The Anatomy Lesson (33 page)

He chooses a small round brush and dabs it into the Kassel earth, then draws a bit of lead white and red lake into the mixture. The resulting color is brownish pink for the muscles of the dissected hand. With very light strokes, he fills in the shadows of the hand, the contours between where the fingers would have been. Then he adds more white to the mixture, and dabs in another layer, where the edges of the fingers and knuckles would be. He is building up the layers, building a hand from no hand, giving it detail.

Then he cleans his brush and dabs it into white, mixes in a touch of umber. Light falling on the hand, on the wrist, on the corpse’s side. Light falling on the belly, on the ribs, on the chest, on the lips. He adds white to the face—not the whole face, because half of it falls into shadow, under the bodies of the surgeons who are leaning over Aris’s head to get a glimpse of Tulp’s demonstration of the hand. A touch of white, to make a glint of light on the edge of the forceps. The tips of Tulp’s fingers and the dead man’s left hand.

There is much more to do. He will go on painting until he gets it all right. Until there are layers and layers of pigment that will never be diminished. Not by his death, not by his time, not by any time. Cologne earth, Kassel earth, lead white, umber, red lake, vermilion, yellow ocher, red ocher, bone black.

THE BODY

Aris hears his own name called from the gate. His name and all his aliases.
Adriaen Adriaenszoon. Aris Kindt. Kindt. Aris the Kid! Your hour has come
.

The same words called by the executioner with barbarous clarity. Adriaen Adriaenszoon, alias Arendt Adriaenszoon, alias Aris Kindt, alias Aris the Kid. Your time is nigh.

Then other voices join in—other men, in other cells, other guards: Aris, Aris! Aris Kindt! Aris Kindt! The jailhouse echoes with it mercilessly, and then the crowd calling his name doubles the sound. Aris Kindt! Aris! Aris! All these voices mingle into one insistent mass of voices, indistinguishable as a chorus, all at once. Aris, Aris, Aris, come! Aris Kindt! It’s your hour.

Where is he now? He is not shackled. He is not walking. In fact, he can discover neither his hands nor his feet. The voices outside are also crying within.
Adriaen!
One cries.
My Adriaen! Where can I find you?

That voice there is unmistakable; it is Flora. She is calling out for him. Where was she, then? Nearby? Has she made her way to Amsterdam? Will she come and claim him?

He senses hands upon him. They do not seem to be human hands, though they are human voices. Are they the executioner’s hands? Or God’s hands? The devil’s hands? Why can he feel the pressure of hands but not his own body being grasped?

As their force surrounds him, lifting him and moving him through the night as if he had no substance, he sees no men, no hands, and no figures of any kind. It is only these voices and a sense of heat somewhere, a sense of flame that lifts him.

There comes a rush of memories, all rearing up like stallions in
the confines of his mind. His father towering over him at the pine workbench in the shop. The soft, pungent leathers pressed through his tiny child’s hands. The tall reeds that made fence posts along the worn path to church. His father’s mumbled scolding. The windmill with a roof made of thatch. Flora through the window playing on the heath. Flora. Her cool cloth pressed into his hot wounds. Her bucket of water and her basket of herbs.

The sting of the blade of the first knife that cut him, the way he gasped. The weight of one fist on his chin, then many more. The ache of his ribs kicked and shattered. His father standing before a large, darkened door. The bill of deed on the shop door. The pitiful trawling all over town for day labor. The dead old crone with her bucket of sand. The cool redemption of a swim in the river. The terror of escaping a galley by diving into the sea. The pain when he hit the water, the reward of freedom when he surfaced. The supple forgiveness of Flora’s flesh. Flora. Flora and her basket of bandages and herbs.

He is drawn through the square weightlessly, feeling no body, sensing no self, and the sky is starless and clear, no clouds mounting, no threat of rain. In fact, there is heat, like a thousand torches burning, filling the night air with their subtle smoky scent.

He flies over Dam Square, past the Oude Kerk graveyard, past the gibbet at the Volewijk and he sees the crowds below, a flow of people like rivers from one street to the next. He hears the crowds: the masses of people who stand and dance and revel and call and curse. They cry his name. Their voices are now softened, calmed, soothed until they are no longer shouting his name but singing it:
Aris Kindt!
Like a lullaby.
Aris! Aris! Where are you now?

He knows at last what he must do. He must confess everything, the whole truth of it to whoever is ready to listen. It does not matter
if he is saved—no, he knows he will not be saved in spite of all this floating. Speaking is merely a step toward whatever will next unfold, but he wants to speak, he wants to explain, to tell his story because now, at last, someone—some more than one—seems to be listening.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel, six years in the making, would not have been possible without the generous support of a US Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing (2006–2007) and the Jack Leggett Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2007–2008) as well as support from the Netherlands America Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and two heavenly writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

It would take a proper bibliography to credit every book that helped prepare me to write this novel, but I’d like to mention those that were particularly influential and inspirational:
Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp
, by William S. Heckscher;
Rembrandt: The Painter at Work
and
Rembrandt: Quest of a Genius
, by Ernst van de Wetering;
The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture
, by Jonathan Sawday;
Rembrandt Under the Scalpel: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp Dissected
, by Norbert Middlekoop, Marlies Enklaar, and Peter van der Ploeg;
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes
translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch;
The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients
, by Andrew Cunningham;
The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: from a Pre-industrial Metropolis to the European Experience
, by Pieter Spierenburg;
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
, by Simon Schama;
Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City
, by Geert Mak;
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
, by Lawrence Weschler; and
Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now
, by Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace.

I also want to acknowledge the support and guidance of particular historians and scholars: William Heckscher; William Schupbach; Norbert Middlekoop; Tim Huisman; Dolores Mitchell; Robert C. van de Graaf; Jaap van der Veen; and the terrific conservator who worked on the painting at the Mauritshuis, Petria Noble. I want to thank Bas Pauw from the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature for lending me some seventeenth-century Dutch plays in translation (particularly the Bredero!).

I’d like to thank the wonderful researcher Ruud Koopman for retrieving for me the
confessieboek
and
justitieboek
documents related to Aris Kindt’s criminal history in the Amsterdam municipal archives, and his son, Karsten, and Jaap Wit who translated the seventeenth-century Dutch texts. These laid the foundation for the Kindt narrative, which was also inspired by G. A. Bredero’s social satire,
The Spanish Brabanter
, which, in turn, was based on the sixteenth-century picaresque novel
Lazarillo de Tormes
.

But primarily, I wish to thank Ernst van de Wetering, the world’s leading Rembrandt scholar and author of six volumes of the
Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings
, for being my guide and mentor during the early days of writing this book. He gave me my Rembrandt reading lists,
suggested contacts in other historical arenas—seventeenth-century Dutch social, criminal, and aesthetic history—and provided me with his thoughtful feedback on chapters and repeatedly enlightened me with his considerable wisdom on Rembrandt, the man and the myth. I am deeply indebted to this brilliant art historian.

I’d like to thank my generous readers: Leslie Jamison, Erik Raschke, Patricia Paludanus, Jim Lake, Dina Nayeri, Christopher Saxe, Amal Chatterjee, Marian Krauskopf, Julie Phillips, Joshua Kendall, Emily Raboteau, and Josh Rolnick. I want to thank Benjamin Roberts, a historian of seventeenth-century Dutch society and culture, for fact-checking the final draft. For various sorts of cheering on: Jeremy, Tom, Mickael, Bajah, Josh, Alex, and Itamar.

Finally, thanks to my incredible agent, Marly Rusoff, her partner Michael Radulescu, to my wonderful publisher, Nan Talese, her assistant, Daniel Meyer, as well as to David and Rebecca and Dad and Carol for the love and encouragement that helped me get through the rough spots. And to my daughter, Sonia, for giving me the incentive to finish it.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nina Siegal received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of the Jack Leggett Fellowship from Iowa, a Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, and other grants and awards. She has covered fine art and culture for
The New York Times
, Bloomberg News, the
International Herald Tribune
,
W
,
Art in America
, and many other art publications.