Ava reaches across the table and takes Gemma’s hand as Gemma pours herself more wine. Ava massages Gemma’s knuckles.

“Removing yourself from the world isn’t actually an option,” Gemma says. “My ancestors on my father’s side believed they were running off to the middle of nowhere to live peaceably. They wanted less possessions, less worldliness, they thought everyone was getting too extravagant and ungodly back in Russia. They were also the first settlers here after Treaty 1. There’s no such thing as opting out of your life’s worldly consequences. Thinking otherwise is just fooling yourself.”

“I see what you’re saying,” says Olive. “But wait, your father’s side? I thought both your parents were Mennonite?”

“Yes, but my mom’s family came over in the twenties. To Ontario. They were called Russländers, back then.”

“Does your mom meet in a house?” asked Olive. Old Mennonite churches had no decoration or ornamentation, still didn’t in many ways. Gemma would walk into those churches and they were the sparest large rooms. Another way meeting in the houses had been different; those had been as stuffed and lively as any other country house with a big family.

“No, she does not meet in a house.”

Gemma’s drunk for real now. She continues, “To cut yourself off from the world. It makes you resistant to outside forces, yes. But narrowly. Not in a way that is strong. Like a tree that grows only upwards, never outwards. Is a poplar not easier to fell than an oak?”

Gemma pauses, refocusing on the two women in front of her, returning a bit to Earth. Gemma realizes she could’ve said a lot of other things. She could’ve relayed the story she once heard from her Russländer grandmother in Kitchener, a story her mother had told to her, about soldiers who swept through what was then southern Russia during the Revolution and rolled up pages of the family Bible for cigarettes, soldiers who ate all their food and left them to starve, and starve some of them did, yet the story was always framed as how lucky they were, that it could’ve been so much worse. One only needed, Gemma surmised later, to hear one story about a different family who, say, had their heads cut off and placed around the dinner table. One likely only needed to hear that story once. (This same grandmother had showed Gemma that documentary And When They Shall Ask when she was in frickin’ grade two. There was a joke in that decision somewhere.)

But the story her Russländer grandmother relayed: That her grandmother, Gemma’s great-great-grandmother, had noticed the soldiers itching; their coats appeared to be moving. She realized the coats were infested with insects, but the soldiers did not see this. So, Gemma’s great-great-grandmother took the coats and put them in the oven to kill the bugs. This did not change how the soldiers treated them, yet when Gemma’s grandmother told this story eighty years later in a Kitchener living room, her eyes were enchanted and alive. “The soldiers were confused! They would think, well, why is she being kind to us? They were confused!” She became serious. “You understand what I’m saying. There is a reason she survived. My grandmother believed in Jesus.”