The Anatomy Lesson (21 page)

Lievens spoke next. “It’s a good thing, then, that we took you in. For you have made us very wise to the ways of the world. And when you walk out that door again once you’ve warmed your feet and supped, you will put yourself into peril once again to steal something somewhere else?”

“Yes, my lord, I suspect I will,” he said, finishing off the turkey
leg and drinking the rest of the wine. “Though maybe not tonight. My father foretold that eternal damnation awaits me, and I have accepted my soul’s curse.”

“You accept that you cannot be any better than you are?”

“It makes no difference whether I accept it or not,” he went on. “There was never any other path.”

We did not argue with him. Our job was not to judge or to dispute morality with every passing stranger. We were, of course, not beyond reproach ourselves. We were busy trying to be painters, and we thought that art had little to do with morality. I was, at least, satisfied that he would not rob us while he visited, at least while both of us were in the room, and so I asked him if he would sit for me, for a
tronie
. I wanted to capture the peculiar mix of callowness and ruggedness in his face that is so characteristic of vagabonds.

“You want to paint me?” he asked. “It’ll scare away the kids.”

“It is not for children,” I answered, with a laugh.

He did sit for me, and he was not a bad subject. He sat still and only moved his eyes to scan the room. I still did not recognize him, though, and I should not have if we hadn’t gotten to talking about his past.

“You say your mother died at birth. Did you go to the orphanage?”

“No, my father did me that kindness. He kept me at home.”

“And who reared you?”

“My father, himself. Reared me as cattle. Branded me here on my neck, as if I was a scabbard. He was a sheath maker and this was his brand.”

He pulled down his collar to show me the brand—that beechnut I once took for a prickly clover. It was a scar you don’t forget.

“He was a sutler in Maurits’s army?” I said. “You lived here, not too far from the Weddesteeg?”

It seemed he knew me almost as soon as I knew him.

“Knucklebones,” he said.

“Knucklebones,” I said.

I wish I could say we stood to embrace, and laughed over old times. But we did not. Instead, the realization that we had known each other as youths made us both uncomfortable. He started to shift in his chair and asked if I was done. I put a few more quick jots onto the paper, and tore it from my book. I handed it to him. “No snake or fox.”

He took some time to look at it. “I’m not as ugly as I think.”

He tried to hand it back to me, but I told him to keep it.

“Trade it for your next supper. I’ve signed it there.”

He laughed. “I guess they know you around here.”

Adriaen left that cold night, and I didn’t think on him after that, except to muse about how one man’s fate is so different from another’s. If he still had any plan to rob us, I knew he wouldn’t, since I knew who he was.

Standing in that clearing in the snow, I imagined Adriaen’s youthful face—the one I’d met years earlier—transposed upon that older, tired face of the thief in winter, and now on the cold, bluish-gray face of the dead man in the Waag. What a strange thing to have known a man in these three ways.

I stood for a long while, letting the snow continue to fall on me, letting it blanket my cloak and cover the red fabric in its sinless tint. There was nothing else to see on the horizon. Just various shades of white.

I pounded on the door of that tower. The one that led up to the skinner’s hall. I pounded and pounded and pounded. No one heard my calls. I ran round that weigh house, crying, screaming for anyone who’d hear. There were doors to guilds on every side—surgeons, painters, blacksmiths, masons—but no one opened any of them.

It were busy in that weigh house, full of men putting everything to the scales. Weighing grains and meats and butter and bags of worldly goods. Who knows what they weighed. No one had time to hear my cause. The dissection, they said, would start at sundown.

I pounded on the tower door and I cried out for anyone who’d hear me. The boy stood near, also crying. The boatman finally came and shushed us. He said he would take us somewhere warm, wait with us until they opened the hall. But I would not be moved. I sat myself down on the steps of that tower door.

This, here, is Adriaen’s son. He is all I have in the world now,
all that means anything. If I were to go back to Leiden, to go back to that mill house, the stones would always come, the boys would always jeer. The only way to keep my Carel safe, to give him any life at all, will be to do as Father van Thijn said. To bury Adriaen in our church. That were a chance he gave me.

Little by little they came. The people from Dam Square. They’d seen Adriaen go hanging and now they wanted to see him skinned.
Aris the Kid
, they called him, like he were their friend. That Kid, they said, who went to death so bold. The one who flexed his chest and bared his stump for all Dam Square to see. Tore off his shirt and stood naked in the cold.

The boatman stood by me and tried to shield me from their force. The boy said I were there to claim his body for holy burial. That’s how word went through that market of who I were and why we’d come. I thought they’d try to stone me there, too, but that were not how it went.

The first thing that came to us were a link of sausage and then, right after, a hunk of bread. “For the lass,” said the old baker who placed them in the boatman’s hands. “She’ll be hungry.” Someone else saw what were brought and added to it butter. The boatman used his knife to cut the sausage and spread the butter. And then one came with cups of hot cider and gave them to the boy. “For Kindt’s lass,” he said. “No use freezing to death out here.” More came. More food and more kindness. They called me “Kindt’s lass,” “Kindt’s wench.” They brought what they had, and shared it with me, the boatman, and the boy.

When we were done eating, a woman came up and asked to touch my belly. “There’s luck in it,” she said. “A babe with a strong mother like that.” Others saw her and came, too. They called him
“Kindt’s babe” and “Kindt’s kin.” One old lady bent down for a kiss. They came like that all day. They came with a shawl for me and gloves for the boy. They brought over a chair so I did not have to sit anymore on the steps by the tower door. They stood with us and talked with us and asked how I met “Aris.” It were nothing like what I’d seen done in Leiden. And these were folks who had wanted his neck.

The boatman said, “She’ll need your help to break into that tower. She’ll need a mob to help her get his body back.” He lit the idea like an edge of straw. They pushed forward, to the front of the line, where we sat at the foot of the tower and they told me they’d help. With the force of that whole crowd behind us, they promised, we’d manage to break the gate.

Some people thought I could save Adriaen. I could touch his soul through his wounds and turn them wounds into byways of grace. I could let his scars trace the course of his story. He did not tell me where he’d been and what he’d done, or why they’d flogged and banned him. I were not a confessor, and no redeemer. I started when we were young, the first time his father beat him, just before that wicked old man went off on his crusade.

“Mother says your father has joined Maurits’s army.” I stood at the door. It were almost evening. “She said I should check in and see if you’d supped.”

“He’s not a soldier. Just a sutler,” he told me. I saw the dried blood around his mouth and eyes, his hand still cupping his chest. The blood on his mouth crusted in the small hairs of his first mustache. He were still young. No razor had ever touched his face.

“You’re hurt,” I said. He could barely see out of one eye. “You need care.”

I were no older than he were. I made a poultice and fixed some soup. He could barely move his lips. His jaw were broken. We did not talk, but I fed him with a spoon. I stayed with him until the lantern went low. I wiped my hands on my apron and said, “Okay, then. Mother will be waiting.”

He said nothing. “I will check on you tomorrow,” I said before I left.

He tried to get used to the loneliness of his house with his father out of it. But he never managed that. In the evenings, he preferred the tavern. He loved the giddy sounds, tankard tapping tankard, the hurdy-gurdy men or the players of therobos and other lutes, the gamblers and vermin catchers. There were laughter in the taverns, and talk of journeys and adventures. He craved what he could not imagine and he drank down them ideas with the ale. I had mended him so he could get stronger and when he were strong he wanted the world. Soon, he were well enough to leave, and he packed fast and went.

It were nearly ten years before he came home after that. When he came back to me, all them years later, he were a rough man, a hard man, and a thief. I could see how he’d made his way. It were through filching and scrabbling. I could read his crimes on his skin and his hardships in his face. He had been hurt. I saw that, too. It were in his eyes, in his ways. He flinched if I reached out to touch him; he had a kind of twitch in his eyes. He were not that small and spindly boy who needed my ministering hands.

I tried to read Adriaen’s story from his skin. Each of them flogging scars on his back and brandings burned into his neck and arms were a part of his story, part of the life he went and lived apart
from me for all them years after he left Leiden. When I were sponging water over his wounds or sometimes when he were sleeping, I’d touch them gently. Trace my fingers through the shapes.

He had the count’s sword and stars for Haarlem and the lion from Aalsmeer, them three Sint Andrew’s crosses from Amsterdam, and he had the shield of Utrecht, and the fresher ones were two crossed keys for Leiden. Even when he were awake sometimes he let me touch them, even though the skin were raw there and numb in places. He squirmed sometimes, but he let me.

“Every town did claim you,” I said. “Every one put its mark upon your flesh.”

“It was the other way around, Flora,” he told me, as you might explain to a child. “They branded me to keep me out.”

“But they couldn’t do it, could they? Still, here you are.”

He didn’t always want my touch. Sometimes, he’d turn over and push me away. Sometimes he’d glare at me.

Maybe once you have that much of the world marked onto you, you take yourself as the sum of your markings. I’ve seen sailors come back from the seas with the ink in their skin they call
prikschilderen
. They say they do that to stain themselves, to mark something of their travels.

I traced my finger through his wounds where they told me a story. I crossed the coat of arms for the city of Amsterdam. I touched the groove where it marked out Utrecht’s shield. I felt the long lines of the whips along his back, the thin scars of the knife blades. It were not for him I did this. It were for me. To know something of his travels.

The white scars were thicker and longer. From the whippings. Them were the ones he said were numb. The scars from the brands were raised up. I moved my finger across the white ones and he
would squirm and wiggle. He said it felt like someone else’s skin on his flesh. Like they’d given him different skin. I tried to be more gentle. But I did not pull my hand away. I let my fingers touch.

I dressed his wounds and kissed his forehead and brought food to his lips—that were what I could do. I could not save him and he would not save himself. There were something in Adriaen that liked a beating. After I’d nursed him them months in my house, I’d asked him why he kept going back to that tavern where he’d felt a thousand fists.

“I deserved it,” he said. “It made me know I was alive.” Then he cried like a babe. I let him curl into me, and I held him. He were gentle sometimes.

When he were well, up and about, and able to do his carousing, he were no different than he’d been before. A man’s nature is his nature and a fish cannot turn to a sheep without witching. If I had that power, I would have done it: I would have changed him, saved him. I’ve never been any good at saving, only mending.