Sweeter Than All the World Read Online Free Page A

as the dead Czar says to you all the way to Moscow, ‘How do you think you’ll get out to Germany, you with your sick Tien and four kids, you don’t have three kopecks to rub together?’ How do you forget that?”
    “Abraham, we know God needs money for nothing.”
    “And the Communists don’t either, thank God.” Adam’s father laughs, sardonic with his own wit. “Having money in ’29 was the end of any going, no beginning.”
    His mother’s steel needles are flying again, as if red wool in her hands could knit the splintered world into goodness. She murmurs, “So forget that old story, it—”
    But if Adam could have told them this story, he would have had to interrupt her. “This wasn’t your brother Peter, Pa, it’s his son. He was in Moscow with you too, a boy then, he survived over fifty years in Russia and just got out now.”
    “Peter Wiebe is in Germany? He bought his way out, now?”
    “Not your brother, Pa, his oldest
son.”
    “I remember his oldest son in ’29, we always called him ‘Young Peter,’ ” Adam’s mother would have said if she had heard. “He was fifteen then, short, thin, and bright eyes. Such an open Wiebe face.”
    “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, abroadening 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