Nobody There

A second cousin of mine put it to me straight one time, a couple of years back — he’s gone now himself, passed this last Christmas. We were talking about the old place, the colony, and whether a man could ever really go home to a thing like that, and he just looked at me and said that if I ever went down to where I grew up, I would stand there and look around and not have the first clue where I was. The more I have turned that over the years, the more I think he had the right of it.

So no, I have not been back. People ask me now and again whether I’d like to fly down one more time and walk through the village, see the old farm, stand in the yard where I was a boy. I understand why they ask. But the honest answer is no. There is nothing down there to go back to, not for me. The people I knew are gone, every last one of them — passed on, or moved off, or grown so old and so changed that we would walk straight past each other in the road and never know it. I have absolutely nobody there. Nobody knows me, and I don’t know anybody.

But I can tell you what it was, in the days when it was still mine. That part I remember well enough — and the part I don’t remember firsthand I had from the old people, told and retold until it was as good as my own. I can tell you precisely what happened the day I left the Chaco, sixty years ago. It’s the things in between that the years have worn smooth.

We were Mennonites, my people, and we had come down out of Canada — not because anybody chased us out with guns, but because they would not give up their schools and the way they meant to raise their own children. Up in Manitoba and Saskatchewan the governments had brought in new school laws around the time of the Great War — Manitoba in 1916, Saskatchewan the year after — did away with the little church schools, made all the teaching English, put a stop to teaching the faith in school at all. And a great many of our people simply would not stand for it. They petitioned, they kept their children home, they took the fines; and when the fines turned into the threat of losing the farm and going to jail, that was the end of their patience. They had crossed an ocean once already, a generation or two back, to be left alone with their religion, and now here was the government reaching right into the schoolhouse. So they pulled up stakes and went again. Most of them — something like eight thousand — turned for Mexico. But around eighteen hundred souls set their faces toward Paraguay instead, and mine were among the ones who went south.

Now you have to be a certain kind of person to do a thing like that, and I will not pretend otherwise. I call them stubborn Mennonites, because I am a stubborn Mennonite too. And I mean it kindly, you understand, but I do mean it. You do not walk away from a good and settled country and load your family onto a boat for the bush of South America — a place you have never laid eyes on, where you do not know the language and you do not know the land and you do not know a living soul — unless there is something in you that will not bend. Stubborn is the only word for it. I come by it honest.

What drew them, what made it possible at all, was a contract. That is how it was always told to me, and I have no reason to doubt the heart of it. The way I had it from the old people, Paraguay gave us an agreement — fifty years, that we could live there free, no army, nothing, a colony completely our own with nothing to answer to the government for. No army — that was the great thing, for a people who would not take up a gun against anybody. Our own schools, our own ways, nobody set over us telling us how to pray. To folks who had just been driven out of one country over those exact things, you can imagine what it sounded like. It sounded like the promised land.

The land itself, somebody had to pay for — I know that now, though it was not always how the story got told around me. A company down there had bought up a great stretch of the Chaco, and our people bought their piece of it off that, acre by acre, and held it as their own. It was never granted free. But the privileges, the things that mattered to a Mennonite — those they had in law, and those held.

And they made us welcome, too. I always loved this part of the telling — my dad always said it, and it was a thing all the Mennonites knew: the president of Paraguay had gone to night school and learned German so he could welcome the people in their own tongue when they came up the river. Think of that, though — the head of a whole country sitting down of an evening to learn our tongue, so a boatload of strangers could be met with words they understood. Whether it happened just exactly so, I cannot swear. But that is the story we carried, and it told us something true about how we believed we had been received.

It was no easy place to begin, though, and I would not want to leave you thinking it was. My mother and my grandmother told it to me: how the first of our people came up the river at the tail end of 1926 and were set down at the port and could go no farther — the land they had bought was a hundred kilometers back in the bush, past where the railway ended, and never surveyed. So they sat. They sat at that port the better part of a year and a half, the sickness going through them — the typhus and the dysentery. A hundred and twenty-one of them died there in the waiting, before a single village was ever founded. Around sixty families looked at the graves and the bush and the long way still to go, turned around, and went straight back to Canada — and I have never once blamed them. The ones who stayed went the last hundred kilometers the only way there was: behind two oxen and a wagon. My mother said they dropped the families out on that big empty field with nothing, and left them to start. How they began at all is past believing.

And I should tell you what kind of country it was they had been dropped into, because it explains the rest of it. The Chaco. The old hands had a name for it before we ever softened it into home — the green hell. It is a dead-flat land, flat as a table top as far as a man can see, and about as hot a corner as there is on the whole continent. Thornforest and scrub — the hard quebracho, the palo santo, the cactus — thickets so dense in places you could not push a body through them. Half the year the sky gives you nothing, months on end, just the dust and the heat; and then it comes all at once and turns the only roads into a mud that will swallow a wagon to the axle.

And there was no good water to be had from the ground. The wells you dug came up salt. So you lived off the sky — you caught the rain and you held it and you were careful with it, because there was nothing else to have. That is the real reason that, when I was a boy, nobody had running water and nobody had electricity. It was not that we were behind the times. It was that the country did not give you those things, and you made do with what it gave.

The way we lived out there, a person nowadays would hardly credit. We were laid out in villages — Dorf, we called them — strung through the bush, twenty and thirty and forty families to a village, each on its own land, and the whole colony run by ourselves, for ourselves. We had our own people running things, our own schools, our own taxes, our own church. The government off in Asunción may as well have been on the moon for all it touched us day to day.

And most of what we made, we made together. There was the cooperative — the Chortitzer, ours was called — and it was the thing that held the colony up. It lent a man credit to get on his feet, it took in what we grew and sold it on, it ran the store and the gin and the mill. What we grew, in my day, was cotton mostly — that was the money crop — and peanuts and sorghum; and then the things you ate yourself, the manioc and the beans and the sweet potatoes and the watermelons.

And it was our colony that did the cotton for the whole of that country round about. We had the machinery for it, the big machines, and the other colonies would bring all their cotton in to us. It got cleaned up real nice, every seed taken out of it, and then pressed into big square bales and strapped tight and shipped down to Asunción to go out on the world. We did the peanuts the same way — pressed them and made the peanut oil. So a good deal of what those neighbor colonies raised came through our hands before it ever left the Chaco. The cattle and the dairy the colony is famous for now — the milk I’m told they send all over Paraguay these days — that all came later, after my time. I went out the door just before the best of it arrived.

In school it was German — the High German, the proper written kind, the language of the books and the sermons. But at home and among ourselves, wherever you went in that colony, we spoke the Low German, the Plautdietsch — that is the tongue I grew up in. I couldn’t speak the High German at all until I was about six and started school, and even then you had to learn it slow, the way a child up here learns his English at school. My teachers were Mennonite German too, and the preaching in church was all High German. We dressed plain, we kept to ourselves, and there was no dancing nor much of anything the world would call fun. It sounds strict, and it was. But it was the whole of what we knew.

I was born on the twenty-fifth of June, 1945, in a farm village called Eggenhof, out in the Chaco — and the Chaco is a big state, a big, big state, like B.C. would be to a man up here. We were a good four hundred kilometers northwest of Asunción, the capital, away up in the bush. And the colony itself was really two pieces — an older part to the north, settled first, and a south part they started later, about the time I came along; but it was all reckoned the one colony, all of a piece. We were a long way from everything, and you felt it worst when somebody took sick. When I was born we were a good three hours from the hospital — and I use the word loosely, because there was a sort of a hospital but hardly ever a doctor in it. In time it got better. We hired doctors in from the Spanish part of the country, and I remember one, a Dr. Ketler, who had come down from Canada and stayed a number of years. And the getting around — well, when I was small, the first couple of years I can remember, the only transport my own family had was two oxen and a wagon. Our own oxen, ours to yoke. Two oxen and a wagon. You went where the oxen could carry you and not one step farther, and that was the entire size of your world.

And it wasn’t only the country that kept your world small — it was our own people, too. There were other colonies out there besides ours. Ours was the Menno colony, the first one, the Canadian one, the people who’d come down out of Canada the way my folks did, and our German was so full of English words we never even thought about it. A radiator was a radiator, a transmission a transmission, gasoline was gasoline, and a pie was a pie — all of them straight English dropped into our Low German, and we had no other word for them. The Russian-side people had their own words for the very same things. Where we said radiator they said reglota; what we called gasoline they called brandschaft; and a pie — well, they had a word of their own for that too. Same Bible, same Low German underneath it all, and still we could hardly follow one another’s everyday talk.

And we mocked each other over it, the way people will. There’s one my uncle used to tell. A couple of the teenage boys from the other side came up to him once and asked him, straight out, “What does pie mean?” And my uncle looked at them and said, “Oh, that — that’s something you spread out on the ground to sleep on.” Just having them on, you understand. That was the run of it. We poked at each other’s talk and thought ourselves the clever ones.

Right alongside us was one of those colonies, settled a few years after ours by people who had come the other way round — out of Russia. They’d left early, that lot — most of them out by way of Germany, but some came the long way round, by way of China, of all places — and down to Paraguay in the twenties and the thirties. They called their colony Fernheim. So we kept apart. For a man from our colony to marry a girl from theirs — that was a very, very odd thing in my day. We had next to nothing to do with each other at all.

Then there was another wave, just after the war, of people who’d only just escaped out of Russia, and they founded a colony called Neuland — New Land, it means. The way it was always told, the Bolsheviks would come right onto the farms and take the men away — just take them, and the families never saw them again — so that often enough it was only the women and the little ones who got out. Two more colonies out there came from Russian stock as well, Volendam and Friesland — and one more group came down out of Canada the way my own people had, arriving in 1948. Six big German colonies in all, when you counted them up, scattered across that country, and every one of them keeping to itself.

And it wasn’t only the talk that set the colonies apart — it was the church, too. Our whole colony was the one kind, what they call Conference, and we did our baptizing by sprinkling; we had no Mennonite Brethren among us at all, not one such church. But over in the Fernheim colony they had three different churches going — a Conference one like ours, a Mennonite Brethren one, and a third that I believe was the Alliance. Same people, near enough, and they’d sorted themselves three ways over how to follow the Lord.

And we were a people apart down there, make no mistake about it — you felt it everywhere you went. We were the colonists, the gringos, and that word carried a weight the local folks never got the good of. We were a tiny handful of that country, and yet we did well — better than the people around us — and they knew it and we knew it. I remember riding the bus one time, and a policeman came down the aisle with a big gun, checking this one and that one, papers and all — and he came to me, saw I was a gringo, and passed me right by. Never said a word. That was the kind of standing we had, earned or not, and a boy notices a thing like that and files it away.

Though it cut both ways. For all that we were Canadians, with our own law and our own privileges, the country still counted us its own when it suited: once you turned sixteen you had to carry a travel paper to go about, the same as any Paraguayan born there. So you were inside and outside at once, the whole time.

There were people on that land long before us, of course, and I want to be honest about that. The Chaco had its native peoples, a good many of them — something like nine different peoples in that country — who had lived back in the bush when no Mennonite had ever come up the river. When I was a boy I came to understand that until our people got there, those folks had been living out in the bush in tents, with next to nothing — no roofs, no houses. We brought the gospel in, the way we reckoned it, and these days there are big native churches out there, people standing on their own feet. And I remember one evening in particular. I was visiting with my uncle, sitting there in the way you did of an evening, and a native boy came and talked with us — sixteen years old, he was, and here is the thing that has never left me: he spoke Low German just like I do. Fluent as anything. A native boy, and the Plautdietsch came out of him same as it did out of me. And he asked my uncle why God had not sent the Mennonites to Paraguay a good deal sooner — so that his own mother and father might have known about Jesus. He was not bitter at us for coming; that is the thing I want you to hear. He was grieved that we had not come sooner, for his parents’ sake. That question has stayed with me all my days.

There was hard history all around us, too, that a child only half understood at the time. Not long after the colonies got their start, a war came down right on top of where we were — through the first half of the 1930s, Paraguay and Bolivia went at each other over that same dry Chaco for the better part of three years, and they say it cost something near a hundred thousand lives before it was done. That was my parents’ first stretch in the country, that war. They called it the War of Thirst, on account of the dry country it was fought over. Imagine it — a people who had crossed the world precisely so they would never take up a gun against anybody, setting themselves down in the one patch of bush two armies were about to fight and die over.

I left in 1966, and looking back on it I left right on the hinge of the thing. The big highway out across the Chaco — the Transchaco, near four hundred miles of it — had only just been finished, and that road changed everything, because it let the world in. Everything that has made the colony what it is now — the power, the water in the houses, the dairy, the money — it all came in just after I had gone. So the place I carry in my head is the colony as it stood the moment before any of that arrived: the oxen, the dark houses, the caught rain. When I left, nobody had running water and nobody had electricity. Now everybody does. Everybody has a telephone and a television and air conditioning against that heat. We had none of it. None.

And it’s cattle country now, all of it — that’s what Paraguay turned into. There was hardly any cattle to speak of when I was there. Now there’s a slaughterhouse right near the colony where I used to work, and I’m told it does a thousand head a day, and the meat goes out all over the world. Back around 1978 they said Paraguay had the best meat on the world market. Best meat there was. And I’d already been gone a dozen years by then.

And the colonies that kept so strictly apart in my day — that’s gone too. The young people started getting together, and now it’s all mixed in, one colony marrying into another the way nobody ever would have then, and marrying Hispanic Paraguayans besides, which simply never happened in my time. Everything out there is Spanish now; the schools teach nothing but Spanish, though in the colonies themselves most still speak the Low German at home. It’s come to be like one big colony, where once there were six that hardly said a word to each other.

And the people are gone, which is the part that shuts the door for good. I had four cousins I grew up alongside, close as anything. One died at thirty-nine of his heart; another at forty-four, the same way; a girl my own age went to bed one night with a headache and was dead by the morning. By my own reckoning, better than thirty of the people I knew down there are already in the ground. I have no uncles left, and one aunt. There is nobody.

It’s a hundred years now, near enough, since the first of our people set foot in that country. And they mean to mark it — a great reunion and celebration down there next June, a hundred years. They’ve let me know about it. But no, I won’t be going. I expect you understand by now why not.

So when they ask me would I go back, I think of all of it. The hundred and twenty-one graves at the port. The sixty families that turned around. The oxen, and the salt in the wells, and the green hell that we made into a home. And my cousin, standing in the middle of a place he helped to build and not knowing his own town. There is no one down there now who would know my face, and there is no face down there that I would know. I have absolutely nobody there. Nobody knows me, and I don’t know anybody.