Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

It didn’t help that her brother was the Über-Schultz. It was like being the sister of Moammar Gaddafi or Joseph Stalin. You fall into line or you fall. My dad liked it when she went to help but he also liked it when she didn’t. It seemed like he could never figure out which Trudie he loved the best, the docile church basement lady in the moon boots or the rebellious chick with the sexy lingerie. I imagine that both of those extremes were just poses and that the real Trudie fell somewhere in between. But that’s the thing about this town — there’s no room for in between. You’re in or you’re out. You’re good or you’re bad. Actually, very good or very bad. Or very good at being very bad without being detected.

People come to East Village from all over the world for a first-hand look at simple living. Most of the time Trudie refused even to acknowledge the fact that in the summer months we were on display as backward Jesus freaks. She’d wonder out loud what all these cars with American licence plates were doing in town. Faker, you do so know, Tash would say. Trudie hated thinking of herself as a citizen of the world’s most non-progressive community. When the Queen came to visit our town years ago for a glimpse backwards in time, Trudie said she wasn’t going to go. The Queen was half a block from our place and everyone in town was going and it was kind of a big deal to Ray for some reason and he had wanted Trudie to put on her dark blue dress and join him in the crowd but she said nah, she was going to stay at home and read. She said she wasn’t going to stand there like an idiot just to be called a local yokel by the sneering British press. Or have a picture of her taken with the caption: Unidentified Mennonite Woman unmoved by Queen’s visit to religious community. Please Trudie, said Ray, please accompany me. No, she said, take the girls. Which he did. And we met up with my mom’s brother-in-law, who had a stepladder that his kids and me and Tash took turns climbing to get a really good view of the Queen and her entourage while the people behind us swore in the whimsical language of our people. It’s hard to take offence when you’re being called upemmuhljefulle und siehn muhl blief ope, or a schlidunzich.

On the way home we met up with my mom, who told us that she had seen the Queen after all. Trudie had been sitting on top of Kliewer’s machine shop in her housecoat and Keds with a bunch of teenage boys and they’d had the best view in town. So, she said, are you happy now? I saw the Queen. She linked her arm through my dad’s and dragged him home. Tash and I exchanged looks that meant something like: Is our mother crazy in a cool, fun way or has she now stepped over the line into disturbing crazy that we’d like to see stop? Ray didn’t seem pleased or displeased, just confused. It was really typical of the way she’d do something for his sake but in her own vaguely defiant way. Half in the world, half out. She was like the funny kid in class who knows just how far to go with the sassing.

She hid her records in Tash’s old toy box in the basement. One time when I was around ten, Tash called up The Mouth and told him she’d found one of Trudie’s Kris Kristofferson eight-tracks and she was very afraid she was about to listen to it and The Mouth said okay, now, calm down, pray with me. Take the…item and put it in a paper bag. Staple the bag closed and bring it to me here, at the parsonage, and we will deal with it together. Satan is tempting you, do you know that? Yes, said Tash, he’s such an awful…man. (What exactly was he again? A fallen angel?) She started to cry. It was all fake. She and her friends, who were listening to the whole thing, rolled around on the floor killing themselves laughing, but I was horrified. She was so earmarked for damnation it wasn’t even funny. Later that day The Mouth came over to talk and pray with Trudie about her fondness for guys like Kristofferson and Billy Joel. He told her that in his dictionary hell comes after rock ’n’ roll .

There were so many bizarre categories of things we couldn’t do and things we could do and none of it has ever made any sense to me at all. Menno was on a cough-syrup binge when he drew up these lists of dos and don’ts and somehow, inexplicably, they’ve survived time and are now an integral part of our lives.

When I was ten years old my mom and I had a big discussion about the Swiss Family Robinson movie playing at the Rouge Cinema, on Main Street. I wanted to go. My best friend at the time, Agnes, was going but that was because her father smoked and was the town bartender before the purges occurred and The Mouth took over everything and closed the bar and the bus depot and the pool hall and swimming pool and forced all the teachers to follow an oddball curriculum that had nothing to do with the standard provincial guidelines. Our textbook could have been called Proven Theories We Decry . The only thing he couldn’t take down was the Rouge Cinema but I was never sure why not. Some back-room deal, I guess. A cut of the profits. Who knows. He may have left it there for the American tourists. Something for them to do in the evenings when the village closed. Or maybe he had a dream of someday showing the movie Hazel’s People non-stop. Or Menno’s Reins. Those were the films (we were discouraged from calling them movies ) that we were shown on a regular basis.

If you think that those films were only propaganda, simplistic tales about a group of shy farmers overcoming world pressure to be normal and starting up their own whacked-out communities in harsh climates, you’d be right.

Agnes’s family had stopped going to church generations ago. It didn’t matter to them. They existed in a vacuum. In the town, but not of the town. They were awe-inspiring. The smell of tobacco that lingered in their house was like some kind of exotic perfume and the clanking of empty bottles was a rare and beautiful music.

Before the purges, when Agnes’s dad was working in the bar all night, I’d go over to her place and we always had to play very, very quietly because her dad had to sleep during the day. We usually played a game called hide-the-sponge, but there was no looking involved, just listening. The entire game took place in the downstairs bathroom and the point of it was to put the little green sponge into the cupboard under the sink without making any noise. While one person was putting the sponge into the cupboard, the other person perched on the toilet and listened very closely to see if the cupboard door had made a sound while being closed. If it had, the person listening would whisper sound and it would be the other person’s turn. Even though I abhor the silence of this town at night, I have to admit I was intrigued with the concept of playing as quietly as we could at the bartender’s house.

I had never been to the Rouge Cinema. It wasn’t the kind of place families like mine went to. But, damn, how I wanted to see the Swiss Family Robinson. My mom said she’d think about it and I said it’s this afternoon and she said she’d have liked a little more time. She talked to my dad about it and he of course just didn’t know. It was up to her. She walked around the house in her red down-filled slippers doing diversionary things while she figured out what to tell me. I followed her and said well? She asked me what it was about and I said I didn’t know. A family, I thought. That lives on an island and is trying to get off. She had a very serious expression on her face. What’s sinful about a family trying to survive and fight off things and get off an island, I asked her. She told me it wasn’t that, really. It was the problem of certain people seeing me at the cinema. I said I’d wear a disguise and she laughed and said this is utterly unreal. Just go. She said something in the old language that I think meant more or less to hell with it, except, of course, not. We couldn’t use the word hell casually, although my parents would often say oba, yo, which could be loosely interpreted as meaning hell, yeah.