite Church.”

  “I don’t want to be baptized, not in Amsterdam or anywhere else.”

  She peered up at me from under her eyebrows. She was a left-handed woman and her eyes could be sharper than her knitting needles.

  “Your brother Peter,” she said, “has already talked about catechism, and he’s younger than you.”

  “He likes numbers, he likes business, he even wants to go back to Danzig if he ever can.”

  “You
’re sure you don’t?”

  “Why? In Danzig I’d be nothing but a Mennist.”

  “Well, you are one.”

  “I’m a painter too.”

  Grosspa Isaak Seemann had pulled his long hair forward over his shoulder and was braiding it. He lived in London for twenty-five years, but he would never wear a wig. He listened closely, as always, but I knew he would not say a word. Grossma continued knitting, good Danzig gloves for endless London rain. She said quietly, “September 9, 1689. The clock struck four in the morning when I first felt your bloody head coming.”

  So I inscribed my first commission: Enoch Seeman, pinx. AE 18 1/2. 1708. Which translated means: Enoch Seeman (my father dropped the second n when we moved: “Double anything is too confusing for the English”) painted this (Latin: pinxit) at the age of (AE, Latin: aetatis) eighteen and a half years, 1708. Both the Dictionary and the even more massive Künstlerlexikon, Leipzig, 1936, record my inscription, but both insist on “c. 1694” as my birthday. Perhaps it’s not Latin that is beyond historians, it’s mathematics.

  A portrait painter lives by his commissions; mine grew gradually from minimal nobility to the climbing rich to royalty. I painted Elihu Yale full-length, the old tyrant of the East India Company who gave so much of the money he “made” (some say stole, but legally of course) in Madras to a school in the United States that they named it after him. My portrait of him still hangs in the Yale University Art Gallery. Some years later George of Hanover, the great-grandson of James I, became my patron; during one of his rare visits to England, shortly before he died in 1727, I painted him as he wanted it: much younger, wearing his coronation robes as King of England. He talked to me congenially in German while I worked—talked about nothing, the way royals speak to commoners. Squalid, cramped London depressed him, so he would not live here, and he never learned English. His son, George II after him, liked the portrait so much he commissioned me to paint him too, together with his beautiful Queen Caroline of Anspach. Both full-length and bust.

  Grosspa Isaak would likely chide me for being prautzijch—vain—for listing myself in this way. Too unhumbly un-Mennonite. But in lands devastated by war, memory is never more than one last thought away from disappearing. The corner of the Baltic where I was born has often been destroyed: a form of Christianity arrived there in the thirteenth century when the Teutonic Knights received the blessing of the Pope to become “missionaries” among the Lithuanians and Old Pruzzens who lived their pagan lives at the curve of the Baltic Sea. Within two centuries the Order had either forcibly baptized them or killed them. The atrocities of war often memorialize a man in history, but I, Enoch Seeman the Younger, was a defenceless Mennonite and a painter. So I hereby affirm my existence.