Sweeter Than All the World (30 page)

“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 us 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.

“You’re still here?” one called to us, and gestured with his machine gun. “Get away, hurry, the Reds are on our heels.”

“Please!” Sister Erika cried. “Please, as God is good! Find us a truck, a cart, anything—we have fourteen old people here who cannot walk to the end of the street!”

All three looked at us sadly, but they didn’t stop or even hesitate. The very youngest raised his right hand as he passed, palm up and wide open; it was no Hitler salute.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and I thought at first he was cursing, but then I understood, “the same yesterday, today, and in all eternity.”

“Amen,” said Sister Erika. She turned to me. “We must move them. Down into Frau Heinrichs’ room, behind the airraid shelter.”

For our evening prayers she has only her pocket Bible: everything else is upstairs in our rooms, where we dare not go. Sixteen of us crowd in a circle around the room, fourteen on chairs with the oldest, ninety-year-old Taunte Gertrude, and the weakest, Onkel Johann, who is seventy-four, propped on the sofa. As the panzer fire on the street thuds and rattles the building above us, the windows shatter, Sister Erika smooths back her black, springy hair and reads:

“Listen!” whispers Frau Heinrichs. “They’re upstairs!”

We hear them then, and in our stunned silence I understand their Russian yells, orders, as doors crash open. Before we can move, our door breaks inward off its locks and hinges and men burst in, one and another and another, so enormous with heavy fur hats and quilted uniforms. And the guns in huge, knobby hands. I have had to look at them too often, but now that blue circle like a pursed steel mouth is searching around the room in such hands—the leader glares, his eyes are barely slits in a livid face darker than any winter sun could burn off the snow and if I weren’t seated my legs would surely collapse.

It’s the surprise, I tell myself. What’s the matter with me, I should have expected this, a quiet year caring for old people and you forget that war always returns with more horror, over and over? And then, if his face hadn’t told me, the sound of his voice does.

“Germans, hear, you Germans,” he stutters each memorized syllable. “We not here for land, we have plenty land. We here for revenge!”

And quick as lightning the gun leaps in his hands and he fires into the ceiling, three shots that explode inside our heads, and screams a command. All the gawking soldiers blunder back
out ahead of him; we hear them pounding, yelling up the stairs and through the air-raid shelter. They are gone.

“O dearest, dearest God in heaven,” Onkel Johann prays.

Sister Erika gets up slowly and moves to him. “Yes, of course, God will protect us,” she says. Her voice tries to find its unshakable calm. “See, shooting is very loud, but doesn’t hurt the ceiling, the beams are two hundred years old.”

“I’m ninety-one years old,” Taunte Gertrude explains again. I am thankful that she doesn’t comprehend.

We brace the broken door in place with chairs, spread sheets over the straw we have brought in and bed all our beloved old ones under the quilts and blankets we brought from the rooms upstairs. There is no electricity for light, but we still have a bit of gathered coal for Frau Heinrichs’ heater; if you look directly at it you see light flicker in its tiny slate window. The house no longer shakes, the night outside has grown momentarily silent. Sister Erika and I lie down together on the bare floor where the door opens, there is no straw for us but we have two quilts, one wool, one feathers, and one pillow between us. On that warm stone floor, breathing and ancient rustling all around me, I can almost imagine the world a place where one could sleep.

Not an instant! I reach in the darkness, touch Sister Erika’s face, her nose, with the tips of my fingers, her temple, and I turn until my lips are against her left ear.

“Tonight we can’t sleep,” I whisper. “We must tell each other everything.”

Her breath runs over my chin and throat. “Yes,” she says so low no ear but mine could have heard it. “I saw you. Did you know that Russian?”

“He’s not Russian, he’s a Tatar, from the Caucasus. They’re
Muslims, and if anyone touches a Tatar woman … those dark, slant-eyed women hidden under veils, to the Wehrmacht in Russia they weren’t human, they ripped off their veils, used them like whores, like animals, anything they wanted they did.”

“Elizabeth!” She twists her head, hisses against my mouth, “What’s the matter, what?”

The room is warm but I am shuddering. It is as if the gunfire still hammers in the room; those blue mouths searching, those rifles so smooth and shining as if grown out of those terrible hands like steel trees, they make everything that has been impossible to say until now absolutely necessary. I have to say it:

“Have you ever been violated?”

“No … no.”

“Then listen,” I say, “may God have mercy but listen, you and I could flee, but our very old people … there are two things we can do. These are blooded soldiers, they’ve survived and killed, who knows what’s happened to them and their women in four years of invasion and counterattack—nothing has happened to you till now, but I was two months on the muddy trek, retreating before the Soviet advance from the Ukraine to the Wartegau and I know—these soldiers will take Marienburg building by building and the castle too, they broke in on us, we can’t hide and they’ll come back whenever they want, there are two things we can do: try to resist, or accept. It will happen so fast, like they broke in and he yells and fires into the ceiling, your mind goes white, gone, so you must think now, before it happens, two things, resist or accept—”

“Elizabeth—”

“Listen! We are women. In war, women are only one thing for soldiers. First try to talk … when he grabs you, talk, talk if you can as long as you can, even if he can’t understand you, a
human voice and words, with one soldier alone it can be possible, but soldiers in a gang are not men, they’re a trained kill machine, they have no head, no conscience, no reason except fear and you can’t scare them. Listen. For a front-line soldier any woman is a hole to be fucked. When they knock you down and one is on top of you, and you’re still conscious, resist only if you can grab something you can kill him with, grab a gun or a knife or club and use it instantly, don’t hesitate, don’t think, grab it and hit the body, the head’s too small and hard, always the body, the best is the throat or under his arm or in the belly as deep as you can when he’s over you, but don’t
hesitate
, stab his eyes if you have a chance, that’s good … as hard as…”

I’m gagging, I have to stop. She lies against me, her heart beats steadily; doesn’t she understand?

I try to whisper more calmly. “Even if you stop one, kill one, alone, or even two, it won’t do any good. There are armies of them, they’ll only be more enraged and come and they won’t waste bullets, whatever they want to do, they’ll rip our old ones open with bayonets, fingers, cocks, they’ll blow…”

Erika turns completely, pushes her left arm under my neck and with her right pulls me against her. Tight, she is tenderness and warmth, my face held between her breasts—but I have to concentrate, prepare her!

“Shhhh,” she whispers, “that’s enough now. There’re two hundred German Wehrmacht in the Marienburg, if they can fight their way out, they’ll take us all west, over the Nogat.”

“Fighting for their lives, you think they’d carry fourteen old people four hundred kilometres to the Oder?”

“Danzig,” she says. “Ships are evacuating people from Danzig.”

The great city I have never seen. Which our ancestor Adam Wiebe once protected with a wall no army broke through in one hundred and fifty years. Our father told me and my brothers that the centre of Danzig is unbelievably beautiful. He said the tall, narrow buildings that line both sides of the Long Market have stepped façades like the houses that tower over the canals of Amsterdam.… Erika holds me, her voice quiet. In my thirteen months at the Home I have known her as a person of calm, superb organization, and unquenchable hope. And no fool.

I shiver. “Yes. You and I could reach Danzig.”