The Anatomy Lesson (15 page)

I bolted awake to find my head swarming with black ants. The creatures were everywhere about my face, in my hair, within my ears, inside my nostrils, and climbing across my tongue. I soon saw the cause of this pestilence. In the darkness of the previous night I had made as my pillow a log that was rotted and emptied by vermin. And behind this log there was the body of a gray hair who seemed to have been taken by the black death. In the weariness and torment of the previous night, I’d lain, unawares, with a corpse. The insects had taken me for her companion and were already trying to make a meal of my flesh.

Once I’d shaken off the ants and the chills, I looked at this gray hair for a while. She was a curious cousin, curled into herself like a ball, her hands touching her face. Beside her was a metal pail, filled with sand. I didn’t know where she had hailed from or where she
was bound, for I could think of no beach near this forest, and concluded that she was a crone whose bucket of water had turned to sand.

All of this I took for a dark omen for my journey, but I didn’t turn back to Leiden, for my greater fear was of my father’s wrath. I searched the old woman’s body, found two stivers in the pocket of her smock, and went fast upon my way.

They tell me I fainted when the deed were done. When I awoke, I were lying in the wet mud, the boatman kneeling over me, holding my hand. The boy were saying, “Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am,” over and over, like a babe cries.

I moved my hand to touch my belly. All could go like that, all at once, everything. I didn’t feel him there at first and I could not move, the fear were so tight in me. But then I felt movement—a hard kick up under my ribs. Once, then twice, and a third time and I cried, laughing, too. My boy. He were still there. We were still here.

Adriaen were gone. The scaffold, the guards, everything. He had seen us, and he knew, but now they’d taken him away again. The noose had been cut from the rope, the hangman were gone. The sky were as dark as midnight. It seemed like black night, but it were still day.

There were people standing over me, peering down to see my face. “She’s carrying the Kid’s child,” I heard one of them say.

“She shouldn’t be here, not in this cold,” said another.

“Get her somewhere warm,” said another.

“Let her rot out here,” said someone else.

I felt Father van Thijn’s purse. I drew a few coins into my fingers and held them out. I said, “I have money. Take me home. Please take me home. We have to go home.”

“But, ma’am,” the boy said, “ma’am, Father van Thijn said we should claim the body. For his Christian burial. If he didn’t live. That’s what Father van Thijn said.”

His small hands found my fingers again. He made me think on Carel and how the two of us would go on.

The boatman helped me raise myself onto my elbows. He said, “They carted his body away.”

I pushed up from my elbows in the mud. The people in the square got me standing. They helped me to walk a few steps, and then a few more until I were not too dizzy, until I could walk alone.

“The boy is right,” the boatman said, once he thought I were ready. “If you want to claim his body, we need to get to the skinners.”

Yes, I remembered. His body. That is all I would be able to save.

I did not have the words to save Adriaen. They did not want to hear my words and I had no words to tell. I did not know they would take him from me like that, like that so fast out in that square. I thought there had to be some will of God in it for it to be done. But what God wills this? To hang a thief? If they knew he were just a thief, why did they hang him?

I had no words for the magistrate but I thought I could form
words for that doctor who wanted to cut open his chest: He would find no hard heart in my Adriaen. No cold liver, no black blood. Adriaen had a sweet soul. Ever since he were a boy. I knew him then and I knew him as he grew. His body came to be a man’s body but I never saw his soul change. He were a soft soul and a hurt soul, a soul in want of kindness. That’s why they called him “the Kid.” Them who knew him. Though I never liked that name. He just went simple from one thing to the next.

I want to tell you about how it started between us, because we were in love, and it were true. It started when his father beat him and left him to join Maurits. We heard it from the house next door, my mother and me. We held our hands to our lips to stop from crying out and crouched there by the stove. We knew the wrath of men when all the kindness has left them. We waited and when the father left, my mother said I were to go.

I brought him food and mended his wounds and stayed until it got late. The next week, he came to our house with wildflowers he’d gathered from our yard. I saw him out there picking them, and then he tied them up with twine. My mother said, “The boy’s come to see you. Fix your hair.” So I twirled my curls round my finger and went to the door. Adriaen were young then, his hair blond and fine. He asked me if I wanted to take a rowboat out on the river and I said I would if he were well enough to row.

I remember that day and every drop of light in it still, because it were then I fell in love. We walked down to the docks and he untied a rowboat and pushed it out into the water. His face still had
some cuts and his eye had a bruise above it, but he looked strong and young, and his arms were lean and freckled. I were quiet most of the day and he did all the rowing. He took me out into the river and we glided along. The sun were shining and the air were crisp and there were birds to see just everywhere. He weren’t turning around to see where he were headed. He knew where he would go. He were taking me somewhere and I were happy to go there. Wherever it were.

We landed on a small island just covered in trees. I never saw a place like that, with no houses anywhere, no paths and no walls or fences. It were all overgrown, untame, and we had to hold on to tree trunks just to scramble up through the weeds. He went ahead, but every time I looked up, he were holding out a hand to me. We went into it, this wild forest, and soon we were on top of a hill.

“There,” he said, pointing upward.

There were nothing there except the sun, but it were the sun, and we could see it clear. The light rained down through the thickness of the trees and the light were cut into pieces, like small drops, falling onto us and into our eyes.

I sat with him, not touching, not kissing, nor any of the things young lovers do. He were shy, but he sat near me and he watched me and he said, “I wanted to show you this.”

Something changed in me then. I grew up, I grew old. I saw him, this bruised boy, hurt but strong, proud but weak, tamed and yet wild, showing me the sunlight. I don’t know how long we sat there but soon we left, and it were in the skiff on the way back from that trip that I looked at him and knew I loved him and knew we’d never be apart.

It were days before he kissed me, but eventually he did. It were
years before we became lovers, but eventually we were. There were years and years in between, but Adriaen were always that boy to me. The one who rowed that skiff across the river and took me to that quiet, gentle place. Where he pointed up through the mess of leaves in the wild thicket and said, There. There’s sun.

It was no simple deed to get Aris all the way to the Waag in the corpse cart with that crowd upon me. I suffered a beating of cabbages and apples; my hair was yanked, my beard pulled, my sight nearly blinded by rotten eggs.

The police escort proved well worth the extra ten stivers the magistrate charged me for the “courtesy” of his company. There were hundreds of men and women and even tiny lads who wanted to put a hand on that dead Kindt. I haven’t seen anything like it since they put Black Bartle to the rope—and he’d killed six men with an ax.

This is the worst part of the job of the
famulus anatomicus
. The rest—the eye plucking and bathing and burying organs in the churchyard—is mere dirty work compared to getting that dead man out of the square once he’s been hanged. The women howl, the men grab your garments, and the children hit your shins with wooden spoons.

I swear, they would lift the corpse right out of the cart and carry him over their heads through the town, singing his name, if they could. I know not why a crowd is so capricious like that. One minute they’re calling him a rogue and crying for his neck; and once he’s fallen all is forgiveness, and they rush to greet him as if he were the miracle of Amsterdam itself.

I felt sorry for that Kindt, though, because he didn’t need to go that way—on the rope and to the anatomy, too. He was a cloak thief and a vagabond, but it’s rare to get the rope for robbery.

Oh, yes, I am the friend of all scoundrels, a lover of rapscallions. I have no lust for vengeance on any living soul, sinner or saint. There isn’t a man in Amsterdam who can’t be accused of burgling and beggary on some scale, small or large. Wrongdoing is what makes us human, you see, for not a single one of us is sinless. Show me a man over twenty who hasn’t at least a hundred minor crimes to his name and it’s sure to be a monk or a minister. Then show me a monk or minister who doesn’t have fifty smaller trespasses, at least. Even that magistrate took a little extra out of my pocket when I had to buy Aris’s body instead of Joep’s. “Another three guilders,” that long-faced officer declared as a cunning smile swept across his lips. As I say: every man in this town is a thief.

Once inside the Waag and cloistered with the body behind the heavy doors of the guild chambers, I felt, at least, secure. I began to consider all that had transpired that day: chasing Rotzak, getting the fake paradise, visiting the painter, seeing Joep set free, begging the magistrate for the new body, being harangued through the streets. The bird, the sailor, the artist, the corpses, the throngs. As soon as there was silence, my emotions pressed for some release. I’m not ashamed to admit I sat for a moment and cried like a babe.

Then I composed myself, for my work had to be done with some
haste. The first thing I needed to do was to remove the dead man’s shoes, a sad pair made of battered leather with holes through the soles and rotted wooden heels. Then, using a blade, I cut off the rest of his tattered rags, which consisted only of a coarse pair of wool hose and knee breeches. He no longer wore a shirt or the jerkin, since he’d stripped himself above the waist for his performance at the hanging. All that covered his upper body were the bandages wrapped too tightly around his stump. It took a little effort to get it free from all the caked-up blood and dirt.