Sweeter Than All the World (15 page)

“Enoch, Enoch.” My mother was rocking Elizabeth on her breast and weeping.

Grossma said sharply, “What is this? Enoch? What happened to you?”

My father was tilted so far back, he had been talking so fast and loud and glaring straight up at me on the edge of the oven; now it seemed he actually saw me, saw what I know was my terrified face. I was seven then, and I had never heard or seen him like this.

Looking steadily at me, he said with his usual controlled calm: “I have destroyed all the portraits.”

“What…” My mother, like a sigh.

“They told me this afternoon that if I did not I would be placed under formal church ban, and every church member must shun me. No church member would be permitted to say so much as a word to me. Including you, Susanna, who would have to deny me both table and bed. And even…” and he gestured at me, quickly, but was looking past me, somewhere blank, “even the children, for the good of their souls. So, in the presence of Elder Hansen and
Vermahner
Sawatsky and van Steen and the three who spoke against me, the shopkeepers Daniel Kurtz and Dirck Cowent and Berend Kauenhowen, I cut up thirty-seven paintings, including the portraits I did of you, Susanna, and our boys, and you too,” he nodded to my grandparents, “and myself, I slashed them to pieces. And then…”

My father stopped. By now Isaak and little Peter were awake beside me on the oven, and we and everyone below us around our family table were staring at him.

Father took a deep breath and continued, “Then they burned them. Behind the church, where no one could see the fire from the street.

“And,” he was talking faster and faster, “I told those three little envious shopkeepers, ‘Now,’ I said, ‘you will obey the Elder’s “Second Commandment” too. You will take down the signs above your shops and you will break them in pieces, and burn them. Because they have “graven images” of people on them too!’ ”

I saw my father then hard and grey, and as sharply dangerous as any rock cracked by fire.

After some time Grossma Triena said, “They won’t do it.”

And she was right. Father’s portraits of the Council belonged, of course, to Danzig and so they remained on the walls in City Hall, but he had to work to feed us, he said, and the Elder Hansen did nothing about the three shopkeepers, and so he sent them a letter, saying “I see you hold with your picture signs, you continue to worship these graven images because they attract customers, well, as I told you all, I believe I have as much freedom as you.”

In the next six months my father painted two more portraits, of city bankers who were not Mennonites, and he wrote a book. With paint my father was skilled and allusive—a shade of paint on a lip could say more than a whole suit of clothes—but when he handled words he demanded they say precisely what he meant, so his title stated his intention without a hint of ambiguity either artistic or theological:

He wrote in German, and the word he used,
Torheit
, is really stronger than “folly”; it leans towards “stupidity.” “Brotherly admonition” and “faithful warning” were words the Mennonite ministers emphasized in their role as church
Vermahner
, and it was obvious that by publishing this pamphlet in German rather than Mennonite Dutch, my father intended everyone in Danzig to be informed of the exact
Torheit
perpetrated by this widely read and highly respected church leader and independent businessman.

Grossma Triena always said that if Enoch wanted to expose That Old One’s stupidity, he should have done it with his greatest strength, painting, and not tried to use Hansen’s great strength: words. Perhaps, if my father and grandmother had worked together, using his skill with the human figure and her incisive verbal ironies, they could between them have invented the satirical cartoon, even as my great-great-grandfather invented the cable car. As it was, at first my father’s “hateful, spiteful, venomous book,” as many Mennonites called it, achieved a good deal. The Danzig City Council called Elder Hansen to appear before it, and he had to admit that he had no civic or legal authority to interfere with the conjugal family rights of a properly married couple. The Council then invited my father to accept a new position they created specifically for him, namely to become the official “Danzig City Artist.” As far as the City was concerned, he could paint what he pleased, portraits, landscapes, murals—anything anyone wished to commission.

“It is too much,” Grossma said.

She was right again. My father now came to be seen as a high-handed man who used his great gifts, and more particularly his political influence with the City Council, to dominate both the members of the church to which he insisted he remained faithful, and the citizens of the city he insisted he loved. The more liberal Frisian Mennonite Church in nearby Neugarten—where since Adam the Wiebes had always been members—would not have banned Father for his portraits, but now their elder had to agree with the more conservative Flemish Church that the Danzig City Council could not decide on a fundamental matter of church discipline. And the lucrative City Artist appointment made the Painters’ Guild more envious than ever. Mennonite church members and Danzig citizens: between them our Seemann family lost all community. Because of my father, we were Stolzenberg pariahs.

When Elder Hansen read out the ban against my father, the whole congregation of the Danzig Flemish Mennonite Church at the Petershagen Gate was present. Two hundred and thirty families, over a thousand people including unbaptized children. I was eight, and I remember the Elder’s powerful hands lifting the black leather Bible folded open, and his voice like a trumpet:

“Thus doth our Lord command: ‘And I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ ”

And then he turned some pages and looked up. He didn’t have to read the words, he knew them:

“Thus saith the Lord: ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’ ”

My father, standing alone before him, turned and walked past us in the pews down the centre aisle; out of the church. Grossma Triena stepped around my grandfather into the aisle and followed him.

“Let That Old One ban me too,” she said to my father.

But my mother and grandfather did not know what to do. Night after night our family sat around the table, talking. My father obeyed the letter of the law: he ate separate food and did not speak to us, but wrote short notes, which Grossma read aloud. But soon he stopped writing: it was clear Grosspa and my mother could not defy the Elder.

“God gave Enoch a great talent, to paint,” Grossma Triena argued. “Why should he bury it now? If he can’t paint here, there are other cities.”

Father agreed with her. He decided to leave Danzig and accept an invitation to the court of Augustus II Duke of Saxony, who was now, after innumerable wars, also King of Poland. Father travelled to Warsaw to design and decorate the new palaces Augustus was building himself there, and he took Isaak and me with him to begin our apprenticeships.

Protected child that I had been, I could scarcely believe what I saw in Warsaw; often out of the corner of my eye, it was so shocking. Augustus was barely twenty-seven, and not yet as debauched as he would be when he created at Dresden the wealthiest and most dissolute court in Europe. But, as the dazzling architecture of the Zwinger Palace proves to this day, his obsession with every imaginable human experience of beauty and vice was lifelong and unquenchable. My father was painting an immense wall mural of large figures draped to their feet—though sometimes the drapery fell aside for thigh or breast—he
painted the flesh, folds and edges of the figures, while Isaak and I filled in the solid colours of cloth as he instructed us. But the way we did even that seemingly elementary work did not satisfy him.

“It’s cloth, yes, but there’s a human body under it. Even when it drapes down, straight, you have to see the body!”

Isaak and I could only hang our heads. We tediously brushed endless paint on plaster; for us there could be no bodies, certainly none like those we pretended not to glimpse in a split-second shriek of flight and pursuit flitting through the lantern-light of the magnificent gardens below the royal servants’ quarters, where we lived.

“Take off your clothes,” our father ordered. “Every piece.”

We stared at him. At home in Stolzenberg we three brothers slept in a room separate from our little sisters, but even so we undressed quickly as our mother taught us, without a candle and with our backs turned. We knew perfectly well the shameful, naked story of Eve and of Adam.

“I will too.” Father was unbuttoning his shirt. “Take them off.”

And when we had, he raised our heads so we had to see him first. All that bare, broad flesh, and so much hair. Isaak … I … hairless, small … but we were shaped exactly like him. Isaak already had a bit of hair darkening there, in the triangle of his little front tail. It was no more pointed than mine, and just as fleshily pink.

“Your bodies, look, look at them. Given you by God.” Father’s voice was getting louder. “Every part as perfect and honourable as any other, you see? Whoever you paint, whatever covers them, this body is always here!”

He jerked up a bedsheet, draped it over his shoulder so that
it covered half of him, even half of his large “member” as our mother never dared name it. He moved his shoulders, his legs, it seemed he might twist into dance.

“See how the sheet moves on this side, and the muscles here, at the same time, see? A beautiful physical machine, each body is different and each is also the same. The best painters always see that difference within the sameness. In Italy, in the studios, they work at that, they practise painting the nude body.”

He was putting on his clothes again, but I didn’t want to. I had never before felt air all over my skin.

“When I came back from Italy I was baptized in Elbing, and I wanted to paint anyone who would sit for me, not nude of course, men and women in their ordinary clothes sitting, standing, at a window. And I did that for a little while, and one day the
Vermahner
came to me and said it was going around that I had painted a woman lying down. I told him she was leaning on her elbow, stretched out on a couch with her dress draped over her boots … but she was stretched out,
lying down?”

There was something in the way he said that, the tone of the words, “lying down.” I felt cold; as if I’d been dropped into ice.

“Even in Elbing the
Vermahner
asked me about that,” my father told us. “Before you were born. Long before the Danzig second commandment.”

After two years in Warsaw, Father was bidden to Augustus’s court in Dresden. Danzig was now so far away, we could visit our family only once a year; being a court painter, Father said, was little better than being a slave. I was becoming a pretty boy, the King’s women living in the Zwinger told me that often enough. There were fifty or sixty of them at one time (Augustus was
nicknamed “the Strong,” because, it was said, he fathered over three hundred children), and they never had enough to do, so they became very playful. Father watched Isaak and me carefully, but one night after Isaak had turned seventeen—he was more than “pretty” by then—he did not return to our sumptuous apartments behind the Palace until dawn.

Father did not ask him what he had done. All he said was, “This will not happen again,” and then Isaak bent over our salon settee and took his punishment on his bare flesh. I had to watch, and I thought I could certainly mix the colours correctly to paint a series of his buttocks as they changed. But I was also weeping with my brother. Within the week Father resigned his position.

The Court High Chamberlain would not accept his resignation, but Augustus did. Isaak and I had already noticed that he was looking at us very closely, and we were becoming apprehensive about it, but the King respected our father and he would not force us to stay, as he easily might have. We returned to Danzig, in one of the King’s coaches piled high with gifts.

There came the day when, in a tall ship, our family sailed past the high warehouses of Motlawa harbour. Beyond them, through the wide streets of the Granaries district, we could see the narrow Dutch façades of houses towering over the docks and bridges of the inner channel, the spires of the churches and the Danzig city hall thrust up behind them, the Green Gate entrance of the Royal Route leading into the Long Market and the heart of the city. On the right, out of the Lower City, appeared the orchards of the Roehfer Roads and the walks and green plots of the Long Gardens that Adam Wiebe had enclosed inside the city walls. We were moving slowly, all so slowly. People stood to watch us pass, it seemed perhaps the ship was
standing, would we ever get away, out to the river and on towards the open sea?

“Oh, the sea … the sea,” our little sister Katerina sang in Highgerman, anticipating. She was less than three, but she loved the sounds of words and could already sigh many of them as long and softly as our mother.

Mother and Father and Grosspa Isaak were in our cabins below; they could not endure this endless leaving. But Grossma Triena was on deck, holding Katerina on her arm, with the rest of us children—Peter, Elizabeth, Abel, me, tall Isaak holding little Johann—huddled around her at the rail.

“Remember this,” Grossma said in Lowgerman. “Who will see it again?”

It seemed then the ship would sail inevitably into the giant shipping crane of the Krahnstor directly before us, the immense square tower of St. Mary’s Cathedral on the left and on the right, far over the houses, the needle spire of St. Catherine’s. We were pressed so close together I could feel all our breathing heave in one gasp and stagger, we would certainly drive into the crane and sheer onto the street! But slowly, slowly, the ship tilted right and there over the narrow, muddy water came the high Church of St. John bending towards us, we were leaning into the east turn of the harbour towards the city walls and the Vistula River.