by Nina Siegal
As soon as they’d walked on, she’d remind us not to dislike the man, but we were allowed to feel some pity for the boy, since life could not be easy without a mother to comfort him.
Once I saw him walking down that path without his father. It was Sunday and he might’ve been going to church, but he didn’t seem determined about it. I was out sitting on the fence, doing nothing in particular, waiting for some instruction on my chores. He walked up the road, then turned around and came back. Then walked again, turned around, and came back.
“Where’s your father?” I asked him.
To look into his pale blue eyes was to tread into a kind of shallow puddle.
“He’s gone off to be a sutler.”
“Gone off?”
“To support Maurits in the campaign.”
“When did he leave?”
“A few weeks ago.”
His mother was dead, and now his father was gone, too.
“You’re alone?”
He just nodded, though that puddle in his eyes took shape.
“And you’re still going to church?”
He shook his head. “Not sure.”
I was at the time something of a lonely boy myself. My brothers were my main companions, but they were all industrious workers, men who understood the value of a good day’s labor. I was different. I did my chores, but grudgingly; and often if I had a moment when I hadn’t been given precise instructions, I would drift off into abstraction. My eyes would fix on the light coming over a bank of clouds, and I would stand watching it grow and then fade. Or I would gaze out along the mill line and observe the turning of the vanes and feel on my face the wind that made them spin simultaneously.
“Want to throw bones in the barn?” I asked him.
He stared at me like I’d offered him the first reprieve of his life.
The next Sunday, he came with some sheep’s knucklebones he’d begged off a scullery maid in town. He showed me how to play the game by tossing a ball into the air and moving the knucklebones into groups, then picking up the bones. Only we didn’t have a ball, so we used a rock from the garden instead. After that, I let him help me with my chores. He was faster at raking out the barn than I was and better at stacking hay. He could accomplish in a few moments what it took me an hour, and then he’d toss the knucklebones onto the ground and we’d play for a while.
Before the next Sunday, I showed my mother the knucklebones and she used some madder to dye them red. Then she baked me a bikkel ball, which we painted black. Properly equipped, I was happy to welcome him back when he came the next Sunday. Playing knucklebones became our regular pastime. He kept the set in the lining of his vest, and whenever we were done with my chores, he’d toss them out onto the floor.
Our friendship went on like that for a while. He seemed to have nothing else to do and no other obligations at home. I asked him about his father, and he’d tell me stories about his exploits in the Gomarist war. Every time he told a tale, it seemed his father took a larger part.
He had done so much more than just become a sutler, it seems. He led the horde that forced its way into the Abbey Church in The Hague, and won an honorable place beside the stadtholder Maurits of Orange.
When Oldenbarneveldt went for his beheading, he claimed his father was at the front of the throng. “He got close enough to spit in the advocate’s face just before he uttered those famous last words: ‘Make it short, make it short.’ ”
I never knew if any of his tales were true, and I suspected they weren’t. But they had real drama and battle scenes and that was what my young mind required.
Once I asked him about his father’s shop. He said they were sheath makers, supplying civic militias and Gomarist warriors with leather scabbards for sabers and falchions and holsters for daggers and muskets. He rolled down the collar of this shirt and showed me a mark on the back of his neck. It looked like a prickly clover with a circle in its center. He said that was the shop’s brand that they marked onto every scabbard and holster. “It’s a beechnut in its husk,” he said. “I collected them as a boy. They’re bitter to eat, but you can use them for their tannins.”
“Why is it on your back?” I asked.
He met my eyes and said, “It’s from my father. He said he’d use it to know me when he saw me next.”
I didn’t ask him to elaborate. I saw that it was enough for him to tell me that much. His father had harmed him, scarred him, leaving him behind to tend a shop that supplied equipment to his religious army. We tossed the knucklebones that day until it got dark. But the next Sunday he didn’t come again.
In the clearing, the sun had vanished over the horizon. A waxing moon illuminated the snow to a shimmering ghost white. I began to feel the sting of the cold for the first time, and pulled my cloak closer about my neck.
A vagabond passed along the path, leading a donkey laden with leather sacks. Where he was headed in this weather at that pace, I could not imagine; what town or inn lay in the distance I did not know. The old man did not look up at me, walking stooped with his gray head bent. I watched him pass and observed the sets of footprints leave imprints in the immaculate snow. The moonlight glanced off the donkey’s black coat. They made their way across the clearing soundlessly, tracing a diagonal line through the field.
I hadn’t intended to walk so far. There were pupils and apprentices at the studio waiting for my return. There was the anatomical lesson at the Waag. I had not given all of this any thought. My reason had been overruled by my meditation, and my memory still held sway.
The next time I saw Adriaen, I was already working with Lievens in Leiden. Maybe a decade had passed. We were busy at our studio, always painting, always competing for who could produce the best work. I was painting self-portraits. Over and over again, my own face. Lievens did it on occasion, too, but not with as much ardor as I did.
One particularly cold night I was working on a self-portrait and Lievens said to me, “Let’s get you someone else to paint, so you don’t have to paint yourself.”
“Who should I paint, then, you?”
“Absolutely not. Not again.”
A little while later there was someone at our studio door, asking for alms, asking for food. As I said, it was very cold, and more than anything he was looking for shelter. Lievens heard the door and went to answer it.
I heard him from the other room, speaking in a grave but tender voice. “It’s bitter cold outside. Come in, come in.”
When he came in, the man spoke briefly of his plight—the snow, his frost-bit feet, his hunger—but Lievens told him to take a seat beside the stove while he went to see if there was anything in the studio to eat. We sat together for a while. His face was hidden by his beard, and also by a broad-brimmed hat. I would not have known him. He’d changed in a hundred ways since I’d seen him last. I stood and stoked the stove and told him to move closer.
He did and soon his cheeks turned ruddy with the warmth. He took off his ratty shoes and warmed his feet by the crackling fire. I could see his eyes roaming the room to discover all our possessions. Mostly, they were items we used as props for our history paintings. Our hearth was arrayed with brass pokers and metal-handled brooms, and upon the wall, above our desk there was a gilded and bejeweled sword. In our cabinets were two gold flagons, a multitude of glass goblets, three silver platters, and several porcelain bowls. We had all manner of notebooks and papers scribbled with notes and sketches for our art.
Lievens returned with a jug of wine and a leg of turkey, holding them upon a pewter plate that nearly glinted in the light. The man was so grateful I could see tears coming into his eyes, but he held them back and merely nodded and thanked us. It was all he could do not to swallow that turkey leg in one bite.
Lievens and I took a seat beside him and we poured ourselves some wine as well. Lievens held up his cup. “To the courage to ask for help when it is needed,” he said.
At first, it seemed the visitor wasn’t sure the meaning of this, but th
en he lifted his cup. “To the generosity of strangers. I mean it with all my heart.”
“Tell me, now,” Lievens said, without taking his eyes off the man’s face. “You told me something when you were coming in. You said you saw a man murdered this very night?”
“Indeed, I did, my lord, but it was none of my doing. I only sat nearby and was a witness.”
“And who was this man, then?”
“No one, my lord, of any consequence. Just a vagabond and a thief, like myself.”
“And what did he do to bring on his death?”
“It was a brawl. I believe it was over a few coins in a game of cards.”
“A man was killed for a few coins?”
The visitor laughed. “I have seen a man drowned in the Amstel for a mushroom cap he foraged from the woods. And once I saw a man knifed for a piece of herring.”
I could see the food in his teeth. I said, “You say you are a thief?”
He took a gulp of wine. “I am, my lord, a coat thief mostly. I steal other things on the occasion when I cannot get my bread by alms. A man must eat one way or another.”
I asked, “And you don’t mind saying you’re a thief?”
“No, I suppose not. I didn’t choose it. It chose me.”
“Certainly you were not born a thief,” Lievens said. His tone was one of complete equanimity. He didn’t scold or provoke.
“I was born of my mother,” he answered, “but once I was alive, she wasn’t anymore. I killed her, you see. I started off a sinner.”
Lievens laughed, and to my surprise, refilled the thief’s goblet. “But you could not have killed her. You were a babe. But if, as you say, you have been a sinner all your life, that means that you have no remorse when you steal?” he asked, the wine gurgling into the cup.
“I used to. But I have none now. For I have seen many a man thieve, even those who have no need or want in the world. I have seen chandlers steal from oil sellers; I have seen priests rob the church coffers; I have watched noblemen refuse to pay the cobbler who fixed their boots. Is this not a kind of thievery, too? What of the merchants, who strut the avenues, plumes bobbing from their hats? Have they not made their wealth by thieving from those lands where no muskets protect their God-given goods? The world is full of thieves, my lord, and I am just the foolish and feckless kind who takes a little here and there, this day and that, who never improves his lot.”
Lievens seemed very pleased by our visitor, and was thrilled to be having such a lively talk so late into the night. “You would condemn commerce, then? You would condemn the building of churches with tithes and alms? These are not examples of theft but of the ways of business and government in the modern world.”
Our visitor sipped the wine slowly, and I could see that he was starting to consider his words.
“My point—and a very humble one it is indeed, for I am no man’s judge—is that many a man has his hands in some other man’s pocket. Thievery is a common sin. It is up to the thief to determine whether he lives by some moral code, and every thief must create some sense of his own morality. For myself, my lord, I have a few basic rules. I won’t steal of a man poorer than myself, and I won’t harm a man who does not seek to hurt me. If I can go two days without bread, I’ll wait until the third to knock over a vendor’s table in the public square. And once or twice when I was well off enough, I returned what I did steal.”
“I see,” said Lievens, very much intrigued. “And so, in this way, you feel that you are honorable, within your ignoble profession.”
“Indeed,” he said. “Every man is his own lord and master. Only God will determine his place in heaven or hell, and he does that before we take a single step upon this earth.”
I leaned forward. “Have you come here to rob us tonight?” I said these words very simply, so that he would feel no shame in answering.
“I thought on it, my lord, for yours would be an easy house to rob. If one of you was alone here, or neither of you was here. It seems you have no way to defend yourselves save that fake sword you hang on your wall, and there’s all that silver and those fine goblets in the cupboards. I’m certain there are many more treasures I haven’t seen. Why do you keep them here? It’s not a home but a place of work, it seems. But you have been kind to me, you see, and by my code of honor—though it may not seem terribly honorable to you—I cannot do you harm. I would not thieve of a generous soul who would willingly give so much comfort to a vagabond.”
Lievens spoke next. “It’s a good thing, then, that we took you in. For you have made us very wise to the ways of the world. And when you walk out that door again once you’ve warmed your feet and supped, you will put yourself into peril once again to steal something somewhere else?”
“Yes, my lord, I suspect I will,” he said, finishing off the turkey leg and drinking the rest of the wine. “Though maybe not tonight. My father foretold that eternal damnation awaits me, and I have accepted my soul’s curse.”
“You accept that you cannot be any better than you are?”
“It makes no difference whether I accept it or not,” he went on. “There was never any other path.”
We did not argue with him. Our job was not to judge or to dispute morality with every passing stranger. We were, of course, not beyond reproach ourselves. We were busy trying to be painters, and we thought that art had little to do with morality. I was, at least, satisfied that he would not rob us while he visited, at least while both of us were in the room, and so I asked him if he would sit for me, for a tronie. I wanted to capture the peculiar mix of callowness and ruggedness in his face that is so characteristic of vagabonds.
“You want to paint me?” he asked. “It’ll scare away the kids.”
“It is not for children,” I answered, with a laugh.
He did sit for me, and he was not a bad subject. He sat still and only moved his eyes to scan the room. I still did not recognize him, though, and I should not have if we hadn’t gotten to talking about his past.
“You say your mother died at birth. Did you go to the orphanage?”
“No, my father did me that kindness. He kept me at home.”
“And who reared you?”
“My father, himself. Reared me as cattle. Branded me here on my neck, as if I was a scabbard. He was a sheath maker and this was his brand.”
He pulled down his collar to show me the brand—that beechnut I once took for a prickly clover. It was a scar you don’t forget.
“He was a sutler in Maurits’s army?” I said. “You lived here, not too far from the Weddesteeg?”
It seemed he knew me almost as soon as I knew him.
“Knucklebones,” he said.
“Knucklebones,” I said.
I wish I could say we stood to embrace, and laughed over old times. But we did not. Instead, the realization that we had known each other as youths made us both uncomfortable. He started to shift in his chair and asked if I was done. I put a few more quick jots onto the paper, and tore it from my book. I handed it to him. “No snake or fox.”
He took some time to look at it. “I’m not as ugly as I think.”
He tried to hand it back to me, but I told him to keep it.
“Trade it for your next supper. I’ve signed it there.”
He laughed. “I guess they know you around here.”
Adriaen left that cold night, and I didn’t think on him after that, except to muse about how one man’s fate is so different from another’s. If he still had any plan to rob us, I knew he wouldn’t, since I knew who he was.
Standing in that clearing in the snow, I imagined Adriaen’s youthful face—the one I’d met years earlier—transposed upon that older, tired face of the thief in winter, and now on the cold, bluish-gray face of the dead man in the Waag. What a strange thing to have known a man in these three ways.
I stood for a long while, letting the snow continue to fall on me, letting it blanket my cloak and cover the red fabric in its sinless tint. There was nothing
else to see on the horizon. Just various shades of white.
I pounded on the door of that tower. The one that led up to the skinner’s hall. I pounded and pounded and pounded. No one heard my calls. I ran round that weigh house, crying, screaming for anyone who’d hear. There were doors to guilds on every side—surgeons, painters, blacksmiths, masons—but no one opened any of them.
It were busy in that weigh house, full of men putting everything to the scales. Weighing grains and meats and butter and bags of worldly goods. Who knows what they weighed. No one had time to hear my cause. The dissection, they said, would start at sundown.
I pounded on the tower door and I cried out for anyone who’d hear me. The boy stood near, also crying. The boatman finally came and shushed us. He said he would take us somewhere warm, wait with us until they opened the hall. But I would not be moved. I sat myself down on the steps of that tower door.
This, here, is Adriaen’s son. He is all I have in the world now, all that means anything. If I were to go back to Leiden, to go back to that mill house, the stones would always come, the boys would always jeer. The only way to keep my Carel safe, to give him any life at all, will be to do as Father van Thijn said. To bury Adriaen in our church. That were a chance he gave me.
Little by little they came. The people from Dam Square. They’d seen Adriaen go hanging and now they wanted to see him skinned. Aris the Kid, they called him, like he were their friend. That Kid, they said, who went to death so bold. The one who flexed his chest and bared his stump for all Dam Square to see. Tore off his shirt and stood naked in the cold.
The boatman stood by me and tried to shield me from their force. The boy said I were there to claim his body for holy burial. That’s how word went through that market of who I were and why we’d come. I thought they’d try to stone me there, too, but that were not how it went.
The first thing that came to us were a link of sausage and then, right after, a hunk of bread. “For the lass,” said the old baker who placed them in the boatman’s hands. “She’ll be hungry.” Someone else saw what were brought and added to it butter. The boatman used his knife to cut the sausage and spread the butter. And then one came with cups of hot cider and gave them to the boy. “For Kindt’s lass,” he said. “No use freezing to death out here.” More came. More food and more kindness. They called me “Kindt’s lass,” “Kindt’s wench.” They brought what they had, and shared it with me, the boatman, and the boy.