Sweeter Than All the World Read online

  “The Bloody Theatre,” Susannah said in wonder, “what an amazing title for a book. And Mirror too.”

  “It was odd, yeah, but no odder than all the bloody stories.”

  “All books had those long, complex titles then, in the 1600s.…”

  “One of those martyrs,” Adam told her, “was barely a teenager, they tortured her by ‘tearing her tender limbs with cutting hooks,’ I remember that, they cut her open to the ribs and she cried out, ‘Behold, Lord Jesus Christ! Thy name is being written on my body!’ ”

  Susannah’s large, brilliant eyes held him unblinkingly. Adam murmured, “I remember that … story.…”

  And she responded, strangely, “In a mirror you see the world in reverse.”

  “Yes,” Adam said, “there’s that. And also it’s always behind you.”

  They were two people profoundly together, and together thinking beyond themselves; his deliberately cobbled world of medicine gone somewhere then, somehow pale and shallow and gone. But. But. Never as completely, he sensed, never quite gone in the flat, factual way she vanished when he lived hands-on in medicine.

  Eric said no worry, they were just up to their goddamn necks in endless minutiae. More likely, Adam thought, he was in over his head. And if he could surface, would a life split with Susannah submerge him as well? How many ways does a person need to drown?

  “C’mon, clear your head,” Eric pushed him. “A break before term, before the wedding, just relax, hunt caribou on the tundra where there’s nothing but horizon. C’mon, Napoleon says sure, if he wants to, you bring your friend along.”

  Adam hunches down on the soft edge of a lake at the Arctic circle. Huge prints with four toes; grizzlies have five. Napoleon would say: This is our brother, our sister wolf who long ago when the world was new showed us how to hunt the running caribou, taught us how to live as good a life as the Creator has already given us, live it until we die. The relentless hospital wards slide over Adam’s thoughts, row on row on corridor of Hippocratic devastation so simple if they could all simply die when their bodies said so, and he simply carry a tumpline of meat, drag his convoluted life over the moss-and-stony tundra—sweet shit.

  He should go back. Gnaw a roasted rib, listen to hunter talk and grunt, stare into a three-stone fire. Shut the shit down.

  As the autumn night deepens they lie side by side on or in their sleeping bags inside the perimeter of the tent; it is so compact that unless they curl a little their feet touch down the centre line. Napoleon sits beside the barrel heater and tells stories. Some in English, a few in Dogrib that he has been given to tell only in that language, but which John L has permission to translate. Stories about the People, who have always lived here, who know certain things a little, who have no word for wilderness because everywhere this land is home. No plane or skin canoe or radio or bone needle changes land and People. A journey here to Lastfire Lake for fall caribou once required three or four weeks, paddling and carrying around rapids and between rivers from Rae-Edzo, their dogs running along the banks with them in summer clouds of mosquitoes, fifty-seven portages on tumplines, even the little children carrying. And on the way they would pass the immense dam built by the Giant Beavers where the Lawgiver Yamoria fought them, and also the place where the Dogrib and Yellowknife Dene a hundred and fifty years ago pledged peace to each other forever and danced, the circle they pounded into the earth dancing still rounded deep between the stones. Napoleon’s lips barely move, a mystery of incomprehensible language and John L’s quiet voice speaking his words into the further mystery of English as the spruce snaps in the heater. They are drifting into sleep while the mantle lamp hisses down.

  And then Adam is jerked awake, the warm stovepipes crashing down over them. Storm outside, slamming the tent with boxer combinations boom! boom! boomboom! Someone opens the tent flap, in the grey dawn snow is streaking past and John L shouts above the din for everyone to sit up, back onto the floor edges of the tent, the anchor ropes may not hold. Then he tries to burrow out, low, and the wind catches the flap and gets a muscle inside and bulges the tent out of itself with a roar, it will heave them all into the lake; they can hear whitecaps smashing against the shore below. They sit bunched up and as heavy as they can imagine themselves, the canvas pounding continuous ice and thunder back and forth over them, and there is nothing to do but sit, and nothing particular to think about; they are inside and dry and together, nothing to do but smile at each other sometimes a little. Wait.

  Napoleon tells Adam, “My grandfather Pierre had power with animals. Mostly with caribou, but he always said to me, power is seeing. There’s a way to find anything you need, what you have to do is first see it.”

  They have re-erected their tent in a hollow studded with brush at the end of the lake. Kathy is showing Adam how to cut meat properly into strips for drying. She laughed aloud when he asked her if he could try; the cutting board is short and for every uneven strip he manages she cuts three. Swiftness matters here, not studied laboratory investigation, though the running muscles of a caribou haunch are stunning in their complexity. They sit shoulder to shoulder on the ground over the cutting board worn thin by long hunts, while the old man lies on his elbow feeding tiny sticks into the fire.

  “Everything you need to have,” Napoleon continues, “my grandfather always said when I was a little kid, you need to understand it’s already there, you just have to see it and then you’ll know how to make it. So, when you need caribou meat, you first have to see the snare, and you braid that, and then you see the right trail going past Winter Lake and down through the trees to Snare or Roundrock Lake, and the caribou will get tangled in that snare because you set it where you saw the caribou was already caught.”

  For an instant something flickers in Adam, almost a whiff of comprehension, but it is gone.

  “You mean … dream it?”

  “No no, like a dream, but you’re not dreaming, no, you see it. And you can’t be scared because then you won’t see. If you’re scared, that always keeps you too small to see anything.”

  Adam thinks, placing his knife for the next cut, Maybe it was this caribou leg I carried here this morning through the snow on the tundra, where John L shot it and removed the hide as if he were pulling a parka over his head and had it disassembled and bundled in twenty minutes, and then I was staggering off again, over two ridges and along an esker, under the gathering pain of a tumpline and not seeing even one trail found long ago by the caribou for easy travel on this relentless, endless land. I’m blinder than a whole Dogrib tundra of bats.

  Napoleon seems to be staring into the flames. Five curved halves of caribou rib-racks surround the leaping fire, lean towards it speared on sticks; looking like oval lyres some bloody-minded giant might play with greasy fingers.

  If everything can be seen as having already happened, then there is nothing, further, to be scared of. Napoleon said that, twice.

  The old man lifts himself off the ground. “Let’s look at the animals,” he says, and walks towards the slight tundra rise between them and the lake. Adam follows him. And he’s right, there the caribou are against the knobby hills again, where they already were when the plane first landed; but much closer now because the storm forced them to move their campsite.

  Napoleon lifts his hand, and stops. The hunters from their camp are black dots far away to the right. Arctic landscape with motionless animals and running sky. Adam walks forward. He keeps on walking towards the caribou.

  Walks until one by one and then all together they begin to run. They spread flat like a stream flowing over the tundra before him, the mass of them breaking out into tremendous speed and they are so close he sees how they lay their heads back to run, nostrils high in the wind, and he can hear their hooves thunder and click, running right and vanishing behind a long hill away from the hunters and emerging at last far in the flat distance, still running but turned back again to the left, until they slant up among the erratics of a ridge and their small, huge-antlered
bodies walk away south there, high against the wild, cloud-driven sky.

  When Adam finally turns, Napoleon has not moved. The old man looks at him silently, without expression, not even his eyes asking Adam what he is asking himself: Why did I do that, walk towards them till they ran? Why am I such a fool?

  Beside the fire the dark ribs still roast on their stakes. Kathy bends, gathers up a handful of meat strips they have cut. She begins to hang them over the line they have tied between the tent and a dwarf spruce farther in the hollow. Adam listens to the snow melt, the air peaceful as a blanket.

  Kathy asks, “You got a picture of your sweetie?”

  “Oh yeah,” Adam says. The muscle he sliced looks amazingly like human muscle; he would look like this if he were dead and someone were cutting him into strips to dry, exactly like this, nothing whatsoever special about his muscle; there’d just be a lot less of it to keep someone alive.

  “Can I see it?” Kathy grins at him over her shoulder; skin and long profile like any classical Egyptian. “Her picture?”

  “Sure.” Adam fumbles against the bump of his wallet, and suddenly he is wiping his hands on his parka, down his pant leg as he lifts the edge of it, wiping his greasy hands the way his mother taught him never to do, unthinkable in the lab too, and talking, words running from his mouth. “It’s just little, one of those silly things you go into a bus depot, mostly greyish, it’s not her alone, in Edmonton and you stick your head behind a curtain, she sat down and I just wanted to too so I stuck my head in beside her and just then the silly flash goes off, Susannah was trying to ask me if I…”

  He is nattering as if he has lost his head.

  Adam wants to tell this tundra woman he will never see again absolutely everything. The story of the life he has lived until this very moment, the longer story of the life he will live, his singular life, which as he has seen in the running of the caribou, is already, and simply, complete.

  FIVE

  ToNGUE SCREW

  Antwerp, Flanders

  1573

  Danzig

  1638

  I WAS BORN IN ANTWERP, FLANDERS, in our small stone house on the Oudenaerde Ganck in 1570. They named me Jan Adam Wens. It was the horrid time when the Spanish Fury burned in the Low Countries, driven by the merciless inquisition of Antoine, Cardinal Granvelle of Utrecht, and the Spanish armies led by Fernando Alvaraz, Duke of Alva. King Philip II of Spain and Portugal considered himself the champion of the Counter-Reformation; his armies slaughtered infidel and heretic alike, and he paid his mercenaries with shiploads of gold and silver brought from the Americas. Death by labour in the mines of the New World, death by religious rage in the Old; my brother Adriaen Wens was fifteen years old and I was three when, early in the morning, our mother was led out to be killed.

  In the Grand Square of Antwerp, where the unfinished spire of Our Lady Cathedral towered over the tall seven-stepped houses facing the new city hall, Adriaen climbed up on a bench, holding me as our mother had written him in her last letter: “Take Hansken on your arm now and then for me.” He was trying to lift me high so that together we could see her burn. But when the executioner chained our mother to the stake piled around with firewood, Adriaen fainted and fell to the cobblestones, and of course no one in the crowd noticed. So neither of us actually saw it happen.

  October 6, 1573. I remember nothing, not even how my head cracked. I was only three.

  On the other hand, my wife, Janneken, says she remembers everything. Both how on September 6 of that year her father Hans van Munstdorp was burned alone in such a huge fire that it drove the watchers into the side streets and they feared for the surrounding buildings, and also the four well-controlled fires—the executioner had a month of burning experience—which much more slowly, and with great torture, destroyed her mother Janneken Munstdorp and my mother Maeyken Wens, together with her sisters, my aunts Mariken and Lijsken Lievens.

  “It’s impossible,” I say to Janneken. “You weren’t born when they killed your father, and only a month old for your mother.”

  “I know, I know,” she answers in her low, soft voice, her small face looking at me as fierce as any bishop. “But I saw.”

  “How?”

  “I saw him because my mother saw, I was in her womb. That’s why they didn’t burn her and my father together. For her they waited till I was born and they found a wet-nurse.”

  “I know that—but how can you say you saw even them? You were barely a month.”

  “The nurse took me to the square.”

  “But I was three years, and I remember nothing!”

  “If you don’t remember, how do you know what happened?”

  “Adriaen told me.”

  “But he told you, many times, he fainted and fell. You have the scars to prove it.”

  “He saw enough, before and after.”

  And usually, I don’t have to say any more. I can’t. We sit opposite each other in our hearth, warm, silent together. She knits, I stir the fire and raise or lower the kettle on the kettle-hook, so it sings. Adriaen told me all he ever will; he’s no longer alive. And when Janneken and I speak of that time, sometimes years apart, we talk the way a wife and husband do who have lived through forty-seven years together and who know they will continue to circle back, again and again, to those horrible memories, sometimes by accident, sometimes when it seems they can, momentarily, bear them: this is how we were born, it is our one life. If we cannot by the mercy of God forget, then we have only this past by His grace to remember.

  Sometimes, when I’m at work splitting or polishing stone, trying to shape it exactly into what it needs to be, I see my scarred hands and tools chipping away forever at what already exists: our immovable past. Which surrounds Janneken and me like an immense plain of irreducible stone. Hand, hammer, chisel, stone and the years of our life, we keep on trying to split and shape them right; so they will fit.

  Fit into what? How? If you could remember perfectly, could you shape a horror the way you work a stone? Shape it for what? To build what?

  “They would have killed your father too,” Janneken says suddenly, directly to my thoughts. “If he hadn’t fled to Friesland.”

  “Then why—my mother knew that—why did she write to him, asking him to visit her in prison? He never came.”

  “He sent Adriaen and you, he knew they wouldn’t hurt children, especially unbaptized ones.”

  Why do I have no memory? Not so much as a slant of darkness in her cell, a smell of stone. When I was fourteen and our father died, Adriaen decided we must leave even Friesland, forever, and he took me back to Antwerp so I would have some memory of the place where our mother died. The roadstead of the Scheldt River was full of more ships than I could count, their ordered sails tied up or opened white as the clouds of heaven. But we had no time to watch them glide by, we were staring at the stone walls of Het Steen Castle rising out of the harbour water. Stones well cut, expertly laid, its great arched halls could have been filled with choirs singing praise to God over the water, to encourage travellers leaving for the measureless oceans of the globe. A king’s castle for seven hundred years, and now a dungeon. Defenceless Christians chained there to groan, their bodies beaten open and rotting.

  Like our mother. Arrested in April, tortured for six months and burned in October. Adriaen told me I was with her inside that stone twice, for several weeks.

  Janneken says, “It was all they could do. Your father escaped Antwerp alive, he worked to send money so the four women had better food and a cleaner cell.” She smiles at me, certainly the living memory of her mother’s face, with no chisel needed. “So I didn’t have to be born among the rats in the holes below the river.”

  “Six months. She smuggled out two letters, and he never came to her once.”

  “How do you know he never?”

  I don’t. That’s the trouble. No matter how often you turn over what memories you have, you still never know any more; you never know enough to recognize what mo
re you will want, what more you will desperately need to know, later. And when the later arrives and stretches into endless future, what can you do?

  Remember what you cannot forget. Every bit you have. When the evening light fell low across Antwerp harbour, the water blazed like polished steel against the castle, and finally Adriaen and I walked away. Through the narrow, high streets to the Grand Market. It was safe enough then, just a young man and a boy walking. The winged, slate slope of the city hall roof, its carved arches and windows, and the tight, beautifully peaked buildings all around us, as if in the level light we were standing inside the darkness of an immense, blazing crown. The Cathedral spire was still not complete; the Calvinists momentarily controlled the city and they had been throwing the Papist furniture out of the church while Antoine Cardinal Granvelle and Philip II were busy ashing Catholic heretics in other parts of the Low Countries. In southern Europe the Calvinists burned Anabaptist believers—rebaptizers, as they called them—as quick as did the Catholics, but not in Antwerp. They used other means, like allowing them no work and hoping they would either starve or leave.

  Adriaen showed me where the bench had stood that he climbed on. Where we both, he told me, strained to look over heads to the four tall stakes. They made the four women climb up; they had brought them in carts along the same street from the castle that we had just walked. The fountain was not built yet, nor the statue over it representing the Roman soldier holding the chopped-off giant’s hand high over the Scheldt and, in his defiance of tyranny, about to act out the city’s name, hand werpan, that is, “throw the hand away.”