Sweeter Than All the World (10 page)

“Love God above all. He Who is, and shall ever be.” And then she did that.

The smith pushed the curled iron onto her tongue until the flanges spread her lips as wide and hard as possible. He pulled it off, hammered it a little tighter, then forced it on again. He was silent, efficient, well accustomed to intimate work on a shuddering woman’s face. He screwed the vise down to the point of steady blood, and finally, to make certain it would never slip, with tongs he took from out of his fire a white-hot iron. He laid that iron on the tip of my mother’s tongue.

H
ISTORIANS CENTURIES LATER WILL WRITE
that I, Wybe Adams, was born in Harlingen, Friesland, in 1585, but my mother told me it happened on July 12, 1584. A day easy to remember, she said, because she gave birth to me when she heard the runner cry out in the Harlingen fish market that our Protestant Prince Willem of Orange and Nassau had been assassinated two days before. Killed by the bullets of a Catholic fanatic; his death was most certainly paid for by our relentless enemy Philip II of Spain.

It happened in Delft, which is barely an hour’s walk through fields and along dikes from The Hague, where the Spanish Inquisition tried and burned my great-grandmother Weynken in 1527, for confessing only to her living faith in Jesus and the reality of flour and yeast in the bread of the mass.

For thirteen years Prince Willem had led the Dutch in negotiation and in relentless war until Spain and the Roman
Church gave in and agreed that he would become the independent Governor of our United Provinces of Holland. How often, both by sword and by negotiation, had he not protected Mennonites from persecution. Now, at the crying of the news of his death—and especially at his last words: “Oh, love of God, have pity on my soul and on this poor country”—what a wail ascended to heaven. My mother screamed and fainted in her market stall, and when she regained consciousness she was in labour.

“So why didn’t you name me Willem?” I asked her.

“Oh no, you had to be Wybe,” she said. “Wybe was your great-grandfather, as Trijntjen Wybes became your grandmother’s name after he died. You were the first boy in two generations. Wybe Pieters was lost at sea in 1526 or the Inquisitor in The Hague would have burned him together with Weynken.”

“Either way, he was dead.”

“No no,” she said at my tone, “it’s all different. The sea is forever what God made it, but people … we people can decide for good, or too often for evil. War, hatred, revenge, fear … our good Prince Willem wrote to King Philip when he was fighting both the Spanish armies and the Jesuits: ‘God did not create people to be slaves to their prince or bishop, to obey their commands whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of his subjects, to love and support them like a father his children, a shepherd his flock as Jesus taught.’ ”

“Nice Christian words,” I told her, “and so now the Calvinists, not the Papists, can laugh at us.”

“A little laughing is no sword in the belly. If it makes them happy…”

“Happy! They yell ‘Mennonite wedding’ at me when they pour their morning shit bucket into the canal!”

“Wybe, Wybe,” she sighed. “Names don’t burn us alive.”

“I can turn my teacher into knots with his own numbers and I can’t go to Leyden because I’m a Mennist!”

Without raising her head from her endless knitting, she stared up at me through heavy eyebrows. She read the Bible in German and Dutch and Frisian, and could multiply five numbers in her head faster than I could write them down. Her hands continued the rhythms of tugging, knitting the line of wool into a sweater for me thick enough for any of God’s storms on His endless ocean. She told me, again:

“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.”