Sweeter Than All the World Read Online Free

alternating loops of earth and water into the grey sea; or tell her of the long blond girl named Wiebke den Hoet he and his daughter Trish had met, whose father was the dikemaster on Ameland in the North Sea and who invited them to come, see how the Frisians still make land with the sea; or tell her of Het Steen Castle—now an innocent maritime museum—where in the 1560s the Inquisition chained the “defenceless Christians” in dungeons until they convicted them of heresy and led them out to burn.
    All the facts Adam knows later, all the places of the ancestral past he will visit, all the family members scattered in the world he will talk to—but rather than parade the intermittent, infinite details of history he has excavated over years, he will then think only: I should have asked her to sing.
    Her beautiful soprano, vivid forever in the folds of his memory. Any of the songs she sang when the leaves came out, green as frogs in the Waskahikan slough and poplar May, and she began to cook in the outside “summer kitchen” to keep their low log house dark and cool for sleeping. It would have been a song from the
Dreiband
, their pocket-size hymnal without notes, but of course a person who sang in a Mennonite church then knew at least three or four hundred songs from memory, truly “knew them by heart” as English expressed it so profoundly. And his father across the farmyard somewhere within earshot would have answered her in tenor harmony, their voices floating like lovershand in hand high in the bright air. By some genetic shift more drastic than his nose, the musical rock of Flemish Loewen and Frisian Wiebe has faulted into Adam’s tunelessness: though he can recognize any melody, he cannot reproduce or mirror one either close or at a distance. Not even the overwhelming choir of twenty-six Peter Wiebe descendants he will discover in West Germany in 1983 will help him to one consecutive tuneful sound, those two dozen Peter Wiebe children and great-grandchildren finding hours of harmonies in a tiny apartment, their heads filling endlessly with identical words and running notes, their bodies leaning together like one body.
    “Peter Wiebe?” If Adam’s father hears that name spoken, he will certainly raise his head from
Die Rundschau
, and glare. “That was my brother, the rich one, with us in Moscow in ’29.”
    “Leave that old story,” his mother says quickly, as she always does.
    But once the story of the Great Mennonite Flight over Moscow is hinted at, Adam’s father is not stoppable, he can only rush on:
    “In October ’29 my oldest brother, Jakob, the one who inherited the stone house and one full farm, he and his big sons and all his workers were threshing in the front yard when we drove down the street with our little wagon, and you remember, Tien, what I said, I told him, ‘Come, it’s Moscow now or never!’ And he, with his threshing fork high: ‘Yes! yes! I just have to finish my barley.’ Huh! He was still thinking money would get him out of Russia.”
    Adam’s mother nods sadly. “His wife never got any buns roasted to go.”
    “Of course not!” His father is triumphant. “And theCollective with Kolya Wiebe who was still too young to get married but the Communists of course made him kolkhoz boss, Kolya had to take all his grain away from him too, but my brother Peter—”
    “Stop it,” she pleads. “Don’t start with that.”
    “But that Peter,” the weight of his remembering rolls over her, “my second brother, he had inherited our second full farm and he had his money sacks tied up and the travel ham smoked, he had three teams of horses harnessed and train tickets bought ahead from Platovka, and his whole family—”
    “We have to forget such things!” Adam’s mother interrupts, very loud, her head bent; her needles in the sagging wool no longer move.
    “Forget!” His father’s worker hands crush
Die Rundschau
. “You can forget? When your own brother who’s as rich