Tulip Fever

  He passes them to Jan. Jan takes the parcels to the table. The men stare, mesmerized. There is no sound except for Gerrit’s wheezing lungs; he is breathing heavily from his exertions.

  Jan unties the first package. Inside lie lumps of pigment, loosely wrapped in tissue paper.

  There is a silence. Jan opens the other package. There are crumbs and broken bits of pastry.

  “Sorry, sir,” mumbles Gerrit. “G-g-got a bit . . . knocked about a bit . . . fighting, see . . . fighting the Spanish . . .”

  Jan whispers: “Where is the tulip bulb?”

  Gerrit looks at him; his mouth hangs open. “The what?”

  “The third package, Gerrit. It had a tulip bulb in it.”

  “The onion? I ate it.”

  58

  Sophia

  If you peel an onion, you cry.

  —JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

  I have a nosebleed.

  “I get them too, when I’m agitated,” says Lysbeth. She is ironing a dress for me to wear. She brings over the hot iron. “Here, lean over this. Let a few drops fall on it; that’ll do the trick.”

  I lean over the iron. The drops of blood land with a sizzle. Suddenly I miss Maria and her superstitions. We have been through so much together, more than anyone will ever know, and I will never see her again. I will never find out if she and the baby are thriving. Will her ruse work, the ruse about the wet nurse? Will the baby’s resemblance to Maria become too apparent? These are questions I can no longer ask. Death has removed me from the living and soon I will leave this country for good.

  I feel lonely. The only person to whom I have spoken is this woman Lysbeth, whom I have never met before. Where is Jan? I fling back my head and press a handkerchief into my nostrils. The iron didn’t cure my nosebleed. I am full of blood; I am too much alive.

  Why isn’t he here? Outside, the church bells peal eight o’clock. Lysbeth goes downstairs to baste the goose. I take out my rosary beads—I was clutching them in my hand when I died, they are all I have with me. “ Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .” I count the beads, praying for him to come. It feels wicked, to pray for our treachery to succeed, but I am past redemption now.

  At least my nosebleed has stopped. I take off my night-dress and put on the clothes Lysbeth has laid out for me—a shift, a petticoat and a black dress and bodice. I have decided not to wear an exotic disguise; I am not in the mood for any more pantomimes. I shall wear plain black and the blue cloak that the grocer’s wife wore when she was the Madonna.

  I sit on the bed, waiting. Outside there is a roar and childish shrieks. Mattheus is chasing his children up and down the stairs.

  “I’m the bogeyman! I’m coming to get you!” he bellows.

  Lysbeth calls up to him: “Don’t excite them. They won’t eat their dinner.”

  Footsteps thunder along the passage and then there is silence. Somewhere outside, far away, a dog barks. I feel cut off from this boisterous family, from life itself. In Utrecht my mother and sisters will be grieving. I cannot bear to think of their tears. I have left Cornelis a note instructing him, in the event of my death, to continue supporting them, but though this may ease their circumstances it will not heal their sorrow. Not far from here, in the house in the Herengracht, Cornelis will be mourning his dead wife. How can I do this to them? How can I be so cruel, to sacrifice their happiness for my own? I can sail to the ends of the earth, but they will remain forever in my guilty heart.

  Outside, the church bells toll the quarter. My hands are trembling as I smooth the blue cloak over my knees. Jan should be here by now. What is happening? He has sent no message, nothing.

  The house seems strangely quiet. Even Mattheus’s booming voice has stopped. I do not dare to leave this room; the children must not see me.

  And then I hear footsteps on the stairs. They are slow, heavy footsteps, the tread of an elderly man.

  It is Cornelis. He has opened the coffin and found it filled with sand. He has discovered my deceit.

  The stairs creak, as loud as pistol shots, as he approaches. Surprisingly, I stay calm. In fact, a curious feeling of relief spreads through me. It is all over.

  The door opens and Jan steps into the room.

  He looks terrible. His face is gray; he seems to have shrunk. He sits down on the bed—no greeting, nothing.

  He says: “We are ruined.”

  IT TAKES ME A WHILE to understand what he is telling me. It is something about Gerrit eating the bulb. What on earth is Jan talking about? He says they have taken everything.

  “Who?”

  “My creditors. They’ve taken my paintings, my chests, everything.” He pauses. “They want to take out a charge against me. The doctor can’t—if he does, it will all be revealed, what he’s done—but the others may do so. My assets aren’t worth enough to cover my debts. Not a quarter of them.”

  It is only then that he takes my hand. He pulls me down beside him on the bed and kneads my fingers.

  “I’m so very sorry, my love. I was a fool. But how can even a fool predict something so preposterous?”

  There is a silence. “What we did was worse than preposterous,” I say.

  We sit there, side by side. I am thinking of our wickedness—our profound and unpardonable wickedness. God was watching us all the time. I knew He was, in my heart.

  “We did something very terrible—” I begin.

  “Listen, my darling—”

  “We did it,” I say. “And we have been punished.”

  “We love each other.” He grabs my chin and turns my face to his. “We love each other. That’s why we started all this, don’t you remember?”

  I cannot reply. I gaze at his face—his blue, glittering eyes; his madman’s hair.

  “You have died,” he says. “We cannot stay in Amsterdam; we’ve got to get away. We can still do it. We’ll have to start all over again, with nothing, but we can do it. Can you live with me in poverty?”

  I do not listen. Let me kiss her, Cornelis cries as he is pulled away from my body. Far away, in the darkness, my mother has lost her daughter.

  “We’ll manage, my sweetheart.” Jan speaks with passion. “We can still sail tomorrow; all is not lost. I’ll ask Mattheus to lend us the money for our passage and I will pay him back when I’ve found employment . . . by all accounts there’s plenty of work out there . . .” He clutches my shoulders. “Do not despair, my only darling.”

  God has been watching us all the time. God is all-seeing. I knew that, of course; I was just blinded by my own greed. God has done this to punish us.

  Jan is looking at me, reading my thoughts. “God will pardon us. Don’t have doubts, Sophia. Not now.”

  We sit there in silence. Outside, the dog is barking. A smell of cooking drifts up the stairs. I cannot speak. It all makes sense; it was only a matter of time. There is a terrible symmetry to it: we committed the crime and for this we must be punished. God has driven Gerrit—bumbling, drunken Gerrit—to do His work. It has all fallen into place.

  There is a long pause. My mind is made up. I turn to Jan, put my arms around him and kiss him deeply. How passionately he responds, with what relief. I dig my fingers into his hair and cradle his face in my hands. How I have loved him.

  Our bodies are pressed together, but bodies tell their own lies. Mine has lied so often in the past. I hold Jan close, drinking in his kisses as if I will never stop. I am betraying him now, just as all those months we have been betraying others.

  Then I ease myself out of his arms. “Go and ask him, then,” I say, stroking his hair. “Go and ask Mattheus to lend us the money. I will wait for you here.”

  59

  Jan

  Love laughs at locksmiths.

  —JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

  Mattheus and Lysbeth are waiting in the kitchen. The goose turns on the spit. Drops of fat fall from it, hissing in the flames. Their spaniel watches, strings of saliva hanging from its mouth.

  When Jan comes in,
Mattheus rallies. He pours him a glass of brandy and puts his arms around him. “You poor old rogue,” he says. “You’ve always been a fool when it comes to women.”

  “She’s not women.”

  “So what are you going to do now?”

  Jan drains the glass. “We can still sail tomorrow, but we need your help.”

  He asks for a loan. Mattheus agrees.

  Lysbeth takes Jan’s hand. “We’re glad to be of help. Soon you will be gone, and you can put all this behind you.”

  At this moment their eldest son, Albert, wanders in.

  “Time for your dinner,” says Lysbeth. “Call the others.”

  “Who’s that woman?” asks the boy.

  “What woman?” asks Jan.

  “That woman who came running down the stairs,” says Albert. “In the blue cloak. Is she a model?”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s gone.”

  60

  Sophia

  None can clean their dress from stain, but some blemish will remain.

  —JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

  There is a full moon tonight. No painter can reproduce the perfection of God’s work; what presumption to try! The moon is a perfect circle, more perfect than the orbs that Jan painted in his moonlit landscapes, more perfect than the rows of greedy O’s that he drew when he was hunched over his sums . . . those empty O’s that led us to this.

  The streets are deserted. They are bathed in ghostly light as I run through them, my slippers pit-patting. For once I do not care if I am seen, for I have reached my final surrender. Last night I died to the world, but tonight I shall disappear for good. The relief makes me light-footed; I skim along.

  The moon, reflected in the water, accompanies me. The heavens have fallen; in one convulsion my world has been turned upside down. No wonder that print haunted me when I was little, that drowned world where the bells tolled underwater and the dead swayed. I thought that their arms waved in supplication; now I realize that they waved in greeting. I knew that I would arrive here in the end.

  The waters of this city mirror us back to ourselves—the vanity of it! Maria dressed up in my clothes; she gazed in the mirror and dreamed herself as me. My own vanity is far more profound. I have presumed to turn the natural order inside out. I have meddled with God’s plan; my pride is the pride of our people who wrenched our country from the sea. The making of new land belongs to God alone, wrote one of our engineers, Andries Vierlingh, for He gives to some peoplethe wit and strength to do it. What double-thinking is this? We use God to justify our actions when in fact it is our own instinct for survival that pushes us on.

  But why survive? This world is but a chimera, a dazzling reflection. Did we suspect this, when we built our city upon mirrors? Once I dreamed of a life with Jan. I gazed into the water and saw a dream world, mirroring my own, where I could be happy. How wrong I was. For it was nothing—just the glitter of moonlight on the surface, the sheeny satin luster of a dress. That was all it ever was. Through lust and pride, those deadly sins, I blinded myself to the truth.

  Tonight I shall bid good-bye to this optical illusion. I shall disappear from this world and truly be reborn, for Jesus waits for me, His arms outstretched like a lover. And nobody, not even my darling Jan, will be able to find me. There’s only one way to escape , we said, all those months ago, and for him never to think to look for me.

  I am standing on a bridge now. I look down at the pewtery sheen of the water. I think of all the things I have loved in this world: my sisters, flowers with dewdrops trembling in their freckled throats . . . the smell of clean linen, the smell of a horse’s neck when I bury my face in its fur . . . the taste of warmed wine as Jan poured it from his mouth into mine, of his skin against my lips . . . I remember the first night we lay together, our fingers laced, gazing at each other with terrible seriousness . . . in our end was our beginning, for we knew in our hearts that we were doomed . . .

  There is no time to lose. He will be searching for me now and I have not gone far—just a few streets from Mattheus’s house. I lean over the parapet, gazing at the moon’s reflection. Like my own face, it gazes up at me. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity . . .

  I pull off my cloak and drop it over the edge. It floats on the water—my last, shed skin.

  61

  Willem

  What waters are not shadowed by her sails?

  On which mart does she not sell her wares?

  What peoples does she not see, lit by the moon,

  She who herself sets the laws of the whole ocean?

  —JOOST VAN DEN VONDEL

  Down in the port, six ships of the fleet have docked. Crowds of sailors pour down the gangways, setting foot in their homeland for the first time in months. Some fall to their knees and kiss the ground, thanking God for their safe return; others head for the stews. The seafront seethes with activity—relatives, pickpockets and whores mill around the new arrivals. Hawkers shout their wares. Lights glow in the waterside taverns; the brothels throb with music.

  A young man weaves his way through the crowd. He carries his belongings in a bag, slung over his shoulder. The flames of a brazier illuminate his face. Eight months at sea have transformed Willem. He has lost his puppy fat; his face is lean and brown. He walks with confidence. The sea has made a man of him—a fine young man, tall and upstanding, though the streets still roll beneath his feet. He is not the same Willem who left in March, battered, beaten and stripped of his illusions. He has lost his innocence— that will never return. However, something more profound has taken its place: wonder.

  The sights he has seen! Mountains, for a start. He is a Dutchman; he has never seen such things before. Who could believe they could be so steep? He has seen waves as high as mountains and mountains so tall they must be scraping heaven. He has seen whales the size of mountains, whales hoving into sight, water spouting through their blowholes, water sluicing off their sides, whales plunging into the depths, a moment of stillness and then their great tails rearing up and following them. He has seen shooting stars in a spangled southern sky; he has seen flying fish glittering like silver arrows. He has seen cities to dream about: the gleaming domes of Constantinople; the ravishing, mirrored streets of Venice, corrupt and seductive, like Amsterdam’s wanton sister.

  Willem has both seen wonders and caused wonder in others. After his first disastrous encounter with a whore he has made up for lost time, and the reaction has been gratifying. In three languages women of easy virtue have marveled at his astonishing member. (Wat heb je een grote lul! . . . Che grozzo kazzo! . . . Ku kuzegar o khar o kuze faroush!) It has done battle and so has he. He has battled against storms in the Bay of Biscay, scaling the rigging and lashing the ropes. He waged war against the fever and survived. Most gratifying of all, he has fought the Spanish and has a full purse to prove it.

  For Willem has gold in his pocket. Not the fool’s gold that fattened his purse the last time he walked these streets—this is real cash, plundered in a spirit of patriotism. While engaged on escort duty to a merchant fleet sailing to the Levant, his ship was attacked by a Spanish vessel. After a fierce engagement the Dutchmen captured the ship, plundered its cargo and divided up the spoils. His captain and fellow crewmen have taken their percentage of the bullion.

  It is not surprising that Willem feels a profound gratitude to the sea. She has yielded up two livelihoods: her fish and then her gold. With this booty, plus his wages, he has enough cash to discharge himself from the navy and start a new life. His expectations are still modest. A little shop, he would be happy with that. Not fish, however; he is sick of fish. He wants to set up in a little cheese shop, with Maria at his side.

  All these months he has tried to forget her but he cannot do so; she is lodged in his body like lead shot. Maria has made him a chronic invalid. Maybe the wound has healed but she lies beneath his skin; the slightest movement inflames the pain. He misses her desperately. The bitterness is still there; it has eaten away at
his heart but it has failed to destroy his love for her. She is his soul mate; it is as simple as that. With rented arms around him it was Maria to whom he made love; it was through her eyes that he marveled at the minarets of Alexandria.

  He misses her chuckling laugh and her chapped hands, her robust good humor and sudden lapses into dreaminess. He misses her body. He has traveled the world but its center of gravity lies between her sheets. East or west, home is best. He is a Dutchman, through and through.

  Maria might be married; she might have left Mr. Sandvoort’s employment and gone to live with the man in whose passionate embrace Willem last saw her. She might have forgotten all about him. Of course he has thought of this, every hour of every day, but it will not deter him from trying to find her. He is a grown man, now, with money in his pocket. He has faced worse foes than this. And if he loses the battle and finds that she no longer loves him . . . this is something he cannot contemplate, not tonight.

  The houses of the Herengracht loom up in the moonlight. The bells toll eight; Willem smells cooking. Behind their shutters the families will be eating their dinners. How strange, yet familiar, these houses seem. In his former life he has knocked on their doors. Fresh cod! Fresh haddock! Such a journey he has made, through such storms, and to them it is simply a night like any other. Under his feet the street still sways with the swell of the sea. He has dreamed about returning here for so many months that he can hardly believe it is happening; he will wake up and find he is still swaying in his hammock on his rocking ship. The moon accompanies him in the water, his light of navigation.

  He reaches the house. His heart beats faster. For a moment his courage fails him. Maria was his friend, that is the terrible thing; she was his dearest companion and now he dreads to see her. He shifts the bag onto his other shoulder and walks up to the front door. The window shutters are open. He looks through the glass.