Rembrandt's Mirror Page 15

  ‘I can’t do both at the same time, you know,’ he said, crouching down next to me.

  I grunted, in despair.

  Shielding his face with his hands, he said, ‘Please don’t hit me again.’

  He sat down on the floor opposite me, still behaving as if we’d had nothing but polite conversation. And then, like a feeble idiot, I burst into tears. He put his hand on my back.

  ‘Why are you not angry with me?’ I sobbed.

  ‘What? You mean because you felt like hitting me?’

  ‘I did hit you!’

  ‘Only because I was too slow.’

  ‘No, you let me!’ I cried.

  ‘I think you needed to,’ he said. ‘After all, you didn’t get a chance to finish off Geertje.’

  He was almost grinning. It was not funny.

  Then he said, ‘You know, you are not the first person to get angry when someone hurts you.’

  ‘Nobody hurt me,’ I protested.

  He pointed at the bruises on my arms and came to sit next to me, inviting my body towards him with his arms. I gave in, letting him take my weight. I felt the warmth, the shape of him. And yet how alone I was and soon would be again. People like him did not bother with people like me. I pushed his arms away but he held on. I drew a breath and then another, but the air imparted nothing to my lungs. I wished for solitude. To be alone was to be safe.

  ‘Rika,’ he said, ‘it’s not so bad.’

  No one had ever called me this. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘let me go.’

  He finally opened the girdle of his arms.

  ‘I . . . I can manage,’ I said, pushing out the words.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  I moved to sit away from him but he reached out again and stroked my arm in sympathy. And so, despite myself, I was made flesh again. He shuffled closer until I felt his knee against my thigh and his care. My head grew heavy and rested on his shoulder. I pulled his arms around me like a cloak.

  He brushed loose strands of hair from my face and then I felt him bending down and then his lips kissing my cheek. I touched my face against his beard, wishing for his lips.

  They found me, as if he knew, first soft and unsure, then without hesitation, plunging me into a jewelled darkness – a sensation so vivid I almost withdrew from our communion. But I stayed and let it reign – and in the precious dark, I sensed like the chime of a distant bell the approach of bliss.

  But how could I, so undeserving of grace, how could I abide in bliss? To find such joy in flesh was wrong. And with that thought my lips had turned to clay. He let go of me and I of him. I told myself that it was good I’d called a halt to lust (if it had indeed been lust).

  He leaned back a little so he could look at me but I glanced down, unable to face him.

  ‘You are right, you are the reason I am sending Geertje away. I have no design as to how things will be from now on, but they could not have stayed as they were. Change is the way, no point opposing it.’

  After that he went downstairs and bid me stay in the studio.

  After a while the pupils started to arrive. It was now late morning and Dirck had brought in a bust from the kunstkammer as a drawing exercise. He told me, ‘You are to stay here with us.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Making arrangements.’

  I watched them gather around the bust and start to draw. Rembrandt finally returned a few hours later and told me to go downstairs and prepare lunch. That was all he said.

  I wondered if Geertje was really gone so I checked her room. The few personal things she had possessed were no longer there. The shelves were empty, the bed was tidy and made up. I wondered about Titus. Rembrandt must have sent him to school. I hoped he at least got to say goodbye to her.

  I set about preparing lunch the way Geertje would have done.

  Winter

  I did not stop to have a day off until two months after Geertje’s departure. The Christkindl had come and gone, or rather had not bothered to stop by our house. I had no way of knowing if servants would customarily receive a gift from their employer, but was glad anyway to be spared the embarrassment.

  It was the first week of January 1648 and I went for a walk. It was freezing cold but soon the tulips would be poking out of the earth in the countless private gardens that dotted the city. The owners would have to keep a watchful eye on their pricey flowers, for they were a thief’s favourite. I had no particular destination in mind but after a while I became aware that I was heading for the watery woodland.

  The last months had passed quickly. There had been a great deal to learn. Looking after Titus had been both easier and harder than I’d anticipated. Easier, because he seemed to like me, and harder, because he required so much of a warm sort of attention that I was not used to supplying.

  As for Rembrandt, at first I’d been in a continuous state of apprehension as to what would happen with Geertje gone. But absolutely nothing did.

  We spent a great deal of time together going over matters of a practical nature and Rembrandt treated me with a constant but distant kindness. No mention was ever made of Geertje, not once, as if her name alone could summon demons.

  He taught me how to order supplies and keep the books, and said I should approach him whenever I needed to. However, if a client came while he was working I was to send them away. When I went to him, he answered my questions still holding his brush and palette. At lunchtimes we went through bills and accounts. I noticed that large sums were spent at auction houses, just as Geertje had said.

  So here I was happily ensconced in my new role, feeling safer with him than during all the months she’d been in the house and in his bedroom.

  I’d reached the boundary of shrubs and undergrowth. Now I had to find the way into the forest. Last time I was here something unthinkable had occurred; something so different from anything I’d ever known that I doubted my own memories.

  I looked back at the road by which I’d come. How silly to imagine that he’d follow me a second time. I continued along the edge of the forest. How naked those trunks looked, like corpses. I was quite convinced that they would never sprout again. I could not see a way into the forest. It was fringed by thorny, bone-white bushes, twigs tightly interlaced. I took a deep breath and pushed my way through. A lone bird sounded a warning at my intrusion. I continued further, hoping to find the stream. The frost-hard earth did not yield under my foot and the forest was wreathed in eerie silence, without so much as a rustle of a leaf. But then something – gurgles. The stream! It was frozen over entirely in places but in others it was rimmed by brittle ice shelves. Spring would come. Soft grass and flowers would grow again. I wondered who I would be by then. Change was inevitable, Rembrandt had said. Already I was but a distant relation of the girl who’d kissed him in the studio, who’d learned that rapture resides in the smallest of things. The man I saw every day, had he changed too, like the seasons, to and fro? The moment Geertje had left the house we’d all become like fish in a dark, murky sea – bored and sullen.

  I smothered these pointless thoughts. I’d have to try to go back to being that unknowing girl again. I could still make friends through church as I’d intended when I first arrived. I gave several of the ice shelves a good kick, enjoying the sight of the little pieces floating downstream, and then made my way back to town.

  As I passed by the harbour area I recognized Petronella. She wore exactly the same clothes as last time.

  I quickened my steps and walked towards her, shouting, ‘Petronella, it’s me.’

  She said nothing until I was closer and then admonished me. ‘What are you doing, announcing to half the town that you know me?’

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said, forgetting all my manners.

  She rolled her eyes and drew her thick eyebrows together but then her mien softened. ‘Come to the third house in the Huitersgracht at one hour after midnight. The door will be open. Make sure nobody sees you enter.’

  ‘But it’s after curfew
,’ I said.

  ‘It can’t be helped. If you are careful and don’t take a light no one will see you.’

  I nodded, not feeling reassured in the slightest.

  *

  In order to merge with the night I’d wrapped a thick dark shawl around my head and face, feeling a bit like a tulip thief. Out of the shadows, a drunken man staggered towards me. I stepped to the side but he mirrored my move, barring my progress. My heart was beating a tattoo in my chest while I stared at him. He said, ‘Please wait, I just wanted to . . .’

  ‘Do not block my way!’ I said.

  He stepped aside and I quickly walked on, mightily satisfied that I’d seen off the drunkard. I peered around each street corner to avoid stumbling across one of the night watchmen who would throw me into a cell.

  I found the house and entered. A door was ajar at the top of a set of stairs. I pushed it open. The ample figure of Petronella filled the only armchair in the room. She got up with surprising ease, closed the door and motioned for me to sit down in the chair she had vacated. She sat on the bed, which creaked under her weight, and said, ‘You look like you’ve been through the wringer; what’s the trouble?’

  ‘There is no trouble.’ I glanced at the innocuous-looking bed.

  ‘Have you become his bedfellow?’ she asked.

  ‘What? No!’

  ‘Good, so he’s got some other woman?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll hold my tongue and let you speak,’ she said, grinning.

  ‘He’s thrown out Geertje, the housekeeper. He used her in his bed but sometimes I wondered if it was the other way round.’

  ‘A lusty one, was she? A born whore. So why did he throw her out?’

  I said nothing.

  She looked at me and said, ‘I can see why.’

  ‘No, no, he’s not interested in me.’

  She raised her eyebrow. ‘Is that why we are talking? You want him to be interested?’

  ‘No,’ I protested loudly. ‘It is the opposite. I feel revulsion. I have had unchaste feelings.’

  ‘That’s not the opposite.’

  I ignored her and continued, hoping that sooner or later the purpose of my visit would become clear both to her and to me. ‘I don’t understand how you can do what you do and not be afraid of God’s punishment. The devil fuels our lust. We must be chaste or burn in hell for our sins.’

  ‘How do you know that’s the truth?’ she said.

  ‘Your question is blasphemous.’

  She was calm as a catkin. ‘Have you ever wondered how it is possible that there are Anabaptists, Remonstrants, Counter-Remonstrants, Catholics, Calvinists, Quakers, Jews, Mennonites and they all say that different things are true? They cannot all be right, so how do you know any of it is true?’

  I could not think of a suitable reply. It was odd to see her sitting on the bed, looking so coarse and yet she spoke with such eloquence and education. How far she must have fallen.

  She continued, ‘Who is God more likely to forgive, the whore who is starving and has to make a living, or the man of means who pays her and commits the sin for his pleasure?’

  I considered this; she hardly looked like starvation was a problem.

  She studied my face. ‘Have you felt desire?’

  I could feel my colour rise and this seemed answer enough for her.

  ‘So have I,’ she said, ‘a long time ago.’ She was still looking at me intently. ‘What did you do when you felt it? Did you feed the fire?’

  I thought of the kiss in the studio many weeks ago. ‘No, I put it out.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘But some fire is necessary – remember we keep one going in the hearth.’

  I was growing irritated. ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘You’ve resolved to keep putting out the flame in you, but it’s God’s flame too. You’re stifling the very life in you.’

  I looked at her and glimpsed how she must have been, when she herself still loved. But what of her warnings that I must not make the mistake she made and fall pregnant? Where was the sense in her contradictory counsel?

  She spoke again. ‘You’d better decide if you want to be a whore or a virgin.’

  ‘I want to be neither,’ I said.

  ‘Then you’ll have to be something of your own making, but most people won’t see you for who you are; they can only think in terms of what they know. To them you will be either virtue or vice.’

  ‘What do you see when you look at me?’ I asked.

  She studied me again. ‘I’ll show you what I see. Go and lie on the bed.’ I was frightened of her now. She had something to prove and I might merely be the means to prove it. But I was far too curious. So I lay down on the quilted bed.

  She spoke quietly. ‘Loosen your limbs until you sink into the bed.’

  Tiredness crept up on me with a softness.

  ‘Now imagine a man coming through the door. A man you like.’

  There he was, standing in the doorway wearing his painting coat. I could even smell him.

  She continued. ‘He’s walking towards you, sits down next to you. Can you feel his warmth? He lies down beside you and kisses you. He goes to lie on top of you.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to play your game.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, genuinely puzzled. ‘Don’t you want to study the flame? We’re only making a little fire. It’s quite safe.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I said.

  ‘What is it then?’

  Something was bursting out of me – I did not know what I was saying but the words came anyway. ‘I want something more, something brighter, a shining light that pierces the heavens.’

  She laughed, walked over to the bed and put her arms around me. I thought this strange but I returned her embrace, my bosom against hers. Then she put her hand on my heart. I felt a growing warmth inside. I had not been held for a long time. I hugged her closer. Her hand was still there on my heart, on my breast. Her touch changed. Her hand enveloped my breast. I stayed against better wisdom, a sensation between my legs keeping me there, a flame, first soft then violently alight. She pressed my flesh the more, causing a throbbing that spilled into an ache, reaching up deep inside me.

  She let go of me and went back to her chair. ‘There,’ she said. ‘There’s more colour in your cheeks now. That was lust, my dove, perhaps not so bright as to pierce the heavens but still it’s what keeps you and the world breathing. The church, remember, is full of withered old men. Now, time to go. I’m expecting a man who wants some of that.’

  ‘But what about you?’ I wanted to say, for I remembered that she felt nothing, but she quickly ushered me out.

  I staggered back home, in a state not much different from the other drunks and no closer to knowing what I’d wanted to ask her, let alone what the answer was.

  In the Depth of Winter

  He’d been looking at me for quite a while before I realized I’d pulled a strand of hair out from under my cap and was winding it around my finger. I let go of it. He smiled with a kind of curiosity. Titus was not back yet from school so Rembrandt and I were at lunch on our own. I noticed that his beard was made up of many different colours, including red. The morning sunlight brought them out.

  ‘Rika.’ It was the first time in a while he’d used the familiar form of my name. ‘I’ve been wondering whether Six is right and I should emulate Gouvert for at least an evening?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Not his tedious, tight-arsed brushwork but his panache for entertaining guests.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, thinking with terror what this would mean for me.

  ‘I’ve got an appetite for painting their faces again. So perhaps it’s time to get them to part with some guilders. Six thinks a dinner is a good idea.’

  I supposed it was – given that he was barely breaking even.

  ‘I thought we could come up with a list of fancy ingredients for a lavish banqu
et – curly cabbage looks nice, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure if it’s what you would serve to impress.’

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘Rose water – I heard you flavour cakes with it; that’ll have them guessing.’

  ‘Yes, that’s good,’ I said, and made a note.

  He took the pen and paper from me, brushing my skin accidentally. But could a hand capable of painting light reflections the size of pin pricks do anything unintentionally? He started making scribbles on the paper, then something recognizable, a mouse. This was also the hand that had touched Geertje and now it was innocently holding a pencil. There was no outward sign of its encounter with her flesh. Was the hand guilty of the sin? Now it transformed a white sheet of paper into a beautiful drawing and had it not painted many pictures of our saviour, inspiring devotion in anyone who laid eyes on them? Did virtue reside in his hand, his heart, his brain or any other part of his body? Surely the sin was attached to him – no more and no less – than the blessing of his ability to render God’s word in paint.

  ‘Don’t buy any parsnips – they taste like a dung beetle’s ball at this time of year.’

  No, I thought, the hand was just a hand. Dung beetles rolled dung, that’s what they did. I was a woman in possession of a body. Bodies responded to bodies, just as mine had when Petronella knew how to minister to it. If God had not wanted the dung beetle to roll dung, why did he give it a love for such dirty work?

  ‘You must get saffron, Rika, it sweetens rice and colours it the most golden of yellows.’

  There was a knock on the door; not a plain knock but a fist rapping with insolence. I ran upstairs to open it. Rembrandt followed; like me he must have thought something was wrong. A man dressed in black burst in past me with the words, ‘I must deliver this to the master in person.’

  ‘I am Rembrandt.’

  The man handed him the letter and walked straight out again. Rembrandt read the missive there and then, his face transfiguring itself into a fortress. ‘That greedy, never-satisfied sultana. She wants to milk me for more.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘The old carp, it says here, is suing me for breach of promise to marry her and this is the summons to the hearing. And,’ he took a deep breath, ‘she pawned the jewels – Saskia’s jewels. Remember she agreed to leave them unencumbered so they could pass to Titus, when at long last she relieves this good world of her presence. Of course a contract means nothing to her.’