Of This Earth (19 page)

But the lightning advance of the German army into the Soviet Union raised fearful awe in the hearts of Mennonites who had so recently escaped Communist Russia. Magnificent St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, was enjetjätelt, literally “kettled in,” besieged, and Moscow almost surrounded, the Mennonite settlements of Ukraine were overrun to the western banks of the Volga: how could unstoppable Hitler be stopped? And should he be? Why? Stalin himself, that worse-than-devil, certainly deserved Hitler, if only the poor Russian people … and with all our relatives still there. But no one had received a letter in four years. Outside the post office—they didn’t want to get Joe Handley talking England—at Harder’s store, or after church when the men hitched up their horses at the church
barns, bits of rumour were exchanged as everyone worried about all those relatives we all still had in Russia, whom everyone had prayed for for years, that they might somehow live despite revolution and collectivization and starvation and purges and secret police and no preachers or church but Siberian labour camps, ach, and now invasion by millions of soldiers killing with guns and tanks, and bombs exploding out of the clear sky—would there never be an end to the world getting worse? And we Mennonite Canadians, far away and safe from that Land of Terror for no reason except God’s inexplicable mercy, would eventually hear about those events; decades later, personally from the few aunts and uncles and cousins and friends who had endured it all and yet survived, somehow. Though often with their bodies, and minds, torn beyond fathoming.

In our home, not in public, Pah said, “Those Germans better watch out, Stalin has lots of practice, he knows how to kill anybody.”

“Such talk,” our mother chided him. She tried never to speak of suffering or killing; only in her long prayers in the evening before we went to bed did we overhear her endless fears.

“And your brother Heinrich, if he’s still in Stalin’s army, they better watch out even more!” Pah laughed, but not as if it was funny.

Mam said nothing; she turned away to the pan of Kottletten, flattened meat balls, deep-frying on the stove; next to raw sliced potatoes fried brown my favourite food. In our cardboard box of family pictures was a portrait of Heinrich Knelsen in a Red Army uniform, complete with the Red Star on his pointed military cap. He had a handsome fringe of moustache over his full lips. I thought of him somewhere in the Russia that spread across half the school’s world map like a long bloated monster, a soldier certainly bravest of the brave with a big rifle fighting Germans, though I could not visualize how. What did soldiers in a big army do when they fought? What happened when a bullet hit them, did they explode, their head break open even if they wore a uniform? I had never seen a man in uniform, only pictures, not even the Handley brothers—though Dan worked all winter with Bill Handley for Lobes at Cold Lake, we never visited the Handleys and they never visited us—and when Abe Fehr brought his .22 and shot our big pig for butchering, only a tiny hole happened on the pig’s forehead. Though it fell over and Pah could dagger its throat, thick blood pouring out
like a spilled pail, but in war shooting people would be much more horrible, bullets bigger, bodies would explode. Maybe there was a picture in a book at school of armies fighting, but Helen said no no, there was something quite terrible about Onkel Heinrich’s picture too. What, with such a nice, sad face? Well, how could he wear such a uniform for that Stalin? And also, Onkel Heinrich had written on the back with a very fine pen, in perfectly shaped German,

“What’s that, ‘artelistic’?”

“A Communist word, Mam will never say.”

I studied the beautifully swirled, indecipherable signature of my uncle Heinrich; the Communist words “Rotarmist,” “Artelistengrüss.” But “Onkel” was written there as well, the word as warm as Preacher Onkel Jacob Enns smiling over the pulpit. And if Onkel Heinrich was with Stalin he would be fighting against Hitler now, and maybe Hitler and Stalin would kill each other and everyone could go home happy. You don’t understand yet, Helen said, and there’s Onkel Johann too.

“What about Onkel Johann? Is he a Rotarmist?” I asked.

“No no, he’s older,” Helen told me. “He was in the First World War, a medical orderly.”

“What’s ‘medical orderly’?”

“He helped wounded soldiers get to hospitals from the war, but now Stalin dragged him to Siberia, to prison.”

“Why, if he helped soldiers?”

“That’s the way Stalin is,” Helen said. “Onkel Johann was a teacher, but now he’s chained like a dog, freezing in a camp.”

“Siberia is on the big map, where in Siberia?” “Onkel Johann is maybe dead. You can’t understand yet.”

Yet! The youngest in the family so I had to learn everything from everybody, and always yets! But I would know, sometime, soon I’d know everything I wanted, know so much I could forget half of it and still know more than I had to tell anyone, maybe even as much as Mr. War Churchill if I wanted to, glowering in that small picture at the corner of the long blackboard that stretched across the entire north front of the school and halfway down the east side, right to the library cupboard below the small window; the picture beside the two large, rectangular Neilson Chocolate maps, one of Canada and one of The World with the Communists, including Siberia, in green—I thought, though I never asked anyone—and the British Empire scattered everywhere on the blue oceans in obvious red because Canada was that too, the sun never setting on it, not yet. And it never would, Miss Hingston told us. I’d know everything by then, exactly what had gone so badly wrong between my mother’s brothers Heinrich and Johann in Russia.

The five large western windows let the light fall on our desks from the left. This was standard prairie school design, since everyone had to write and draw right-handed; those born naturally left-handed were, by Department of Education fiat enforced by the school inspector, simply forced to write with their right hands. In spring and early fall when most of us came to school barefoot we played at writing with our toes in the dust, or with sticks held between them. We discovered our feet had skills parallel to our hands.

It may have been Wesley Dunz in grade two who said, “See, I can write better with my left foot than my right hand.”

Someone told me his last name in English meant “stupid.”

“Don’t say that,” Helen said. “He’s just a hard learner.”

Like my brother Dan, as our family said, though I think now it was mostly his erratic, quickly ended Canadian schooling; in any case he was an excellent, hardworking farmer, managing our farm with Mam better than when Pah was home from working out. Dan was nineteen and, like Abe and Emmanuel, had to report to the government in North Battleford. I knew our church and family did not believe in guns; the only time our father would allow a small rifle on
the yard was when we butchered pig, not even a gun for hunting. And though the Fiedlers and the Lobes had big rifles and hunted deer and ate them every fall season, none of them believed in killing people either, not even when the Canadian government decided it was good, they’d send you over the ocean where you were supposed to kill Germans, the Mounted Police wouldn’t put you in jail if you did that, rather you’d become a hero and meet the King so he could pin a medal on your chest. There were pictures like that in the
Free Press Prairie Farmer
quite often.

Our family had no soldiers during the war years. Gust was too old with four children, Abe and Emmanuel were pastors in mission churches in small towns in Saskatchewan bush: Abe and Gilda north in Pierceland, Emmanuel and Mary in Livelong, then Sandy Lake, and Dan was excused for essential farm work. We did not have much more grain, our land on Gust’s homestead as Speedwell stony as anywhere else, but we did have more cattle, both milk cows for cream and steers for sale as beef, and pigs for pork. With war food prices rising, in 1942 our family finally paid off the last $100 of its Reiseschuld, the travel debt almost all Mennonites owed the CPR for bringing them from Europe to Canada on credit in the 1920s.

Pah had our family’s exact travel route and dates stamped all over a long four-page yellow form issued to him by the Prenzlau, Germany Police Authority on 7 Feb. 1930:

which declared him a staatlos, stateless, person who had left Russia on 1.12.1929 with a present temporary address at the refugee camp in Prenzlau, Germany. On Mam’s long yellow Passersatz, Nr. 158, just above and to the right of her name were the names of their five children listed by order of birth. In the picture our mother, thirty-four years old, is gaunt and large-eyed; it may be she has never known how to smile. Sometimes on a winter Sunday afternoon my father would take de Papiere as he called them, the papers, out of the box on the short shelf above the clothes hanging in a corner of the bedroom and bring them to the kitchen table. I would kneel on the bench so I could lean into the lamplight beside him and look at, even touch the strange heavy documents long as foolscap in school but thicker, so yellow, doubled with broken edges and incomprehensible words. The names were clear enough, delicate pen-and-ink names that were certainly my parents and sisters and brothers, but with so many stamps pounded blue everywhere in the spaces and the long blank pages: round Prenzlau Police and the absolutely critical “Department of Health Canada 10 Feb. 1930,” the rectangular blocks of “Government of Canada Civil Inspection Hamburg” and “Immigration Officer Grimsby” to the miraculous tiny oval of “Immigration Canada St. John N. B. Feb 24 1930.” And just below that, the last indispensable stamp in high capitals: C.P. R., followed by a handwritten “# 19622.”

The Passersatz, passport substitute, had a small black-and-white picture attached to the front page,
stamped on its top corners by both the Prenzlau Police and Canadian Immigration Hamburg. My father’s stamped picture seems barely possible: a man in a high black turtleneck, trimmed moustache and tight cropped hair staring straight ahead so wide eyed and frozen he appears on the verge of terror. Even in Germany, well beyond Stalin’s clutches. In Speedwell, Saskatchewan, fourteen years later my father sat with his head between his hands, his elbows on the kitchen oilcloth, musing over de Papiere as he did his Bible; saying nothing. Staring at his gaunt family backed against a board wall in Moscow, November 1929. At Baby Helen crooked tight in Mam’s arm, her face already blurring before life’s iron reality.