Autobiography (cont'd)

Autobiography (cont’d)

       But Klaas Reimer interests me more than does Johan Martens, Klaas, the Fool of the Dnieper, Johan, the Emperor’s Golden Bird. Klaas and Johan had known each other during the early troubles. They grew up sons of neighbours in what is now Zaporosni, once Chortiza, as I’m sure you know. Klaas eventually led the Mennonites from the land that no longer tolerated them, while Martens moved in the intimate inner circles of the one who had promised them peace and betrayed them. Both were conspirators of a sort, and both ambitious, true, but much more of that later.

       This ambition, this private inner agitation that leads the self toward some social destiny, these ideas of the singular consciousness pitted against the history of man, stir vague interest in me, but not by a long shot the hunger I feel to know and transmit the details of the generation, birth, life, death and notoriety of Klaas the Fool. I wish to tell you of the family he fathered, next in size to Abraham’s, and the family that fathered him descended, it is rumored, from the Vikings themselves and the great peoples who once flourished all across what we now know as northern Europe, who, alas, in our day subsist only in Iceland. Before the Vikings, certain records in song from the murky past suggest, the Reimer line extends to the coldest regions of the Northwest Territories, to peoples who crossed the ice or land bridge at Alaska and migrated West and South until they finally populated all of Asia Major and begat, in turn, the famous and bloody Danish hordes.

       Large indeed! Members of the Reimer family like to do what it takes to ensure the generation and increase of our own. We go to ridiculous lengths to propagate our genes, the women and men alike. Klaas was no exception. His forefathers and mothers neither, I believe, and that is of what I wish now to speak to you. But, first the circumstances of his growing interest in America.

       Klaas Reimer, bless his migrant soul, was my great, great grandfather on my father’s side. He was born propitiously (though anything but precipitously) with the sun beating down on him in the family bunta, the midwife collapsed in a chair and frantic from the effort of extruding him with a set of crude wooden forceps out of  great, great, great Grandmother Inga Reimer. Imprisoned in Russia as a lad, he met there with dissidents who could talk of nothing else but America. I wish to tell you of the events long before the Czar’s demise, when he was a young emperor and kindly disposed toward Mennonites. Good farmers, lusty and fruitful wives and daughters, quiet in the land (that laughable lie goes) and the whole business of the golden touch, the gift of weaving straw into gold. Korzanski told me what he knew of Klaas, whom he had met again when Klaas was warden at the Brignh, that most devilish of all of Peter the Great’s prisons. But that is another story. Now I need to hurry. I have only a few moments. I go for exercise shortly. The other inmates will be out of the yard in two minutes.

       My mother, a Zacharias, a Jewess, longed for a son and on the day I was born sunlight filled the room with such brightness and warmth that she felt certain I was destined for some great purpose.

       “A great joy filled me and I knew that God had some grand plan in store for this baby,” mother would say. “I felt like Elizabeth must have conceiving John.”

       My father left his father’s farm at a young age and worked in the great north woods for a spell, till he turned twenty, and then headed south to find his fortune. I had ten brothers and sisters, being born at a time when large families still outnumbered small, and children crying and suckling and fidgeting in church bothered no one especially. Spank them with a show of severe agitation as they carried them down the aisle out of the assembly and keep them in the waiting area till they settled down and when refreshed come back for what was left of the service. This provided mothers and children with a necessary break, two and a half hours being an immense long time to endure the buzzing of the preacher.

       We lived on a small acreage near the American border, a quarter mile from the Emerson-Pembina crossing and we did, I now admit, though with some chagrin and slight embarrassment, occasionally sneak across to buy and sell, and to seek entertainment of various sorts among the farmsteads and small towns. These were mainly dairy farmers; and, their milkmaids, let me establish right at the start, surpassed all for litheness of limb and general felicity of proportions.

       Circumstances and bad luck started my troubles, and now I find myself here, my ten years almost complete. Lucky in love, unlucky in money, they say. Outlaw, I enjoy my surroundings. I have grown accustomed to them with reluctance. The men here treat me with respect, though a reminiscence of initial rites of passage I will not foist on anyone. You may well prod and pry, gentle reader, but no word of those trials will escape these lips. Be that as it may, I inhabit my own cell, availed of good books and various sources that I find useful for my historical interests and research, and the food they serve me three times daily leads me to nothing more uncomfortable than an occasional mild melancholy.

                                           (To be continued)