The Anatomy Lesson Read online

  “Adriaen.” I said his.

  Then the hangman covered Adriaen’s face with a hood.

  CONSERVATOR’S NOTES, TRANSCRIBED FROM DICTAPHONE

  Painting diagnosis: Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632

  Earlier, I noted something that intrigued me when I began to observe the right hand of the corpse with a scope. I described it as an “uneasy transition between Adriaen’s right hand and the body” with wrinkles of paint occurring together with a few premature cracks. This is the hand that is not the focus of Tulp’s dissection (the one that has gotten so much attention from the medical community over the years) but the other one. I requested a copy of the 1978 radiograph from De Vries and his team and I have that in my hands now.

  Over lunch, in the cafeteria, I gave the X-ray a great deal of my attention. I observed something no one seems to have noted so far in previous examinations of this X-ray or of the painting: remarkably, the underpainting of the right hand is a very unusual shape. It is not a full hand but a shape that is more like a curve, like a very large backward C. This seems to indicate that Rembrandt originally painted in a hand that is not quite a hand. This presents two possibilities, it seems to me: it could either be a kind of sketch for the hand, or it could actually be a depiction of a severed limb. That is, a hand that was amputated. A stump.

  I’m quite surprised we overlooked this in the 1978 study, because it’s right there, and quite easy to see, now that I’m looking at it.

  Could this just be a way that he sketched out a location for the hand before adding more detail later? I suppose that’s possible. But I’ve never seen him use that technique in other paintings. His underpaintings are typically quite detailed, especially in these younger years when he seems to never want to waste any paint. When he does change things using his pentimenti, he typically moves objects or figures left or right or up or down—he makes some of his characters in this portrait lean one way at one point and then adjusts their position in the frame later, to make way for other figures, like Colevelt. But I have never seen him sketch out a hand like a club and then paint in a more detailed hand later. Nor a foot. Nor a head, for that matter. Rembrandt didn’t sketch on canvas. He painted. And when he made a mistake, he went back and dabbed in pigments until he corrected his painting.

  I am almost certain there is something else going on here. Perhaps what Rembrandt was trying to paint was indeed a stump. Because now we know that the dead man he painted was a thief, a recidivist thief. And in the seventeenth century, thieves were often punished with the amputation of their right hands. Corporal (corporeal) punishment. The next step is to check this justitieboek to see if he was in fact punished in this barbaric way.

  Fascinating, really. It could explain why there is so much discussion of the left hand being quite distended. The right hand is quite a bit shorter, and it appears that the distal area of the hand has been painted over the shorter limb.

  I am now taking a very small pigment sample from the right hand area, to examine it under a binocular microscope. I am also taking a small pigment sample from the overpainted section. I’ll have to discuss this all with Claes when he comes in this evening. It could be a very exciting finding, indeed!

  I committed my first crime with my first breath, Lord Schout: I killed my mother as I came wailing into the world. My father never made mention of my name day nor year of birth, nor season. He only cursed that day and me with it, pronouncing me sinner from birth.

  Yes, Lord Schout. I will tell you all. I will speak volumes. Only don’t let them haul me up with weights, sire. I will tell you all you want to know. I will sing, Lord Schout, I will dance for you. Just do not haul me up.

  Yes, Your Honor, it is true what it says in your papers. I’m a Leidener. I grew up in a cottage on the Rhine between a corn mill and the Kerkgracht Bridge. Father was a pious Calvinist by temperament and a sheath maker by profession. He supplied the civic militias with leathers for sabers and falchions, and holsters for daggers and muskets, and did trade with sword smiths and munitions men. He sometimes did handiwork on saddles, too.

  We got scraps of hides from the butcher and the tannery, and irons from a nearby smith. The work of a sheath maker is only to craft the leathers, and it is not too hard for a child to learn. Since as early as I can remember he took me daily to the shop, where he taught my tiny hands to smooth the leathers, press in studs, and sew on straps.

  While other children went to school, I was sent out into the woods to harvest oak and beech bark, or crack beechnuts for their tannins. We used that to soften the harder bits of leather. My father did the carving—fancy patterns all along the length of the scabbard—and then I’d sew the seams and add the belt loops. At the end, we’d add our shop’s brand, a beechnut coming out of its husk. The nut is shiny and smooth, but the husk is a prickly burr. It was a simple brand, and he used a fire-heated iron for it—he’d leave it in the stove until it was red as a poker and then press the brand into the leather. I used to love the smell of that burning hide.

  Inside the shop and out, my father was as devout and workmanlike as a monk, and unless instructing me in skills of the trade, he uttered no words. I would be grateful if a yawn or a sigh passed his lips to break our terrible monotony. We toiled side by side all the day, all the week, year upon year, as I grew from a small sickly boy to a large able boy, his apprentice in every trade but happiness. I was a dutiful servant, never fighting, never swearing, never throwing bones or running off to the town square as the other boys did; and on Sundays I followed two paces behind him on his weekly pilgrimage to church.

  I should have known no love at all in my life had it not been for Flora, the girl who lived in the house with the mill. She was as wild as the red corn poppy that grew among the heath. From my window I watched her in the yard. I saw her putting out saucers of milk for the cats. I saw her in the shade of a juniper tree.

  She did not live under the heavy hand of Calvinism. Flora’s father’s only religion was beer sucking, and he’d take to bed midday in the mill’s hayloft. Because of his idleness, the mill had long ceased to spin and the grindstone never felt a chaff of wheat. Flora’s mother, whose fingers were too fat to ply the Leiden linen trade, earned her family’s way by hiring out studs. From break of dawn until lantern lit, she led the bull from town to town and farm to farm, leaving Flora to wash the linens and tend the garden and the farm.

  If my father tried vainly to convince me of God, here at last was evidence. In church, if the scriptures mentioned Mary, I imagined Flora. And when I was told to consider the sins of the Magdalene, there I imagined Flora, too. But when Flora passed my windows and I saw the golden flicker of her sunlit hair, I dropped my eyes in piety as my father taught me to do.

  Father believed in the strictest doctrine of predestination. When Maurits of Orange came, Father quickly fell behind the stadtholder’s crusade to rid the Low Countries of the waardgelders, and as soon as the more pious Calvinists in his congregation took up arms, he was the first to call for outright war. He set out to supply their forces as a sutler, and planned to pack up from our home and leave me behind to tend the sheath-making shop.

  The thought of living in that house alone, running the workshop without him, was frightening, in spite of his cruelty. I tried to prevent him, pleading, “But, Father, I will miss you if you leave.” He only raised an eyebrow and told me a man does not use his tongue to stir honey.

  The night before he left, we sat down to sup together for the very last time. Before our peasants’ feast, I opened my mouth to speak and in a quavering, cracking voice, I started out slowly. “What is the use of fighting any war if we are predestined to our fates?”

  His desired silence broken as a pebble disturbs the clarity of a windless lake, he steadied his gaze upon my face. “Say you something, my son?” he asked. “I didn’t summon you to speak.”

  “I only said …” I hesitated but then mustered the courage to go on: “If God had predestined us to ou
r fates, then it makes no difference whether anyone is a Gomarist, Arminian, Calvinist, or Libertine, goose or swine.”

  Anger bloomed in Father’s cheeks. “Do you doubt our cause?”

  That was all I ventured. My lips, which were now clenched to save me from my own destruction, could not utter even “yes.” I looked back to my plate.

  But my father, now stirred, would not let it rest. He repeated his question, this time strengthened by my timidity. “Would you have the Libertines in our church? Open the dikes to let flood in all those papists from the south?”

  I focused my gaze even harder on my plate.

  “Speak, son. You are so bold as to challenge our morality. I will hear it.”

  I knew he would goad me until I would speak again, so I tried.

  “It’s only …” I had worked on my logic for some time. “If we are destined each one for heaven or hell, what is the use of this war? Each of us will learn God’s will by our own hand.”

  My father’s expression was like that of a man kicked by his own horse. Then, with the full force of his wrath, he smacked me across the jaw, knocking me from my stool to the floor.

  He stood above me and spoke with anger, masked by clarity and reason. “God forgive me, but now I will repent. Does that take away the sting of the blow? Does it raise you off the floor? If this is your belief, Son, tell me: Shall I repent for this act as your papists do? Or is it better had I not raised my fist to you at all?”

  My father had never before touched me in the spirit of anger. He had almost never touched me at all. This blow rang through my whole body like a sudden revelation, and I did nothing but let tears fall from my eyes and run along my cheeks.

  “What is better?” my father wanted to know. He seemed to think we were having a discussion.

  I had no answer for him. I had never tried to argue with him before and now I knew why. I became aware of the taste of something like copper in my mouth. I moved my tongue and tasted it, and when my tongue roamed further, it found a tooth moving freely in the gum.

  “Answer, lad,” he said, kicking me in the ribs. “Does it hurt any less if I repent?”

  I spat out some of the blood. “Repent not,” I told him from where I lay. Now I wanted him to kick me. “Your place in heaven or hell is secure, Father. Kick me, if you must.”

  It was the only time in our lives together that I spoke back this way. And it was the only time in our lives he obeyed an order from me.

  He kicked again. “Cannot keep shop, cannot carve or sew. Is this what God gives me in exchange for my Ilja? Why has God cursed me? I am a pious man. I have been a soldier in God’s army.”

  I felt nothing for my father then. Not hatred and not love, and certainly not pity. I did desire to weep but gritted my teeth instead because I saw for the first time how much he hated me.

  I won’t recount all that did befall me at my father’s evil whim that night, for every man knows the consequences of betraying a lord and master. But I will tell you that he used the tools of his trade to sear the memory of my disobedience into my flesh. He heated our brand in the stove and pressed that beechnut into my back. I do not remember when, exactly, it came to that, but I recall his words: “I might be gone a long time,” he said, “but now I’ll know you when I see you next.”

  By morning, I had succumbed to the force of his argument. I wasn’t dead, but I could feel every inch of my body. I had been beaten and branded by my own father, but it was human contact and that was something for which I very strongly craved.

  I awoke to the sound of his sobbing, as he crouched beside my cot and stroked my head. I let him cry, and didn’t reveal that I was awake, for I preferred to see him at least manly in his rage. Then he left to wage his war. I didn’t open my eyes until I heard his footsteps fade on the path.

  Flora came to me for the first time that day, with her basket of bandages and herbs. She had heard it all from the mill house next door, and she’d waited until my father left me. She came and fed me, cleaned my wounds, dressed my cuts. She was the only person who ever touched me with gentleness, that Flora.

  My father went to join the Gomarists and I went to join the tankardists at the local tavern. As the year wore on, I spent more and more time there and I became a lax servant to the shop. Although I knew my new path was ruinous, life among the beer suckers, pickpockets, and thieves was far easier than attempting to become an upright man.

  Those days, my Flora was very far from me, because she had become a slave to her father, who had finally given up his old religion, only to become one of the most austere Calvinists of our town, though her mother was a Lutheran. Poor Flora wasn’t allowed to walk the circumference of her yard, unless she was fetching water or taking the washing to the canal. I saw her only from afar, now wearing a servant’s scarf over her beautiful straw-colored hair.

  But the more time I was without my father and without Flora, the worse I felt. For, among these damned souls, I was only securing my own doom. And yet, I reasoned, was it not unavoidable anyway?

  On the third anniversary of my father’s last night, the Leiden overseer posted a bill on my door, claiming the shop would be closed. I had failed to pay property dues. It was the fault of my idleness and depravity. I tried to find a man in town who would help me, some good friend of my father’s—a former client or customer who had relied on him through the years—but none would help. A week later, they came and boarded up the shop. They posted another note on the door naming me and calling me a bankrupt and a coward.

  On that same date, I got word from my father that he would be returning home to Leiden to work alongside me again, this time to take up the cobbler’s trade. The trade in warlike goods was ended, he said, and he wanted to run a civilian shop.

  I didn’t know what to do, Your Honor. I dared not stay to show my father my ignominious face! I could not stand before the shop and see his view of me confirmed as he read the slanderous bill posted on the door.

  I threw a few goods into a sack that night and ran as long as my strong young legs would take me; and when I could not run any longer, I walked until I was out of breath; and when I could not walk without limping, I slowed my gait; and when I could not walk at all, I crawled. At last, I found myself in a forest of stunted trees and there, bleary-eyed and tired to sightlessness, I cried until my eyes were void of tears, put my head down on a log, and fell into the arms of sleep.

  I was awakened, just before dawn, by dreams of such a terrible nature that they sent my soul fleeing from rest: I was on the shop table, and my father was standing over me, holding a knife over my chest. I was immobile and unable to speak or to move and defend myself. I could see and hear my father, who was lecturing me about human frailty and moral turpitude. He spoke at great length, but I didn’t understand the words he was saying, muffled as they were as if through a muslin cloth. Other men entered the room and looked on as Father used shears to slice into my breast. The men were awed by his actions, but they did nothing to protect me. They seemed to agree that I had sinned, and that was enough to justify this living torture.

  I bolted awake to find my head swarming with black ants. The creatures were everywhere about my face, in my hair, within my ears, inside my nostrils, and climbing across my tongue. I soon saw the cause of this pestilence. In the darkness of the previous night I had made as my pillow a log that was rotted and emptied by vermin. And behind this log there was the body of a gray hair who seemed to have been taken by the black death. In the weariness and torment of the previous night, I’d lain, unawares, with a corpse. The insects had taken me for her companion and were already trying to make a meal of my flesh.

  Once I’d shaken off the ants and the chills, I looked at this gray hair for a while. She was a curious cousin, curled into herself like a ball, her hands touching her face. Beside her was a metal pail, filled with sand. I didn’t know where she had hailed from or where she was bound, for I could think of no beach near this forest, and concluded that she was a crone who
se bucket of water had turned to sand.

  All of this I took for a dark omen for my journey, but I didn’t turn back to Leiden, for my greater fear was of my father’s wrath. I searched the old woman’s body, found two stivers in the pocket of her smock, and went fast upon my way.

  They tell me I fainted when the deed were done. When I awoke, I were lying in the wet mud, the boatman kneeling over me, holding my hand. The boy were saying, “Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am,” over and over, like a babe cries.

  I moved my hand to touch my belly. All could go like that, all at once, everything. I didn’t feel him there at first and I could not move, the fear were so tight in me. But then I felt movement—a hard kick up under my ribs. Once, then twice, and a third time and I cried, laughing, too. My boy. He were still there. We were still here.

  Adriaen were gone. The scaffold, the guards, everything. He had seen us, and he knew, but now they’d taken him away again. The noose had been cut from the rope, the hangman were gone. The sky were as dark as midnight. It seemed like black night, but it were still day.

  There were people standing over me, peering down to see my face. “She’s carrying the Kid’s child,” I heard one of them say.

  “She shouldn’t be here, not in this cold,” said another.

  “Get her somewhere warm,” said another.

  “Let her rot out here,” said someone else.

  I felt Father van Thijn’s purse. I drew a few coins into my fingers and held them out. I said, “I have money. Take me home. Please take me home. We have to go home.”

  “But, ma’am,” the boy said, “ma’am, Father van Thijn said we should claim the body. For his Christian burial. If he didn’t live. That’s what Father van Thijn said.”

  His small hands found my fingers again. He made me think on Carel and how the two of us would go on.

  The boatman helped me raise myself onto my elbows. He said, “They carted his body away.”