Sweeter Than All the World (16 page)

“Remember,” Grossma Triena said. “In 1635 your great-great-grandfather Adam was granted the right to live inside Danzig. There, past St. Catherine’s, by the Wagon Gate he himself had built, and the Council gave him, the only Mennonite then, the right to buy land inside the walls and he built three tall houses. You’ve seen them.”

My brother Peter said, “I’m coming back, I’m going to buy them again.”

He wasn’t thirteen when he said that, the day we were barely moving down the Motlawa River, past the high stone of the Old Castle and all the ships tied to the wharves and anchored out towards the eastern ring of deep-moated walls, leaving Danzig. I did not believe Peter then, and I didn’t know if my grandmother did; I could not look at her, we were passing too much. But she did; I think now that not only her left-handed faith but also her left-handed spirit helped her to understand more than we were able to think or imagine, painters or not.

Peter returned to Danzig after baptism, with good Dutch connections in the East Indies, to become an importer of spices and coffee. By 1722 he had bought the most neglected of Adam Wiebe’s houses, and a year later Grossma Triena sailed from London to celebrate his marriage in the restored house. Katerina and Johann travelled with her; at the wedding Katerina met Anthoni Momber, a Mennonite who wanted to start a coffee house. Two years later he came to London to marry her, and together they returned to Danzig to build their coffee house beside the Market, near the beautiful Renaissance Artushof where the bankers counted their money. Within a few years, because of its splendid gardens, its poetry and drama readings, its superb beverage, the “world-renowned Momber Coffee-house in Danzig,” as Professor Hans Meyer of Hamburg wrote, “invites all the peoples of the earth, even the Poles, Moscovites and Cossacks, to partake of its aromatic beverages, which rival anything London or Paris has to offer the most discriminating connoisseur.”

Johann did not return to London; he settled in Danzig because artists were in great demand there, again. He named
himself Johann Leonhard Seemann and a decade later painted the portrait of the Danzig Flemish Mennonite
Vermahner
Hans van Steen, whose wife was our second cousin Sara Siemens. Grosspa Isaak, my father and my mother were no longer alive, but Grossma Triena was. She was ninety-one, and laughed out loud when I told her.

“You wait,” she said in Lowgerman; between us we never spoke anything else. “He’ll be ordained Elder too,”

She was right of course, though she could not wait until that happened to laugh with me again. Shortly after her death I married a young woman of good family, who taught me how to behave properly English in high society. When I died in 1744, our only child, Paul, was ten and already away in public school; the last time I saw him, he came into my studio and told me he wanted to be a painter like me and Uncle Isaak. I was then completing my last, and largest, group portrait for Sir John Cust, Belton House,
Lady Cust and Her Nine Children
.

What remains of my life’s work is scattered. The portrait of Elihu Yale is in the United States and the much earlier
Colonel Andrew Bisset…
, which I now concede is of more than “somewhat” uneven quality, in Scotland.
The Lapland Giant Gaianus
, painted in 1734, the year Grossma Triena died, is in Dalkeith Palace;
Sir James Dashwood
(1738) at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. My one self-portrait, which Augustus II liked so much, I painted in 1716, rather too young. Seen from the left, I have my hand folded up long and thin towards my chin, a lock of hair too abandoned on my wide forehead, full lips and my eyes soulfully large.

When my grandmother saw it, she considered it for some time before she said:

“Slanted to the light, you look almost, as the English would say, sinister.” She was smiling, and I did not need to tell her “sinister” in Latin means “left.” She continued:

“You always say you don’t want to be a Mennonite, and you’ve certainly painted yourself as if you weren’t.”

“Well,” I said, “then I suppose I’m a really good painter.”

“But you talk about Mennonites so often, you insist too much on not being one.”

“Must a person be forever what he’s born, only one thing?”

That was not quite what she meant, of course, as with time I understood. During the last two years of her life, when we lived alone together in London, we talked much; sometimes, I like to think, for days without stopping. Grossma could no longer knit, her right fingers were swollen large at every joint, but she could wind thread around them and hold the tension for crocheting with her left hand. Our chairs and settees were covered two and three deep with her delicate doilies, her crochet hook flying. She laughed at her hands, the right so thick and painful and the left so amazingly strong.

“You see,” she said, “the left is the side of the heart.”

She told me whatever she wanted to remember of her long, long life, and her memory about certain events was astounding. For she of all people understood the continuous contradictions, the unperceived endings that our lives contained. “We are
Himmels Flijchtlinje,”
she said—people fleeing to heaven, or spiritual refugees might be the English for it—though at the end of the twentieth century it would be something clumsier, like “psychically displaced.” People more devout than I ever permitted myself to appear might say she simply meant “a stranger here,” or even “pilgrim.”

In any case, during the night of February 13, 1945, that studied self-portrait was destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden. My portraits of the first two Georges lasted a little longer, until they too were transformed into soot and air by the flames of the Windsor Castle fire.

Of my grandfather’s work nothing at all remains, and of my father’s only a few copies of engravings, one of which is Adam Wiebe’s cable car. The copper plates of it were, of course, melted long ago for bullets in some war.

My brother Isaak sailed from Rome to visit me the year before I died, and together he and I attended the first London performance of George Frederick Handel’s
Messiah
, at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden on Wednesday Lent, March 23, 1743. My wife deeply regretted not coming with us when we told her of the magnificence of the performance, with Mr. Handel conducting from the harpsichord, and even more so when a controversy grew in the press about the words of the New Testament and the name of Jesus being sung in a theatre by stage actors of “loose morals” and well-known “dubious sexual habits.” The
Universal Spectator
demanded, “Is a playhouse a fit temple for God’s Word? Is the New Testament to be a text of Diversion and Amusement? What a Profanation of God’s Name, in diverting themselves are they not accessory to the breaking of the Third Commandment?”

Isaak laughed. “Shades of our Danzig Commandment,” he said. “What is the third?”

I had no idea, but my wife knew her Anglican past. “Isn’t it the ‘shalt not’ where you’re not to take the name of the Lord your God in vain?”

We three laughed a little, together, as people who love each
other do when they grow older. We talked about our Seeman family that had once been so close, and was now dispersed so utterly.

I died a year later, to the day.
Messiah
was not performed again for many years, but for me the music and words of one particular song have always burned like driven fire. Bass voice and trumpet:

Changed. No more end. Grossma Triena understood that. On earth she was a left-handed woman.

T
HEY ARE SEATED AROUND THE DINING-ROOM TABLE
for their Saturday morning ritual, the first since Susannah has returned from Italy. The cinnamon rolls, which Adam as usual brought from the bakery on his way home from his hospital rounds, have been eaten, and Susannah is moving the cutlery around on the table as if a visual model were necessary.

“It’s simple,” she says. “I go to Calgary,” one coffee spoon moves to the left, “your father stays in Edmonton,” a fork to the right, “Trish, you’re in university residence in Edmonton,” a knife to the right in parallel, “and Joel…”

Her long fingers are on another spoon; her hand hesitates, but then she moves the spoon firmly to nudge the fork.

“Little Joel,” she reaches up to fondle his tall head bent above her. “You stay in Edmonton, and finish grade twelve.”

Joel mutters, “I already had four months alone with Dad.”

Susannah’s arm drops around his broad shoulders and for a
moment, football tackle though he is, Joel is simply her boy, resting his head on her shoulder.

“You know it’s not good to break up your last year so late.”

“What’s the matter with a Calgary high school?”

“Sweetheart, not the last three months.”

“It’s just cramming for provincial finals, I can do them anywhere, easy.”

Trish asks, “Why are you moving to Calgary now? You said the job starts in September.”

Adam is staring out the floor-to-ceiling glass of the dining-room window. The North Saskatchewan valley covered in snow falls away deep and wide to the frozen river, and every tree, bush, park-path, bench and shelter is primed with hoar frost. The distant streets and bridges far below with the small cars edging along them and the glass and concrete highrises on the far bank, bristle, blaze thick silver and white in the morning sun against a cobalt sky. Every crystal of snow and ice is unique, every day the world he sees from his house—when he has time to glance at it—is different, changed superbly by changing cold.

And Susannah’s calm voice. She has thought through every detail, it all sounds so practical, sensible, obvious, most reasonable, rational and so painlessly practical … he ran out the words until she told him to stop it, he knew exactly what she was doing so just stop talking and face it, for once.

“The dean of arts called me,” she now explains to Trish, “he wants me to teach both spring and summer terms, spring term starts in May and I have to find a house.”

“I thought you were going to commute.”

“Three hundred kilometres one way? I’d still need at least an apartment there.…”

“It’s a lot simpler,” Adam says, to lay the facts on the table, though he keeps his voice absolutely reasonable. “It’s a permanent job and if she can find a house she likes right away, and we buy it, it’s an investment. Why pay unnecessary rent?”

“I pay rent,” Trish says. “Four hundred a month.”

“You want a house?”

“No, I don’t want a house.”

“If you want, I can buy a house near the university, and you can live in it and pay me the rent, it’d be simple as—”

“I don’t want to be a simple investment,” Trish says flatly. “I just want to graduate this spring and get out of here.”

“What happened to the tightwad?” Joel asks Adam. “You wouldn’t even get me a second-hand Datsun when I got my driver’s licence and now you’re buying everybody houses?”

“Listen,” Adam says, holding tight to the voice of calm reason. “Our family is changing. You’re both grown up and graduating this spring, your mother has a tenure-track position at the University of Calgary, the kind of job she’s so qualified for, after two books and fifteen years of sessionals here she should be the senior professor in that department—so, we’re changing, if you’re alive you change, and I want to explain something, that we can make good, reasonable decisions about what each of us does, and we don’t have to concern ourselves about money. There’s enough, I know, for all of us.”

Trish says, “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Adam stops. He hears she is not asking about money, but he continues, “My father told me, if you ever have any money, buy land, land is good, it never goes away. But we both,” he gestures to Susannah, who is now in turn studying the glistening hoar frost outside, “both had lots of university bills to
pay, we could only start with a small house for which Grandpa Lyons lent us the down payment, but when you were born, Trish, an old patient in the hospital told me, ‘If you can scare up a hundred dollars, put it into Xerox shares for your baby girl.’ So I did that, and when you were born, Joel—I could scare up a little better then—I bought five hundred dollars’ worth of IBM stock. By 1977 we had this house, and more. Plenty more, now.”

“You’ve got land too?” Joel asks, astonished.

“No, not land, and that’s lucky because the bottom fell out of Alberta land in 1981, but shares, especially technology … okay, there’s enough now for both your educations, including living costs, and a few long trips too, education as far as you want to go.”

“I want to finish high school,” Joel says. “In Calgary if Mom’s gonna work there all the time.”

Susannah does not look at Adam, but they agreed, it was part of their understanding.

“That’s okay with me,” Adam says. “And when you graduate, you pick out a new car.”

“What’s the max?”

“Depends on your marks. I’d say, first-class marks, first-class car.”

“All right! Okay, Mom?”

“I want you with me, but it will take more than a month to get a house.”

“But you have to be in Calgary to find it. And I can get a summer job in Banff. With a car I can commute there.”

“Washing dishes,” Trish says quietly.

“So what? I’ll be in the mountains every day.”

Adam says, “You don’t have to work. You can help your
mother find a really good house, where you can see the mountains, every day.”

Joel is laughing. “What are you, a millionaire?”

Susannah says, “Your father and I have agreed, whatever we do, we all share and share alike, equally. But the money has to be used sensibly, and we don’t have to arrange everything this morning.”

Trish is staring at the cutlery; she says, still more quietly, “I’m beginning to wonder. What all are we arranging, so out-of-the-blue this morning?”