Sweeter Than All the World Read online

  “Young Peter” Wiebe will still have that the first time Adam meets him. In 1983 Adam will see a small man come towards him through a crowd of several thousand Mennonites at their first mass gathering in West Germany to celebrate their escape at last from the Soviet Union, his hands high in greeting, exclaiming, “That’s a Wiebe face, a Wiebe face!”

  And at that moment he will appear to be Adam’s father reincarnated in a slight, short body, with his thin hair that will never turn completely grey and that patrician nose and square jaw, limping through the crowd that parts and turns to stare and then laughs aloud at their happiness, at their embrace and enfolding double kiss. Adam will have to bend down to his cousin Young Peter, over him, his arms surrounding those narrow bones, and suddenly between his fingers there spreads an overwhelming silence. He might be holding his father Abraham, alive again after seven years; though his father never in a lifetime held Adam like that.

  “I never wanted another Peter in my family,” his father says like a groan over their Coaldale kitchen table. “An Adam I didn’t care, but a Peter, another Peter …”

  Adam’s mother is singing while she knits. She sings not to avoid his father: they will not live sixty-one years together that way. Rather, that sweet sound suspended by her voice, a broadening colour that does not hesitate at sadness or pain, never breaks because of anger, unforgiveness, or even hatred. It is a sound that slowly, slowly threads brightness into the stifling Sunday afternoon.

  “My home is always on my mind,

  Ahh, when will I reach home?

  I long to be in heaven fair,

  With all God’s children gathered there

  In blessed harmony, in blessed harmony.”

  As she knits and sings, Adam unhooks the skeins of wool sagging over the chairbacks, strand by strand, and rolls them into a ball. In the slow, steady tug and rhythm of her needles his mother will sing every verse of her favourite Heimatleed. She knows so many Mennonite “songs of home”—which have nothing to do with their home on earth. On earth you are forever a stranger, here you can only endure and sing long, slow songs that in your longing inevitably circle around to your true and only home, which is always “over there,” blessed and perfect with God “far beyond yonder sea of stars” where loved ones are already waiting to greet you.

  Across their kitchen table, Adam’s father refuses to join her, though Adam can see the song’s sweet, sad melody tugs at him, that his mother’s high soprano holding on “har-mo-ny-y-y-y” is wrapping itself around him, an irresistible, sorrowful happiness. His father does not so much as glance at the Yearbook Adam has laid open before him, to see the austere and brooding face of his ancestor Adam Wiebe, who in 1616 sailed east from Harlingen to Danzig. Over years he laid out the city’s first wooden water mains, set new flowing fountains in its squares and drained the great marshlands along the Vistula and Motlawa and Radunia rivers by building dikes anchored by roads and great bridges to control the spring and heavy rain runoffs, and dug drainage collector canals and designed wind and horse-driven mills that lifted the turgid water up over the dikes and into the Baltic Sea. Adam Wiebe making dry land, so that the whole Vistula delta of deep river soil could flower into ever more Frisian and Flemish Mennonite farm villages.

  “What is this,” his mother says, pointing with a needle, “these lines here, these things hanging?”

  She is studying the grey picture of the copper engraving of Danzig, the coat of arms in its top left corner, the long, bearded face of Adam in its top right. Across the centre of the picture is printed, “Die Stadt Dantzig,” but above that hangs a wide scroll of Latin, some of which in this printed miniaturization is almost legible through her reading glass. Adam can decipher “Nova inventi,” and more clearly, “MACHINAE ARTIFICIOSAE,” but then lines of scattered dots, something “Exacta delin—” and a sudden “Sacra” and “Adam Wiebe Ha—,” the words lost inside their engraved, dotted and multi-copied minutiae. Whatever they were once intended to say, below the coat of arms on the left there remains a line drawing of a high hill labelled Bischoffsberg, Bishop’s Hill. The centre is low sagging land along river and marshes with the church spires of the city beyond, but below Adam’s picture on the right there is an elevation almost as high as the hill: it is clearly labelled “Wieben Bastion.” At the urgent request of the Danzig City Council, in the 1640s Adam rebuilt the walls and that particular fortification to protect the city during the Thirty Years War between the Roman Catholic and Protestant kings and dukes and emperors and opportunistic generals for hire anywhere in Europe, and since there were no stones in the watery delta, he reconstructed the entire circuit of the Danzig city wall and redesigned and built its twenty military bastions above the flood plains between the rivers by using rocks and earth from the Bishop’s Hill. The “lines, with things hanging,” across the centre of the picture, are the double cable “Nova inventi” that Adam strung on poles, so that by means of an endless circuit of moving buckets attached to this cable, earth and rocks could be carried from the hill and over the river and the marsh to the bastion walls of the city. So exactly were these buckets designed, so precisely were distance and weight calculated, that no power beyond themselves was needed to make them move: the weight of the filled buckets at the top of the hill carried them down across the valley to the top of the bastion while returning the empty buckets back up the hill. And though the mighty Swedish army under King Gustavus II Adolphus, with its enormous wheeled cannon pulled by six- or eight-horse teams, its cavalry and pikemen and lockstep infantry armed with the lightest, quickest-firing muskets, destroyed much of Europe for pay and ultimately, as they professed to truly believe, for the glory of the Protestant Christian Church, though unnumbered armies trailing even larger rabbles of camp followers ravaged and raped their way, year after horrible year, through the farm villages of the Vistula delta, in thirty years not a single enemy got inside the walls of Danzig: because Adam Wiebe invented the cable car to rebuild the defences of an indefensible city.

  “Na oba doch,” Adam’s mother says in utter amazement. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  And she reads aloud the Highgerman caption historian Horst Penner has placed beside the picture: ‘“Adam Wybe (Wiebe) from Harlingen in Holland was apparently the ancestor of most of the present bearers of this name. He was a highly successful engineer and master builder in Danzig during the seventeenth century.’ ”

  Adam’s father can refuse to see or read, but his large ears force him to listen. Adam says, unnecessarily loud, “Adam Wiebe built all that, but he had to live outside the Danzig wall, in a Mennonite village outside. Only after twenty years they finally gave him permission to build a house inside the city, against the wall he rebuilt.”

  His father asks abruptly, “Why would he want to live in there, with strangers?”

  “Walls protected people in war. There were always armies tramping through, they shot and took whatever they wanted, they always wanted food, and animals, women—when people heard armies were coming they left everything in their villages and fled behind the city walls—if the Danzigers opened the gates and let them.”

  Adam’s mother asked, “And the walls, they did keep soldiers out?”

  “Adam Wiebe’s walls did.”

  His father pulls the book around; his crooked right thumb rubs the margin beside the portrait. He says at last, “So, when did this Adam Wiebe die?”

  “Sixteen fifty-two … three hundred … Pa, he built their city for thirty-four years, and his sons after him too, but Danzig never even made him a citizen.”

  “Yo, yo”—his father draws out the Lowgerman “yes” long and heavily—“that’s the way it is, it always was. Those Communists hammered on our door after we sat in those Moscow summer houses for two months and told us to get on the train to Germany, go! They gave me a yellow card, ‘Stateless refugee.’ That’s all it said. A hundred and fifty years in Russia and they shove you out with nothing, the clothes on your back and a piece of yel
low paper, fill in your own names. ‘Stateless refugee.’ ”

  Adam realizes he has not known that either. Perhaps, in the face of certain facts, ignorance does not much matter. After all, over how many lakes and rivers and parts of oceans, across how many fairgrounds, up how many mountains on how many continents do millions of people sail through air, suspended somehow from a cable, without ever having heard of his ancestor Adam Wiebe? Their ignorance—or his own when he is carried through air—has of course never made any of those cables less real, the sailing less beautiful or potentially lethal.

  Years later he will remember their small house in Coaldale, the kitchen table covered in oilcloth where he ate so often; remember his parents sitting there, suspending the thin thread of their songs across the marshes and bitter rivers of their past. Building what bastions? Against what fearfully anticipated or remembered war, against what memory, what knock at the door by secret police, “We just want to ask you a few questions, come on now, you’ll be home for night”? Slight, bent “Young Peter,” the once rich Peter Wiebe’s son having to live a sort of a life in the Soviet Union, and he—whatever his name was, Adam or Heinrich—the once poor Abraham Wiebe’s son living a very different sort of life in Canada and running all over the world: which would one actually prefer? His oldest uncle Jakob Jakob, his beard white as snow, escaping the Communists by a miracle and dying surrounded by his family in 1962, his second uncle Peter Jakob dragged off by the NKVD in the bloody purges of 1937, and his son, “Young Peter,” surviving Stalin’s Orenburg prison once and the Gulag not once but twice—these are the facts, were already becoming facts somewhere in the world that August Sunday afternoon when Adam was seventeen and the Coaldale Mennonite High School history teacher gave him a German article to read—one he could never have discovered for himself, not then knowing enough to know he would want to see it if it did exist—seven amazing pages of archival research on the Wiebes in The Mennonite Yearbook, 1951. When he glanced at the fiercely bearded man whose picture stood at the head of it, and saw his own name.

  The summer Sunday when Adam discovers that, for all their stories, his mother and father can, or will, tell him little about the names he has. What they do is tell him small, personal, contradictory, denied, avoided details of their lives that explain very little; that are, as it seems, less facts than momentary needles tugging at a string of wool, knitting mittens to protect some hand they will never know; less facts than thin images of poles sticking up out of sinking ground, and holding up cables made possible by what genius, what vision, no one can explain, so that all that solid earth could be moved with such marvellous ease over marsh and river from the high cliffs of the Bishop’s Hill to build an impregnable Wiebe Bastion.

  “So.” Adam looks at his mother. “That’s my first name, so. why the second?”

  “So.” After a moment she stops knitting; she glances up at his father, but he continues to stare at the book tilted in his hands, motionless and silent. They hear, outside, a car rush by on the gravel street.

  “In 1935, just before you were born,” his mother says, “we got a letter from Russia. My brother Peter David Loewen was dead. You were named for him.”

  Adam studies her gaunt, motionless hands, fingers ringed by the tension of soft wool.

  “They said he was killed, in a Communist prison camp on Sakhalin Island.”

  “Sakhalin … the island in the Pacific, by Japan?”

  “Peter and I were the only children of my mother, Justina. She died when I was born and every day, my father told me, he carried me across the village street to your father’s mother, Maria Wiebe. She had just had Netta then, and she nursed me too.”

  Slowly Adam’s mother begins to knit again. “I’m sure you can find a map in school,” she says, “where that is, Sakhalin. He’s been dead so long now, all your life.”

  THREE

  FLOUR AND YEAST

  Makkum, Friesland

  1527

  I WAS BORN ALMOST FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO on our farmstead near Makkum, Friesland, now a province of the Netherlands. I am Trijntjen, daughter of Weynken Claes and Wybe Pieters, their first and only child. Two others born after me died before they were one. My mother told me I came on a Wednesday, very early in winter. Ice was forming on the canal but it was still too thin to cross—the midwife had to walk along the dike to the lock by the second windmill.

  Not knowing the date of one’s birth was common for my time. Not even Menne Simons’ birthday is known, and he had all the “defenceless Christians” nicknamed after him because he wrote so many books for them. Countess Anna van Oldenburg called them “Mennists,” trying to protect them. Menne was born nine kilometres from Makkum some twenty-five years before me, and at the end of this millennium many Mennonites still say, “Ejk sie een (I am a) Mennist.” They number over a million and live everywhere in the world.

  But I’m no Menne Simons. I never wrote a word.

  My mother couldn’t write either, but she has been well known since the day of her death. The exact day was recorded in a book of martyr story-songs, The Lord’s Sacrifices, 1562, and again in The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians, 1660:

  Weynken, a widow, daughter of Claes, of Monickendam,

  burnt to death in The Hague,

  the 20th November A. D. 1527

  Burnt to death. Charles V of Spain “by divine right,” as he said, was then the Holy Roman Emperor of Europe. He also considered himself ordained by God to be the owner of the provinces of Holland. So he in turn ordained Duke Anthony Lalaing van Hooghstraten to be our Governor, that is, our Chief Exploiter. The official records say my mother was brought by cart as a prisoner in chains to The Hague on Friday, November 15, 1527. The Governor arrived in the capital on Sunday, November 17, and on Monday, November 18, my mother Weynken was arraigned before him and the full Governing Council of Holland. Accused of heresy.

  It was deep sunset when the Spanish soldiers in their steel helmets hammered on the gate of our farmstead. We had watched for them through the outside window. They came marching along the road on the dike, and the evening light burned red around them. They looked like one huge, thick monster that bristled spears and heads, different heads lifting out of it and pulling back in, heads human, then horse, then steel human again. Growing larger so fast. I had looked out on the dike road all my life, but they seemed to be coming low, flat, on a burnished sea of shining blood.

  My mother had sent our farm people quickly to their relatives, so they would not try to defend her. But I hid myself deep in the hay of the loft. By the time she found me, it was too late to run to Auntie Lijsbeth’s. My mother kissed me hard and pushed me towards the ladder again. “Deep, deep!” she hissed as I climbed. I was so terrified for her, at their hammering and their smashing the rooms below me, that I was too stupid to look out the roof window. So they dragged her away, and I remember only her face against mine in our terror. And her kiss.

  My mother was the widow of Wybe Pieters of Makkum. But she could be arrested in Friesland and taken for trial in The Hague because she was born in Monickendam, Holland. Makkum is eighty kilometres from Monickendam by sail across the Zuiderzee, and during an autumn storm my father’s fishing boat was driven ashore there, and they saw each other. She was locking down the shutters of her family’s shop against the spume flung by the crashing sea, and she glanced at him with the usual Dutch expression when recognizing a “stumma Fries,” no matter how young, long and handsome he might be. The problem was he looked up at exactly that moment.

  That’s the way she always told the story. He and his two mates walked past, staggering from their twelve-hour struggle to save themselves and their boat. They had thrown all their gear and fish overboard to lighten it in the storm, and his hard body passed nearest her, bent like a tree against the shuddering wind. Then he saw her bare feet, the edge of her skirt, and from under his heavy eyebrows he looked up the length of her dress to her face. Expecting, and seeing, her lip curl. T
hey were so close she would have touched him had she raised her finger. Their looks locked, and she saw light shape itself into an immovable decision in his blue Fris eyes.

  That’s how our mother Weynken told me the story. What my father Wybe saw he never said. Not that story in her eyes, nor any other. I remember him a little. He would sit with his legs stretched out, long feet naked and toes moving a little as if he remembered a song, staring into our hearth fire where bread baked. He was always mending a fish net, or sewing one. God took him, my mother told me, to Himself in the violent winter water, west beyond the Wadden Islands of the North Sea. I asked her, Does God live in the stormy sea? She said, I’ve told you and told you, God’s home is everywhere.

  On November 18 in The Hague, my mother stood alone and chained—there was no place to run, did they think she would attack them?—before the Duke van Hooghstraten and all his Councillors seated high in the Council Chambers. They would not, of course, talk directly to her themselves. As the records show, they had a woman ask her the questions that their learned and compliant theologians had prepared:

  Question: Have you well considered the things my lords have told you?

  My mother: I stand by my word.

  Question: You have been warned. If you do not speak differently, and turn from your error, you are subject to execution.

  Answer: Only if power is given you from above. I am ready to suffer.

  Question: Do you then not fear death?

  Answer. Often I fear it. But I shall never taste it, for Christ teaches in his Gospel, “I tell you the truth, if anyone keeps my word, they will never see death.”

  Question: What do you hold concerning our holy church?

  Answer: Nothing. I never in my life met a “holy church.”

  Question: You speak with spite. What do you hold concerning the sacrament?

  Answer: The sacrament your priest gives is in one kind only, not two. And the one he gives, I know it is flour and yeast.