Girl in Hyacinth Blue
The upper room was too small to contain him. He climbed out the window, taking Piet and Marta with him, still good for his word to take them on an outing, and she was left with Jantje and Katrina. Their first day outdoors together after more than a year. Ruined. Sobbing, she paced the few steps back and forth across the room, picked up a dried dung cake and hurled it out the window after the retreating boat. It didn’t even reach half the distance.
A fine time Piet and Marta would have with that man today. Good riddance to him. She flung herself on the bed so hard Jantje bounced.
Stijn stayed away all day. For the first time during the flood, she was afraid. She’d had a simple faith that everything would be all right—it always was on her family’s farm in Westerbork—but Oling wasn’t Westerbork. And Stijn wasn’t her loving father.
It wasn’t that Stijn was unloving. It was just that after eight years, she still had trouble telling the difference between his love and his worry. She’d been wrong about one thing. Stijn’s hope. It was there, stronger than hers, but more deeply buried in the dark soil of his soul.
Late in the afternoon she took a good long look, and put the painting in an empty grain sack and sewed it closed.
At dusk she heard the children’s voices singing, and his deep voice coming in on the refrain of a silly children’s song, but as the skiff drew nearer, the singing faded, and eventually stopped. In a sickening silence, Stijn left off the oars and let the boat float slowly toward the house.
Through the window Marta handed her a fistful of wilted blue wild flowers. “Why thank you, liefje. These are called lady’s smock.” She looked at Stijn climbing in after the children. The name meant nothing to him. Piet told her in tumbling sentences all they had done that day, but Stijn was silent. All the anger had gone out of him and only an awkwardness remained.
“I’ll go to Amsterdam. The day after tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll bake enough for you, and I’ll take the children. Alda can row me to Woldijk.” From there she could get a passenger towboat to Groningen, and another and another all the way to Amsterdam. The trip would take two or three days each way, depending on connections.
On the morning they were to leave, she felt Stijn’s eyes as well as Katrina’s following her as she packed a few things. “If you can get anything close to eighty,” he said as they parted, “take five and buy yourself a different painting. Something you like.”
Sitting on the uncomfortable benches on board the large passenger barge headed south from Groningen, she felt like a vagabond surrounded by all that was hers. Occasionally the children’s delight at what they saw penetrated her gloom. What was it all for? To have excitement about life, about life together, about a farm and a new kind of crop that would feed the whole world, and then to see it dissolve into only work, work, and tiny, growing separations. How does it all hold together?
Past Assen they had to wait until a lock was vacated by a larger barge, so she got off to let the children run along the dike road. A small waterway led toward the east. “Is that the Westerborker Stroom?” she asked the locksman.
“Aye, ma’m.”
Her heart burned. Westerborker Stroom would take her straight through Beilen to Westerbork.
“Does it have service?”
He motioned with his head to a small flatboat waiting to leave.
Just to float home and have Mother feed her something besides potatoes—the mere thought set her in motion. She called to the children, lifted Jantje to her hip, gathered her things and said, “Children, come. We’re going to see your grandparents.”
They switched to the small flatboat towed by a young man, and sat on the deck leaning up against some crates. New tendrils of willow branches dipped down and floated gracefully. The tall leafy meadow rue was already bursting in fluffy yellow sunbursts, and every duckling peeped his birthsong. Along the banks, the apple trees were in blossom. A breeze blew and ivory petals rained down on the boat and the children tried to catch them. Soon she would be in Westerbork where everything was beautiful and everyone was kind.
Beyond Beilen her heart pounded as the landscape became familiar and her peaceful childhood passed before her. On farmhouse doors she recognized the rustic scenes like she had painted on hers, the only one like it in Oling or Appingedam. Nooteboom’s corn mill was painted green now, with a handsome red door. And there was the small stone church she went to as a child, where she and Stijn were married. The sight of it brought a pang of guilt, as if she’d been unfaithful in some way.
At first Mother was delirious with relief and joy, loving the children, Jantje equally with the others, not letting him out of her sight. Saskia thought she knew her mother by heart, but when she showed her the painting and told her everything, her mother’s smiles turned hard.
“Seed potatoes! You know better than that.”
“I know. I know. May I just stay here for a while, until he gets over it? Long enough so he’ll miss me? It’s so lovely here. The water violets will be out soon, and the children can run free for a change.”
“And let that man worry himself sick over you? No. You leave tomorrow. For Amsterdam. The children can stay with me. Get them on your way back. This isn’t a holiday. It’s business. And you get down on your knees tonight and thank the Lord you have a man as hard-working as Stijn. Work is love made plain, whether man’s or woman’s work, and you’re a fool if you don’t recognize it. The child’s the blessing, Saskia, not the painting.”
Alone in Amsterdam two days later, she walked along the East Quay past fishwives who shouted insults at her because she passed without buying. She drew her shoulders back. Their mockeries only amused her. While their oily hands were shaking codfish at her, in her hands she was carrying a Vermeer.
Spice merchants had set out on the canal edge sacks of powders every shade of yellow and orange and red and brown. Their colors blew onto her skirt and she shook them off. She wore her dainty leather boots with the laces and she glided along the brickway toward the Rokin feeling a sense of grace and power. She was carrying a Vermeer. The day was sunny. There was no need to hurry.
She walked the Rokin all the way from the Dam to the Singel, keeping the painting in its sack and just looking in all the shops before she declared her business. Art dealers were a strange lot, she decided. Though the signs on the shops identified “Reynier de Cooge, trader in pictures,” or “Gerrit Schade, experienced connoisseur of art,” in truth the shops sold frames, clocks, faience, pump organs, even tulip bulbs along with paintings. She showed the painting first to Gerrit Schade, whose walls were covered with scenes of shipwrecks in stormy seas and tavern revels. She suspected he couldn’t read. When she held forth the document, he dismissed it with a wave of his hand and offered her thirty guilders.
“It’s a Vermeer,” she said.
“I don’t particularly care for it,” he said. “No action. So no drama.”
She covered the painting and left.
She would have to be extremely cautious. At the next three shops, she learned to uncover the painting slowly while she watched the dealer’s face. At the shop of Hans van Uylenburgh, she noticed at that moment a tiny, sudden intake of breath. He offered her fifty, and his wife raised it to fifty-five when Saskia shook her head. “Mateus de Neff the Elder, only fine paintings and drawings,” a sign read. Good. Carefully she held the painting high as she climbed the steep steps. When she uncovered the painting, de Neff made no effort to hide his excitement. “Stunning. Magnificent.”
“It’s a Vermeer.”
“Yes. Yes, it is. A rare find indeed.” He called to his associate and his wife to have a look.
She unfolded the paper and he read it carefully, but he spent more time absorbing the painting. “Look at the window glass. Smooth as liquid light. Not a brush stroke visible. Now look at the basket. Tiny grooves of brush strokes to show the texture of the reed. That’s Vermeer.”
She tried to see what he saw but her eyes flooded, and in this last hungry look at th
e painting, the girl in a blue smock became a blur. She knew she would sell it to him even before he named a price. She wanted it to go to someone who loved it. “I call it Morningshine,” she softly said. It was important that her name for it go with the painting.
When de Neff was drawing up the document of sale, she looked at everything in his shop. Stijn had said she might buy something inexpensive in exchange. There were paintings of rich people playing lutes and virginals, others of ruined castles in the countryside, kitchen maids scouring pots, church interiors, Noah receiving direction from God, vegetable stalls in marketplaces, and windmills alongside riverbanks. She couldn’t choose. Some of them were pleasant. Some were interesting. But none of them meant anything to her.
He counted out seventy-five guilders in five florin coins, put them in a muslin drawstring bag, and laid it gently in her hand, supporting the weight with his other hand under hers. Looking softly in her eyes, he closed her fingers over the bag and patted them.
It wasn’t eighty, but it was still a victory. They would live. Stijn would have his hogs. Jantje would grow up and help Stijn in the fields, and Stijn would be proud of the work Jantje could do, but they, Saskia and Stijn, would never again be as they were.
She meandered across humped bridges, trailing her fingers lightly over iron railings, bought five tulip bulbs, one for each member of the family, and, while the color of the girl’s smock was still vivid in her mind, enough skeins of fine blue Leiden wool to knit a soft woolly for each of her three children.
From The Personal Papers of Adriaan Kuypers
On the day Aletta Pieters was hanged, I came to recognize the tenacity of superstition, even in an enlightened age. And on the day after Aletta Pieters was hanged, in the St. Nicholas flood of 1717, I gave away the only things that mattered to me.
The first time I saw her, she was standing in the pillory of the narrow square in Delfzijl, flinging out curses in a raw voice and spitting at the village boys who were taunting her. None of the matrons glaring at her chastised the boys for their insults. Between two ivory fists, the girl’s long hair blew wildly, fine as spun silk the color of nothing, of wind, so light it was, making her seem a creature of exotic plummage caught in a snare. Her eyes, unshielded by any visible eyebrows, had a reckless look. A sly, superior spark leapt from them and fell on me, a stranger shouldering a knapsack and a strapful of books. Her hands relaxed and she teased me with a wanton smile that puckered a small x-shaped scar on her cheek and pushed out her lips across the space between us. I suppose I flushed, for the mark had been laid with precision across the pure beauty of her cheek. The rest of her, hidden by the pillory planks, I could only imagine.
“What did you do against the good people of Delfzijl that you deserve the stocks?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know, now.”
The boys hooted a challenge.
“There’s more to life than what’s in books, Student,” she cried. “Come a mite closer and I’ll tell ye.”
Still with the scholars’ close-cropped haircut, I had just fled, disenchanted, from university in Groningen.
“You’d best avert your eyes, lad, if you want it to go well with ye in this town,” commanded a weighty matron. “Pack of baggage, she is.”
Such virulence did not rest well in this quiet northern village on the Eems Estuary where I had, that day, come to live with my aunt, but the peculiarity of the girl’s scar and her wild, colorless hair in brilliant disorder beguiled me. I stepped up to her. “No spitting,” I warned.
“Closer now, don’t be afraid. I’ll whisper it.”
When I bent to put my ear to her face, her hair blew against my cheek like the tingling of fine fresh mist and she stretched through the pillory hole toward me and licked my ear. “Let that be an omen to ye,” she cried.
The boys hooted again, and although I muttered, “Shameless wench,” I conceded to myself that my callowness deserved the trick.
The next day, I found her crying on the floor of my aunt’s countryhouse in a hump of gray skirt, all the defiance drained out of her. She looked up at a small painting of a young girl about her own age sitting at a window. The flesh of Aletta Pieters’ delicate throat had been scraped raw. I crouched beside her. “Is this the same fiery maid as was in the pillory yesterday?” I asked.
She ran sobbing out of the room.
“What’s she doing here?” I asked my aunt.
“A year ago the minister found her on the dike road yelling curses, brought her to us filthy and raving, and said, ‘The Lord setteth the solitary in families.’ He insulted us into taking her. ‘Do something decent for God’s poor creatures for a change, for the sake of your souls,’ he said. So we have to keep her as our wash girl until she’s eighteen.”
I did not love Aunt Rika, on account of her pretension, but I felt the delicacy of her position, wed as she was, out of love I regret to say, to a slaver, that is, an investor in ships doing Westindische trade, the Middle Passage of which everyone knew but no one acknowledged was in bodies and souls, but passion and prudence are rare sleepmates. Even so, Rika keenly wanted respectability. If she couldn’t get it in the sight of God, she’d have to settle for its sham substitute in the sight of man, so while Uncle Hubert attended investors’ meetings in Amsterdam, Rika spent well, and gave to the organ society and the orphanage in Groningen. She had filled her townhouse in Groningen with carved furniture and Oriental urns and paintings, and now she was starting on her countryhouse—going to auctions in Amsterdam and hiring an Amsterdammer to paint her portrait with Uncle Hubert.
When Aletta remarked that the face of Rika in the painting was beginning to look like the ghost of the witch of Ameland Island, Rika got offended and made her sleep in the kitchen and scour the bottoms of all her cooking pans until she could see the “x” on her own face in them. In retaliation, Aletta convinced them by shaking their bed curtains at night that their house was haunted by the souls of dead Africans. One night before I arrived she walked in the fog outside their window with a sheet over her head moaning strange words and clanking pots like a ghost dragging his chains. Uncle Hubert became so terrified he fell out of bed and cracked his skull on the bed steps. But that wasn’t why she was hanged. For scaring him, she only got three days in jail and that one afternoon in the pillory. Before that, she got a beating, two weeks in jail and her cheek slit when a farmer’s sluice broke and flooded his field after she murmured something incoherent while passing him in the market square. “I was only playing witches,” she’d confessed to Rika. “I meant him no harm.” She was pardoned because she was so young, fifteen then, though some townswomen, Aunt Rika said, wished for their sons’ sakes that the extremity of the law had been brought down on her then and there.
In truth, she was hanged for smothering our baby girl.
I had come to the village of Delfzijl to study windmill design with the master millwright of the northland. I had worn myself out squeezing some personal meaning out of Descartes, Spinoza and Erasmus and wanted instead to experience in action Descartes’ principle that science could master Nature for the benefit of mankind. I wanted the making of practical things—devices to tell time, to pump faster, to see farther, not the making of arguments and treatises. And, I wanted intercourse with flesh and blood, not ink and words.
So the next time I saw Aletta crying in front of the painting, I sat beside her and studied it, trying to understand how something so beautiful could grieve her so. The tenderness of expression on the girl’s face showed it was painted with intimacy and love—qualities missing, I supposed, in Aletta Pieters’ life. In the painting, the girl’s mouth was slightly open, glistening at the corner, as if she’d just had a thought that intrigued her, an effect that made her astoundingly real. To me, she was the embodiment of Descartes’ principle, “I think, therefore I am.” She was everything Aletta wasn’t—peaceful, refined, and contemplative.
When Aletta finally calmed, I asked her what had made her cry.
“Papa said she had eyes like that, like pale blue moons, and hair like hers, that golden brown color, only in braids. She died when I was born.”
“Why don’t you braid yours? It might make you feel like her.”
“I’ve tried a hundred times. It just slips out. Nothing holds. It’s a curse, I think.” The failure made her eyes flood again.
“You have beautiful hair,” I said. “Just as it is.”
“People think it’s false. False hair means bandits will attack soon, and so people hate me.”
I turned to hide my smile. “You don’t know that for a fact.”
She shrugged. The rawness on the curve of her throat had not healed yet. It would be a pity if it scarred, but few there are who go through life unmarked.
“Where is your father?”
“He went to sea on a slaver and never came home.”
“Who raised you?”
“Grandfather. My grandmother died young. Same as all the mothers before her. A mean neighbor put a curse on my Great-great-grandmother Elsa that no girl in her family would ever live long. She said Elsa put pishogue on her butter churn and so they tied Elsa’s thumbs to her toes and dragged her through the canal and she drowned, so she was innocent. A stork even flew over the canal to prove it.”
“There’s no such thing as witches or curses, Aletta. You have no proof.”
“Oh, there’s witches, all right. Grandfather heard them whispering about my mother the night before I was born.”
She looked up to the painting imploringly. “You think somewhere girls actually live like that—just sitting so peaceful like?”
Neither a yes nor a no would make her less forlorn. There were no words I could give her to diminish the distance between her and the young woman in the painting.
On Sunday afternoons when I was free from the millwright’s instruction, I went walking. I loved the sweep of the flat, domesticated northland which presented few obstacles to wind. Here, most of the time, wind helped man to manage the land scientifically—Descartes in action. I was always bothered, though, that my countrymen depended so completely on its constancy. What would happen if they needed to drain on windless days? There were enormities still to learn in this world.