Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

But shortly after the visit from the bishop and his men Elf made a painting and put it in an old frame she’d found in the basement. She hung it in the middle of our living room wall right above the scratchy couch. It was a quote. It read:

“I know of a certainty, that a proud, haughty, avaricious, selfish, unchaste, lecherous, wrangling, envious, disobedient, idolatrous, false, lying, unfaithful, thievish, defaming, backbiting, blood-thirsty, unmerciful and revengeful man, whosoever he may be, is no Christian, even if he was baptized one hundred times and attended the Lord’s Supper daily.”

— Menno Simons.

Okay, but Elfie? said my mom.

No, said Elfie. It’s staying right there. It’s the words of Menno Simons! Aren’t we supposed to be following them?

Elfie’s new artwork hung in our living room for about a week until my father asked her: Well, kiddo, have you made your point? I’d really love to put mom’s embroidered steamship back in that spot. And by then her righteous indignation had blown over like so many of her wild personal storms.

ELFRIEDA DOESN’T DO INTERVIEWS. One time she let me interview her for my cheesy class newspaper but that’s it. I was eleven and she was leaving home again, this time for good. She was on her way to Norway for a recital and to study with an old man she referred to as the Wizard of Oslo. She was seventeen. She’d finished high school early, at Christmas. She’d got honours everything and six scholarships to study the piano and a prize from the Governor General of Canada for highest marks which sent the elders into paroxysms of rage and fear. One day at dinner, a few weeks before she was due to leave, Elf casually mentioned that while she was in Europe she might as well go to Russia to explore her roots and my father almost stopped breathing. You will not! he said. Yeah, I might, said Elf. Why not?

My grandparents originally came from a tiny Mennonite village in Siberia in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution. Terrible things happened to them there in the land of blood. Any hint of the place, the slightest mention of anything Russian, and my parents would start clawing the air.

Plautdietsch was the language of shame. Mennonites had learned to remain silent, to shoulder their pain. My grandfather’s parents were murdered in a field beside their barn but their son, my father’s father, survived by burying himself in a pile of manure. Then, a few days later, he was put in a cattle car and taken with thousands of other Mennonites to Moscow and from there sent off to Canada. When Elf was born, he told my parents: Don’t teach your kids Plautdietsch if you want them to survive. When my mother went to university to become a therapist she learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big green eyes, and dimly lit scenes of slaughter, blood on snow, played out behind them all the time, even when he smiled.

Absurdities and lies, Yoli, said my mother. The worst thing you can do in life is be a bully.

My interview happened in the car on the way to the airport in Winnipeg. As usual, our parents were in the front seat, my dad was driving, and Elf and I were in the back. You’re never coming back, are you? I whispered to her. She told me that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. We looked at fields and snow. She was wearing her white leather choker with the blue bead and an army jacket. We were driving over black ice.

Is that your question for the interview? she asked me.

Yeah, I said.

Yoli, she said. You should have prepared other questions.

Okay, I said, what’s so hot about playing the piano?

She told me that the most important thing was to establish the tenderness right off the bat, or at least close to the top of the piece, just a hint of it, a whisper, but a deep whisper because the tension will mount, the excitement and the drama will build — I was writing it down as fast as I could — and when the action rises the audience might remember the earlier moment of tenderness, and remembering will make them long to return to infancy, to safety, to pure love, then you might move away from that, put the violence and agony of life into every note, building, building still, until there is an important decision to make: return to tenderness, even briefly, glancingly, or continue on with the truth, the violence, the pain, the tragedy, to the very end.

Okay, I said, that should do it, well thanks for sort of answering my question, Weirdo.

Both choices are valid, she said. It depends where you want to leave your audience, happy and content, innocent again, like babies, or wild and restless and yearning for something they’ve barely known. Both are good.

Got it, thanks, I said. Who’s gonna be your page-turner now? Some Norwegian?

She took a book out of her army backpack — she was into military-issued everything like Patty Hearst and Che Guevara — and chucked it into my lap. When you’re finished with that horse series, she said, your real life starts here. She tapped the book with her finger. She was referring to my obsession with The Black Stallion . Also, I had recently started horseback-riding lessons with my friend Julie and was on my way to becoming third-best barrel racer in the provincial Under Thirteen category, which contained only three members.

In a way I’m relieved that you’re going to Oslo, I said.

It was either that or hitchhike barefoot to the west coast, she said.

The roads are icy, said my father. See that semi in the ditch? He wanted to change the subject. Elf’s hitchhiking plan was a crazy idea he had buried. My mother had laughed and said hitchhiking barefoot to the west coast is a reasonable idea, maybe, but not in January. She didn’t believe in burying anything.

What is this? I was looking at the book Elf had given me.

Oh my god, Yolandi, she said. When you see the words “collected poems” on the cover of a book what do you think is inside the book?

Can you drive any faster? I asked my father. We don’t want her to miss her plane. I was trying to act tough but I truly believed that I might die from heartbreak when my sister went away, to the extent that I had written a secret will, bequeathing my skateboard to Julie and my lifeless body to Elf, which I hoped would make her feel really guilty for leaving me to die alone. I had nothing else but my skateboard and my body to give to people but I attached a note of gratitude to my parents and a drawing of a motorcycle with the New Hampshire state motto: Live Free or Die.

And by the way, I said, I’m not reading those horse books anymore.

What are you reading then? my sister asked.

Adorno, I said.

She laughed. Oh, because you saw that I’m reading him? she asked.

Don’t say “reading him,” I said. You think you’re so big.

Yoli, said Elf, don’t say “you think you’re so big.” That’s what everyone around here says when somebody purports to know about something. I could say tomorrow is Thursday and you’d say “oh, you think you’re so big.” Don’t say it anymore. It’s déclassé.

Our mother said, Elf, c’mon, enough advice on how to live like a dilettante. You’ll be gone soon. We should be using this precious time to have fun! Elf sank back and explained that she was just trying to help me survive the world outside our hamlet. And also, she added, dilettante is the exact wrong word for you to have used in this situation. Okay, Elf, said my mom, but let’s just speak English or sing or something like that. She’d had fifteen brothers and sisters so she knew about keeping the peace. Our father suggested we play I Spy.