by Rudy Wiebe
“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.
“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 a
re 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:
Behold, I tell you a Mystery.
We shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed
in a Moment, in the twinkling of an Eye,
at the last Trumpet.
The Trumpet shall sound,
and the Dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.
Changed. No more end. Grossma Triena understood that. On earth she was a left-handed woman.
NINE
TABLE SETTING
Edmonton
1987
THEY 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.