Sweeter Than All the World Read online

  “We have been given the good fish in the sea. You don’t need a conceited professor lying to you in a university.”

  Are professors liars? I was never able to prove it for myself, because I never went there, and after I was sixteen I had no time for good fish either. When violence threatens you, there are two things a defenceless Mennonite can do: run away if you can find a place to run to, or try to build a shelter to protect yourself. For fifteen years I helped dig moats, built walls in Franeker, Leewarden, Bolsward, Sneek. The war engineers of the world were making more and more powerful cannon, so I redesigned the walls and corner bastions of our small fort at the head of Harlingen harbour, the last refuge for citizens who could not escape by sea. When I was thirty I was invited by the Danzig Council to come work in that city, and the Mennonites who had fled to the Vistula delta to escape the Spaniards wrote to me as well. They said that perhaps they had not fled far enough: around Danzig they were not persecuted for their faith, but nevertheless their villages were overrun by more political wars than ever.

  You know how to build dikes and walls, they wrote, to channel and control water. Please, come. Protect us, and the good people who have given us refuge, from violent princes.

  Strange, strange. My grandmother and mother and later also my wife knitted sweaters, mittens, scarves, hats; they sewed cloth and leather clothing to protect me from cold and water while I worked. Without that protection I would have suffered and died, at sea or on land, as surely as the thousands of people I protected by building walls against the annihilation of armies. I have been praised across Europe for what I built of earth and stone, princes have called it extraordinary, but my mother and my wife built the “walls” that fitted my single body so perfectly that I forgot to notice how well I was protected, and they were never praised. They were merely doing the woman’s work expected of them. Protecting.

  My head swarms with the perpetual wars of my life, war perpetrated with every imaginable brutality by self-centred princes and bishops and popes and sultans and kings and emperors and counts and the “great liberating Christian” preachers Luther and Calvin, even though they are both already long dead, and by shiploads of gold and silver hauled from the new Americas, to pay for more and more soldiers to destroy villages and slaughter animals and ravage women and children, pays for designing more horrible guns, so that now a soldier can actually carry one on his shoulder, aim it, kill with it all by himself. In 1615, while I was pondering the Danzig invitation, Europe was about to plunge into the deep and bloody canyon of the Thirty Years War.

  I did not know that, of course. But I think my brilliant engineering master, Jan Adriaenz Leeghwater of De Rijp, anticipated it.

  Jan Adriaenz taught me what I comprehend about building; how to desire the logical, reasonable beauties of the things that are given us, especially the reliability of water, its absolute and inviolable constancy; how to sense the spirit in discrete things, the shards of the seemingly impossible that glitter beyond the edge of imagining. When he heard of Galileo and his discovery of the telescope, he could not contain his joy.

  “Think of it!” he exclaimed. “Some day soon we will see past the stars, perhaps see far enough to understand how we are alive, and why.”

  I could not understand him then; he seemed to be thinking in circles, and the genius of the telescope, as far as I could comprehend, lay in looking as far as possible in a straight line. When I was apprenticed to him in De Rijp, I saw the same puzzlement in his Mennonite congregation when he occasionally preached. Not often, for it seemed his practical brilliance—which could design a city hall or a mill or an overflow canal, or sketch the sluices and dikes that would drain the enormous Haarlemer Lake so that the island town of De Rijp could become the centre of the richest grain field in Holland—lifted his spirit beyond language into mystifying mystery. His pulpit contemplations did not open the minds of the hard-working men and women of De Rijp; rather, they became uneasy, and settled themselves all the more firmly into a spiritual position of stubbornness.

  That has never been a particularly difficult position for any Holland people to achieve, and it is almost habitual for us “stumme Fries.” Jan Adriaenz was never invited to preach at any Harlingen Mennonite meeting—by 1600 there were several Mennonite congregations in our town; they had fractured not about baptism or refusal to bear arms in war, but upon some extremely fine biblical interpretations that for me were theologically indiscernible—and the last time he came to Harlingen he and I did not go to Sunday worship at all. Rather, we walked in the spring air all afternoon, until towards evening we stood on Harlingen’s outer harbour wall.

  The burning ball of the sun nestled between the black smudged islands of Vieland and Terschelling on the farthest edge of the Wadden Sea. Its level light glazed the sea into a crimson mirror.

  We were surrounded by the landscape of my life. We could hear the water of the canals that drained the land being lifted everywhere around us by creaking windmills, their last small step up into the sea. A cloudless evening, but we would have stood there in rain or storm, for Jan Adriaenz loved to watch water fall from the sky to the patient earth, or contemplate the enormous power of wind and tide driving wave after wave of it, over the sand, against the land, endlessly. If you could only, he said, build a machine to catch a few strands of the power of that water the way our enormous, balanced windmills caught a bit of every passing wind, you could grind all the grain in Friesland into flour with the roaring sea that smashed itself against our short harbour dikes. But there was sometimes nothing and sometimes too much overwhelming power in the sea, and after twenty years of thinking he still could not see how it might be held, even for a moment.

  But that evening he did not muse about machines to channel the unfathomable power in all creation. Rather, he told me of the diving bell he had at last perfected, which held air in its dome like an overturned cup so that he had been able to walk on the harbour floor at Hoorn for almost an hour. And beyond its breakwater, he had stood deep in absolute water silence, on the sunken ship that had foundered a year before in the shifting shallows of the harbour mouth.

  “With the diving bell we can inspect any harbour floor,” he said. “And need never again lose men or a ship to sand.”

  “You went in it yourself? To the sea bottom?”

  “I had made it, I could not send an apprentice down first.”

  “You are now,” I said, amazed, “a man who walks under water.”

  In the level light his moustache and pointed beard seemed to be, like the far islands, on golden fire. And I saw he was thinking of something altogether different.

  His burning mouth opened. “Adriaen Block has returned. With all his men alive and his ship full of fur and strange plants.”

  Hoorn’s most daring sailor, two years gone and almost given up for lost.

  “Where was he, how far did he go?”

  “He explored very slowly where the Englishman Heinrick Hudson sailed past and up a river so fast. He says the New World and the oceans are far, far larger than we can imagine. That if it takes three months to sail to America, as it does, then China, he thinks, is still half a year farther, if you could find the direct water to it.”

  “Did he bring back people?” At thirty-one I had never yet travelled farther from Friesland than Amsterdam or met any strangers beyond sailors, whose stories simply grew more fantastical with every league they had sailed and every dram drunk. A Mennonite like Adriaen Block would drink only beer.

  “No. He said he would not bring any away, they always die in Europe. They were very good to him, they traded furs and helped them live easily through a winter in their country. It’s a beautiful island. They call it Man-a-hat-a; in their language it means ‘the heavenly land.’ ”

  “Those people know of heaven?”

  “On earth, Adriaen Block says. Endless giant trees like we have never seen in Friesland and deep, rich soil, a harbour sheltered from the ocean and faced by great rivers thick with fish
. Heavenly.”

  My eyes were almost blinded by light; the western islands beyond which my great-grandfather vanished were now like black, narrow clouds running out to sharp points in the sky of the sea: heaven indeed, with every upper edge blazing fire. I could not imagine what else Jan Adriaenz was thinking until he said it.

  “The Inquisition,” he said, “and then the Lutherans and Calvinists burned us, but now, between ourselves, we argue much thinner theology than baptism or bread or state citizenship or pacifism. We ourselves have learned to make the immense teachings of Jesus into small, sharp knives to slice ourselves apart. If someone does not agree with us, we hit them with the Scriptures. You, we say, you are now banned from the believers, you must now be shunned! Then we cannot eat with you or even speak—for what reason? With every theological debate the list of little reasons grows longer, and smaller.”

  “You think…” I was trying to catch his tone. “You think there is a new world? Possible?”

  “Perhaps. As Adriaen Block says, perhaps if we had to sail for three or six months more and the terrible ocean made us vomit out enough of ourselves.”

  We chuckled a little. We both doubted that even the world’s greatest oceans were large enough to purge most Christians of their smallness.

  “And he said the people who live there invited him.”

  So I reminded Jan Adriaenz, “I’ve been invited too—because you won’t go—in the opposite direction.”

  “Danzig,” he said like a deep sigh. “The great city on the Baltic.”

  “They do need help, and so many Mennonites have found refuge there.”

  “Yes,” he said, “they fled there because they were offered protection by a city and a Polish king who did not believe in the Inquisition if they could get industrious people. So now they’re surrounded not by Spaniards and French and Germans, as we are, and the English across a narrow sea, but by the lands of the Swedes, Danes, Finns, Russians, Poles, by the Prussians, Saxons, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, to say nothing of hounded gypsies and Jews, and the brutal Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns who have been killing each other for centuries to prove they alone are God’s elect to rule the whole earth no matter how enormous it may be—a small corner of Europe and such a past. As full of slaughter as the Mediterranean, or Jerusalem itself.”

  “Why?” I asked him then. “We keep killing each other—why?”

  “Why.” The sun was gone and we were fading into darkness. “In all of Europe, now, God is every reason.”

  “You think we wouldn’t drag that to this ‘New World’?”

  “Of course, of course, it’s happened already, for over a hundred years. But … it sounds like a story in the Bible, so beautiful if it were far enough away, a hidden corner of earth. Man-a-hat-a.”

  “Anyway, how long could you hide heaven?” I said, and I knew the tinge of bitterness was in my voice, but I could not help it. I had been dreaming of all that might be built in a great city since the Danzig delegation came to Harlingen, after he refused them but suggested they consider me. “John in the Bible saw heaven. An immense city with very high walls.”

  “The new Jerusalem,” Jan Adriaenz murmured. “I have read the Book of the Revelation often, and pondered it. Heaven is not shown as a garden, or a deep, hidden forest. The angel says to John, ‘Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife.’ ”

  I looked at him; I did not remember that.

  “Heaven is first of all a woman, the Bride of the Lamb. And after that it is also a city.”

  All I could say was, “What can that mean?”

  He smiled wanly. “You see why we studious readers of the Scriptures, we Menniste literalists will have problems between us forever. What I think is, these are all pictures, and on earth no one picture of heaven can be enough; we need many. For me, the simplest is heaven as a city—and that is complex enough—a huge city brilliant as jasper, square and hard … but also,” he added abruptly, “trees of life grow on the banks of the river that runs through it. If we built a beautiful city with a river…”

  I said, into his silence, “A river runs through Danzig.”

  On the Bay of Danzig our ship caught the morning wind off the Baltic Sea and under full sail moved slow as a procession between the sand dunes of the Wester Platte and up the bent throat of the Vistula River. The church spires and towers of Danzig—I counted more than thirty-seven—blazed in the sun standing low over the delta and outlining the three peaks of western hills, against which the city lay, and the tips of the masts of ships anchored there from every ocean on earth—I saw twenty-two of them along the river quays, their wrapped sails glowing into a deeper brilliance as we moved between them. I thought of small, flat Harlingen, its houses squeezed between the four fingers of the van Harinxma Canal, its tiny fortress above the Wadden Sea. Danzig was huge, it was walled and bastioned below the hills a mile inland from the sea, and it stretched out farther than that. When we turned right from the Vistula and sailed into the Motlawa River and between the towers of the city walls, the harbour narrowed before us into a molten street of welcoming light. Our long bowsprit pointed between stepped Dutch houses on the right and the huge granaries along the left quays, between the silent men and women and children at windows and standing motionless watching us arrive in our tall blue ship. Verily, in 1616 Danzig seemed to me a city of beaten gold floating on the long, northern-summer light.

  But my engineer’s eye recognized it had by no means “come down to earth adorned as a bride.” Its walls were not two hundred cubits high nor its gates made of pearl. The river was thick and sluggish, the gate irons rusted thin, the stone lintels and pillars cracked by age and cannonballs. Inside the low walls, as we bent away from the old, glowering castle, there were so many houses and markets and tight cobbled streets and granaries and immense wood and iron cranes so crushed together upon each other that not a single green tree could possibly have found a place to root, anywhere.

  A most earthen, stone, and muddy water city. I had come to the heart of my life’s work.

  SEVEN

  BELIEVING IS SEEING

  Edmonton

  1986

  “HAVE YOU EVER,” SUSANNAH ASKS, “seen a row of dead people?”

  Adam looks past his nightly day-old newspaper; her profile as if dreaming against the low bedside light.

  “I see enough bodies,” he says. “More than I want, alive and dead.”

  “No, not one dead at a time, I mean a row of them, a long row.”

  “A long … everybody dies, everybody runs to the doctor, you can never stop it for good … what is it?”

  Susannah is staring immovably into space. “No. I mean”—her hand makes sharp chopping motions across the width of their bed—“people, laid out in rows one beside the other, full length on the ground, say hundreds of them, dead.”

  “No, where would I?” Adam murmurs. “Yes, of course I have.”

  “Where?”

  “TV news, everybody sees it, practically every evening.”

  “No, TV doesn’t count.”

  “Not count? The first TV we bought, the first thing we saw was Lee Harvey Oswald shot between those Texas cops, live on TV, and now it’s twelve-channel reruns of news bodies, all the time.”

  “I know, but television’s just an electric shimmer, like a voice on an answering machine, I mean human bodies, that’s what Dad said once, like this.”

  She makes the chopping motion again, across into his paper; despite the elegance of her hand, the gesture strikes him as grotesque.

  “What, your dad?”

  But she continues, obliviously, “And your doctor training wouldn’t help, there’d be so many you couldn’t believe your trained eyes and you’d have to touch them, one after the other.” Her fingertips rest momentarily on his skin. “Every one dead human flesh.”

  “The fact of touch, that’s proof, yes.”

  “And the fact of smell,” she says.

  “Oh, there’d sure be t
hat, in no time.”

  “Yes, that.”

  Her quiet voice seems to have turned the bedroom light so dim they might be between candles in a chandeliered dining room again, her face a Pre-Raphaelite vision over the table, a face he can, for the moment, barely recognize in its incomprehensible beauty.

  Adam has to look away; years ago they were like that, and not in bed reading either.

  “Unless it’s very cold,” she says, “like February, bodies swell up, there’d be an extremely strong stench very fast.”

  “And flies and maggots.” He hesitates, but her lengthening stillness is some consideration he must break. “A Dene from Fort Good Hope, I was sewing his knife cut, he told me a body even in cold water like the Mackenzie will come to the surface from stomach gases, you often can’t recognize the face after the fish find it but the body will certainly rise again.…” He laughs, realizing what he has said. “At least in water!”

  “In Canada,” she says deliberately, “we see rows of bodies only in industrial disasters, like Springhill, or the Hillcrest coal mine in 1914….”

  His long wards at the Royal Alex Hospital, suffering flesh laid out row on row and never permitted to simply die; it was worth your life in lawsuits not to multiply attaching, supposedly succouring, machines—Adam crushes the newspaper and drops it to the floor, but Susannah continues:

  “ … one hundred and eighty-nine men in Hillcrest. When they brought them up from the exploded shafts inside the mountain they laid the body parts out in the mine washhouse and tried to reassemble them, arms, legs, heads, so relatives could identify—”

  “Susannah,” he has to interrupt, “why are you talking about this?”

  “We could drive to Hillcrest, five hours, it’s more or less a ghost town, and see all the graves,” she says. “A long double row with little pickets, hardly any tombstones or names, just Crowsnest Mountain and the lovely valley and grass sunk in like giant footprints, side by side.”