The Anatomy Lesson Page 12

  I will not call myself a Michelangelo or a Leonardo, but I have cared to know how form follows function in the human frame. I visit the gibbet on the Volewijk to sketch the dead, rotting away in the rain and tossed by the harbor winds. I go to the Kalverstraat shambles to sketch the oxen hanging from hooks at slaughter. I often bring women from the bawdy Breestraat to our studio to sketch them in the nude. I am not squeamish or licentious, only interested in the truth of life, artistry.

  It was a tomblike room under that busy weigh house. On the other side of the great oak door, traders were doing business in grains and tobacco, gin and beer. But in that chamber where I’d met Fetchet, it was silent. The brick walls were slick and glistening with frost. There was a layer of frost on the windows, too, and so there emitted into the room a kind of shimmering, dusted light. It was colder inside than outside. My breath entered the air in great visible plumes.

  After Fetchet left me alone, I gazed on the covered form, a landscape of hills with soft and sharp inclines. A muslin cloth was draped over the body. Stretched out on that bed of ice, with only his bare feet and the crown of his head and hair exposed, it struck me that the corpse looked like a kind of holy figure. In fact, the whole scene called to mind Mantegna’s Lamentation.

  Do you know it? If you come to my studio someday, I will show you my reproduction. Lastman gave it to me to teach me chiaroscuro in fabric folds. It is a portrait of Christ in the tomb, his feet toward the viewer, his head at the top of the frame, the whole of his body foreshortened. Two disciples sit over him and weep, but you barely see them. What you see is a moment of actual serenity; his Christ is not dead but—at rest.

  I began to sketch with my charcoal. My thought was: start again with the mathematics, the correct proportions, the geometry, the width of his shoulders, the curve of the elbow and the length of the forearm.

  I reached out and touched the edge of the muslin and began to fold it down on one side. My hands grazed the surface of his skin, which had the most unlikely texture, like brittle parchment. I could sense the stiffness of his flesh under my fingers. I used discipline to steel myself. I reminded myself to note the color of his skin, to ascertain which minerals would combine to produce the ashen gray hue.

  I saw the other arm, with its stump, about which Fetchet had warned me. Where his hand had once been, his limb had been severed just above the wrist. The skin was pressed together like the end of a sausage casing. It was ugly and uneven and ragged where they’d sewn it back up. You could witness the cruelty of the executioner. I have seen a hand amputated once before. Or at least partially amputated. It was my brother’s hand. He’d crushed it in a mill accident. That was when I was young, when Gerrit had only just taken over the mill. It was a hard time for my family: an accident that led to many difficult years.

  I pulled back the muslin off the other hand. There it was, the thief’s left hand. It was not as rough as I’d expected. The skin was callused, but the fingers were long and even a little elegant. He had done work with his hands, but it was not a laborer’s hand. It had not plowed fields or fastened fishing lines, hauled up sails or sliced whale meat. It had wielded a knife, for eating, for tradesman’s work, for fights, perhaps. But it was not a coarse hand, and the nails were freshly cleaned.

  I sketched both arms. The stump and the hand. A study in contrast of the most gruesome sort. I stood and I drew, there in the frigid tomb, trying to prevent my thoughts from turning to Gerrit. I ran my charcoal along my pad and tried to capture these shapes. I drew from several angles, trying to get a feel for each form and a comparison of both forms. I felt sick and sad and hollowed out, but I went on drawing. I drew and I tried to prevent it, but my thoughts could not outrun the memories that these new sights so naturally evoked. One hand destroyed, another preserved.

  The morning of Gerrit’s accident was overcast, the sky thick and grainy, filtered through a thick haze. I had been given the chore of baling hay and carrying it to the cart. Even this light task had proved somewhat beyond my capacities, because instead of doing my work, I was standing just outside the barn, watching light play off the few aureate bundles I’d managed to bind so far.

  It’s funny how the mind collects details of certain sensations at particular moments: before something momentous is about to occur. Even now I can still remember the mesmerizing transition of color along each stalk, from a deep umber to weld, and the point where there was a pure spot of yellow ocher glowing hot like an oil lamp.

  I heard my brother shouting—not Gerrit, who had assigned me my chores, but Cornelis—and then I heard the thudding of feet along the path.

  “Get over here now. Now!”

  I grabbed a pitchfork and pretended to be impaling the innocent grain. “I’m doing it. I’m—”

  Cornelis was quickly upon me and his hand fell hard on my shoulder. “Drop that,” his voice as firm as that hand. “We need you. Come now.”

  I followed swiftly as Cornelis ran back toward the mill. As we got nearer we could both hear Gerrit’s voice, crying out in pain. As I got closer I heard that his words were incoherent, involuntary; and in between shouts he was yelping like a dog. It was an unbearable sound, and my first impulse was to turn back and disappear behind the haystacks.

  Instead, I slowed, switching to long striding steps, while Cornelis ran ahead, spurred on by the cries. “Don’t stop,” Cornelis yelled at me, running back and grabbing my arm and slinging me through the door of the barn: “Don’t be afraid. It’s only Gerrit.”

  It was pure fear that surged through me then, hot and insistent, pulsing through my spine. My teeth clenched, my chest violently tightened. Already everyone but my mother was gathered around Gerrit, who lay on the dirt floor of the mill covered in what at first appeared to be a caking of bronze plaster, cracked with hairline fissures like the surface of a fallen Roman bust.

  Then I understood that this effect was produced by my brother’s blood, caked with the tawny dust of the mill’s floor. And the blood, I saw, I came to see, was everywhere—on my father’s breeches and shoes, splattered across my sister Lysbeth’s dress and Machtelt’s torn smock, and, I saw, too, on Cornelis’s brow, an ominous spattering of uneven claret freckles.

  “Let’s get him up,” I heard my father say, the familiar voice, round and authoritative. “Rembrandt, come to this side and take that shoulder.” Once again I hesitated. When I tried to walk forward, my knees buckled as if I were steeped in marsh grass. “Now!” shouted my father so fiercely that my body finally obeyed.

  I moved toward Gerrit and leaned down to position myself behind his head, as instructed by my father. It was then that I saw with horrifying clarity the catastrophe that had been wrought of Gerrit’s hand. In the place of two of his fingers were mere stumps of flesh, bound up and crudely sealed by strips of fabric torn from Machtelt’s smock. I could see the matching pattern still, but the makeshift dressing was soon seeped through, bright crimson. It did not entirely cover the flesh, which looked as if it had been bit and chewed by a dog.

  I could not think, and I felt sick. I must simply follow orders and do as I was told to do. My father shouted, “Everyone, lift!” and I lifted Gerrit’s shoulder even as he writhed and cursed and screamed my name. I had moved faster this time than the others, and jerked him unnecessarily. Then everyone else lifted him and when we had him up, I managed to lean down and press my lips upon my brother’s brow and whisper, “It’s okay. We’re here. We’re all right here, Gerrit.”

  As we carried him toward the cart, everyone was shouting instructions. Cornelis was telling Machtelt where to find the doctor in town if he were not to be found immediately at his home. My father, who was carrying the bulk of Gerrit’s weight, was shouting toward the house at my mother, “Neeltje! Neeltje! Draw water from the well!” Lysbeth was weeping, saying something muffled through her tears.

  I leaned close and spoke into his ear, “We’re all here, Gerrit. We’re all here. None of us is going anywhere.” I said these words over and over
as we moved toward the cottage and the more I said them, the more my voice seemed false, unsure.

  “Hurry ahead,” said my father, after we managed to place Gerrit in the hay cart. Getting no response from my mother, my father called to Lysbeth, who would not be consoled. “Mother must have taken the horse to the river. Go and get the bucket and bring water from the well.”

  Lysbeth lifted her skirt and ran on ahead. Father called after her, “If the doctor doesn’t come in time, we’ll continue on to town. Wait for Mother and tell her what has happened. Say it slowly, Lysbeth. This news will not meet her well.”

  My sister made off like a sprite across the hill, quieted, at last, by her purpose. I saw for the first time then that she, too, was covered in my brother’s blood; it draped the back of her honey-colored dress.

  The doctor had not come. The wheel on our hay cart was broken. My father and Cornelis and I had to carry Gerrit the whole way to town. The doctor treated him with true kindness, but his diagnosis was as swift as a sentence: Gerrit had already lost at least two of his fingers, shorn by the teeth in the mill’s crank. To save the hand he would have to amputate one more, which had also been crushed beyond repair. If the hand healed as he hoped and did not become infected, Gerrit would still be able to use his index finger and thumb, the two vital digits for his work, but if the hand did not respond to surgery, the doctor would have to amputate even further, to the wrist.

  This somber news passed through our family quickly and everyone descended into silence to wait. Though ten men were called upon to hold Gerrit down for the first operation, I was excused from this task because I was too young. Instead, I sat at the wooden table in the adjoining room, my head hanging, while my mother wept, smoothing her hand through my curls, as if it were I who deserved comfort. I wished only that I were an older, stronger, more capable man, as I carved my initials, RHL, into the soft surface pulp of the bench.

  In the days that followed, our family home on the Weddesteeg was full of people coming and going, faces drawn with worry. From my room in the house, I could hear Gerrit’s soft moans through the starless nights, his turning in his bed. The hand had become infected and the pain burned up through his wrist. He begged the doctors to amputate it all to alleviate the terrible burning.

  I offered to be the one to change the dressing on his hand. My mother saw that I needed something to do, to help, and she allowed me that task. I would unwrap his bandage slowly, doing my best to prevent it from sticking at any single point. But I was never entirely successful at this. I would accidentally tug too hard or pull too fast and he would cry out in pain.

  Afterward, I tried to sit with my brother as much as he could bear my company. I told him, “You’re going to be okay. The pain will pass soon.” I didn’t know if this was true. Looking at the hand, I didn’t really believe it was true either.

  Sleeping in the house and hearing his moans gave me nightmares. Once everyone else had retired, I crept out to the barn. But though I was out of the house, I had to face in my solitude my own torturous purgatory.

  The fate of Gerrit’s hand, you see, seemed intimately linked with my own fate. Gerrit, the eldest, had been trained to run the mill, which had been passed down through three generations of Van Rijns.

  Cornelis was also capable of miller’s work, but my brothers Willem and Adriaen had already pursued other trades. I had only just begun my apprenticeship with Jacob van Swanenburgh. I would be wanted back in only a few days to continue helping him with a large Italian-style painting of the punishments of hell.

  If Gerrit couldn’t run the mill, and Cornelis or Willem had to take over, I might be asked to suspend my apprenticeship. I thought my mother might ask me to come home for her comfort, for I was her youngest, and if she wanted that, I would of course oblige. That, too, would make my continued cultivation as a painter under Van Swanenburgh impossible.

  Every night, my brother let me change his dressing. I was not a great nurse to him, but at least it was something I could do. You will think me very tender and caring when I tell you this. But I was only partially concerned about Gerrit’s hand. Man is driven by his own interests, as you know, and those are often centered on one’s self. The thoughts of my own future would not leave my mind. Throughout the days of Gerrit’s recovery from the amputation of his fingers, I was hardly able to sleep at all, even in the barn. If it had been out of concern for my brother perhaps it would’ve been excusable, but it was for my own sake. Because I wanted so badly to continue my apprenticeship, to leave that house, to become a painter and a man of the world.

  To my parents, painting was a worthy trade, not fit perhaps for an aristocrat or a merchant’s son but sufficiently lucrative to support a miller’s child. I already felt, however, that it was my calling to become a painter, and not only to be a tradesman but to be an artist, like Rubens or Titian. I felt a passion for the work, beyond anything I saw my brothers feel toward working their trades. To be able to express the conflicts and concerns of man through crushed stone applied with a brush: this is miracle maker’s work. No less. I was awed by the task before me and uncertain I’d be able to master it.

  You must know from where I speak, Monsieur Descartes. Here in this unassuming room, you work as I do in my painting studio, with no more than a slide rule, a few weights and measures, this handful of books, and your own mind. From these basic elements and your view out this small porthole onto the night sky, you produce titanic theories about the movement of objects, the circulation of the universe, and principles that guide nature. Neither you nor I will likely become wealthy from our endeavors, and yet we pursue them with the avidity of East India Company merchants seeking to conquer the New World. A discovery that elucidates perspective, or a new technique that allows us to illuminate a once-obscure human truth—these are what we both seek, as most people seek love or worldly riches.

  Gerrit’s accident made me want it even more. I was tormented each night in the barn by the thought that, as a consequence of the accident, I should need to stay at home at the mill and work as all my forebears had as a laborer and a tradesman dealing in grain. Losing the chance to be the painter I knew I must be.

  But I was lucky: Gerrit’s fever broke. The infection abated. The arm would be saved. There was a muted celebration in our house, everyone walking carefully across the floorboards and being utterly polite in case anything would disturb our good fortune.

  My mother filled me in on the plans that had been arranged: Adriaen and Willem would both take leave from their jobs for another month to work at home through the summer. It had been decided that I would spend only a few more days at Weddesteeg before I returned to my apprenticeship. My elder brothers could manage until Gerrit was ready to take his rightful place beside my father again.

  Greatly relieved by this turn of events and the consideration that had been given to my artistic progress, I wanted to prove to my father and brother that I would always do my part. I awoke at dawn and joined Cornelis in the mill, offering to crank and shovel and grade the wheat, or whatever else was needed.

  My father and brother tolerated me through the morning, but by noon I sensed something wrong. I did not know if I had done my chores poorly or whether I worked too slowly, or what irked them. I tried even harder, begging for new tasks, demonstrating my willingness to help and improve.

  At midafternoon, my mother sailed into the mill, flew directly at my father, and began to shout at him, as I’d never seen her do before in my life. All I heard was her constant refrain: “You promised me! You promised me!”

  Finally she stormed back into the mill and toward me, as my father pleaded behind her, “I didn’t think one day could do any harm.” I thought my mother was about to reprimand me, but she grabbed my wrist and tore me away from the crank of the mill.

  “You’re a good boy, my son,” she said. “You will be rewarded in heaven for trying to be a help. But your father gave me his word that he would not let you come anywhere near this mill from now on.”<
br />
  I really did not understand why she’d sought this absurd promise. I was a Van Rijn son, destined to take my turn at that crank. “But, Mother,” I said, “I must help.”

  “Look what happened to Gerrit,” she said, softening her tone. “What if that happened to you?”

  She reached out and took both my hands, holding each one by the thumb and cupping my palms over her fists. “These gentle hands,” she said, “are not going to be broken in a mill.” She drew my left hand toward her lips and kissed the palm, then did the same with the right—each a benediction.

  I rubbed my eyes, feeling the fullness of those orbs through the thin shield of my lids. When I blinked back to sight, tiny pink and green dots clustered in my vision like gnats. There were the two hands. One amputated, one whole.

  Here I was, in Amsterdam. Gerrit was dead, buried six months ago in Leiden, just about the time I moved here to run the academy. My brother had gone on to work the mill, but every day for him had been painful.

  I put down my charcoal. My gaze continued to wander the body, like a traveler in an exotic land. Beyond the arms, past the severed limb. I rolled back the muslin and saw that the rest of the body was badly scarred: he had flogging scars on his shoulders and sides. I put down my pad and gently raised one shoulder off his bed of ice for just a moment. He was lighter than I imagined, but touching him seemed too much of a violation, and I let him down as quickly as I’d raised him. In that brief moment, though, I could see that the scars must have run the whole length of his back. They were hard, raw things, these scars—like carvings in a tree trunk, only raised rather than incised. I thought of the old tree and how it stands, in spite of these carvings, bearing those human cruelties with grace.

  There were brands upon his neck and shoulders, both front and back. His stomach, though cleaner than his chest, had marks where he’d been stabbed. I imagined what kind of knife did those: the makeshift blades men fashion in jails, I thought. Some men wear their scars as badges of honor. I’ve seen university boys in Leiden who proudly cut their shirts to display their jousting scars. There are young men who seek to gain scars on their chin and neck. To toughen their flesh. To show they are men.