The Anatomy Lesson Page 2

  “Observe the motion of my right hand,” he tries. “The hand, with its opposable thumb, as the great Galenus has revealed to us, is unique to mankind. To what do we owe to this appendage that sets us apart in form from all other barbarous creatures and brutes?”

  He pauses to address her. “I have heard tell that the chimpanzee may also have opposable thumbs, though it is not yet confirmed. I wonder if I should mention this? Or does it confuse the point?” He muses to himself, drawing his hand across his beard, and then raising his hand again.

  She suppresses a smile that wants very badly to form on her lips as her husband’s hand continues to histrionically twirl in the air, like some grandiloquent rhetorician of the Egelantier’s. He doesn’t seem to notice, but he abruptly paces away from her, dropping his head and muttering something to himself. He holds his fist to his forehead and remains silent for some time. She looks down to check the red detailing, which has gone amiss.

  “Don’t you think it’s quite fascinating that we associate so many negative things with the left hand?” his wife observes idly, after the silence has gone on for a while. “Think of it: the Latin sinister, which you use so often in your speech, for the left hand, means ‘evil or inauspicious,’ ‘foreboding.’ And when someone is left-handed, we fear they have powers of witchery.”

  She glances up to see his exasperated expression, before he drops his arms to his sides and some papers flutter to the floor. “My love, are you paying any attention at all?” He shakes the remaining pages of the manuscript at her. “I must memorize the speech by this evening. So far, I have not even completed the writing. I shall embarrass myself and our whole household.”

  Margaretha takes in the plaintive look in her husband’s eyes. She’d heard him rustle in the adjacent chamber at least three times in the night. She should’ve gotten up to heat milk for him, or at least forgotten all about the green floss and not mentioned the Latin just now.

  She runs her needle into the fabric, just where the stem will eventually reach the blossom, and leaves it there. She reaches out her hand to take her husband’s. “You’re absolutely right, my love. I shall not interrupt you again. Please start again from exactly where you left off.”

  THE HEART

  Flora can hear no bells, not even the distant chiming of those of her own cathedral ringing for the fourth time since the dawn, only the quiet rustle of the rushes as the wind blows across the Rhine. She crouches on the ground behind her home, holding her belly and vomiting into the tall grass.

  It had come on of a sudden, her stomach cramping, her mouth filling with salty bile; and then, in a second, her throat was convulsing. Six months along and still she suffers from morning sickness, running from her own home into the garden to erupt into the grass.

  She brings foods to her lips and the smell is revolting, as if everything, all at once, has gone sour. A boiled egg, perhaps, she can manage. The smell of cooking goat can make her gag, the scent of cheese is overpowering. In the mornings, though, it comes on without the help of any food or smell.

  It comes again, her stomach heaving, and again it is over sooner than she’d expected. Once she finishes, she turns onto her back and lies there. Her belly still aches, but the feeling will lessen, she knows. Flora opens her eyes to see the full globe of the sky. It was a luminous dawn, and it will be a clear day, she tells herself, and now that the demons have escaped her body, she will be able to work. Her stomach, at least, in peace.

  She thinks on Adriaen again and imagines what his reaction will be to her news. He’d told her once that he thought he wasn’t the right kind of man to be a father. Adriaen doesn’t ever think very much of himself as a potential anything. Adriaen has his troubles, and he has his wandering, but maybe the babe would bring about a change in him. Once he will look into eyes that contained such love and innocence, maybe he’ll see his own innocence as well.

  It is then that she hears the yelling and the loud crack that follows. She sits up. No, it sounds more like something being smashed. It is fast, and now it is over. A cry, a loud crack, and the sound of feet running. Boys, making trouble. She pushes herself up, still holding her belly, and starts toward the front of the house. If she can glimpse the back of their heads as they run away, their clothes even, she’ll know them. She knows all the boys in this town. All the boys and their mothers.

  They’d screamed something. Gekke heg, she thinks: crazy hedge. What a strange thing to scream before throwing cobblestones. Was there something in the yard, with the bushes? No, she realizes as she turns onto the path that leads to the front of the house. One boy is still standing there, though the others have run off. He is a small boy, with bright blond curls. His mouth is gaping wide as if he’s spotted a sea monster.

  Heks, she thinks. That is what they’d cried. Witch. A witch, they’d called her. A crazy witch.

  “Crone!” The small boy cries now again, before running off to catch up with his friends.

  She stops where she is, a rock under her toe. She takes a few steps of retreat, fearing that perhaps they didn’t really run away. Maybe they are waiting. Maybe they are hiding behind a tree, waiting to see if a man was in the house to protect her. They’d called her a witch. The neighborhood boys had come to taunt her.

  But why? She’d been called other names, and maybe less flattering names. But never this. Stones thrown, curses hurled.

  What had she done to offend someone? She could think of nothing. Since she’d gotten round in her belly she rarely left her property. A friend from a neighboring farm took her eggs to market for her, brought her goods back home.

  Has something happened in the town? she wonders. She had heard rumblings of a renewed war between the Remonstrants and the Counter-Remonstrants, but what had this to do with her? Could it be that the Spanish have won the southern wars and have returned? It could be that. Spaniards.

  She runs into the house to look around for anything that could condemn her. What will they look for? What will they take? What is there to protect?

  There’s another noise outside and she jolts. It is not loud; maybe it isn’t anything but the wind. But she can’t stay here. What if the boys return? What if more are coming? She grasps her belly and speaks to the babe inside, “We’re okay. We’ll be okay. I will get you somewhere safe.”

  There’s nothing to take, she thinks, nothing worth saving. But where can she go? Who will protect them? When the Spaniards were here last, her mother and cousins had hidden at her church. But will they take her there, now that she carries a bastard child?

  THE MOUTH

  The distant Westerkerk bell mingles in De Wallen with the louder Oude Kerk bells and the Zuiderkerk bells—to make a thunderous racket between the ears of Jan Fetchet, lying in his hay bed in the storage loft of the Waag, the old town’s weigh house, attempting to bury his aching head under a sack of millet.

  Jesus, they chime as if to announce the world’s end, he thinks, pulling his millet sack closer. There is a sudden eruption in the hay beside him, like the rising of Poseidon from the sea. He watches and soon recognizes the many folds of skirt and petticoat he’d crawled his way through last night, the undone blouse, the nest of blond hair falling out of the white cap.…

  “Ooooh, ma poupée,” the beast moans happily as she throws her arms conjugally about his shoulders. “There you are, you handsome charmer. Come back into my arms.”

  “My lady, my lady,” he sputters, starting to push himself out of the hay, while attempting to ease her back to her side of the loft. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “You make me laugh.” She speaks hoarsely, her lips chalky with the dust of sleep. “You make me laugh,” she says again before proving her statement with a series of great hacking laughs, like some kind of elderly mule coughing.

  “Really,” says Fetchet, as he pushes her off. “What hour bell is that? I was supposed to be up for the first. I’m late to my work, and, God forgive me, I remember nothing of last night.”

  He ris
es to discover he is wearing no pants, and spends several moments prowling through the hay to find them. His head pounds. He puts one hand to his temple and presses there to still the ache. His mouth tastes as if a rat has visited in the night. When he breathes into his palm, the full stink of the canals comes through his nostrils.

  The wench in his bed keeps laughing as though he’d made another joke. As soon as he’s located his pants, though, she sits up soberly for a moment and remembers: “But you owe me seven stivers.” To accentuate her demand, she claws her abundant curls away from her face, holds her nest up like a flaming crown, and blinks her narrow yellow eyes to seem fierce.

  Fetchet stands with one leg in, one leg out of his pants, his right hand still pressed to his aching head. “Well, that makes perfect sense,” he says, while he attempts to pull the second pant leg into its rightful place with his free hand. Finding it impossible to tie the drawstrings into a knot with a single hand, he at last removes the hand from his temple and a powerful moan escapes his lips. His pants fall again. He reaches down and riffles through his pocket and finds his purse. He tosses it to her, but she doesn’t reach out to catch it. It clanks to the floor, full as it is with the money he has lately earned from setting up all the provisions for the festive anatomy. “Take what you will.”

  “Better cover up that scrawny little bum of yours,” she says, grabbing it and counting out her coins, pocketing a couple extra. “Or I’ll take another bite out of it, fee or no fee.” She begins to crawl toward him, tossing her hair about like a pony. Fetchet grabs his purse before she can filch another coin and tosses on his cloak, then climbs down the ladder of the loft, into the busy weigh hall, through the room full of traders and merchants, even as she’s still following, pulling on her own clothes, taunting, “Come on back and I’ll give you the next romp for free!”

  Out in the brisk air and the busy square in front of the weigh house he has just exited, he stuffs his purse back into his pocket. He passes the line of horses tied up before the building, cups some water out of their trough, brings it to his lips, and gargles, spitting onto the dirt. One horse startles and he uses the mane to dry his hand. The trollop follows him into the square and when she catches up with him, she says, “Aw, you rush too much,” trying to administer a parting kiss.

  He pushes her off, saying, “Come now. You already earned your stivers.”

  She manages to plant one on him nonetheless, right on his lips, and after she pulls away at last, he watches her saunter off, dizzy and smiling, as though a love affair has begun. When she waves her plump fingers at him in final parting, he suppresses the bile in the back of his throat. He is reminded yet again of the sins of too much beer.

  This time he dunks his full head into the horse trough, lets the frigid water wash over his face, and scrubs his mouth with both hands. He shivers, but he’s awake now. Just as he’s straightening, and feeling the stiffness of his aching back, he hears a voice calling from across the square. A young messenger is upon him. “You are Jan Fetchet, are you not?” says the boy.

  “Who’s asking?” Fetchet replies.

  “I have a note from one T. Rotzak, a sailor on the East India ship Lioness for the curio dealer Jan Fetchet. A vendor on the market pointed me toward you. Are you Jan Fetchet, mister? If not, can you tell me where I find him?”

  Fetchet knows the name Rotzak well; it’s one of the sailors who supplies him with curiosities. “Yes, yes, you have found the right Jan. Did he already pay you for your troubles?”

  “He did, sire,” says the boy, before slapping the note into Fetchet’s palm. The boy shifts from foot to foot as Fetchet reads the note, which is short and to the point.

  “Take down two notes,” he tells the messenger. “One is to Rotzak, the other to Master van Rijn on the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, the painter who runs the academy in the House of Uylenburgh.”

  The uninterested boy scribbles two notes that are dictated to him, shows them to Fetchet for approval, and then extends his hand for payment. Fetchet reaches into his still-heavy purse and hands the boy two doits. The messenger bows and speeds off through the crowded square. Within seconds, he has vanished.

  Now, on to business, thinks Fetchet. The meat from the butcher, the cheese from the cheese market, breads from the baker, vegetables from the grocer, and then corpse from the executioner. When the fishmonger killer Joep van de Gheyn dangles from his rope, all they’ll have to do is cut him down, so he’ll drop right into Fetchet’s cart.

  Poor doomed Joep, thinks Fetchet as he starts out of the Nieuwmarkt. Well, at least there is one man in Amsterdam who’s wickeder than me.

  THE MIND

  “Ah, there you go,” says René Descartes, who is in the midst of negotiating the price of a lamb on the Kalverstraat with the cheapest of the half dozen butchers when the Westerkerk bell rings, its chimes reverberating down the narrow alley and through the shambles. “The church bells are tolling once again, which means it’s a half hour now that we’ve been haggling.”

  The ringing of the bells incites a sudden lowing of the cattle up the byway. “Remarkable,” says Descartes. “The animals are more attuned than the men.”

  “I agree, sire,” says the butcher, a pleasantly ruddy-cheeked man with a giant belly and shock of white hair. “As they say, a friend is always better than money in the purse.”

  Descartes isn’t quite so sure what level of sarcasm was intended with this axiom, since he never met a Dutchman who’d choose a friend over a guilder. He stands for a moment, contemplating his response as the bells finish their tolls. “Then friends we are,” he finally answers.

  The butcher smiles, revealing the large gap between his two front teeth.

  A city of so many Remonstrants and nonbelievers and yet still this constant catholic ringing of the bells, he muses as the butcher waits for his payment. They mount a revolt against the church, build a capital on the worship of the mighty guilder, and still they continue to count out their hours by the church tower.

  They are prosperous, though, these Amsterdammers, beyond all imagining. Yet so damn cheap—one has to wrangle over everything. He counts the coins in his palm one more time. Hadn’t he paid half this amount not two weeks ago to this selfsame butcher?

  Wait, though. His servant had mentioned the new exchange rate from guilders to livres, and he has just received payment for his “Meditations” in livres. Did the servant say the markets had crested? Was that the word he’d used: “crested”? Everyone in this town speaks the tradesman’s argot, don’t they?

  Now then, he was becoming confused. Was he the one being stingy? Perhaps it was the other way around, and a week ago he’d paid twice as much? Descartes, a world-renowned mathematician, baffled by this utterly simple matter, hands over all his coins. “You’re right. We must not waste our youth in bargaining.”

  The butcher nods with a smirk and, after pocketing the money, leaves to collect the animal. He should learn to put the servants in charge of these tasks, Descartes berates himself; they’re more familiar with simple mathematics amid such trading chaos. Still, it is so troublesome to have to explain to them repeatedly that it isn’t the meat he’s after.

  While the butcher is collecting the carcass, the mathematician leans down to pick up one of the stivers that fell from his purse onto the street.

  “Monsieur Descartes,” comes a voice from behind, immediately followed by a heavy clap on the back. “I see you’re returned to the metropolis from the bog. Well, at least you don’t look too much the peasant.”

  The man addressing him is so tall that it takes the diminutive Frenchman a moment to look all the way up to his face. On the way there, he takes in the silky finery of a true Dutch dandy: his black French silk shoes adorned with black flowers, white stockings and breeches, a doublet of glazed linen with paned sleeves, and a cloak adorned with loop lace, thrown open as if he is not the least bit cold, plus a wide-brimmed hat embellished with feathers from … well, yes indeed, a peacock.

 
“Good afternoon, Mijnheer Visscher,” says Descartes, not yet placing this acquaintance’s first name. “What, may I ask, brings a man of your high breeding into this bloody byway?”

  “I should ask the same of you, my friend. It’s rare that I bump into intellectuals in the butchers’ quarter. My excuse is that it’s an easy shortcut to Sint Antoniesbreestraat, where I am to join an art connoisseur’s circle at the Uylenburgh academy. We are to hear from a painter whose name is on everyone’s lips, some Harmanszoon or other. Do you know the name?”

  “I don’t believe I do.”

  “Apparently he’s impressed Huygens with his biblical paintings and now he’s doing burgher portraits. Truth be told, I’ve arranged all kinds of activities for myself today simply so that I can avoid the festival. The streets are too thick with foreigners.”

  The comment stings, since Descartes himself is, of course, a foreigner, but he suspects the dandy doesn’t mean this as a slight.

  “My excuse is, as usual, work. I’m doing a little amateur anatomical research to help with my search for the soul in the body,” says Descartes. He sees his companion’s face contort into what could be disgust for either the subject matter or the academic pretention. He adds, “I find the sights and smells of the Amsterdam markets pleasing, and the butchers are such clever tradesmen.”

  Meantime, Descartes has managed to place the name: Nicholas Visscher. That is it—the cartographer. Cousin to the merchant poet Roemer Visscher. They had all met last winter at one of those grandiose parties at one of those oversized Amstel mansions.

  “Speaking of which, I presume we’ll see you tonight at the anatomy?” Visscher continues. “I believe you will appreciate our Tulpius—a kindred spirit. He intends to elaborate upon Galen, I’m told.”