The Covenant (36 page)

A few days after their conversation Vermaas ran up to De Pré with exciting news: “It happened by accident. When the Bosbeecq factor was here the other day I told him you liked flowers. He became quite interested, because the Widows Bosbeecq are still looking for a gardener.” So it was arranged that Paul quit work early one afternoon and accompany the Bosbeecq factor to the tall, thin house on the Oudezijdsvoorburgwal (Old sides-forward-city-dyke) where the widows waited.

“We have a large garden,” they explained, and from a narrow window Paul could see a garden so neatly trimmed that he could scarcely believe it was real. “We like it neat.” There was also much work to be done inside the house, and the widows wondered if Paul had a wife. “Is she able?” they asked. “Is she encumbered with children?”

“We have only two boys.” Quickly he added, “They’re quite grown, of course.”

“How old?”

“Six and five.”

“Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” The sisters-in-law looked at each other in real dismay.

Paul sensed that his entire future depended upon what he did next, and he started to say, “Those boys have walked all the way from …” Dramatically he stopped, for he knew that this was irrelevant. Instead he said quietly, “Please! We live in a cold, damp shack, and my wife keeps it like a palace. She could do wonders here.”

The Widows Bosbeecq liked their servants to be at work at five in the morning; it discouraged sloth. But once on the job, the workers enjoyed surprising freedoms, the principal one being that they were exceptionally well fed. The widows liked to prepare the food themselves, leaving to Marie de Pré the cleaning of rooms, the sweeping of the stoep and the ironing of clothes sent upstairs by the slaveys. They were good cooks, and being country women, felt that one of man’s major requirements was an adequate supply of food, and where growing boys were concerned, downright gorging was advisable.

“It must have been God who brought us here,” Paul said frequently, and on Sundays he led his brood across the canal to the
French church for prayers. One Sunday the widows intercepted him as he was about to leave: “You should attend our church now. It’s just as close.”

The idea stunned De Pré. It seemed almost blasphemous that he should abandon the church of his fathers, the place in which French was spoken, and attend a different one which used Dutch. He had never considered this before, since he was convinced that God spoke to mankind in French and he knew that John Calvin did. It would have surprised him to know that Calvin’s principal works had been written in Latin, for the solemn thunder of Calvin’s thought had reached him in French translation, and he could not imagine it in Dutch.

He discussed this with his family, even though the boys were scarcely old enough to comprehend the difference between French, the correct language of theology, and Dutch, an accidental: “Within the family we must always speak French. It’s proper for us to speak with the widows in Dutch, and you boys must always thank them in that language when they give you clothes or toys. But in our prayers, and in the services at the church, we must speak French.”

He told the widows, “I went to see your church and it must be the finest in Christendom, because ours is certainly a small affair. But we have always worshipped God in our own language …”

“Of course!” the widows said. “We were thoughtless.”

The fact that De Pré now lived in the Bosbeecq house, with no further obligations at the weigh-station, did not mean that he lost touch with Vermaas. On Sundays, after church, they would often meet to discuss affairs pertaining to the Bosbeecq ships, and one fine April day they stood together at the bridge leading from the French church as the two widows came down the cobblestones, attended by their servant.

“Pity you’re married,” Vermaas said.

“Why? Marie’s wonderful …”

“I mean, if you weren’t married, you could take one of the widows, and then the house …”

“The widows?”

“Never be deceived about widows, Paul. The older they are, the more they want to get married again. And the richer they are, the more fun it is to marry them.”

“They’re older than my mother.”

“And richer—”

“Who are those men?” Paul interrupted, referring to the horde of strange-looking men who seemed always to be clustered about a building which abutted onto the French church.

“Them?” Vermaas said with some distaste. “They’re Germans.”

“What are they doing here?”

“They line up every day. You must have seen them before this.”

“I have. And I wondered who they were.”

“Their land has been torn by war. A hundred years of it. Catholics against Protestants, Protestants killing Catholic babies. Disgraceful.”

“I knew war like that,” Paul said.

“Oh, no! Not like the German wars. You French were civilized.” He made an ugly sound in his throat and drew his finger across it as if it were a knife. “Slash across the throat, the Frenchman’s dead. But in Germany you would …”

“Why do they stand there?”

“Don’t you know what that building is? You’ve been working here for more than a year and you don’t know?” In amazement he led De Pré across the bridge and into the Hoogstraat (High Street), where a sturdy building surrounding a courtyard bore on its escutcheon the proud letters V.O.C.

“What’s that mean?” Paul asked.

“Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie,” he recited proudly. “Jan Compagnie. Behind those doors sit the Lords XVII.” And he explained how this powerful assembly of businessmen had started more than eighty years ago to rule the East.

“But the Germans?” Paul asked, pointing to the rabble that waited silently outside the courtyard.

“There’s nothing in Germany,” Vermaas explained. “These are men who fought for some count … some baron. They lost. For them there’s nothing.”

“But why here?”

“Jan Compagnie always needs good men. The clerk will come out tomorrow morning, look them over, try to spot those likely to survive. And poof! They’re off to Java.”

“Where’s Java?”

“Haven’t you seen the big Outer Warehouse of the East Indies Company?”

“No.”

“Well, after we weigh the goods here and assess the taxes, they’re
stored in the proper warehouses,” and on Sunday he took Paul on a leisurely stroll along various canals, past the house in which Rembrandt had lived and the place once occupied by Baruch Spinoza before he had to grind lenses to keep himself alive. They crossed a footbridge to an artificial island that contained a vast open space surrounded by row upon row of warehouses, a very long rope-walk and a majestic, five-storied building for holding valuable importations.

“The treasure chest of the Lords XVII,” Vermaas said, and he summoned a watchman, who granted admission. In the darkness the two men moved from one stack of goods to another, touching with their hands casks and bales worth a fortune.

“Cloves, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon.” Vermaas repeated reverently the magic names, and as he spoke De Pré grew sick at heart for contact again with the soil, the real soil of trees and vines and shrubs.

“Now, these bales,” Vermaas was saying, “they’re not spices. Golded cloth from Japan. Silvered cloth from India. Beautiful robes from Persia. This is from China, and I don’t know what’s in it.”

“Where’s it come from, all this richness?”

“From the gardens of the moon,” Vermaas said. All his life he had wanted to emigrate to Java, where a purposeful man could make his fortune. He had an insecure idea of where Java was, but he proposed one day to get there. Grasping De Pré by the arm, he said in a whisper, “Paul, if you can’t marry a rich widow, for God’s sake, get to Java. You’re still young.” And the sweet promise of this dark warehouse was overpowering.

In the morning De Pré asked permission from the widows to visit the offices of Jan Compagnie. “Whatever for?” the women asked.

“I want to see what the Germans are up to. About Java.”

“Java!” The women laughed, and the older said, “Go ahead. But don’t you start dreaming of Java.”

So he walked only a few blocks to the Hoogstraat, where the crowd of Germans was vastly augmented, men extremely thin and pinched of face, but willing to undertake the severest adventure if only it would provide sustenance. He stood fascinated as clerks came out of the Compagnie offices to inspect the supplicants, selecting one in twenty, and he saw with what joy the chosen men leaped forward.

But when he returned to his work the widows said that they wished to talk with him: “Don’t get Java on your mind. For every guilder that reaches us from Java, six come from the Baltic. Yes, you’ll see the big East Indiamen anchored off Texel, transshipping their
spices and cloth-of-gold, and you’ll hear that one cargo earned a million of this or that. But, Paul, believe us, the wealth of Holland lies in our herring trade. In any year our seven little ships serving the Baltic bring in more money than a dozen of their Indiamen. Keep your eye on the main target.”

They spoke alternately, with one making a point and her sister-in-law another, but when the roundish one repeated, “Keep your eye on the main target,” the taller wished to enforce the idea: “We’ve been watching you, Paul. You and Marie have been chosen by God for some great task.”

No one had ever spoken like this to him before; he had for some time suspected that he was among those elected by God for salvation, the basic goodness of his heart emitting signals that he was predestined. As of now, he lacked the financial wealth which would have proved his election, but he felt certain that in time it, too, would arrive, and in his self-congratulation he missed what the widows said next. It was apparently something very important, for one of them asked sharply, “Don’t you think so, Paul?”

“I’m sorry.”

“My sister said,” the taller woman repeated, “that if you learn shipping, you could become one of our managers.”

With the bluntness that characterized most French farmers, and especially the Calvinists, De Pré blurted out, “But I want to work the earth. You’ve seen what I can do with your garden.”

The widows liked his honesty, and the roundish one said, “You’re an excellent gardener, Paul, and we have a former neighbor who might use your services, too.”

“I’d not want to leave you,” he said frankly.

“We don’t intend that you shall. But he’s a friend, and one of the Lords XVII, and we could spare him three hours of your time a day. You can keep the wages.”

His hands dropped to his side, and he had to bite his lip to control his emotion. He had wandered into a strange land with no recommendation but his devotion to a form of religion, and in this land he had found a solid friend in Vermaas, who had gone out of his way to help him, a church whose members were encouraged to worship in French, and these two widows who were so kind to his wife, so loving with his sons and so generous with him. When the Huguenots fled France they found refuge in twenty foreign lands, where they encountered
a score of different receptions, but none equaled the warmth extended to them in Holland.

On Tuesday morning at nine o’clock, after De Pré had put in his usual four hours of hard work, the Bosbeecq women suggested that he accompany them to the stately Herengracht (Gentlemen’s Canal), along which his new employer lived, and there they knocked at the door of a house much grander than theirs. A maid dressed in blue admitted them to a parlor filled with furniture from China and bade them sit upon the heavy brocades. After a wait long enough to allow Paul time to admire the richness of the room, a gentleman appeared, clad in a most expensive Chinese robe decorated with gold and blue dragons.

He was tall and thin, with a white mustache and goatee. He had piercing eyes that showed no film of age, and although he was past seventy, he moved alertly, going directly to De Pré and bowing slightly. “I am Karel van Doorn, and I understand from these good women that you wish to work for me.”

“They said you could have me three hours a day.”

“If you really work, that would be enough. Can you really work?”

De Pré sensed that he was in the hands of someone much harsher than the widows, but he was so captivated by the idea of Java that he did not want to antagonize anyone who might be associated with that wonderland. “I can tend your garden,” he said.

With no apologies to the Bosbeecqs, Van Doorn took Paul by the arm, hurried him through a chain of corridors to a big room, and threw open a window overlooking a garden in sad repair. “Can you marshal that into some kind of order?”

“I could fix that within a week.”

“Get to it!” And he shoved Paul out the back door and toward a shed where some tools waited.

“I must explain to the—”

“I’ll tell them you’re already at work.” Van Doorn started to leave, then stopped abruptly and cried, “Remember! You said you could do it in a week.”

“And what do I do after that?” Paul asked.

“Do? You could work three hours a day for ten years and not finish all the things I have in mind.”

When De Pré returned to the Bosbeecq house, where the widows
were preparing a gigantic meal because they knew he would be hungry, the two women suggested that he sit with them in the front room, and there, in forthright terms, they warned him about his new employer, speaking alternately, as usual, like two angels reporting to St. Peter regarding their earthly investigations.

“Karel van Doorn will pay you every stuiver you earn. He’s fiercely honest.”

“Within limits.”

“And he can afford to pay you. He’s very wealthy.”

“He is that. The Compagnie in Java had an iron-clad rule. No official to buy and sell for himself. Only for the Compagnie.”

“But his family bought and sold like madmen. And grew very rich.”

“And the Compagnie had another iron-clad rule. No one in Java to bring money earned there back to Holland.”

“She knows, because her uncle was one of the Lords XVII.”

“But when Karel’s mother died in the big house along the canal in Batavia, he hurried out to Java, and by some trick which only he could explain, managed to smuggle all the Van Doorn money back to Amsterdam.”

“And he should have shared half with his brother at the Cape—”