Girl in Hyacinth Blue (12 page)

She walked the Rokin all the way from the Dam to the Singel, keeping the painting in its sack and just looking in all the shops before she declared her business. Art dealers were a strange lot, she de cided. Though the signs on the shops identified "Reynier de Cooge, TRADER IN PICTURES," or "Gerrit Schade, EXPERIENCED CONNOISSEUR OF ART," in truth the shops sold frames, clocks, faience, pump organs, even tulip bulbs along with paintings. She showed the painting first to Gerrit Schade, whose walls were covered with scenes of shipwrecks in stormy seas and tavern revels. She suspected he couldn't read. When she held forth the document, he dismissed it with a wave of his hand and offered her thirty guilders.

"It's a Vermeer," she said.

"I don't particularly care for it," he said. "No action. So no drama."

She covered the painting and left.

She would have to be extremely cautious. At the next three shops, she learned to uncover the paint ing slowly while she watched the dealer's face. At the shop of Hans van Uylenburgh, she noticed at that moment a tiny, sudden intake of breath. He offered her fifty, and his wife raised it to fifty-five when Saskia shook her head. "MATEUS DE NEFF THE ELDER, only fine paintings and drawings," a sign read. Good. Carefully she held the painting high as she climbed the steep steps. When she un covered the painting, de Neff made no effort to hide his excitement. "Stunning. Magnificent."

"It's a Vermeer."

"Yes. Yes, it is. A rare find indeed." He called to his associate and his wife to have a look.

She unfolded the paper and he read it carefully, but he spent more time absorbing the painting. "Look at the window glass. Smooth as liquid light. Not a brush stroke visible. Now look at the basket. Tiny grooves of brush strokes to show the texture of the reed. That's Vermeer."

She tried to see what he saw but her eyes flooded, and in this last hungry look at the paint ing, the girl in a blue smock became a blur. She knew she would sell it to him even before he named a price. She wanted it to go to someone who loved it. "I call it Morningshine," she softly said. It was important that her name for it go with the painting.

When de Neff was drawing up the document of sale, she looked at everything in his shop. Stijn had said she might buy something inexpensive in ex change. There were paintings of rich people playing lutes and virginals, others of ruined castles in the countryside, kitchen maids scouring pots, church interiors, Noah receiving direction from God, veg etable stalls in marketplaces, and windmills along side riverbanks. She couldn't choose. Some of them were pleasant. Some were interesting. But none of them meant anything to her.

He counted out seventy-five guilders in five florin coins, put them in a muslin drawstring bag, and laid it gently in her hand, supporting the weight with his other hand under hers. Looking softly in her eyes, he closed her fingers over the bag and patted them.

It wasn't eighty, but it was still a victory. They would live. Stijn would have his hogs. Jantje would grow up and help Stijn in the fields, and Stijn would be proud of the work Jantje could do, but they, Saskia and Stijn, would never again be as they were.

She meandered across humped bridges, trailing her fingers lightly over iron railings, bought five tulip bulbs, one for each member of the family, and, while the color of the girl's smock was still vivid in her mind, enough skeins of fine blue Lei den wool to knit a soft woolly for each of her three children.

From the Personal Papers of Adriaan Kuypers

On the day Aletta Pieters was hanged, I came to recognize the tenacity of superstition, even in an enlightened age. And on the day after Aletta Pieters was hanged, in the St. Nicholas flood of 1717, I gave away the only things that mattered to me.

The first time I saw her, she was standing in the pillory of the narrow square in Delfzijl, flinging out curses in a raw voice and spitting at the village boys who were taunting her. None of the matrons glar ing at her chastised the boys for their insults. Be tween two ivory fists, the girl's long hair blew wildly, fine as spun silk the color of nothing, of wind, so light it was, making her seem a creature of exotic plumage caught in a snare. Her eyes, un shielded by any visible eyebrows, had a reckless look. A sly, superior spark leapt from them and fell on me, a stranger shouldering a knapsack and a strapful of books. Her hands relaxed and she teased me with a wanton smile that puckered a small xshaped scar on her cheek and pushed out her lips across the space between us. I suppose I flushed, for the mark had been laid with precision across the pure beauty of her cheek. The rest of her, hidden by the pillory planks, I could only imagine.

"What did you do against the good people of Delfzijl that you deserve the stocks?" I asked.

"Wouldn't you like to know, now."

The boys hooted a challenge.

"There's more to life than what's in books, Stu dent," she cried. "Come a mite closer and I'll tell ye."

Still with the scholar's close-cropped haircut, I had just fled, disenchanted, from university in Groningen.

"You'd best avert your eyes, lad, if you want it to go well with ye in this town," commanded a weighty matron. "Pack of baggage, she is."

Such virulence did not rest well in this quiet northern village on the Eems Estuary where I had, that day, come to live with my aunt, but the peculi arity of the girl's scar and her wild, colorless hair in brilliant disorder beguiled me. I stepped up to her. "No spitting," I warned.

"Closer now, don't be afraid. I'll whisper it."

When I bent to put my ear to her face, her hair blew against my cheek like the tingling of fine fresh mist, and she stretched through the pillory hole to ward me and licked my ear. "Let that be an omen to ye," she cried.

The boys hooted again, and although I mut tered, "Shameless wench," I conceded to myself that my callowness deserved the trick.

The next day, I found her crying on the floor of my aunt's countryhouse in a hump of gray skirt, all the defiance drained out of her. She looked up at a small painting of a young girl about her own age sitting at a window. The flesh of Aletta Pieters's delicate throat had been scraped raw. I crouched beside her. "Is this the same fiery maid as was in the pillory yesterday?" I asked.

She ran sobbing out of the room.

"What's she doing here?" I asked my aunt.

"A year ago the minister found her on the dike road yelling curses, brought her to us filthy and raving, and said, 'The Lord setteth the solitary in families.' He insulted us into taking her. 'Do some thing decent for God's poor creatures for a change, for the sake of your souls,' he said. So we have to keep her as our wash girl until she's eighteen."

I did not love Aunt Rika, on account of her pre tension, but I felt the delicacy of her position, wed as she was, out of love I regret to say, to a slaver, that is, an investor in ships doing Westindische trade, the Middle Passage of which everyone knew but no one acknowledged was in bodies and souls, but passion and prudence are rare sleepmates. Even so, Rika keenly wanted respectability. If she couldn't get it in the sight of God, she'd have to settle for its sham substitute in the sight of man, so while Uncle Hubert attended investors' meetings in Amsterdam, Rika spent well, and gave to the or gan society and the orphanage in Groningen. She had filled her townhouse in Groningen with carved furniture and Oriental urns and paintings, and now she was starting on her countryhouse— going to auctions in Amsterdam and hiring an Amsterdammer to paint her portrait with Uncle Hubert.

When Aletta remarked that the face of Rika in the painting was beginning to look like the ghost of the witch of Ameland Island, Rika got offended and made her sleep in the kitchen and scour the bottoms of all her cooking pans until she could see the "x" on her own face in them. In retaliation, Aletta convinced them by shaking their bed cur tains at night that their house was haunted by the souls of dead Africans. One night before I arrived she walked in the fog outside their window with a sheet over her head moaning strange words and clanking pots like a ghost dragging his chains. Un cle Hubert became so terrified he fell out of bed and cracked his skull on the bed steps.

But that wasn't why she was hanged. For scar ing him, she only got three days in jail and that one afternoon in the pillory. Before that, she got a beat ing, two weeks in jail and her cheek slit when a farmer's sluice broke and flooded his field after she murmured something incoherent while passing him in the market square. "I was only playing witches," she'd confessed to Rika. "I meant him no harm." She was pardoned because she was so young, fifteen then, though some townswomen, Aunt Rika said, wished for their sons' sakes that the extremity of the law had been brought down on her then and there.

In truth, she was hanged for smothering our baby girl.

I had come to the village of Delfzijl to study windmill design with the master millwright of the northland. I had worn myself out squeezing some personal meaning out of Descartes, Spinoza and Erasmus and wanted instead to experience in action Descartes's principle that science could master Na ture for the benefit of mankind. I wanted the mak ing of practical things—devices to tell time, to pump faster, to see farther—not the making of ar guments and treatises. And, I wanted intercourse with flesh and blood, not ink and words.

So the next time I saw Aletta crying in front of the painting, I sat beside her and studied it, trying to understand how something so beautiful could grieve her so. The tenderness of expression on the girl's face showed it was painted with intimacy and love—qualities missing, I supposed, in Aletta Pieters's life. In the painting, the girl's mouth was slightly open, glistening at the corner, as if she'd just had a thought that intrigued her, an effect that made her astoundingly real. To me, she was the em bodiment of Descartes's principle, "I think, there fore I am." She was everything Aletta wasn't— peaceful, refined, and contemplative.

When Aletta finally calmed, I asked her what had made her cry.

"Papa said she had eyes like that, like pale blue moons, and hair like hers, that golden brown color, only in braids. She died when I was born."

"Why don't you braid yours? It might make you feel like her."

"I've tried a hundred times. It just slips out. Nothing holds. It's a curse, I think." The failure made her eyes flood again.

"You have beautiful hair," I said. "Just as it is."

"People think it's false. False hair means bandits will attack soon, and so people hate me."

I turned to hide my smile. "You don't know that for a fact."

She shrugged. The rawness on the curve of her throat had not healed yet. It would be a pity if it scarred, but few there are who go through life un marked.

"Where is your father?"

"He went to sea on a slaver and never came home."

"Who raised you?"

"Grandfather. My grandmother died young. Same as all the mothers before her. A mean neighbor put a curse on my Great-great-grandmother Elsa that no girl in her family would ever live long. She said Elsa put pishogue on her butter churn and so they tied Elsa's thumbs to her toes and dragged her through the canal and she drowned, so she was in nocent. A stork even flew over the canal to prove it."

"There's no such thing as witches or curses, Aletta. You have no proof."

"Oh, there's witches, all right. Grandfather heard them whispering about my mother the night before I was born."

She looked up to the painting imploringly. "You think somewhere girls actually live like that—just sitting so peaceful like?"

Neither a yes nor a no would make her less for lorn. There were no words I could give her to di minish the distance between her and the young woman in the painting.

On Sunday afternoons when I was free from the millwright's instruction, I went walking. I loved the sweep of the flat, domesticated northland that presented few obstacles to wind. Here, most of the time, wind helped man to manage the land scientif ically—Descartes in action. I was always bothered, though, that my countrymen depended so com pletely on its constancy. What would happen if they needed to drain on windless days? There were enormities still to learn in this world.

One Sunday I walked across the peat bog be tween the town and the coast near where the dig gers lived in mean little rows of thatched cottages built of peat blocks. Year after year they dug their slabs of black peat for fuel, and sold their own land, brick by brick, right out from under themselves. Some diggers replaced the overlying clay, mixed it with sand hauled from a beach and refuse from a town to make a soil suitable to grow buckwheat. But it was hard work and took a long time, so oth ers just allowed the pits they had dug to fill with water, leaving straight raised pathways between them. It seemed to me that this practice was only making the land more habitable for frogs, not men. Water was seeping and sucking everywhere. Soon the peat colony would be indistinguishable from the tidal marshes along the great estuary.

I stopped to watch coots poking their beaks into the mud, a teal preening, marsh hens building their nests in the marram grass, and became con scious of a bird call different from the throaty grunt of the coots. It was more like the honk of a wild goose. Across a large pond Aletta had crouched be hind some osiers, her skirts hiked up to avoid the mud, baring her legs to her thighs. She wore no knit black stockings like other women, so her milky skin against the mud gave me a pleasurable shock. The sky was too gray to give back an inverted fig ure in the pond water, which I thought a shame. With her hands cupped at her mouth, she made the bird call again, urgent and wild and yearning. My soul stirred with the stirrings of her hair. I meant to walk on and enjoy my solitude, but an inner move ment seized me and I circled the pond and came up behind her.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Get down," she whispered, and yanked my arm. "I saw a stork here the other day, and I want to see if he'll come again. They bring good luck, you know. If you can get one to eat out of your hand, you'll never go hungry."