She nodded, acknowledging his concession, and stood still to enjoy the weight of his hands. He put his face next to hers and she held her breath.
“Go to Groningen tomorrow. It’ll fetch five guilders, surely. Maybe eight if we’re lucky. It’ll keep us in meat.”
“But—”
“See that you shop it around. By the university. Don’t accept anything less than eight. Try for ten. And show that paper.”
The next morning at dawn, she lowered Piet and Marta, the painting wrapped in a bedsheet, and then the baby into the rowboat. She rowed inland following the bare trees lining the Damsterdiep. The dike road was still under water at first, but farther inland, it slowly began to emerge. Through shallow water pierced by sedges and busy with ducks, she rowed as far as Woldijk, the first dike that held, where it crossed the Damsterdiep. She tied the rowboat to a dike cleat and climbed out, stiff in the legs but feeling the exhilaration of solid ground. She paid a boy half a groat to watch the skiff. Immediately Piet and Marta ran down the dike road crying “Land, land!” and she let them, until a small barge towed by a horse was ready to leave for Groningen.
The sight of winter fields waiting for planting on the inland side of the dike filled her with hope. But even that wouldn’t have the same effect on Stijn. It wasn’t hope that lay between that man and God. Nor was it thankfulness. Or appreciation for a bird or a leaf. Or a kiss. Fear lived in that space instead. The horror of seeing the last of the grain and the fields still wet. The fear of having to abandon the farm and starve beside a canal in Amsterdam, the whole family inching forward their alms bowls in front of the poorhouse. But that wasn’t the God she cared to know.
In the distance the tower of the church of St. Martin rose above the plain, and as they approached Groningen’s tall, stone Water Gate, the children squealed their merriment and jumped up and down. When or where or through what cataclysm do men and women pass that makes them lose that bursting soul-freedom?
They rode past the sugar beet refinery and the metal workers’ alley where the children put their hands to their ears, so much banging and hammering there was. To Piet and Marta, Groningen was a dream city, full of magical buildings and arches and windows all containing mysteries. They plagued her with questions—What’s that man doing? What’s in that cart? What’s that metal thing for?—she couldn’t keep up with them. And people. So many people, the children marveled.
At the dock Saskia asked directions to the university and entered a stationer’s shop full of books and portfolios and papers, some few paintings, and a wealth of detailed drawings of plants and animals and the human body. She laid the painting on the counter and untied the sheet. If she had to do it, she wanted to do it quickly.
The wizened shopkeeper took one look and asked, “Where did you get this?”
She felt Piet and Marta squeeze up against her legs from both sides. “It was given to me.” She unfolded the paper for him to see. He held out his hand for it but she wouldn’t let it go. She didn’t want him to see the back.
As he read, the fingers of his right hand curled in. He gave her a penetrating look, and his eyebrows twitched in a most unpleasant way that made Piet snicker. She squeezed the back of his neck to make him behave. She knew that all the way home in the boat, he’d twitch his eyebrows and then burst out laughing.
The man’s gaze crawled down her homespun skirt of black fustian to her old clogs. “Given to you?”
“Yes, sir.” She held tight to the paper.
“Do you know who Jan van der Meer is?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ll give you,” he paused, and Marta lay the tips of her fingers along the edge of the man’s desk. Saskia shook her head at her slightly and Marta swept her hands behind her back. “Twenty-four guilders, for it.” He turned away and reached for his cash box as if to conclude the deal.
Her surprise made her blurt out, “Twenty-four?” Jantje gave a little cry and she realized she was holding him too tight. She shifted him from one hip to the other.
“Twenty-five. Not a stuiver more.”
Stijn would be jubilant with that. Twenty-five guilders would make him tender to her, and it would make keeping Jantje certain.
But the man wouldn’t look at her. He just sat there stacking up the coins. His fingernails were long and yellow. She couldn’t trust a man with long fingernails. The painting must be worth even more. It was certainly worth more than that to her.
“No, thank you.” The firmness in her own voice astonished her. Piet gave her a quick look of confusion. She wrapped the painting in the bedsheet, tying the corners carefully, feeling the man following her to the door, his protestations a blur of sound.
Once outside, terror seized her, and she broke out in a sweat. What if she had made a mistake? What if she was only offered less everywhere else? Twenty-five guilders! Besides feeding them until their next crop, twenty-five guilders would buy a sow and a mating hog. Stijn’s dream of breeding stock could come true, and she’d be the reason.
“Twenty-five guilders,” Piet said with exaggerated authority, and twitched his eyebrows so violently that his whole face quivered. Marta burst out laughing.
Saskia walked briskly but aimlessly through the streets, bought the children a cinnamon waffle at a street cart, and worried. She peered into the window of an antiquarian shop and saw paintings on the wall. She made Marta hold onto Piet and they went inside. Drinking horns and beakers and goblets and tankards stood in a clutter on chests and tables. “Don’t touch anything,” she warned. Marta and Piet were beside themselves, demanding in whispers that the other one look at each new thing—books, brocade cushions, carvings from the East Indies, and when they found a large mirror, they couldn’t resist making faces with their eyebrows, noses, cheeks, lips, everything twitching at once, and giggling at themselves. “Ssh,” Saskia commanded, and stifled her own chuckle.
The woman was concluding some business with a man so Saskia had an opportunity to examine a yellowed, scrolled map hanging on the wall. The place names were all strange. She could find neither Oling nor Westerbork. Her breath leaked thinly out her lungs and she felt that she was from nowhere. Piet and Marta were giggling louder so she pushed them gently to the door and was about to leave when the woman said, “Is there something you might want?”
Saskia started at the sound. “No, thank you,” she murmured, and gave an apologetic smile. She paused at the doorway and turned back. “Well, perhaps one thing. Do you happen to know who Jan van der Meer is?”
“Of course. From Delft. The painter from Delft. Vermeer.” The woman noticed the painting wrapped in cloth. “You have something to show me?”
Saskia came back in and unwrapped it and the children became serious again. As always when she let herself, Saskia felt sucked into the clean, spare, sunlit room with the young girl in the painting.
“Light. He painted light, you know. Lovely.” The woman carried the painting to the window. “Look at her skin. Glazed smooth as silk. Could be. Could very well be.”
“Could be what?”
“A Vermeer, my dear.”
Saskia unfolded the paper and handed it to her. The woman read it several times, then turned it over. She gave Saskia a long look, then smiled at the baby on her hip.
“Where are you from?”
“Oling. It’s only a hamlet. Near Appingedam. We’re flooded, and—”
“You take this painting to Amsterdam. It’ll fetch a far sight more there than I can pay. Or anyone in Groningen. Take it to the shops along the Rokin. Accept nothing less than eighty guilders. And keep it out of the rain.”
“Eighty!”
Her voice rose so high that Piet shrieked, “Eighty!”
After more assurances and some shared admiration for the painting, Saskia sold the woman her grandmother’s blue linen table scarf with the fine tatting, and then made her way, with the wrapped painting, through the market square to the butchery stalls.
On the row home from Woldijk, he
r mind flew like a caged sparrow. What would she tell Stijn? That she couldn’t sell it? That it only fetched four guilders and so it wasn’t worth selling? She’d sell her small spice chest instead. They would get by on that. He’d never know what the first man offered. Or what this woman said. He would trust her. She’d never given him any reason not to.
At home she uncovered the painting and hung it on the peg and put no clothes in front of it. Eighty guilders!
The story she’d imagined came to life for her. Why would such a young woman who could afford to have her portrait painted by a great artist, why would she, how could she have given away her son? She wasn’t at peace the way that artist painted her. She was leaning forward, and the rigidness of her spine showed the ache in her soul. She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just like her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing, else why would she give away her son? A woman who prayed, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” Saying the words to herself clamped shut her throat and made her cry.
She tried to get the children to go to sleep before Stijn came home. The Lord forgive her or not, she would not tell Stijn. Four guilders, if he asked. After the children were sleeping. Even though the pain of that lie would strike again at the discovery of each new beauty in the painting, truth would drive a wedge between them no tenderness could bridge.
She watched Stijn’s eyes when he came in through the window. The first thing he saw was the painting. The second was the pot of beef stew. They hadn’t had beef since the flood. She put a bowl of it before him so the aroma would soften him. “I sold grandmother’s handworked table scarf,” she explained. He took one spoonful standing up and hung his mud-caked reefer on the peg in front of the painting.
She gasped and could barely restrain herself from whisking it away. Marta and Piet poked their heads out from below the cabinet bed. “We saw lots of bridges and churches and beggars,” Marta said, and Piet mimicked a blind man holding out his bowl.
“And we rode the towboat,” he added.
“Did you, now.” Stijn’s hand reached down to ruffle Piet’s head.
“Ssh. You’re supposed to be asleep,” Saskia said.
“What about the painting?”
“I’ll tell you later,” she whispered, motioning with her head to the children. She couldn’t lie in front of them.
She watched Stijn eat the stew. When there was only broth left, he tipped the bowl into his mouth. She ladled out more. When he finished, they both stood up at the same moment, both moved one way, then the other to get between the chests and Katrina who swished her tail at the disturbance. Saskia let out a nervous, twittering laugh. He questioned her with his eyes. Earlier than usual, she got into her night shift, blew out the oil lamp, and climbed into the high bed. He showed tremendous patience waiting for an explanation. Only when he lay down next to her did he ask again, “Why didn’t you sell the painting?”
“I couldn’t,” she said, and it was the truth. “I tried,” and that, too, was the truth. Let him take it as he would. She rolled away from him. In a moment his hand came across her to turn her again to him. Still he waited.
“Stijn, it’s like selling the boy’s mother. It’s making him an orphan.” She knew it was foolish, what she was saying, but in the dark, she could admit things. All the hardness of life in the bleak northland rushed over her like a flood and she cried, “There’s nothing beautiful up here. Oh, I know you love it, love to look out on your rows of potatoes, love the big, bare flatness of buckwheat, buckwheat, buckwheat, but I didn’t come here for that. I came here because of you, and if we can get along without selling it… I’ll sell the spice chest. Or we can borrow from Father. The fields will be drained soon. Already at Woldijk you can see sedges coming up through the water.”
They lay a long time in the darkness before he asked, “How much were you offered?”
It was a long time again while she listened for noises from the children. In spite of the quiet, she whispered, “Twenty-five guilders.”
He blew air out between his teeth that cooled the back of her neck. She held her breath and didn’t move while the enormity of that sum became truth to him. As much as she tried to contain herself, she turned her face into the pillow and cried.
“I would have sold it if I thought that was a fair price.”
“Fair? What do we know about such things?”
“I didn’t sell it because another woman told me it was worth eighty. In Amsterdam. So you’d best not be treating the painting that way,” she said, “hanging your muddy coat in front of it.”
“Eighty!” he whispered. After a long, still moment, she felt him get out of bed and heard the sound of him dropping his reefer onto the bare floor.
She had, for the first time in their marriage, a lightness, a sense of power in being right. She pressed further. “As I said, Jantje is not the child of some lawless wench, or even the son of a farmer.” She heard the bite in the last word and knew he did too. She turned her back to him and they were both very still until she fell into a sound and peaceful sleep.
In the morning, in those few moments of half-sleep before she moved but when she heard Katrina stirring for her milking, she felt Stijn’s arm laid across her lovingly. She lay still to feel the reality of his tenderness, and after a time, she slipped her hand in his.
Work on the sea dikes was completed before they’d expected, and so now all the drainage mills were turning. Stijn worked on the Damsterdiep Dike now, and as the team of men worked their way inland, his spirits brightened. She even saw him tickle Jantje’s belly once, and he called him Jantje instead of the baby. Jantje was gurgling baby sounds now. She wasn’t sure if she should teach him “Mama” and “Papa,” so she was working on “cow” and “water.”
If only, for one moment, Stijn could feel as she did, if they could be together in the task God assigned them, if he could look at Jantje as he looked at Piet and Marta and know the power of God’s intention, then maybe he’d trust enough to let her keep the painting. But of this, there was no indication. The question of the painting hung in the air of their little upper room, and every day, she put less and less salt pork in the stew and then fewer and fewer carrots and haricot beans bought from the vegetable seller who occasionally ventured out to flooded villages in a punt. Eventually the stew became potato broth, day after day, and Saskia thought for sure he’d tell her to sell the painting.
Spring came in small evidences—only a tenderness in the air and some grasses poking the water’s surface. Inland, just outside the Woldijk, the land was wet but not flooded, and they were spreading refuse from the city to reconstitute the soil. Farmers there might get their crop of sugar beets after all, but Stijn just sat brooding by the window, looking out at his wet fields. With every week, Saskia pointed out a few more branches of trees emerging and another plank of the barn.
Conscription duties lessened so the Water Board permitted each landowner one day free of dike work each week. There was little Stijn could do on the farm so he said he’d take them on an outing in the skiff.
“And can we go to Woldijk and have races on the dike road?” Piet asked.
“Yes, and maybe even to Groningen.”
“And see our horse?” Marta added.
“Of course.”
It would be a holiday. Stijn hadn’t acted this lighthearted in months. She knew there would be heather beyond Woldijk. The marsh gentian wouldn’t be out yet, but there would be yellow pimpernel and bog violet she could pick and bring back that would last a day or two. Already the sun breaking through the clouds made the water glisten in silver patches.
But first Stijn went to the barn.
She stood still and closed her eyes. Katrina’s endless chewing filled the room.
Across the water she heard him shout. Not words. Not a curse. Just a deep bel
low of anguish.
Through the window she watched him thrashing the water with the oars. She had no place to put the older children so they wouldn’t see what would come next. She put Jantje far back into their cabinet bed.
Stijn was already yelling as he climbed in the window. “Saskia, how could you? The seed potatoes! You’ve been using the seed potatoes.”
Piet flattened himself against the wall.
“I—”
“Every farm wife knows, every farmer’s daughter knows that you don’t touch the seed potatoes. There’s only a quarter of a barrel left! Not enough to seed more than a few rows of potato mounds.”
Marta crawled deep into her bed.
“I thought there was another barrel behind the bales,” Saskia said, though she knew, even as she said it, that it was not the truth. They wouldn’t get a planting this year so she thought they might as well eat them. The potatoes wouldn’t last a year. Now she knew—he hadn’t given up the hope of putting in a late crop.
“Another barrel? You knew there wasn’t. And you knew if I knew, we’d have to sell the painting.”
He didn’t lay a hand on her—that he’d never do—but he glared at her with a look that shriveled her soul. She felt God Himself scowling down at her. “Selfish. Selfish! I never knew you.”
“Maybe I should tell you then. It was your idea to come up to this barren place. I haven’t been back home for three years. My parents haven’t seen Piet since he was a baby, but not once have I complained. And not once have I regretted it. And not once have I cursed the flood or bad luck or God Himself. Or you.”
“But a man’s seed potatoes are his future. It’s what he is.”
“Nothing more? You’re nothing more than that? I don’t believe it. You’re holding a grudge. And you know what? It’s not against me, because of the potatoes. Or because I didn’t sell the painting. Or even against Jantje. It’s because of the flood. And you know who it’s against? It’s against God. All you see in life is the work. Just planting, hauling, shoveling, digging. That’s all life is to you. But not to me, Stijn. Not to me. There’s got to be some beauty too.”