Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Within me I feel dry as sand in a rain.

  June 23: Watchword, Zinzendorf: “O Saviour! Weave your holy flames of love through my frozen heart.”

  Rain upon rain. A Russian postal road only, sand and long hills. Our poor Fox can no longer pull, he can hardly walk tied behind the wagon. My sisters and brothers, not Johannes, scolded me. They say I am unwell because I eat too much. But I think it is because I always have to walk in wet shoes.

  And thoughts, too many to carry. All hopes and plans of Heubuden hang so heavy. They must be thrown away. Oh, for the strength. And still they sit like crows. Black and waiting.

  June 25: A tiny stream in a deep valley. Johannes and Käthe climbed down to see it. The narrow road hangs on the edge, leading forever up and down. The sun set behind a distant shower, like light through tears.

  June 28: I want peace. To think only of noodles. Minsk is far behind. Could not walk today. Very stony and rough, but bumping in the wagon I was able to mix dumplings. Everyone ate except me. Miserable Russian towns, churches shine in the rain surrounded by rotten sheds under rotting shingles. Endless soldiers with guns, nothing to do but hold guns and stare. We could find no drinking water. Drove very late and stopped in woods. Beautiful evening light, with many mosquitoes. Double night watch set, this is deepest Russia, Heinrich said. Franz laughed. “Wait,” he said, “there’ll be more, wait.”

  June 29: Sabbath morning, shining with dew. I slept a little in the wagon yesterday driving, and still weak. Without Käthe and Margaret I could not have made coffee for breakfast. Elder Epp preached from Luke, the lost sheep, the ten lost coins. We rested. It was good for us and the poor horses. Good sun.

  After noon all the men sat around Elder Epp in his folding chair and talked about Mennonite non-resistance, how to love enemies. I had to laugh. Every day we meet so many dirty, screaming, stealing people, and the men speak as close to cursing them as they dare. Johannes saw me, and I was ashamed at what he saw on my face. He knows how close I feel to cursing too.

  I showed little Agnes Ewert and her two-year-old brother Benjamin the grand birches, spreading their skirts out wide and gentle like ladies between the stiff, dark pines of men. Käthe came to sit with us. My spring is gone. Why can I not find a soft and submissive spirit?

  July 4: Watchword, Luke 24:29—“Abide with us, Lord, for the day is far spent and night is falling.”

  Road like desert. Poor Fox had to be shot, nothing left to give us but his hide. Waste land. When the sun shines it is desert, then it is dark lightning, rain, mud. Thunder like barrels breaking.

  So sick but I cooked. Many children, they say, are sick. Auguste’s too.

  July 10: The men pushed and shouted with Jews, about horses. We were in the right, but that did not help us. Father bought the horses, and made peace.

  Hot sun. I cannot walk. I shake in the wagon, burning. Auguste comes carrying Benjamin, and cries. Her small children are both so very sick with fever.

  July 18: Watchword, Psalm 63:1—“O God, my soul thirsts in a dry and tired land.”

  At last the Dnieper River. A single tree on the bank, a great oak like the one in our yard in Herrenhagen. I tried to walk along the bank behind the wagon. The black sound of water rushed by—would it be deep enough? Johannes says this river flows past hundreds of rich Mennonite villages sixty and eighty years old, far south near the hot Black Sea. Where we are not going. Thousands of our people we will never see. Is it long enough?

  My sisters found wild currant bushes. I ate a few, sweet and sour as they were, both. White water lilies floated in standing water. A cemetery was hidden among trees but I was too sick and had to cook. I could not walk there.

  July 23: Far beyond the Dnieper River now, but where is Moscow? Always hills and hills, such terrible sun and sand, such driving rain and mud. Everything is so hard here, even weather. The land God gave sinful Cain.

  Johannes found blueberries under pine trees. We sick ate all he had. But it was too late for small Benjamin Ewert, he died in their wagon after noon. Mr. Ewert bought boards from a Jew who passed in a high wagon. It is very hot. They say a body can be carried for only a day.

  July 25: We did not have to bury little Benjamin beside the road. A village near great Moscow had a cemetery.

  I was too sick to go, but Elder Epp led the service in our wagon circle. The coffin open, as always. Isaiah 26:19, “Your dead shall live, their bodies rise, O dwellers in the dust.” A small black stranger lying there, swollen so thick, no one could have said they knew him.

  July 27: Sabbath, and sick. I lie in the wagon, look between the canvas at the onion cupolas of Moscow in the distance. Uncountable. Johannes quietly gave me an apple from the market. He said the evening sunlight shines true: the domes are pure gold. Golden heaven here in Russia and I cannot walk. No no, he said, not the streets, they’re dirty and broken cobblestone. My brothers brought a doctor to our camp, but what can a strange man know? Sabbath service.

  July 30: They brought the doctor again before we left Moscow. He was German, talking to everyone, and such kind eyes. Some men have eyes so sharp you feel cut. He asked questions quietly. He did not touch me but gave me several medicines. I felt better. Father had bought fresh meat in Moscow and I wanted to eat. I dragged myself to the stove and ate while sister Käthe and Margaret, just nine but learning, were cooking. The wagon is full, but in it I can sleep alone. Try.

  August 1: Watchword, Hebrews 11:3—“By faith we understand that the world was made by the word of God.”

  I can only cry at my weakness. An understanding look and medicines are useless, I cannot lift my head. It was unbearably hot, my mother’s thickest blanket could not save me from the endless stone bumps and bang of the wagon. Towards evening it rained and I was so cold. Oh, miserable body that feels everything and knows nothing. Oh great God, create a new world in me.

  August 14: My sisters say we have passed Vladimir and Murom, passed Arzamas. What is that? A small city. We are over halfway from Moscow to Alexandertal. There, across the Volga River, Mennonites and our Elder’s son, Claus, and our new land are ready. I say nothing. Pain and wagon days. I remember bumping along with nightmares, night and day.

  Of the Marienburg, the castle garden and an arm I leaned on. The words said to me—I want to forget what I heard. What I saw. There were iron bars crossed in the thick slits of the walls where they once shot arrows and guns, but sunlight made beautiful faces on a fountain, then ugly. Stone walls. ER. who spoke so softly to me, the summer after my mother died, a letter I burned in our kitchen stove on June 3. I will forget, all is ashes, leave them in the Russian dirt in this unending land of dirty travel, away. There is enough nothing here to lose your all in nothing forever.

  Little Agnes Ewert is still sick. She sits with me now, on the softest blanket in our wagon. Our shoulders bump together, her thin legs against mine. We try to laugh a little. I draw a stick child on her slate, she tries to write the letters of her name. It is all crooked, lines crossed over with bumps. Impossible to read or see. We try to laugh. My sisters cook at the oven outside, and sing:

  “There is nothing on this earth

  Which my longing satisfies;

  O my Jesus, draw me nearer.…”

  Agnes’s perfect face is dried hollow, almost pointed. Like a little golden mouse, her breath sweet. But I see her eyes are growing wide, always deeper.

  August 18: The wagons stopped and I heard Auguste Ewert wailing. We were on a crown of hills. The gleam far ahead of us was the Volga River, Johannes said. He gave me more blueberries. It could be the sad Russian Volga, but to me it looked wider than a sea.

  August 19: We buried little Agnes by the side of the road, her name cut into the thickest tree we found. I rode in the Ewert wagon with Auguste. Sun and flying cloud, a broken road and hills. The wagon lurched on stones, we could cry together as loud as we wanted. In the evening one of her big stepsons helped her down. I climbed out too. I sat by our stove and rolled noodles for Käthe.
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  August 20: Rain and thunder, our poor cattle shiver with cold. Steppe weather, they say, Russia weather knows only extremes.

  All day our wagons crossed the Volga River in a leaking ferry under heavy rain. I said to Heinrich on the water, “So, over there is Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey.” Heinrich said nothing, and Father heard me. He walked away to rub his newest, and best, horse between the ears. We still have eight horses for three wagons, but not one that started in Herrenhagen. All Russian, bought from Jews.

  Johannes was at the edge of the ferry, singing, “Volga, Volga.…” and rumbling along in a bass lower than any Russian. We seemed to be down in the river, standing still, the overloaded ferry sunk so deep we could look out level over the immense water splashing in rain. It sloshed cold as winter around our boots.

  “This time,” I said to him, “we won’t get over. We’ll sink.”

  Johannes said, “Anna, this is not the holy Jordan. This is Mother Volga, the land of Stanka Razin. Two hundred years ago he threw his dearest possession into the river, as the ultimate gift.”

  I asked him who Stanka Razin was, what was his gift? He told me I was already sad enough, I should not ask for more.

  I told him, yes, I did not want a horrible Russian story. What I wanted was to see our mother again.

  “Have faith,” he said. “By faith the walls of Jericho fell down.”

  I told him the walls fell only after the Israelites had marched around them for seven days, and he said, Well, how long have we been marching?

  August 25: Always the steppes now, long, long with grass and not a bush higher than your knee. Sky. Lightning. A cloud rises black anywhere beyond us and for a minute it pours. In our cookstove the fire spits. It cracks aloud with the grass we twist together to burn. Sky. Then far in the west a line of light and a perfect rainbow. The bow of promise, Father said. Johannes said, “It’s behind us, in the wrong place.” And laughed when Father and Heinrich looked at him. As if he didn’t mean it.

  We sisters and Franz laughed with him. Tomorrow, they say, we may reach Alexandertal.

  August 27: The fifth day with not a tree, only the bends of the steppe, like a hand held flat and always reaching away. We found Alexandertal in a small, dinted valley with little bushes. Young Preacher Claus Epp came out of his simlinka to greet us. A thin, dark man with tears running into his beard. Very good groundwater here, he told us, not deep. A simlinka is a Russian house dug two steps into the ground with walls and roof of sod, see, they used the boards from their wagons to make a triangle roof, which made it better than the Russians’ because the rain ran off the roof sods and away very quickly. Inside, he said, they were always warm and dry.

  Young Claus Epp was so happy to see us, he talked and talked. But he looked past us when he did it, or over us, as if he could see something far beyond our heads, in the clouds.

  Above the narrow valley there was only steppe. Open sky and fresh green land completely empty around us, a line cut sharp as a Cossack sword. Johannes put his hand on my shoulder. He told me there would be hundreds of Mennonites here, just wait a little, young men and women digging into the ground, growing out of it like grass.

  I said I had been trying to find a university for him, but I couldn’t seem to see far enough on this steppe.

  He smiled, his lean face burned so dark and clean by the sun. Long ago on the coast of Friesland, he said, and for two and a half centuries in the Vistula delta, our people learned at the University of Water. Now Russia offered us the hard University of Grass.

  ELEVEN

  SLEEPING WITH FRANZ KAFKA

  Cloister, Passau, Bavaria

  Prague

  1988

  THE MORNING LIGHT SLANTS UPWARDS in the bathroom mirror into high, vanishing emptiness. Like a classic Dutch painting of perspective, Adam thinks: the flat spaces of a door opening and the door itself, the bare floor planks focusing back towards a medieval window, and to one side the corner of a bed with a woman’s bare knees bent off the edge, her brown legs down to her relaxed toes. No one in the world knows where they are or that they are together; he feels a lurch of joy at last. An empty day in a forest.

  And in this converted cloister—hidden for centuries in this German forest near the Czech border north of the Danube—the hotel rooms are deserted at this time of year. Adam will think, later: It was in that huge nunnish space that I first recognized Karen clearly, beyond infatuation—perhaps because she was replicated, reversed into distance by a mirror.

  Now, studying his own razored Wiebe face he calls to her, “Would it help”—trying in the mirror to recall all the pictures she has of her obsession’s deep male eyes, the long, bumpy nose—“say, if I parted my hair in the middle? Trimmed it up sort of high, sort of shaggy, like a fur cap?”

  Karen’s legs swing out of sight; she is laughing aloud about the vegetarians fussing in the restaurant the night before. “Those effete English,” she exclaims, “they play with their health as if it were a sickness!”

  “You’re quoting again,” he says.

  Perhaps she hasn’t heard him. She is still laughing.

  “I can’t change my jaw,” he calls louder. “But how about if I prop my ears out like his, sort of these big scoops catching the breeze?”

  “Oh stop it, get back here.”

  Her brilliant head and body waiting. The ancient, noisy bed too tiny in the huge room, under the ceilings that vanish somewhere above them; her naked body forgetful of any nunnery purpose this vacant building once had. A microscopic image of his face shines in her black eyes.

  In the tent of sheets they are hidden from the room’s echoing space. Skin along skin, bodies open to enter and leave, caress and re-enter.

  “Why do you always want me?”

  “An unfortunate state of mind. For me.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘body’?”

  “Not at all.”

  “The body is a state of mind?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “ ‘The applicant,’ ” Adam quotes in German between her breasts, from one of Franz Kafka’s job applications, ‘“is fluent in the German and Bohemian languages, in speech and writing, and further he commands the French, partly the English—”’

  She thumps his head on the pillow. “Stop it! It’s hopeless, you never had a classic Freudian father to hate.”

  He wants to say How would you know? but tight on her moist skin he is instead already translating, against her heartbeat:

  “ ‘“It’s a unique apparatus,” said the officer to the research traveller and considered, with a certain look of wondering admiration, the to him very familiar’—hey, that hurt!—should one translate ‘Apparat’ as ‘execution machine’ or—”

  Karen is on top of him, his arms pinioned back, her knee thrust between his legs and threatening.

  “I’ll kick you out,” she pronounces through clenched teeth.

  “Okay, okay, but please!”

  Adam is trying to laugh. But sad words suddenly drift in his head: his mother singing the longing of her endless Heimatleeda and he rumbles into one in his monotone:

  “Your Bride has waited, oh so long,

  O Lord, for your—”

  and then he can only gasp as she moves them deeper into each other.

  They are in a tight street in the Josefstadt corner of Old Prague, where Karen has found a tiny, crusted keyhole. As she had also found Kafka’s air-blackened bust with its unreadable Czech plaque on the wall of a building at what was once, she informed him, the corner of Karpfen and Enge Streets. Everything of the building, she explained, had been torn down and rebuilt except for the original entrance, and even that is now veiled by scaffolding that might have been clamped there since his birth in 1883, bleeding contemporary socialist rust. Appropriately enough, no Intourist official in Wenceslas Square who could speak either English or German or French would admit knowing the least thing about that Kafka corner, that building now incorporated into the baroque profusion
of the St. Niklaskirche behind blue hoardings, the nine-spired towers of the Tienkirche poking above roofs shrouded in iron. However, the youngest female guide acknowledged sotto voce as the three of them bent together around the map, tracing the curve of the river that pulled the old city together, that, of course, Franz Kafka was born and lived his life in the Jewish ghetto of Prague—yes, right here in this bend—but the ghetto had been entirely rebuilt, after the war, restored, “The Memorial of All the People” to the horrible Nazi elimination of every living Jew in Prague, and for those people, she said, one Jew safely dead and buried in 1924 could not be as important as the rabid, genocidal destruction of an entire race, though Prague itself had not been as badly bombed by the West as all those other defenceless European cities, and of course the Grand Soviet Army had not fired one single shot more than necessary to wrest it from the last Nazi gauleiter, shooting him down in this very street, she said, pointing. And … what were they looking for, exactly?

  Karen is silent as Adam bends to the keyhole. On the other side of the bolted planks of the door he half expects an insect’s legs to waver in unresisting air. The door is at street level, and the long brick cemetery wall in which it is set stretches a metre above his head, but farther along, gravestones abruptly thrust out above it almost to the height of the eavestroughs of buildings at the far end of the wall, gravestones blurred by the moving branches of trees. With stones up there so high, was the city sinking even as it was being torn apart, levelled and rebuilt, the remains of the sinking dead rising up slowly from their centuries? A cemetery rising out of decrepitude and bordellos into tourism, a happening worthy of Kafka himself.

  Just inside the ancient plank door—it can’t be that old, the wood would be more rotten—the cemetery appears to drop down to the level of the cobbled street they are standing on; no huge insects anywhere. Gravestones only, thick as files in a cabinet, blundered over with moss, engraved with what may be Hebrew, or German, or perhaps Bohemian, every body pulling its slab down to its unique angle of decay. Tall sunlight, a mossy garden of stone knives.