August Epp—Ona Friesen

August Epp and Ona Friesen are childhood friends whose shared past gives August a sense of belonging and whose renewed closeness shapes his work as recorder of the women’s meetings. Their relationship is marked by a vivid common history, August’s unspoken love, and moments when Ona recognizes the ideas and language they once shared; it remains emotionally significant without becoming an explicitly mutual romance.

Childhood and Shared Imagination

August remembers Ona as a girl his own age and as the central figure in his memories of Molotschna. Their childhood included play, shared attention to the changing seasons, and elaborate imagined roles: they pretended to be rebellious disciples whose leader, Jesus, first misunderstood them and whose deaths would later be honored. They also jousted on horseback with fence posts, turning play into a mock contest between knights. The recollection includes their kissing and fighting, details that make their intimacy neither idealized nor purely harmonious.

For August, these memories are bound to a particular kind of freedom. He recalls that life made sense, if only briefly, in their imaginary play as daylight faded. The past is not simply a collection of childhood incidents: it is the place where he can locate a relationship that gave him companionship and a way to imagine himself in the world. Ona’s importance is so immediate that, when asked what he remembers of Molotschna, he answers with her name before beginning the fuller account.

Return and Renewed Proximity

August’s memories of Ona shape the advice he receives from a librarian. After a conversation in which he speaks mostly, though not entirely, about Ona, the librarian suggests that he return to Molotschna, seek acceptance into the colony, offer to teach the boys English, and become friends with Ona again. August takes this advice to heart. His return and presence at the women’s meeting bring him back into her orbit, though the evidence presents renewed friendship as an intention and developing circumstance, not as a completed reconciliation or a declared partnership.

When Ona asks for someone to record the meetings, August agrees. He recognizes that the women may not be able to read the minutes, yet he accepts the task without hesitation because he would do anything for Ona. Her laughter gives him courage, but he does not voice the most vulnerable question on his mind: whether she sees him as a reminder of evil because of something that happened before his imprisonment. His silence preserves the distance between what he feels and what he dares to ask of her. The minutes become a practical service to the group and, for August, an act of devotion to Ona.

Recognition in the Meeting

Their connection appears not only in August’s memories and private declarations but also in the attention they give one another in the present. When August argues that thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys can be taught with direction, firm love, and patience, he draws on the educational principles of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ona looks up and silently mouths the words about sympathy and love along with him. August associates those words with his mother’s teaching, but Ona’s quiet participation makes the moment a point of recognition between them: she knows the language and inheritance behind his appeal.

August’s position in the meeting is complicated. He is its male recorder, and he describes himself as a schoolteacher and believer, but he is also acutely aware that the women are deciding their own course. His recommendation that the boys be allowed to leave with them is conditional on the women choosing to leave. Ona’s attention does not erase their different positions or establish agreement on every question; it registers a shared moral vocabulary at a moment when August is speaking before the group. Their closeness is conveyed through this small, unspoken response rather than through a declaration.

Love, Vulnerability, and Limits

August’s love for Ona is explicit in his narration, but the evidence does not make her feelings an equivalent certainty. In one moment of inward address, he imagines embracing Ona and imagines her embracing him in return. The reciprocity belongs expressly to his mind. It reveals the tenderness with which he experiences their renewed proximity, while leaving open what Ona herself would say about their relationship. Her laughter, her request that he take the minutes, and her silent mouthing of Coleridge’s words show trust and recognition, but do not by themselves establish romantic commitment.

Ona’s circumstances also give their bond a difficult present context. She is pregnant after the assaults in the colony and is marked by Narfa, a condition the elders use to question her ability to reason. August’s account makes clear that her judgment and voice remain central to the women’s deliberations. His affection does not replace her agency: she speaks for herself, challenges the demand for coerced forgiveness, and argues that distance from the men may allow the women to preserve their faith and protect their children. August records her words and recognizes their force, while remaining the narrator who must interpret what her presence means to him.

Narrative Significance

The relationship links August’s remembered childhood to the immediate collective crisis. Ona is both the person through whom he recalls a brief period of belonging and the woman whose request gives him a place in the present meeting. The transition from shared imaginative play to his careful work recording the women’s decisions shows how intimacy can persist in altered form: childhood closeness becomes attention, service, memory, and the effort to be understood.

That persistence does not resolve the relationship into a conventional romantic ending. August’s love is accompanied by restraint and uncertainty, while Ona’s gestures permit closeness without settling its meaning. Their history therefore gives the meeting an intimate undercurrent without displacing its larger stakes. The bond matters not because it removes the distance between them, but because it shows August continuing to orient himself toward Ona as she exercises her own judgment and helps shape the women’s future.