The Anatomy Lesson

by Nina Siegal

  “It’ll be dangerous at the mill house,” said Doc, when I got to standing. “There are sure to be more stones.”

  Another one of them said, “We’re only trying to protect you from the senseless fools out there who intend to hurt you. We know it’s not your fault that your man was a murderer.”

  I told him, “Adriaen is no murderer. I knew him since he were a boy. You knew him, too. He were a child of this town, of Leiden. If the townsfolk won’t claim him, they’re as coldhearted as the executioner.”

  They stood in silence and not one of them tried to correct me.

  “A mob is cruel,” were all Doc said. “No reasoning with a mob about evil and goodness.”

  I left Doc’s house, telling all them other crows not to follow.

  The boys with their stones were there when I got home, like they’d said, so I went in through the side yard. That were Adriaen’s yard once. We lived side by side in them houses by the Rhine.

  I went in the back door, hiding in my own house. For the rest of the morning, when the peltings came, I moved behind the wall and wrapped my belly in a blanket to drown out the shouting.

  Some of them stones came through the windows. That’s how hard they threw, them boys. Them maids. They came into the house, thud, thud, crack. We don’t have much and now so much is broken. But I could stand behind the hearth and the stones didn’t hit us.

  When it went quiet, I fixed things. I picked up the shards, the fallen chairs, overturned pitchers and mopped what had spilled. I collected the pieces and put them on a mantel.

  Then it would start again and I would wait by the wall, singing to Carel in my belly. When it stopped, I’d tidy. When there were too many shards for the mantel, I put them into my apron. I took them out back so I could use them to border my garden.

  There were a long stretch when the pelting stopped, and I thought maybe it were over. I listened to the silence. Then came a dark figure in the doorway. A black hat and cloak, a long carved cane.

  With the light behind him, I could see no features of his face. I thought: all them curses have done their work. Death has come for me and the babe. Maybe from weakness, I mustered politeness. I said, please to come in and sit with us. I got up to heat the kettle.

  Death walked in and sat at the table quietly, and when I brought him the cup of cider, I saw it were Father van Thijn from our church under that great black hat, that long sad face with his gray beard.

  I got tired all over again, because I didn’t want to argue with the priest or have to ask his blessing.

  The father didn’t take my cider. He looked around and saw all the broken pitchers and plates, shards on the mantel. It must’ve been him who’d told them to stop because finally it were really silent. I went flush with shame for us, me and Adriaen and our babe. Things are not right when a man of God has to visit a poor woman’s cottage.

  “We are in the Lord’s hands,” I said quietly. “He will protect us.”

  The father shook his head. He blurted out how it were wrong for people to believe in superstitions, witches, omens, and curses. He said it were wrong that the world were so backward and godless, even now in this modern century.

  “The boys don’t know better, but the townsfolk should,” he said. “After all we’ve already been through, they should know.” Father van Thijn talked about Jesus and love and compassion. He said, as he does in sermons, that the greatest sinners benefit most from forgiveness. “It was his crime,” he said. “Now it’s his death. But that’ll be your cross to bear.” In his old age, he said, he sees that only great love can overcome man’s cruelty. Only true hearts, people with courage to love, people with a mind to forgiveness.

  “You will need strength,” the father said, as if he were coming to something, “but you must make the journey.”

  Then Father van Thijn took out his purse. He put coins on the table before me. It were more money than I’d ever seen all at once. My first thought: a man of God should not have such money.

  “It’s from the collections, Flora. For charitable works. Today it is for you. To help you and your family. Our church can spare it.”

  I thought he meant for the pots, the broken glass.

  “For the sake of the child that will be born,” he said. “You must leave this house. There will only be more stones and more curses. You must go to Amsterdam. To the town hall at the Dam. Tell them you are Adriaen’s betrothed. Show them your belly. Tell them about our church, and take this letter I’ve written.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a note, sealed and stamped with red wax.

  His betrothed? I were not his betrothed. Could a priest lie like that?

  “And if you cannot prevent the execution, then at least you can … You’ll bring him home to Leiden for a Christian burial in our church.”

  “Doc Sluyter said they call him a murderer.”

  Father van Thijn looked into my eyes. “Sometimes they do terrible things to make a man confess.”

  It hurt to hear that. “Confess? But fighting and thieving. That’s all Adriaen ever did.”

  “Then perhaps there will be mercy.” He touched the coins on the table. “Say that to the magistrate. Stand strong. Tell him what you know of Adriaen.”

  “You think words can save him?”

  The answer in his eyes weren’t certain. “You can take a barge across the Haarlemmermeer and be there before noon. That is what the money is for—for your journey.”

  To Amsterdam. “I’ve never left Leiden.”

  “I am going to send a boy from the church to accompany you. When you arrive in Amsterdam, hire a coach or a boat to take you both to the town hall. Time is short, but if you leave quickly, you can get there before the hanging. The boy will be outside waiting.”

  He lifted the coins from the table, one by one, took my hand in his hand, and placed the coins in my palm. “You must go, and you must go now, Flora. You must use your words carefully with the magistrate. You must convince him that Adriaen’s soul can be swayed to goodness. Either way, you’ll bring him back to Leiden.”

  “I never spoke to any magistrate.”

  He spoke very slowly. “You must do this, Flora. Only you can do this.” He pressed the final coin into my hand. “Please.” He placed the purse on the table.

  I nodded, though I didn’t fully understand what he meant. He stood and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

  He stood up and put his hat back on his head. The shadows across his face made him look like Death again. I sat on my stool and wondered if it were all real or a dream. God does his work in so many ways, but we must never doubt him.

  I knew that I had to do as the father instructed.

  Ask any burgher in Amsterdam and he’ll tell you: if there’s an oddity or rarity you seek, I can put it into your hands. I’m a barterer, a trader, and a broker in God’s great bounty. Should you desire a clawless otter from the Cape of Good Hope or a bull’s horn to be played like a trumpet, merely inquire here. Maybe you want a tortoise shell worn as a German helmet in our roiling Spanish wars? Just say my name: Jan Fetchet.

  Most curio dealers get their specimens stuffed or dried like market prunes, but I deal in live beasts. Seafarers in my employ bring me armadillos, crocodiles, and wild boars, which I house in the East India Company stables on the quayside. If you went there right now, you’d find a rhinoceros as big as three donkeys and a peacock as colorful as a Haarlem sunset. I can get a sunset for you, too, given the right price.

  That’s just a jest, my friend. Just a jest. If you’d like to take a look at my museum of curiosities, it’s this way, up these stairs.

  No, curio dealing isn’t my sole vocation, of course, for while there is money in rarities and oddities, it comes and goes like galleons, with the tides. For steady pay, I work as the famulus anatomicus for the Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild. A splendid title, is it not, for a rather ghoulish post? Simply put: I’m the one who collects the corpses for our chief anatomist, that fam
ous Dr. Tulp. On the streets they call me skinner’s assistant, or, if they’re punsters, the skinner’s right hand.

  I can tell you the whole of the tale. Everyone wants to hear it now that that painter is the talk of Europe. Since that picture he made caused such a stir. But you’ll have to bear with me, for I’ve been told that a long wind blows across my tongue, and my story may digress. Let’s settle in then, take some beer and vittles, and afterward you’ll come see my kunstkamer.

  That morning when I awoke, my beard brittle with chill, I thought it was fortuitous. Cold weather is always good for the dissection. I get a clean cut of ice from the canals for my corpse bed and the body stays fresh longer. We like to do the annual festive dissection on Justice Day; that’s the guild’s chance to cull whatever body the magistrate strings up at noon, as fresh as a pig from slaughter.

  My body was named Joep van de Gheyn, the fishmonger killer. I read the court papers on Joep’s case, where he’d admitted, without even being put in leg-irons, to murdering the monger in cold blood out of lust for the man’s wife.

  I’d had my doubts, you know. When I went to visit poor doomed Joep in the rasp house, I found him to be a gentle and devout soul who’d sooner say he was too warm than send cold soup back to the cook. If I said it was raining, but the sky was perfect as the sheen on silk, he’d still nod his head and mumble, “Yes, the rain, the rain! I’m sure you’re right; it will rain very soon.”

  Picture him felling a big burly fishmonger with a single swipe of a blade? Couldn’t do it. But you never know a man, do you? From watching our anatomies over the shoulders of our physicians, I’ve learned that a fellow with the kindliest outward bearing often can contain the organs of a sinner. I’ve seen blackest livers removed from even the jolliest of tavern keepers.

  Four days earlier, the mayor had entered the sentencing chamber wearing the dooming blood band and Joep’s fate was sealed. The magistrate handed me the promissory note for his body just an hour after the butcher secured me a wild boar for the feast.

  So, that morning I was in a good mood, indeed, what with the promising weather, all my orders placed, and a fresh body ready for collection. I was washing my face in the basin by my home when a messenger tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a note. It was from Rotzak, one of my suppliers, a deckhand who works the Australasias for the East India Company. He’s Amsterdam’s most reckless curio hunter, going off on his own to chase alicantos and fabled apes. Once, he brought me a sea unicorn, which I sold to Martijn de Groote, who used its horn to cure the bulbous goiter that used to mar his famous neck.

  The note read: “Living Bird of Paradise netted in the Australasias. Fifteen stivers. Today only at the company stables. Shipping out tonight. With feet!”

  The bird of paradise, that true rarity of rarities! Avis paradiseus. A bird so beautiful and strange it could join the Italian commedia as Harlequin. No paradise is like another. One might have the plumage of a king, a red crown, and velveteen breast, while another wears a canopy of purple feathers around his fat black neck. A female might have feathers that trail behind her like a fine courtesan’s train. Each one can inspire awe not just through its beauty but also by the fact that these birds, alone among winged creatures, have no feet.

  Few men or women on this continent have seen a bird of paradise alive, for it lives its whole life aflight and does not deign to mingle with the lesser birds in the trees. It’s almost impossible to capture the paradiseus, and when snared, it soon dies, so well does it love the free air. The great wonder hunters of all Europe have tried, and failed, to bring one back to Amsterdam.

  A living paradise was certainly enough to divert me from my chores, and since this is a town teeming with greedy traders—all thieves, you know, every one a common crook—I knew I’d have to be excellently nimble not to miss this rare specimen. The greatest incentive: the word “Feet!” in Rotzak’s note.

  Impossible, I thought, though I have heard one local philosopher claim that paradise eggs are too large and heavy to be hatched in flight, so the bird must sometimes alight upon a branch to nest. I do not have a firm opinion on the matter. However, I knew a footed specimen could bring me at least fifty stivers.

  I had the perfect client in mind: that one they now call Rembrandt. I knew him then as humble Harmenszoon van Rijn, a painter and etcher who runs the Uylenburgh studio on the Sint Antoniesbreestraat.

  He has quite the kunstkamer, and pays top guilder for items to add to it—more, I suspect, than he can truly afford. Although now he can afford all he likes, I suppose.

  I’ve delivered to him a death mask of Prince Maurits cast from his royal face, a gourd from a calabash tree, a Turkish powder horn, two Indian Mogul miniatures, and numerous coral branches and shells. He has no small interest in birds, and I’ve procured for him two dodos, a cockatoo, and a pelican from the Málaga coast, all alive and clapping their beaks. He has no aviary, but receives these specimens to sketch them and then gives them away—pure foolishness.

  Van Rijn is a bit of a rarity himself, as you may have heard tell, and does not often leave his studio. I must call upon him at the Sint Antoniesbreestraat to bring him his wonders, and each time I visit him, I find him attired in some strange new garb. I’ve seen him don a beret with a plume; a gorget, though he never was a soldier; and the starched ruff, far above his station.

  I conclude that he likes to play at theater and that he uses many of the curios I bring him as props. It is his choice, of course, and who am I to judge? He spends so lavishly on wonders that I compete for his attentions with almost every other curio dealer in town. The paradise would certainly help put me in good stead with this eccentric painter. I breathed in the beautiful wintry air and called myself fortunate.

  However, trouble started to show its face soon after. At the butcher’s shop, after I’d collected the wild boar, the side of beef, the sausages, and the last of my lamb, the butcher held out his hand and said, “That’ll be seventeen stivers.” My mouth was agape. I’d already paid him well in advance, as he knew. I told him so.

  “Nee, that was just half,” said the butcher, his face as innocent as the lamb’s. I was baffled. I’ve known this butcher, Bart Oomen, for years and he’s never been anything but straight with me in the past. It was still Bart Oomen: his eyes were just as blue, his teeth as crooked as ever. I concluded he was right and I must be mistaken. I handed over the additional seventeen stivers and went along my way, shaking my head in befuddlement.

  At the baker’s, my breads were still piping hot when I arrived, and packed and ready for my pickup. Just as I was turning to leave with the loaves, I heard, “But, Fetchet, you owe me ten stivers more.” That was baker Essenhaas.

  This time, I was certain I’d already paid. “Nienke, I may be older than I was last week, but I am not already demented,” I told her. “I paid you in full last week and you shook my hand on it.” She smiled a rather wicked smile, folded her arms across her vast bosom, and simply said, “How is good Dr. Tulp?”

  That famous Dr. Tulp, the man who holds the forceps in that painting. I thought to myself: Dr. Tulp? What did he have to do with it? Ah, yes, now I understood the butcher and the baker and foresaw how the rest of the afternoon would play itself out as I went to collect my goods.

  Publicly, Tulp’s a man of the people, riding about all hours of the night in his carriage to cup and bleed and leech. That carriage with the tulip painted on its side and his grand mansion on the Prinsengracht make everyone in town think him a gallant spendthrift. When it comes time to actually open his purse for his purchases, though, it seems nothing falls out but dust.

  Those who encounter him in the shops, too, find he’s as puritanical and stingy as any of the Leiden Gomarists. I have seen him scold his maidservants for gossip, and berate his daughters for the slightest tinsel on their collars. They cry—Oh, Daddy, but it’s the fashion!—and run off in tears. Even when he does buy sweets for the girls, the shop is left waiting for his payment for weeks. In short:
were Tulp a horse, it wouldn’t be his fine mane that people remember but his droppings once he’s pranced away.

  Last year, many farmers and butchers and bakers supplied the Surgeons’ Guild with bargains for the winter fest. After all, it’s the highlight of the season and usually the guild spares no expense. But this year, the local merchants wanted to get back at “Dear Tulpius”: what he’d saved from penny-pinching for his personal goods, they’d get back from the guild. The rest of the morning, whatever vendor I met, I could tell by their eyes even as I approached that the price of my goods would double.

  What could I do? I could not walk away when the boar and the calves were already in the cart. Return the baker’s freshly baked loaves? Should I refuse to pay or refuse to take the goods I’d ordered, it would be my problem; I’d be bad-mouthed all about town as a conspirator. So I swallowed hard and paid those exorbitant fees and hoped the good doctor would see his way to reimburse me.

  Some more beer, then? Here. Take this tankard, and I’ll refill the glass. Another slice of duck? It is all gratis, of course, and you have traveled far. You’ll love this larded dove. No need to worry about expense; the guild fathers paid for it and there’s plenty left over to last another year. Do you know we ordered twelve hundred tankards from the brewer? Those men drink heartily all through the night; after I finish with my work in the anatomy chamber, I always have to use my corpse cart to carry a few of those surgeons home. Every time I do that, some wife or other decides I’m the cause of all evil, and chases me down the canals with a rolling pin. I tell you, the poor man is never spared the rich man’s ransom.

  So, as I was saying, I was at the tallow merchant’s shop being fleeced—a single bundle of incense for four stivers!—my purse was getting lighter and lighter with every passing moment, when the messenger returned to me with a note from the artist on the Sint Antoniesbreestraat.