Sweeter Than All the World (9 page)

Adriaen and I stood there. Perhaps he prayed. I told my mind, “Here is the place, here,” but it would think nothing. After a time he walked away, into another street. Ten slow steps and we were on an open triangle of cobblestones. I looked up, and up, bending back, looking: it was the magnificent Cathedral of Our Lady.

Named otherwise by the Calvinists, at that moment. But as soon as the last Anabaptist-Mennonites were gone and Alexander Farnese and his army in their turn destroyed the Calvinists and most of the beautiful city for the continuing glory of the Roman Catholic faith, Our Lady would arise once more inside her enormous stone diadem. Wearing her blue and golden robes, her crown three times taller than her head, her tiny crowned Child held high on her left arm. If, as they affirm, the Virgin and the Child neither sleep nor faint, how many thousands of people have they been forced to watch burn? They say eighteen thousand by the Duke of Alva alone.

I have learned the tender prayer that can be prayed to Our Lady: “Heavenly Mother Mary, in his last hour on the Cross, your divine Son Jesus committed us to your motherly care. We pray to you, reveal your holiness in this your city, Antwerp.” But the prayer helps me little. I have no motherly care to forget.

Janneken says, “But Jan Adam, you do. Adriaen and I have told you the stories.”

Sometimes my mind sinks, it refuses even those. The four
chained and violated women whom Janneken says she “knew” for the five months they endured in their dungeon before she was born, and the short month after.

“Your mother wrote to you,” Janneken insists. ‘“My dear children, kiss one another once for me, for remembrance. Be kind, I pray you, to your afflicted father all the days of your life, and do not grieve him.’ ”

“Adriaen’s son has that letter, both the second and first.”

She answers, “But you saw the words she wrote, you memorized them. She wrote, ‘What I say to the oldest, I say to the youngest. By me, your mother who gave you birth in much pain.’ ”

And I answer her back, “And your mother wrote your sister, at one o’clock in the morning on the day of her death, ‘Here are knitting needles for my daughter. Keep them, and do the best with her, my little lamb which I bore under my heart.’ ”

“Yes,” Janneken says, the needles clicking steadily. “I lay in her lap when she wrote that.”

I know the letters by heart, but in a way they will never be more than a memory of paper, of shrivelling ink. Not touch or feeling. But I do know the feel of the ship that brought Adriaen’s family and me to Danzig in 1584, its sway and riding of long swells, the sails cracking full, and the ship’s lean down before the wind to drive the chisel of its prow
smash!
through the froth into the blue, away. The journey of my life.

Danzig was the wealthy Hansa city-state on the Vistula River, a mile inland from the Baltic Sea, protected by low walls and the salty river delta called the Werder. The Danzigers wanted more productive land for their grain trade, and so they welcomed the Mennonites to dike, drain and farm the Werder more
intensively, but inside the confined city they also needed more of the tall houses the Dutch knew how to build side by side on narrow land. So, when I turned fifteen, Adriaen hired me to a builder’s stoneyard, on the channel where the Motlawa River flows through the southern wall of the city to form the harbour inside.

I was a labourer. Climbing down onto the barges heaped high with shifting stone, I grappled chains around each rock so it could be hoisted onto the docks of the stoneyard. I had never seen a mountain, nor will I, but as I clambered and balanced among those immense rocks I began to comprehend the jagged spread of the massifs from which they had been cut. My wooden shoes hooked on their sharp edges, my arms were dusted raw from reaching around them. It came to me then that, as far as it was possible for me to think, here the textures of infinity rubbed my fingers.

The Dutch Mennonites who fled to Danzig to escape persecution could work in the city, but were not allowed to live or own property inside it because they were not citizens. So they built their villages outside the walls, as close to them as they could, the Frisians in Neugarten west of the Hagel’s Hill, and we Flemish in Schottland just outside the southern Petershagen Gate in the shadow of the Bishop’s Hill. It was here, in church one summer Sunday, that I met Janneken.

Met her
again
, she told me. The first time, she said, was in the death cell of our mothers. I cannot even remember her saying that, though she has reminded me often. I remember only her standing there, the wide folds of her long brown dress skirted with a white apron, her reddish hair gathered up under a white cap covering her ears, her small, pointed mouth moving. I did nothing but lift rocks all day, and suddenly before me was a
manifestation: I felt as if God Himself had taken my head between His two hands, twisted it right and spoken into my face: “Jan Adam Wens, look at this delicate woman. She is your wife.”

Janneken helped me understand and accept what my father had undeniably bequeathed my body: his mason’s hands. I became an apprentice in the Danzig guild of stonecutters. Hand and chisel and rule and line and hammer, I learned not only to see mountains in the stone I handled, but I became content, sometimes almost happy, to shape them. Feel them, in turn, determine the very muscle of my hands and arms and back.

That was the best thing I learned, and perhaps also the most limiting. Because seeing mountains in a stone could not teach me to recognize the smaller, delicately beautiful shapes that the greatest of Mennonite stone masters discovered there. The first master was Willem van den Blocke; he had fled Antwerp to escape the Duke of Alva, and Danzig gave him many building commissions, including the magnificent High Gate through which the annual procession of the King of Poland entered the city. I never worked for old Master Willem, but I cut stone for his son, Abraham van den Blocke. He was, if not as gifted a sculptor as his father, certainly a greater architect; better even than Adam Wiebe of Harlingen would be.

Once, towards the end of Abraham’s life, when under Adam Wiebe’s rebuilding of the city core we were fashioning the Neptune Fountain on the Royal Processional Route, Abraham said to me, “I thank God for you, Jan Adam. Every day. I can draw the design for a fountain, and Wiebe can bring up the water, but only you can cut the stone perfectly.”

He created the figure of Neptune, his trident and small
basin, and had it cast in bronze in Augsburg. I built the wide stone base for the fountain where it still stands after 370 years of war and rebuilding, on the Long Street where it broadens into the central Long Market. I also cut the intricate façade of the Arthuis building opposite the fountain, which has been called the most exquisite Renaissance building that still exists north of Italy. Perhaps it is. When the sunlight reflects across its stones, I always thought any soul must feel its flawless serenity.

Janneken is so tiny, I am so large; across from me at our hearth, she is singing. She threads that old Flemish skipping song into the click of her knitting:

And I sing the proverb of the Bishop Pieter Titelman after her:

“One evening,” continues Janneken, “the high and mighty Bishop of Ronse drove his carriage into an inn.” Her voice is lilting as if she were telling this to our six children again, the stories they and their children after them will carry in their blood
into coming generations. “And there the Bishop met the Bailiff of Kortrijck, who was already sitting inside, eating an enormous supper of lamb and boiled and rare roasted beef, and chicken and seven kinds of cheeses, both sharp and salty, with mussels as a side dish and white, white bread so soft to sop up all the lip-smacking juices.”

I join in her telling, the way we often played the roles together. “ ‘My most merciful Bishop,’ said the Bailiff, bowing low to hide his smile, ‘you are travelling again.’ ”

Janneken answers: ‘“Of course,’ said the Bishop as the fawning innkeeper lifted his fur cloak, so fine and churchly heavy, from his broad shoulders. And then he sat down at the table, for the Bailiff was after all close enough to his rank that he could quite properly sit and even eat with him. ‘Know you not,’ the Bishop told the Bailiff, misusing the words of Jesus, ‘that I must be about my Father’s business?’ ”

I speak as the Bailiff: ‘“Of course, my Lord Bishop! So you are again travelling throughout the land in your sacred concern for souls. And perhaps hunting out and capturing heretics again, is that right?’ ”

She says: “The Bishop answered, ‘You know me well, my son,’ and sighed wearily, folding his large, soft hands as if in prayer over his great, round belly. ‘The Church must be ever vigilant, it can never rest at ease when sin would abound.’ ”

I say: “The Bailiff hid his mouth behind his hand and said in a puzzled tone, ‘My Lord, I, like you, travel much in my line of duty. I arrest evil men, thieves, murderers, corrupt merchants, violent lawbreakers. Now, I must have at least nine, sometimes twelve men with me in order to effect an arrest, but you never travel with more than two servants and your skilful smith to
forge and fit the necessary manacles. If I travelled with so few men, I would not live for a day. How is it possible for you?”’

She says: “The Bishop fondled his great diamond rings one by one, and smiled at such ignorance. ‘I need have no fear,’ he said. ‘Wherever I go, I bear the authority of God Himself, and I arrest only good people who have never yet offered me danger.’ ”

I say: “ ‘But my Lord,’ answered the Bailiff, ever more puzzled, ‘if I arrest all the bad people, and you all the good, who then in our land shall escape captivity?’ ”

Janneken’s needles are at rest; I follow her gaze into the low blue flames of our evening fire. She continues:

“And not long thereafter, God Himself visited the high and mighty Bishop of Ronse in his princely palace at Kortrijck, visited him with a miracle. He became infested with lice. They grew on his body like grass, in such terrifying numbers that not even his numberless servants could bring him enough linen to keep him clean, nor wash his body free of them. The more lice they scraped from him, the more the lice multiplied. Days, weeks, months … and at last he died, in his splendid bishop’s bed, a most horrible death.”

My wife glances at me; is there a slight smile at the tips of her lips? The fire burns too darkly, I cannot tell. I take my turn to complete the story:

“Four women came, albeit in great fear, to lay out the Bishop for burial. And it was to them that the second miracle was revealed. When they drew back the blankets, they discovered his poor shrunken body, but not a single louse.”

Janneken and I tell each other this amazing little story quite often; the way we told it to our children, now grown and living around us. For we consider ourselves the third miracle: we found
each other in Danzig, far from Antwerp and twenty years after our mothers gave their final encouragement to each other as they were chained, each to her stake. Encouragement with their looks only, and groans; they could not sing or call out their faith to each other through the rising fire because their mouths were transfixed by iron tongue screws.

After I was old enough to know the story, Adriaen told me how he recovered from his faint, got on his feet and found there was no one in the Grand Market. Just the charred stubs of the execution posts and ashes, smoking. I must have stayed beside him all that time, he said, because I came with my bleeding head and watched him search in the ash heap.

I asked him, “What were you looking for?”

He raised me, and even after I grew to be taller than he, and later much broader, he remained my Big Brother, full of exact facts and wise decisions. He said, “There was no … reason, I was blind with tears, I couldn’t see, not at that moment. I saw nothing happen, and now there was nothing … the square was empty, no one there, smoke going up from the stump and ashes where I saw her being chained, and suddenly I knew that the dear Lord Jesus had come, He had lifted our mother up in His arms straight to heaven, that was what had happened, she had vanished and so everyone had just left, gone home, and I kicked those stupid ashes, they were nothing! and my foot hit something sharp and hot and I cried out, I was kicking embers away from the black stump over the cobblestones, but then you came closer, and bent over. You picked it up.”

I know I did. I have deep scars. I see them every day because I work closely with my hands. I must have picked up the iron tongue screw with my right hand because my right thumb
and two fingers are scarred, and then I dropped it into the palm of my left hand because it is burned even deeper. Adriaen told me he could smell my left hand burning, but I did not make a sound.

My Master Abraham van den Blocke died on January 28, 1628, only a week after his father Master Willem. Though neither had been permitted to live in Danzig, because they were not citizens and were neither Catholic nor Lutheran, they were given the high honour of full city funerals, and burial inside the massive Cathedral of St. Mary.

My mother, Maeyken Wens, has no gravestone; nor do her sisters Mariken and Lijsken Lievens; nor does my wife’s mother, Janneken van Munstdorp. They were translated by fire from earth to heaven, they parted from us and a pillar of cloud received them out of our sight. But the place of their translation remains: the “hand werpan” fountain in the Grand Market in Antwerp, Belgium, stands on the spot.

Janneken and I have the knitting needles, and also the iron tongue screw. Sometimes I hold it in my hand. My gnarled fore- and middle fingers fit into it as precisely as my mother’s tongue, for which it was especially forged. Janneken tells me this: there is no need for memory.

Cardinal Granvelle had ordered that there was to be no more testifying to the crowds by condemned heretics during their procession to the place of execution; there was in particular to be no more singing, especially of martyr songs. They were too disturbing for the church faithful. Therefore, on the ordered day of execution the skilful smith of the Bishop of Ronse came to the cell in Het Steen Castle with his portable charcoal smithy.
The executioner commanded my mother to put out her tongue. She said: