Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  Motion, and a magnificent ptarmigan struts regally past the screen door of the tent. The bird’s pert head cocked, brown, its lower body and legs mottled white, it seems to float on the misty lichen where their packs lie in the sun lining the northern horizon. “Gronk!” it declares again from beyond the boulders.

  “Ptarmigans are slow as barnyard chickens,” Eric had told them earlier that day, their canoes floating together as they rested, “and as sure to walk their own trails as cows or caribou, but don’t knock them, they’re beautiful. The Dene story of the creation of woman turns on the good deed of a ptarmigan.”

  Joel laughed. “Good as Adam’s rib?”

  “Better! When the bird turns into a woman, she helps the man!”

  Christina pushed their canoe into the current. “That’s all men want of women,” she said, “work, more work.”

  “Only the one ptarmigan.” Adam heard Eric’s usual irony as they drifted apart. “They don’t say any other bird ever did anything.”

  “Why would they? One’s enough.”

  Eric’s third wife; about half his age, with a perfect J-stroke. Like the quick doctor he was, Eric made absolute personal decisions, no looking back at possible wreckage left behind. Patients loved him: no waffle, no bullshit. Professor and Head of Surgery at the University Hospital. Any time you want, he kept saying to Adam, I’ll get you back on staff. Not yet, if ever.

  Through waterproof nylon the polar night of summer glows lemon yellow. Almost thirty years ago, a few lakes south of here, with Eric and Napoleon, and Kathy bending over a three-stone fire. In the days when he fell asleep instantly. Caribou walking the skyline.

  Adam feels his body shrink, as if he were smothered by ice; by the deep voice of the river here among stones and light since the slow melting of the continental glaciers spread out the global sea. He feels his own hand, he also is here, and there is his son, sleeping. In the other tent Christina and Eric will have their sleeping bags zipped together, perhaps they are naked. He lengthens out, on his back and staring up. If this were four years ago Susannah would be here lying along him, but she is gone, as he is gone, they continue to agree on that while still looking back at each other, stay away. And Jean gone, easier and quicker than saying “so long.” He will not think of Karen and her wide mouth, her subtle and matching obsession of mind; let her be with her uxorious husband, let this be, without ache of mind and heart. Ribbed between stones too deep to clear for their tent floor, indelible as a requiem by Rilke:

  So will ich dich behalten, wie du dich

  hinstellest in den Spiegel, tief hinein

  und fort von allem. Warum kommst du anders?

  “This is how I want to keep/remember you, the way you stood/placed yourself in the mirror, deep inside it and away from everything. Why do you come different?” His own life a continual movement of looking back, of looking into mirrors and never coming different.

  Warum kommst du nicht anders? That is his line.

  His weight, he feels it, is softening the permafrost. When he and Joel fold the tent they will see their shapes side by side between the stones, momentary body prints steaming a little, rising from the tundra. Beside a nameless river somewhere between lakes labelled Starvation and Winter. Not even Eric can say what their Dene names are. His sleeping bag is warm and tight around his shoulders, like a zipped body bag coming home for burial, though he has never seen a body in war, much less felt it. Good sound, “body bag.”

  Is he north of the Arctic Circle? The creaking globe he memorized in Waskahikan School turns its Arctic face to him and he follows those straight lines that appear to organize and control what, looking down from a Twin Otter, is a simple chaos of lakes, rivers, white flowing eskers. He traces the globe lines revolving and recognizes he is lying on the parallel of the Magadan Gulag just above Kamchatka, USSR. There, beyond the Kolyma Mountain Ranges, somewhere in that desolation of volcanoes between the Yukagir Plateau and the swamps of the Omolon and Kolyma Rivers, they say two of his father’s brothers were destroyed digging gold for Stalin. And his mother’s brother Peter Loewen on Sakhalin Island in the Okhotsk Sea, north of Japan—but most of it stretches south beyond the latitude of Regina or Vancouver. Why does he always think Sakhalin is north? Because exile, in Canada or Russia, can only be north, frozen extermination.

  In the desert of Outer Mongolia, they say, permafrost lives in the ground as far south as the 48th parallel.

  “You paddle this nice empty tundra,” Joel says to him next day in the canoe, “and you still just think about all your lost uncles.”

  “Not just,” Adam says. Susannah, he thinks, would be taking pictures; hours of stalking, to find a loving partner in a bird, one that rarely flew, and then only a few blustering metres.

  They are paddling parallel to a flat esker along a placid lake. That morning they negotiated a series of runnable rapids, then a long rock garden where wading with the canoes in hand was barely possible, and finally a steep boulder-trap of shallow fall in the middle of which Eric stood immovable as any erratic, handing the loaded canoes through with water smashing up into spray against him and the boulders and the leaping canoes all at once, while the rest of them scrambled over shore rocks trying to control the canoe painters.

  “This land makes you think.” Adam looks back at his son.

  “I wish we’d see a caribou.”

  “Gone north to the ocean for calving.”

  “So we get mosquitoes. Look at the bastards.” Joel lifts his dripping paddle and smacks the roped packs in front of him. “They ride along out into the lake, then drill you, even out here.”

  “Keep your head-net down, your paddle in the lake. I’m doing all the work!”

  “You’re just muscle, I keep us on course.”

  “You still have to think to J-stroke?”

  “Ha!” Joel laughs, abrupt, explosive. “Just don’t stop pulling when you think Siberia. I see it every time.”

  The lake is sheet steel; ahead of them Eric and Christina’s canoe slides through the long ramp of the exact, inverted esker. No sky or water, a double of horizontals forged by relentless ice.

  Joel says out of nowhere, the way canoeists talk, “What did Onkel David Loewen say, about your uncles in Siberia?”

  “He talked about Sakhalin Island, not Siberia.”

  “What’s the diff.”

  “Nothing, in misery. They were his uncles too, Grandma’s two brothers.”

  “How come he knows more in Paraguay than you in Canada?”

  “I think they tell more stories, no TV or malls.”

  The year before, Adam and Joel had landed in Asunción barely a week after Alfredo Stroessner was toppled in a coup by his own officers, but a flip of army dictators was irrelevant to Adam’s cousin David Loewen in the distant Chaco. The old man and his circle of six sons sat under their giant paratodo tree, passing a maté cup back and forth. The Paraguayan night, cooling slightly so that Adam’s evaporating sweat became a desert comfort, sang with insects and frogs as one by one the men were satisfied, drinking around and then drifting away. Joel had no language to speak with any of them, but the youngest, both mute and simple, offered an eloquence of gesture that made some facts as comprehensible as speech; he beckoned Joel away, past the darkness into the moonlit fields to look at the Southern Cross.

  “It wasn’t Onkel David who told me,” Adam says over his shoulder between the grunt and rhythm of paddling. “It was Taunte Anna.”

  “I thought she went in the house?”

  “She came back. The women don’t drink maté, but she sat under the tree, then.”

  “She’s the nicest little old mama.” Joel’s chuckle is like the sound of the lake along the canoe.

  “She’s sixty-five.”

  “So small and brown and wrinkled, Chaco sun, I guess.”

  “All her life. She said it, Onkel David never would have.”

  “What?”

  “Fifty-nine years in Paraguay, and the Russian Mennonite vi
llages are still so real to them. And all the relatives … lost or not, every one of hundreds of relatives.”

  Joel says, “Maybe she thinks about it more.”

  “What, thinks? Old David’s the one who knows everything, talks all the time. You saw him, he never stopped while we were there.”

  “I mean, I couldn’t understand them but she always does the same things, clean up, cook, and he’s always running around. Maybe she dares to think.”

  Adam stops paddling and glances back at his son, broad and solid as any Loewen. The lake opens beyond him without edges; his head is down, his paddle driving through the water with a relentless rhythm that surges the canoe straight ahead with a tight, curved stroke. Before he had seen him heave up and invert the canoe on his shoulders and begin that first carry across the tundra, Adam had not imagined him so resiliently strong.

  “Dare?”

  “It’s hard to think sometimes,” Joel says, “some things. What’d she say?”

  Not a story to be told over a shoulder in quick phrases between breaths, kneeling in a shifty canoe where his knees again alternate between groan and spasm. Sixteen months ago in the insect-singing heat of the reversed southern hemisphere, and now here in their own country’s arctic desert. Adam thinks suddenly, My son could become a relentless wanderer like me.

  “Dad. What did she say?”

  Hard to say on water. But no easier to utter flat on his back later in their shuddering tent. His words bunch into the angles of taut nylon, he can barely speak, words could coil their ancestral past into a winding sheet for him and his son stretched out under the ceaseless wind of the tundra. Perhaps if he spoke to the open, quiet sky … where on earth could you say this?

  “Exile … well, they were always being forced into exile. The Loewens leaving Antwerp in the 1580s, the Frisians earlier, even Adam Wiebe when he maybe got lured to Danzig, his travel from Harlingen became exile, I don’t think he ever went back. He drained the Vistula delta to build farms, sure, and when he invented the cable car to rebuild the walls … actually, it’s like he made land, the way our ancestors in Friesland made land from the sea. I think he probably would have taken it out of the sea too, and deepened the harbour, but the Swedish army was already all around them.”

  Joel says flatly, “Dad. You said he built twenty military bastions. A bastion is no wheat field.”

  This is easier, this usual repartee, these genial reacquaint-tances after months apart; father and son working together and talking easily. Adam concedes:

  “Sure. But you can graze sheep on bastion curtain walls if they’re made of earth. You saw the sheep on the Dutch dikes. The new land made by the sea, the watte, isn’t just a field. At a certain point, when the watte’s built up high enough they have to make more dikes anyway to protect it from the sea, and that’s all a city wall is, a dam of protection. In Danzig Adam built earth dams not to hold back the violent sea, but to hold back the brutal people coming over it. But he was still doing what he’d always done: if he didn’t protect the city, even his place of exile would be destroyed, and what new exile would they find then? If they survived at all.”

  “Dad!” Joel shouts above the tremendous wind that is pounding their tent like a spastic drummer. “Taunte Anna was not talking about Adam Wiebe and his damn cable car!”

  Adam continues to evade him. “Our family’s had all kinds of exiles,” he says. “Hundreds, and sometimes the Mennonites themselves did it to each other. Did I tell you about our relative who got exiled for painting portraits? Mennonites did it to him.”

  “A Wiebe was a painter?”

  “He was both Loewen and Wiebe. The seventeenth century was full of great Flemish painters, so you’d expect some in Danzig, where so many fled. This one’s name was Enoch Seemann the Elder, and his mother was Adam Wiebe’s granddaughter. He painted all the portraits of the councilmen to hang in the Danzig city hall. But the Mennonite Elder decided painting portraits was wrong, after all, there is the Second Commandment, and so he excommunicated him, banned him from the Church. That meant Enoch had no community—Mennonites were strict with the ban, as they called it, in Danzig. Enoch’s family wasn’t supposed to even talk to him, or so much as eat with him, because he was banished from the fellowship to hell. But Enoch was too good a painter, he found a royal exile with Augustus II of Saxony, and then a permanent refuge in England, where his son Enoch the Younger later painted portraits of George II and Queen Caroline, and his own self-portrait, which Augustus hung in his magnificent Zwinger in Dresden until—”

  “Dad!”

  “—until the Dresden firebombing in 1945,” Adam concludes gently, the wind catching its breath over the tent. “You’re right. Taunte Anna in Paraguay knows nothing about Adam Wiebe, or painters.”

  “Mom said her father, Grandpa Lyons, was in Dresden.”

  “I don’t think so. He was in France, he serviced the Flying Fortresses that flew there.”

  Joel says, “So he was there.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You pull the trigger, but I loaded the gun and gave it to you, so, who’s responsible?”

  The categorical logic of youth. “Okay,” Adam says, “or I made the gun in a factory, you ordered me to make it … okay.”

  Nothing to argue there, lying side by side in a shuddering tent on the rocky permafrost of an island barely fifty strides long in Little Marten Lake in the Mackenzie District, the Northwest Territories of Canada. Adam thinks: If I was an Ojibwa shaman, this would be the shaking-tent where the Spirits come to answer my most heartfelt prayer. What would I pray, if I could? For whom?—but his son is lying there, waiting for him.

  So, what can he tell Joel of Taunte Anna’s prayer-and-spirit story of Sakhalin Island? Taunte Anna knows only one thing about Sakhalin, certainly not the double-dagger map shape of it, as if roughly chipped from stone in the Sea of Okhotsk, because she has no atlas, in fifty-nine years will not have seen one except perhaps in Spanish, which she cannot read. Besides, Sakhalin Island is not Taunte Anna’s story. She is a Wiebe, daughter of Adam’s father’s third brother. Her husband Onkel David is the Loewen, and it was he who took the story of the two Loewen brothers from Canada to Paraguay because Adam’s mother told it to him when he visited her in Alberta just before she died; Adam’s mother, who was born Katerina Loewen, Onkel David’s half-aunt because she was David’s father’s half-sister. Can you keep that straight without a chart, of family roots and branches intersecting?

  “I know we’re blood related,” Joel says impatiently. “So get on with it.”

  But Onkel David could not bring himself to tell that small, brutal story under the dazzling night flowers of the beautiful paratodo tree. It was Taunte Anna who had to say it aloud in Lowgerman, quick and flat as if she were telling him her recipe for borscht, something every Mennonite in the world already knew except perhaps one overwhelmed by the stupefying comfort of Canada. She told Adam:

  “When my David visited in Canada, the year your mother died, she told him that in the thirties the Communists sent her brother Peter Loewen to jail on Sakhalin Island, and then their half-brother Heinrich, Heinrich Loewen the Communist, he travelled to that place and killed him.”

  Adam could not see the bright flowers above her or her dark, worn face, could barely see her cotton dress in the light reflected from the kitchen where daughters were clattering dishes, their husbands peering over their shoulders.

  Taunte Anna spoke as neutrally as possible, used four little words twisted into idiom: Hee brocht ahm omm. Literally “he brought him around,” like the colloquial English “he did him in.”

  She added abruptly, over Onkel David’s head clutched between his massive hands, “They say he just brought a knife. And stabbed his brother.”

  Spetje: pricked. Like a possible needle wandering through wool.

  His name only “Heinrich Loewen the Communist.” His photograph was in the album Adam’s mother left him when she died—head and shoulders, a morose, ve
ry handsome young man with a shadow of moustache, wearing a flapped woollen cap rising to a peak over his forehead and fronted with a star, undoubtedly red, and a bar on his erect collar. Was that the uniform of Trotsky’s Red Army, or Stalin’s? The cardboard picture was pasted onto the black page of the album with flour. When Adam finally got it separated from the album, between blotches he discovered a message angled across the top left corner in a beautiful German Gothic script, which he slowly puzzled into translation: “With artelistic greetings from your brother, brother-in-law and uncle, Nove—” the date and place (“—ovka” … could be “Romanovka,” but would he use such a Czarist name in the 1930s, when his sister was already in Canada?) torn out forever by paste and black paper. That Heinrich who it seemed never married, except perhaps the Communist Party, rubbing it in with a Party word they must have instantly hated without ever quite understanding. What happened to him? “Artel: a cooperative organization of producers.” Producing what?

  His mother Katerina’s full brother Peter Loewen was nowhere in the album, but her father, David Loewen, was there, stern and bald, a white goatee, thick legs sheathed in gleaming knee boots stretched out black before him, and his fourth and last wife (no older than Adam’s mother, whose best friend she was before, to Katerina’s shock, she married him) standing slightly tilted and unsmiling behind him. Nothing written on the back of that.

  Pricked … they say … half-brother … the Communist. Nothing on paper, just a few words left in air.

  If Adam’s father had been alive when his mother told Onkel David that, his father would have murmured, “They’re all dead now, so long.”

  And his mother would have answered, “Thank God. The Communists can do nothing terrible to them any more.”