“I beg you—please—tell me where I can find them.”
Jacob does not smile. Within him, however, he feels the warmth spreading. It is the warmth of deepest satisfaction. There is, indeed, sense to the world. The wicked shall be punished, for now he can ruin the man who ruined him.
“I know where they have gone.” Jacob pauses, enjoying his feeling of power. “A boy came with the tickets.” He pauses again for the full effect. He holds Mr. Sandvoort in his thrall. In a moment Jacob will destroy his former master and justice will be done. “They are sailing to Batavia.”
“Batavia?”
“At first light tomorrow. On the Empress of the East.” As he speaks, Sophia’s rosy nipples swim in front of his eyes. He feels a surge of chivalry. It fights with his jealousy and lust; after a short struggle, it wins. “It is not your wife’s fault, sir. She is not the one to blame. My master persuaded her to do it.” She, too, has been deluded by this wicked man; her virtue has been destroyed by him, just as he destroyed Jacob’s career. “She didn’t mean you any harm, I am sure. I watched them, I should know. He persuaded her to do it against her better judgment.”
Mr. Sandvoort thanks him. Turning to leave, he knocks against a cabinet. The knives rattle. And then he is gone.
Jacob returns to his painting. He gazes with satisfaction at the chalk figure, bowed with shame. Let Jan take the blame, for he has sinned and now he shall be punished.
Jacob picks up his chalk and gets to work.
65
Cornelis
Life is half spent before we know what it is.
—JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632
It is midnight by the time Cornelis arrives home. He closes the door and stands in the front room. Maria has left the oil lamp burning. Its light glows on the blind wooden panels hanging on the wall. His paintings have turned their beautiful faces away so that they cannot see what is happening. Art creates a world of peace; the bloodiest murders—the massacre of the innocents, Christ’s crucifixion— they are distilled into beauty. The slaughtered John the Baptist cannot feel pain, for he is eternal and removed from the raw grief of those who have to continue living.
Cornelis looks at the cabinet of precious silverware, at the great rooms receding into the darkness. How greedily he has filled this place with treasures, but it is all an illusion. Sophia has realized this. She has given it all up for love and cast herself adrift. Don’t blame her for it, said the boy. Cornelis does not blame her, not now. For if she can give it up, so can he.
Cornelis climbs the stairs. He can no longer remain in this house, the object of gossip and pity—no doubt of ridicule too. He pulls a canvas bag out of the closet and starts packing. A weight has been lifted from him; he feels as light and free as the night, a hundred years ago, in another life, when he lost his faith. (Last night; it was last night.) He knows what he is going to do now. Sophia is alive. She has been led astray by a man who is unworthy of her—the boy confirmed what Cornelis suspected all along. It was Jan who made her do it and he will pay for it with his life.
They’re sailing at dawn . . . There is no time to lose. Cornelis pulls the straps tight and carries the bag downstairs. He is traveling light. Upstairs, the closets groan with his clothes, the shed skins of his vanity. He has sloughed off the burden of years; he feels like a young man again. Sophia thinks that he is a boring old pedant. He will show her how wrong she is. He, too, is capable of an impulsive act, all in the name of love.
And nobody will punish him. This is his deepest secret, the secret that sets him free. For he, and he alone, knows that God does not exist. He, and he alone, will take responsibility for his actions. Cornelis has stepped into the modern world, a brave new era of human accountability. He walks past the Bible, lying open on the lectern, and closes it with a thud.
He makes his way down the steps into the kitchen. In the fireplace the embers still glow. The room smells of fried onions and tomcat. He approaches the half-curtained bed and holds out the candle to look inside. Willem and Maria lie together, sleeping. The fish seller’s rubbery lips are parted; he exhales hoarsely. Maria’s breath whistles in her nostrils. Between their faces is a tuft of dark hair; their daughter slumbers between them.
Cornelis feels a stab of pain. How contented they look. He is an intruder on their happiness. They have their baby; for them, all is well. Cornelis’s throat is dry; he can barely swallow. Already, before he has relinquished it, he is a stranger in his own home.
He leaves the note, and a banker’s draft, on the kitchen table.
I am going overseas. It may be for a long time. If something should befall me and I do not return, I leave this house to you and your daughter, for in the eyes of the world she is my heir. It is only we ourselves who know the truth. Keep it close to your hearts.
Please settle this payment on behalf of my wife’s family, for they are innocents in this affair. I wish you all happiness. Turn the paintings round and enjoy their beauty, for they shall outlast us all.
C. S.
The port never sleeps. It is ruled by the tides and they obey no clocks. Barrels are being unloaded from the fishing boats. Someone is whistling a tune Cornelis has not heard since he was a boy. A mongrel bitch, her dugs so heavy with milk that they drag on the ground, walks stiffly on bowed legs. We must engage a wet nurse. How humiliatingly he has been duped. All his wealth and education, to be hoaxed by a simple servant girl. The world has indeed been turned upside down.
Yet how sweetly they slumbered. His anger has disappeared; his resentment is all but gone. Maria has acted wickedly but Cornelis knows that no punishment awaits her; she can sleep soundly. In truth, the reunion with her sweetheart, the untangling of their misunderstanding, touched his heart. They will bring life back to those rooms; he feels like a woody old bush, old growth, cleared away to let in the sunshine. New shoots will grow in his space.
Cornelis thinks: a daughter has drifted in and out of my life; one blink and she has gone.
He feels strangely exhilarated. In the darkness he recognizes faces—Samuel Solomon, the Jewish cotton merchant, who stands by the quay watching bales being unloaded; the blind beggar for whom day and night are meaningless. This port is Cornelis’s home from home. The odor of the sea is in his nostrils; it is the smell of his wealth and of his working life. Like Willem, the ocean has delivered up his livelihood and now he will finally deliver up himself to her mercies. And when he has left, all this bustle will carry on as if he has never been a part of it at all.
The sky is flushed pink. Among the rigging he sees the tall masts of the Empress of the East. His wife and her lover will already be aboard. Cornelis has no compunction about killing Jan. It will take place when they have left land far behind; the waves will swallow up the evidence, for they have swallowed up worse secrets than this. Cornelis knows the captain well. The man’s silence can be bought for twenty florins; for forty florins more he will arrange for the deed to be done. Besides, he owes Cornelis a favor.
And when Jan has gone to his watery grave Cornelis will reclaim his wife and they will sail to Batavia together and live on his nutmeg plantation. Despite everything, he still loves her—look, he has given up everything for her. She will learn to love him because he has changed; he is no longer the man she married; he himself can no longer recognize that man. Anything, now, is possible.
Life is short; time is fleeting. Grasp it while you can, said the painter. And for once Cornelis has to agree with him.
Cornelis takes one last look at his beloved city, pearly in the dawn. The fog has lifted, the fog of his befuddled past; a thrilling and terrible dawn has broken. The clear blue skies of reason await him, and a new life with the woman whom he reclaimed once and whom he will reclaim again.
He buys his passage and boards the ship. He is only just in time. A few minutes later she weighs anchor and sets sail for the East.
66
Jan
Symptoms of tulip virus: Patterns of yellow discoloration (mosaics,
ringspots, mottles) are common. Cause: Sub-microscopicvirus particles in the sap of infected plants may be transmitted to healthy tissues by sap-feeding pests such as aphids, by nematodes or other soil-borne pests.
—ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, Encyclopaedia of Gardening
Early in 1637 the tulip market crashes. The High Court of Holland, appalled at the national hysteria, intervenes and overnight bulbs are declared worthless. Thousands of people are made destitute. They throw themselves into the canals; they deliver themselves up to the mercy of the charitable institutions; in churches throughout the land they bitterly repent their folly. This curious episode sinks back into the margin of history, an episode that testifies to man’s greed and the fickleness of fate. Yet it all stems from a love of beauty, a passion for flowers whose lives are even briefer than those who are in thrall to them. The fact that the most valuable of these blooms—the most spectacular mutations—are produced by a viral disease will be an irony discovered only in future years. If the predicants had known at the time, what sermons would they have thundered from their pulpits!
When men woke from their dream the blooms had withered but the paintings remained. Lovers, when parted, find solace in a portrait of their beloved. In centuries to come people will find balm in a beauty that once caused such suffering.
And Jan van Loos, through pain, will find greatness. You have to be courageous, my friend, said Mattheus. Only through pain will the beauty of the world be revealed. After losing Sophia he becomes a recluse. He rents another studio in his old neighborhood and devotes himself to his art. He specializes in vanitas paintings—canvases that show, through the humblest of objects, the transience of life. An onion— he often paints an onion—lies next to a sandglass, a broken bread roll, a skull. Food becomes a sacrament; a transcendental homeliness, like incense, infuses his work. Out of suffering he creates great art. And in many of his paintings there is a curved mirror, a wineglass or a silver jug. Reflected in these is not the painter, hard at work. It is a woman, in a cobalt-blue dress, with soft brown hair. Her mirrored image haunts his paintings but her identity will never be confirmed, though scholars will see a resemblance in the bold, passionate nudes of 1636, where the woman gazes with such candid love out of her frame.
She reappears in one of his masterpieces, now hanging in the Dresden Museum. It shows a still life: an onion lies on a porcelain plate, its papery skin half peeled. Cards and dice are scattered on the tablecloth, and an open book reveals a page in Latin script: We played, we gambled, we lost.
In a vase is one tulip: white petals blushed with pink, like the flushed cheek of a woman who has just risen from her lover’s bed. On a petal there is a dewdrop. The woman’s image is reflected there. You need a magnifying glass to see her; she appears to be trembling . . . like a dewdrop, her time is short before she vanishes forever.
67
Maria
Little boats should keep the shore; larger ships may venture more.
—JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632
Maria, in her past life, dreamed that she changed places with her mistress. She dressed up in her blue jacket, with the white fur trim, and paraded in front of her own reflection. At night she dreamed that her mistress was drowned and that she, Maria, inherited this great house on the Herengracht and swam with her children through its rooms.
Now her dreams have been realized. Others have died so that she can live. Sophia has been missing for six years now, presumed drowned. Mr. Sandvoort never returned. In all but name the house now belongs to Maria. She has two children, both girls, and her husband, Willem. It is 1642 and they are sitting for their portrait in the library with the checkerboard floor.
Through the colored panes of glass the sun shines on Willem, in his black jacket and breeches, and on the ivory luster of Maria’s dress. Her daughters Sophia and Amelia sit, straight-backed, on chairs. Their King Charles spaniel lies at their feet. They, too, crave immortality and will hang in the Mauritshuis in The Hague: Unknown Man, his Wife and Daughters by Jacob Haecht 1620–1675 (Signed and dated 1642). For Jacob has become a fashionable portrait painter, noted for the meticulous detail of his brushwork. He will never be a great master; he will not scale the heights of Jan van Loos, but he will please his public.
As he paints them, Jacob asks: “What happened to the old man—Mr. Sandvoort?”
“Who knows?” replies Willem. “All we’ve heard are rumors.” News from the East Indies takes months to travel and is notoriously unreliable. “Some say he died of the yellow fever.” Willem, who has put on weight and become a little pompous, flicks a speck of dust off his jacket.
“I don’t believe it,” says Maria. “I heard that he set up home with a beautiful native girl.”
“Who told you?” asks Willem.
“Just someone I met.” She pauses, relishing their attention. “It’s said that he still lives with her in sinful pleasure, for he has never solemnized their union—in fact, he has never set foot inside a church.”
“Is that true?” asks Willem.
“I believe it,” replies Maria. “Doesn’t he deserve some happiness?”
“Don’t smile,” says Jacob. “I’m painting your mouth.”
He paints for a while in silence. The girls shift in their chairs; their dresses rustle. The dog has fallen asleep.
“I painted him six years ago,” says Jacob. “I painted most of him. Do you remember?”
Maria nods.
Jacob looks at the little girl. “His daughter resembles him, do you not agree?”
Maria grins. “You think so?” She bends down to stroke the little girl’s hair. “I don’t.”
“Sit still please,” says Jacob sharply.
68
Jan
The days of man are but as grass: for he flourisheth as a flower of the field. For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone: and the place thereof shall know it no more.
—PSALM 103
It is a blustery morning in September 1648, rinsed and shiny. Jan is walking to the market to buy some food. His kitchen is empty; he has been shut away in his studio, working like a man possessed, and has lost all track of time.
Emerging into the dazzling day he blinks in the sunshine. Stall holders flap their arms at scavenging dogs; hawkers shout their wares. A chestnut mare plants her hind legs apart, raises her tail and releases a torrent of streaming urine onto the cobblestones. How sturdily alive she looks! Her shiny haunches, damp with sweat; her flaring nostrils. She snorts, groaning with satisfaction, as she relieves herself. This is her life; there is no other. The horse is untroubled by fears of mortality. Mankind’s hopes are fragile glass and life is therefore also short . Little does she care.
Jan himself has no fear of death. Twelve years earlier, when Sophia died, he, too, ceased living in this world. He closed that door and opened another, a world he creates in his paintings. This is his reality, the stillness of his still lifes, and when he steps outside it startles him to see people bustling to and fro, going about their business. It still surprises him, after so many years, that the world carries on so heedlessly without her. Babies are born; piles are driven into the mud of the Damplein for the erection of the great Town Hall of Amsterdam, which will be a monument to civic pride and a cause of wonderment in all who will behold it.
Sophia’s life has been stilled but she still inhabits his heart. He talks to her and feels her holding her breath to listen. Her immortality lives within him and within his paintings, for he paints her reflection trapped in the curve of a glass. She has a life, still, in his still lifes. And he has no fear of death for he has survived what, at the time, felt like extinction. In fact, he will live to be sixty-one ( Jan van Loos 1600–1661 ), the span of this Golden Age, and his greatest work has yet to be painted. On this windy day in September, however, he is simply struck by the sunlight on the metallic scales of the heaped-up herrings. How could they be dead when they gleam so brightly? Does it matter that they have died if, when an artist paints
them, they will become alive again?
Jan stops at a stall and buys an apple. Later, he remembers this moment. He bites into the apple; the juice spurts. Nearby lie some spilled entrails; a crow stands there, one claw planted on them while it pulls the glistening guts with its beak. Jan is remembering when he was a boy, how he watched his father beating silver into shape, its brightness glinting in the murky workshop. He thinks of the twin sheens of fish and silver platter, and how he misses his father, who has been dead for many years.
As he munches the apple he is aware of gray shapes moving across the square. They move like shadows for they are nuns from the convent and have but a spectral existence, like a lost memory of their own lives, in this world. There is one Catholic convent in the center of the city, a closed order impenetrable to outsiders. Behind its walls the nuns have delivered themselves up to God; they spend their days in prayer. When they emerge their faces are veiled in black.
One nun walks a little apart from the others. There is something familiar about the way she moves—her tallness, her hesitancy. In the wind, her habit billows about her slender body.
He gazes at her. She is separated from him by the milling shoppers. She stops dead. She stands transfixed, like a startled deer, her hand gripping the crucifix that hangs around her neck.
At that moment the wind blows the veil from her face. Just a glimpse—that is all. Then she veers away and slips through the crowd.
Jan stands there, frozen. A hand is thrust in front of his face. “May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
Jan fumbles in his purse. Can he believe his eyes? Does she live still; could it be possible? Or has dreaming her into life, into paint, so possessed him that he can no longer separate art from illusion?
While scrabbling for coins Jan’s attention is distracted. When he looks up, the nun is gone. This gray, hooded figure—a ghost, in her final disguise—she has disappeared, as if she is simply a figment of his imagination.