Barnyard Communion
Dietrich Wiens hides in the riverside bush. His large estate lies vacant, home only for the wind. The fields are neglected, livestock confiscated, his son banished to Siberia, his older daughters massacred by bandits, his wife and younger children gone.
Twenty-seven times after the 1917 Revolution, the competing armies of the civil war – White, Red, Makhno bandits – have swept over the Russian Mennonite settlement. Grief and starvation consume him, prayers and hope atrophy within.
Obsessed by hunger, he remembers that shortly before the last Makhno pillage he buried salted pork and roasted Zwiebach (rolls) beneath a pile of straw in the barn. Wiens slinks out of the bush and lurches along the hedgerow to the estate yard. In terror’s grip, he edges from building to building toward the barn, feeling in his bones that Communist thugs or Makhno bandits lurk in wait for him, the rich kulak.
Almost too weak to stand, he wedges his frame between the two rail-hung barn doors, creating a narrow opening. In the dark interior, dust motes dance in the sun streaks shafting through holes left by bandits’ bullets.
He knows the enemy is poised to pounce, but his craving for food drives him forward. The hair on his neck bristles, his skin crawls, but still, as to a magnet drawn, he staggers to the lumped straw in a gloomy corner of the barn.
The straw quivers and erupts into his face!
But this creature, cringing and cowering before him, is a former servant whom he had once
severely beaten.
Starving Wiens recognizes his former servant gnawing at the Zwiebach. The emaciated, cowering peasant knows he is about to receive the beating of his life for devouring the rich man’s bread.
Wiens had been a wealthy landowner with many servants and labourers, including Russian peasants; with a complex, diverse agricultural system to maintain. He had been a determined manager. Everyone on his property, children and peasants, needed to know their roles, responsibilities, and expectations.
The family dined in the elegant dining room attended by uniformed servants; servants and even the Mennonite teacher hired to teach the estate owner’s children, dined apart. Wiens, deacon and elder, and graced with wealth, knew how to order the world and the church.
Now his world freezes, timeless: two emaciated humans, cowering peasant and feared Mennonite, in tableau.
As a trusted deacon in the church, Wiens has often served communion. In a flash of another knowing, he knows what communion means.
Kneeling before the abject Russian, he takes the bread. He cries out, “No! No! We are no longer master and servant, Russian or Mennonite, but brothers under God’s creation.”
Huddled in the mouldy straw and cow manure, they break the bread – sharing, as Wiens said later, “the communion of our Lord and only master.”
Twenty-seven times after the 1917 Revolution, the competing armies of the civil war – White, Red, Makhno bandits – have swept over the Russian Mennonite settlement. Grief and starvation consume him, prayers and hope atrophy within.
Obsessed by hunger, he remembers that shortly before the last Makhno pillage he buried salted pork and roasted Zwiebach (rolls) beneath a pile of straw in the barn. Wiens slinks out of the bush and lurches along the hedgerow to the estate yard. In terror’s grip, he edges from building to building toward the barn, feeling in his bones that Communist thugs or Makhno bandits lurk in wait for him, the rich kulak.
Almost too weak to stand, he wedges his frame between the two rail-hung barn doors, creating a narrow opening. In the dark interior, dust motes dance in the sun streaks shafting through holes left by bandits’ bullets.
He knows the enemy is poised to pounce, but his craving for food drives him forward. The hair on his neck bristles, his skin crawls, but still, as to a magnet drawn, he staggers to the lumped straw in a gloomy corner of the barn.
The straw quivers and erupts into his face!
But this creature, cringing and cowering before him, is a former servant whom he had once
severely beaten.
Starving Wiens recognizes his former servant gnawing at the Zwiebach. The emaciated, cowering peasant knows he is about to receive the beating of his life for devouring the rich man’s bread.
Wiens had been a wealthy landowner with many servants and labourers, including Russian peasants; with a complex, diverse agricultural system to maintain. He had been a determined manager. Everyone on his property, children and peasants, needed to know their roles, responsibilities, and expectations.
The family dined in the elegant dining room attended by uniformed servants; servants and even the Mennonite teacher hired to teach the estate owner’s children, dined apart. Wiens, deacon and elder, and graced with wealth, knew how to order the world and the church.
Now his world freezes, timeless: two emaciated humans, cowering peasant and feared Mennonite, in tableau.
As a trusted deacon in the church, Wiens has often served communion. In a flash of another knowing, he knows what communion means.
Kneeling before the abject Russian, he takes the bread. He cries out, “No! No! We are no longer master and servant, Russian or Mennonite, but brothers under God’s creation.”
Huddled in the mouldy straw and cow manure, they break the bread – sharing, as Wiens said later, “the communion of our Lord and only master.”
—Jack Dueck
