by Rudy Wiebe
He met no one. The cobblestones, rough and unworn as if gathered in a field yesterday, led him down into the day’s deepening twilight. It must have been the time of the evening meal, he could hear voices, and kettles and pots banging through open windows too high to look into but letting in, at last, the evening coolness. He felt his skin loosen a little after the tremendous sun all day, and then turning a corner he saw what must be momentary people passing far below him, where the narrow street he was walking down crossed another. But when he got there, he was still alone.
A tiny intersection between houses; from five directions streets emerged out of their straight narrowness and circled their cobblestones around themselves. The tops of Adam’s feet felt suddenly cold in their sandals: as if along one of the radiating streets a breath had drawn up from the sea.
“May I take your photo?”
It was a moment before he understood that he had been spoken to; in unaccented Canadian English, after months of incomprehensible sound. A stocky man stood in the fold of a wall. Adam realized that must be the person who had spoken to him. A square camera—could it actually be wood?—stared at him, its black cloth partially draped over the man’s arm.
Adam said, a reflex brushing him away, “It’s too dark here for a picture.”
“No.”
That word, trailing him along this endless coast, slowing him farther into hopelessness; he jerked erect to glare, perhaps to curse, and he saw the single eye at the centre of the wooden face flicker even as he turned fast to leave.
The man’s left hand emerged, offered a piece of paper.
The paper was the picture. Adam saw himself in black and white, framed full-length between the house corners of the street he had just come down, his face unguarded and open: as always, running away. But even as he saw this, something else appeared in the stony street behind his image, level, above his shoulders; he took a step into the low evening circle and clearly there was a shape behind him in the picture, long, stretched out, delicate arms and legs reaching as it seemed into the next stroke of water, and blond hair—certainly long and blond!—he saw that more and more clearly, hair streaming flat behind her, over bare white shoulders and black swimsuit, she is there! swimming down the rock street of the narrow village.
The world crashed so dark the street behind him was hardly discernible, but it was certainly motionless and empty. He could only stand there, barely trying to breathe.
The man was beside him, glancing at the picture in Adam’s hand. “No,” he said again, crouching back as if he wished to disappear into the wall. “It is not good, no.”
As if she swam in a layered sea of rock behind and above him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I did not really want to take it.” The man was contradicting himself in abasing apology, his face hunched with pain and his voice so deeply gentle, almost as though he were praying the Miserere.
The village was like hundreds of others on the cliffs above the Adriatic and Adam had never intended to come here; he had to get to Trieste, to ports where sea ferries landed, where officials guarding gangplanks had to be questioned, a twist of the key would carry him instantly, permanently to those places for disappointment. But here this picture lay in his hand.
“Where is she?” he demanded. If he had had a knife, it would have found the vein in the man’s throat.
He whirled around to stare up the street, then back again, both his hands opening to grab the man, but he was gone and the camera was gone and the picture had fallen away from him, between the white buildings there was only gathering darkness and the empty stones circled under his feet. On his knees in the tiny intersection Adam searched, brushed his hands over every cobblestone and up into one after another of the radiating streets, and finally he scrambled to his feet and hammered on door after door. He had no words to explain himself, he acted out “flashlight,” then “camera,” leaped about “taking a picture,” but it seemed no one could understand the frenzy of his behaviour. He ran up the radiating streets until he found the one that opened to his car, he drove into Rijeka, found a librarian who spoke some English and rushed back. But flashlights revealed nothing on the cobblestones, the villagers insisted they had never seen such a thing as a wooden camera, leave alone a stocky man who spoke English. The librarian who translated this looked at him, as the villagers did, standing in the dim light of their doorways, with a profound and blank compassion.
He is standing on a reef in the Java Sea. Unbelievable coral ebullitions roil everywhere in it, reflect a pink surface scrolled in shimmers about his knees. What may be his own thonged feet ripple there, and a purple starfish inert on the sand. Through the water he sees his toe approach, nudge closer, flip it over. A skiff of drifting sand. It is certainly upside down now but still motionless: long before this sudden inversion it must have already been protecting its central mouth like that with its curling self; probably had done so all its life in hopeless anticipation of this unexpected and merciless Canadian.
The upside-down starfish does not move. Adam stares away over the vacant sea, avoids every faint shadow of wave or mountain and concentrates on the meeting of water and sky. Counts slowly. After the third quick glance down he knows that the top left arm is beginning to curl. Under. At the tenth he sees a tiny ripple of water help bend the second arm. In eleven minutes the starfish has almost folded three of its arms back under itself, and then a sea surge lifts it upright and over, flat.
The water clucks around his hips. One flip is not enough. Another.
He lay on his hotel bed in ancient Husum, the Schleswig-Holstein town where Theodor Storm wrote Der Schimmelreiter, reading the novel in the new edition that included pictures of the latest movie made of it. When Trish came through the connecting door and sat on his bed, she barely nodded at the stupendous grey horse he offered her, rearing above a dike ripped through in vicious rain.
“You know I don’t like horses,” she said. She had not yet cut her hair short for travel.
“Joel doesn’t either. What’s with you, Albertans and you don’t like horses.”
“You don’t either.”
“Those were our homestead plugs, Schrugge, that I had to ride to school, but this is a beautiful Schimmel.”
“If only the sea can make land,” she said, “we should have driven along every dike and watte and polder all the way down the North Sea coast.”
But his mind was lost in Storm’s sonorous German and the great farmsteads they had seen that day on their high, diked islands, coming up like ships out of the midst of the driving sea. It was only when she added, “If you think you can follow all your ancestors backwards through your Martyrs Mirror,” that he understood she was talking about something quite different.
“What?” he said, apprehensive.
“You should go to The Hague, to Makkum, and Antwerp, the Frisian Islands too, to the places where the Wiebes started and burned.”
“We’ll get to Harlingen,” he said quickly. “Next time, and Danzig too, I promise.”
“And Russia?”
“Of course, I told you I just have to persuade my old cousin to come, show us everything in Orenburg, but he’s still afraid.”
“There’s Gorbachev now, nothing will happen.”
“But Young Peter had three arrests, you can’t blame him—” He stopped, abruptly happy. “You want to come with me, to Russia?”
“No,” she said. She was standing against the sheer curtain at the hotel window, and he could not see her face. “I’m sorry,” she said abruptly.
“Why?”
“Oh—” She gestured, tossing aside whatever they had said with a flip of her hand. “You said one ancestor was called Adrian. Where would they get such a name from? The Adriatic?”
“Maybe it’s Latin,” he said, puzzled. “I don’t know what it means.”
“It doesn’t matter … sorry.”
Sorry. Twice in one minute, when she rarely said it at all.
Adam thinks of that
pale young Frisian explaining the watte—perhaps his name was Adrian—if he could find him again above the grey sea, they might both be hunched there; together, her fingers accepting the smear of mud and bony bits he offers, they could be holding slippery hands. “In the next century,” Adrian would be saying, “we’ll grow wheat here where there was only sea. This land will grow everything.”
If war doesn’t happen, and flight.
But obviously the fire and brimstone of war does not concern her. She is holding specks of molluscs or bone in her hand, is rolling white specks ground roundly into powder between her slim fingers, the North Sea wind whipping her hair, grown long again, across her face.
“That’s easiest to do,” the young man says, “to try and build it straight. But the sea is always bending everything, of course.”
“Trish?” Adam asks. “Trish?”
But she is not listening to him. It may be she is laughing, like a Menniste Suzje.
Adam stands on the reef in the rising tide of the sea. Far behind him the narrow sand on the rim of land shades dark into palm trees, into high towers of hotels white against the magnificent jungle hills singing with insects and parrots and dipsidoodling monkeys; but he faces away from all that, looks ahead over the flat, reflecting surface. When he bows his head slightly, his chin and the tip of his nose are touched by the sea, the columns of his body, legs, his sandal-patterned feet are as precise as cut crystal bent among coral, gesturing fronds, creatures perhaps moving though seeming still as ash, a strange world so brilliant that at this moment he cannot recognize any bit of it, though his eyes are wide open. With time the sea will reveal everything, of course. Adam simply must know at what moment to look down into it like this, and remember.
SIXTEEN
A ToUR OF SIBERIA
Marienburg on the Nogat, East Prussia
1945
I WAS BORN ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 28, 1903, in the village then called Gnadenthal, Colony Baratov, in the country whose name Josef Stalin later decided would be Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Elizabeth Katerina Wiebe. My mother, also Elizabeth, told me I was born long, so long I did not really uncurl, as she said it, until she had survived seven days of blood and fever, but she lived to bear two even longer children, sons Enoch and Abel, before her motherhood bled away into miscarriages.
I remember my mother always slender, and pale, she might have been a morning mist drifting through the house from the autumn orchard. And sometimes when she endured one, or sometimes two, of “my days” as she called them, in bed, when she lay with her head turned to the wall and her breath so low the blankets did not stir over her, the spread of her marvellous hair made me simmer, I felt myself humming with a happiness I could never quite feel looking at her beautiful, gaunt face.
I know my father, Alexander Wiebe, felt both the beauty and the pain from her as well. In the finest portrait he ever took with his large studio camera, she is half turned, half kneeling on a chair, her left leg almost doubling her long skirt under her and her arms crossed on the chairback; strands of her hair stray back down to her waist, and forward over the lace-trimmed blouse on her breast. She is looking right, serene as glass with the painted studio backdrop behind her, her eyes raised as if anticipating a vision from heaven; it is coming, yes. Her lips will open in adoration.
When I became a nurse, I understood she lived with a prolapsed uterus, her inner organs torn by inflammation and miscarriages. Many women suffered that in her time; she was forty-seven when she died. In 1931, just as Stalin’s freight trains began hauling “kulaks” and their families north to slave to death in the mines and forests of Vorkuta, a name we had not known before and soon could hardly whisper. Perhaps then my father’s missing right arm saved our family from arrest by the State Political Administration, a fancy name for political police, we called them GPU. If it saved him, he always said even a right arm was well worth the price of not having to tour Siberia in a cattle car. But he also insisted our mother’s affliction actually spared her life for a time, since it prevented more childbirth, and childbirth, he said, could be as dangerous for a woman as war service for a man. He thanked God that they had been given three strong children and twenty-seven years of love and care together.
“And all her pain?” I asked him.
He was silent, and abruptly wiped my question aside with his single hand as if it were less than a fly. His right arm had been cut off at the shoulder during the Great War, after an exploding bullet crashed through it and destroyed the Russian soldier he was trying to carry to safety on his back.
‘“We are born to suffering as sparks fly upward.’ ” His favourite book of the Bible. “Have you ever heard in Russia of anyone who doesn’t suffer?”
I remembered my youth very well. “We never suffered, not before I was fourteen and you had to go to war. Except for her ‘days’ all our life was wonderful.”
“I’m talking lifetimes, and we’re no Jobs, we’re just Mennonites. We don’t argue with God.”
Both my mother and father were Wiebes, I was een Dobbel-Wiebe as they teased me, double Wiebe, and named after my grandmothers, only one of whom I knew. My second name is, of course, all princess and purity, but the first means “dedicated to God,” and I have never married. Since the age of fifteen I have been a nurse, caring for the sick and the elderly; when I began nursing during the Revolution there were more than enough hurt people to care for, and I soon realized that being a nurse would save me from the grinding labour of a collective farm, so all these years I appear to be truly “dedicated to God” in caring for others. As only a single Mennonite woman can be who, for whatever seemingly unfortunate reasons, has not been able to dedicate herself to the highest of all womanly callings, that most dangerous one of wife and mother. At forty-two I still appear to be dedicated, a princess, pure.
In January 1945, appearance is all any German has left in Marienburg, in what was once Poland, or East Prussia, or perhaps it is Poland again—who knows what country we’re in or will be in a day or two, in war there is no time for anything but “here.” At night the southeastern horizon flashes and screams with an endless, flaming light. One could imagine the rumble was an immense, unnatural summer thunderstorm, but there is snow on the ground tonight, it is twenty-five degrees below zero and we know that the light is the hordes—as the Germans call them—of the Soviet Red Armies approaching. With Siberian cold and American steel they are steadily killing the German Wehrmacht into a devastating retreat over which Hitler’s insane orders have no control.
Ancient Marienburg Castle is barricaded, surrounded by anti-tank trenches hand-dug by starving Russian prisoners of war. The SS officers who now speak for the Wehrmacht tell us, who live in the town around the castle, that the Red Armies will never cross into the Fatherland, they will be stopped right here on the eastern bank of the Nogat because our massive fortress, built by the German Order of Knights, has withstood over seven hundred years of siege and has never and will never be taken by subhuman Communist Slavs. I don’t remind them of Gustavus of Sweden or Napoleon (they were supposedly Christian and more or less blond), I just fill my two water pails as well as I can where the millrace runs open over the ice-slivered dam, and carry them back between the zigzag tank barriers to Mühlengraben 34. The door opens when I reach the step: Sister Erika is there, smiling as she reaches for one heavy pail, and I am inside the warmth of the Marienburg Mennonite Home for the Elderly.
Our building is outside the dry moats and stone walls of the castle. Whether this is unfortunate or not, time will shortly tell. We have not fled west like the other Germans and Mennonites (and the Poles and Russian prisoners of war working for us, who fear the coming Communists even more than they hate and fear the Nazis) because the local Nazi gauleiter and the Wehrmacht betrayed us.
Three times in the last two days we told the evacuation authorities that we have thirteen aged women and one man in our care, four of them very weak; please, we beg you, bring us trucks or wagons and either help u
s to the train station or to join the road treks so we can escape west, over the distant Oder River and into Germany, before the massive flight of people clogs all transportation. The gauleiter insisted he could never contravene standing orders, screamed at me that the Red Army would be stopped and driven back, what was the matter with us, were we spies, despicable traitors?
Staring, his frightened little eyes; he even affected a small moustache like his deranged Führer. I had not spoken a single word in Russian since November 29, 1943, when, with all the other Mennonites who had fled ahead of the retreating Wehrmacht from the Ukraine, I had been made a German citizen in the re-Germanized Wartegau, and given ethnic German identity papers. Only Sister Erika knew where I came from and she thanked God, she said, in silence.
The next day, January 25, two diving Russian planes fired four cannon-shells into the Marienburg before our anti-aircraft guns drove them off. One shell hit beside the gauleiter’s office and he began to scream, “All civilians evacuate!” He got out ahead of them all because, rumour had it, for three weeks he had already had his Daimler and mistress packed. The Wehrmacht officers assured Sister Erika they had never yet left any civilians behind (they certainly had enough experience, with over five years of war and a three-thousand-kilometre retreat from Stalingrad and Moscow), never left any elderly, don’t worry. But despite endless vehicles and carts and distraught people streaming past our door west to the river, the officials brought no transport.
The last German soldier we saw was at noon today, January 26, the sky screaming with fighter planes and shells, and high bombers droning west with not an anti-aircraft gun to stop them. Three uniformed youngsters came down the littered, empty street as Sister Erika and I were ripping down our window curtains to prevent them from catching fire.
