by Nina Siegal
When we were done eating, a woman came up and asked to touch my belly. “There’s luck in it,” she said. “A babe with a strong mother like that.” Others saw her and came, too. They called him “Kindt’s babe” and “Kindt’s kin.” One old lady bent down for a kiss. They came like that all day. They came with a shawl for me and gloves for the boy. They brought over a chair so I did not have to sit anymore on the steps by the tower door. They stood with us and talked with us and asked how I met “Aris.” It were nothing like what I’d seen done in Leiden. And these were folks who had wanted his neck.
The boatman said, “She’ll need your help to break into that tower. She’ll need a mob to help her get his body back.” He lit the idea like an edge of straw. They pushed forward, to the front of the line, where we sat at the foot of the tower and they told me they’d help. With the force of that whole crowd behind us, they promised, we’d manage to break the gate.
Some people thought I could save Adriaen. I could touch his soul through his wounds and turn them wounds into byways of grace. I could let his scars trace the course of his story. He did not tell me where he’d been and what he’d done, or why they’d flogged and banned him. I were not a confessor, and no redeemer. I started when we were young, the first time his father beat him, just before that wicked old man went off on his crusade.
“Mother says your father has joined Maurits’s army.” I stood at the door. It were almost evening. “She said I should check in and see if you’d supped.”
“He’s not a soldier. Just a sutler,” he told me. I saw the dried blood around his mouth and eyes, his hand still cupping his chest. The blood on his mouth crusted in the small hairs of his first mustache. He were still young. No razor had ever touched his face.
“You’re hurt,” I said. He could barely see out of one eye. “You need care.”
I were no older than he were. I made a poultice and fixed some soup. He could barely move his lips. His jaw were broken. We did not talk, but I fed him with a spoon. I stayed with him until the lantern went low. I wiped my hands on my apron and said, “Okay, then. Mother will be waiting.”
He said nothing. “I will check on you tomorrow,” I said before I left.
He tried to get used to the loneliness of his house with his father out of it. But he never managed that. In the evenings, he preferred the tavern. He loved the giddy sounds, tankard tapping tankard, the hurdy-gurdy men or the players of therobos and other lutes, the gamblers and vermin catchers. There were laughter in the taverns, and talk of journeys and adventures. He craved what he could not imagine and he drank down them ideas with the ale. I had mended him so he could get stronger and when he were strong he wanted the world. Soon, he were well enough to leave, and he packed fast and went.
It were nearly ten years before he came home after that. When he came back to me, all them years later, he were a rough man, a hard man, and a thief. I could see how he’d made his way. It were through filching and scrabbling. I could read his crimes on his skin and his hardships in his face. He had been hurt. I saw that, too. It were in his eyes, in his ways. He flinched if I reached out to touch him; he had a kind of twitch in his eyes. He were not that small and spindly boy who needed my ministering hands.
I tried to read Adriaen’s story from his skin. Each of them flogging scars on his back and brandings burned into his neck and arms were a part of his story, part of the life he went and lived apart from me for all them years after he left Leiden. When I were sponging water over his wounds or sometimes when he were sleeping, I’d touch them gently. Trace my fingers through the shapes.
He had the count’s sword and stars for Haarlem and the lion from Aalsmeer, them three Sint Andrew’s crosses from Amsterdam, and he had the shield of Utrecht, and the fresher ones were two crossed keys for Leiden. Even when he were awake sometimes he let me touch them, even though the skin were raw there and numb in places. He squirmed sometimes, but he let me.
“Every town did claim you,” I said. “Every one put its mark upon your flesh.”
“It was the other way around, Flora,” he told me, as you might explain to a child. “They branded me to keep me out.”
“But they couldn’t do it, could they? Still, here you are.”
He didn’t always want my touch. Sometimes, he’d turn over and push me away. Sometimes he’d glare at me.
Maybe once you have that much of the world marked onto you, you take yourself as the sum of your markings. I’ve seen sailors come back from the seas with the ink in their skin they call prikschilderen. They say they do that to stain themselves, to mark something of their travels.
I traced my finger through his wounds where they told me a story. I crossed the coat of arms for the city of Amsterdam. I touched the groove where it marked out Utrecht’s shield. I felt the long lines of the whips along his back, the thin scars of the knife blades. It were not for him I did this. It were for me. To know something of his travels.
The white scars were thicker and longer. From the whippings. Them were the ones he said were numb. The scars from the brands were raised up. I moved my finger across the white ones and he would squirm and wiggle. He said it felt like someone else’s skin on his flesh. Like they’d given him different skin. I tried to be more gentle. But I did not pull my hand away. I let my fingers touch.
I dressed his wounds and kissed his forehead and brought food to his lips—that were what I could do. I could not save him and he would not save himself. There were something in Adriaen that liked a beating. After I’d nursed him them months in my house, I’d asked him why he kept going back to that tavern where he’d felt a thousand fists.
“I deserved it,” he said. “It made me know I was alive.” Then he cried like a babe. I let him curl into me, and I held him. He were gentle sometimes.
When he were well, up and about, and able to do his carousing, he were no different than he’d been before. A man’s nature is his nature and a fish cannot turn to a sheep without witching. If I had that power, I would have done it: I would have changed him, saved him. I’ve never been any good at saving, only mending.
He’d leave my bed for the tavern, and later come back with his hands clenched to fists and sleep by himself on the doorstep. Sometimes he’d get angry when I tried to care for him, and he’d tell me I were no nun and my house were no convent. Sometimes, he’d just say, “Go find some soul worth saving.”
Adriaen wanted to touch me, too. But he didn’t. Not when he were still in bed with bruises. I touched him and he felt my hands. But he did not want to mishandle me, he said. He said he had too many misdeeds in his hands. They had too much ease for evil. He said his hands took more than they deserved. His hands claimed what were not his to take, and it always got him in trouble. He did not want to take me with those hands.
I wanted to feel his hands on me. Even if they were rough, even with a callused touch. On my back and on my breast. Maybe he thought that if he got that close, he’d never be able to leave again. Leaving were his nature, it were his way.
The day came at last. It were a warm day and there were a spot of sun in the garden. I were out back, tugging with a scuffle hoe at some weeds in the beds. The earth were sodden and rich from a few days of rain. I were going to plant a row of turnips and some vines of peas along the fence. I stopped for a moment and felt the sun fall on my face. Hard to think on it now, in this dead winter. To remember that it can be like that. Sometimes there is sun. Sometimes it is warm. I stood there and let the sun warm me, as if it were only for me.
When the sky shifted and the sun fell behind a cloud, I opened my eyes and saw Adriaen there in the doorway, leaning on a broomstick.
“Rain is on the way,” he said.
“Always is,” I said.
I picked up my scuffle hoe and went on digging.
“I wish I could do that for you,” he said.
“You can. When you’re well.”
“I’d like to plant a few things and see them grow.”
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��Just a few months and it’ll be a harvest. Turnips, potatoes, peas, carrots, and clover. I’ll be drying the peas for winter soups soon.”
“Already?”
“By September.”
I could see in his eyes that he were imagining himself already gone by then. Where would he be? Under what bridge? Beside what city gate, on what river?
“Come inside before the rain,” he said.
“A few more minutes.”
When I got back inside, he were sitting up on the bed and he asked me to sit by him. “Flora, when I’m well, I’ll go. You know that?”
I didn’t answer him. I reached out and took his hand and brought it to my breast. I held it there until he knew it were his. Until he knew I knew he were not taking. I were giving. Then he touched me gently with no promises and no demands. He held my breast and moved his hand inside my blouse and up along my neck. He ran a finger along my chin and touched my lips. He pressed his palm against my cheek and put his fingers through my hair. He used both hands. He drew my face to his face and kissed me. He kissed me with full lips and a full heart, a heavy heart. I felt all his want. He moved his hand along my shoulders, down my back, over my hips. His hands took him on a journey he’d been long wanting to make.
I stood and took off my blouse, apron, and skirt, and stood before him so that he would know it were all his whether he stayed or not. We lay down together on the bed. In the same way I had let my fingers travel along his scars, his fingers traveled my skin. He watched where his fingers went, seeing all the crests and folds, the landscape of skin. They found the dark path from my breast down to my belly. They found the white rivulets of stretched skin upon my hips. They traced the blue tributaries of veins that wind along my legs. They moved slowly. They did not seek to take. They sought to touch, to see, to know. He had two good hands.
His smell were so familiar, a smell I had always known. It were the smell of the heath and the hay, of sweat and ale and burned wood. I relaxed into his arms and breathed him in. He smelled like a man and like a home.
The last time Adriaen left the mill house, we stood together at my cottage door. He didn’t know about the babe then. Neither of us did. He said he wished he were a different kind of man. What I needed, he said, were someone who would live with me in the house beside the mill, and earn a living by the sweat of his brow.
“I wish I was like that,” he said. “If I had it in me to be that way.”
I should have told him he did have it in him. I should have told him he could have been any way he wanted to be. Or maybe I should have just said, “Don’t go, Adriaen. Stay with me. Don’t go.” Odds are, he would have gone anyway.
A few weeks after that, they told me he were in the Leiden jail. He’d done a housebreaking with some other thief. They told me they were to saw off his hand. To take his hand for thieving. I didn’t think they could do that, but they did. They did it right there in that sentencing hall. They brought a doctor in and had ten men hold him to the table. I screamed and cried and wept. What good did it do? What good does it ever do? Adriaen just went on like that.
When he came out of that hall, he would not let me guide him home. Not that time, he said, no more. “You won’t want me now,” he said. “You couldn’t possibly want me now.” But I did want him. I wanted him home. I wanted him by the hearth. I wanted to tend him and mend him and make my house our home.
I saw that they had come. By foot from Dam Square, by skate down the frozen canals, by barge across the Haarlemmermeer, by skiff from the wharf, by carriage from New Town, and by hook and by crook they had come to see Aris the Kid, who’d gone hanging in Dam Square. They’d heard of his bravery on the scaffold, of his brands and his stump and his naked, branded, breast. Now they wanted to see him on the chopping block. They wanted to howl for his flesh.
Nieuwmarkt was as busy as the Monday stock exchange, and just like the traders on that floor, everyone was waving hands in the air for a ticket.
Have you seen our anatomy hall, sir? It is a cramped space, high and circular and narrow and we can barely fit two hundred men in for the lectures, packed like herring into a herring buss. We are badly in need of a better hall, and the guild has already drafted up plans, but for the moment all we can do is strictly limit the tickets. Members of the guild, of course, have priority, after the magistrates and burghers and town councilmen. Tulp himself draws up the list and he is very precise about his guests. They must be men he seeks to cultivate as colleagues, sponsors, supporters, and friends. It’s strictly politics, you see, who gets on the list.
By the time I heard the ruckus in the square outside, the crowd had grown so large you could’ve used it to man a ship. It was only me there—me against a roiling crowd—and I had no more tickets to sell. I heard them pounding, pounding at the door, and I stood behind it for a while, trembling, before I even dared look out the peephole.
My work was all done by then, the corpse prepared, the candelabras lit, the incense smoldering, the dissection table arrayed with all the necessary knives, saws, cleavers, scalpels, forceps, and ropes. I put one ear to the door and crouched beside it, listening, until at last it was too late anymore to keep waiting.
As dusk began to fall, the right and proper invitees—the barbers and surgeons, magistrates and merchants, traders and nobles in their finest doublets, stockings, and lace—at last arrived, pushing past the crowds, claiming their positions by the door. I hoped that the crowd might disperse, seeing the city fathers claiming their rightful places, but instead the crowd cackled and hissed and cursed the ticket holders and wouldn’t let them pass. Then, too, I reasoned that somehow all the jostling would separate the wheat from the chaff, but I was wrong there, too. Immediately it went to fisticuffs as arguments erupted at the door.
I threw open the door and stood staring at the crowd with what little authority I could muster. “Ticket holders for the anatomy lesson of Dr. Tulp may now step forward and form a line right here,” I announced. “Ticket holders only, please. I’m afraid tonight’s dissection is sold out. Please, if you do not hold tickets, you must disperse.”
The gentlemen composed themselves and tried to make a queue, but the crowd only became more agitated at the news that they could not get in. I was jostled and elbowed and yelled at to my face. I can still show you the bruises I received from that mob. Here, here’s one on my arm and here on my hip. I’ll roll down my hose to show you the welt upon my shin. That was where a lady kicked me, before demanding to be let in. A lady! I swear, I thought there would be a riot in Nieuwmarkt square.
Somehow, I got control of the door. I used it as a sieve and received each ticket holder one by one. A steady stream of cloaks and ruffs.
Once inside the anatomy chamber, I thought I’d finally achieve some sense of civility, but then, there, too, was more dispute. This time the jostling was among the guild members and other city nobles about where they’d take their seats.
Tulp’s universe had its own logic, and it was manifest in the arrangement of guests in the rings: the optimal seats in the auditorium are those on the second ring—close enough to the dissection platform to observe every incision and movement of the forceps, yet far enough to shield the audience from the stench of tissue decomposition. City burghers would take the first row, because Tulp is running for city office and wants them to be especially familiar with his face.
Now, some surgeons claimed that they deserved to sit in the front row, in front of the city burghers, since it is their guild, but the burghers wouldn’t budge. Already riled by the crowds outside, they seemed ready to roll up their sleeves again to claim their spots. There was no winning with these men. Honor their status in whatever way you will and still they find reason to quibble. Well, at least they were finally all seated—and I managed to slip back down the stairs and see if I could sell the few final tickets for the standing room in the back.
I have, in a sense, always been a famulus anatomicus. My work is as close to my soul as my hand is just now to this
tankard. I began this noble profession when I was five years old. My father worked for Carolus Clusius at the hortus botanicus at Leiden University. He was a specialist in tropical plants from the Indies and subtropical flowers from the Cape Colonies—a curio collector, too, in his way, but of the leafy vein.
My father performed yeoman’s work in that garden, weeding wild grasses from the beds and deadheading overripe blooms. In the winter months, when the flower beds were fallow, he worked for the chief anatomist, Petrus Pauw, who liked to decorate the theater there with all kinds of frightful sights.
He had ten human skeletons: a skeleton rider on his skeleton horse, a skeleton playing the angel of death, a fateful scythe in his hand. A skeleton man and skeleton mate, side by side at a fruit-laden apple tree: the bony Adam and Eve. Six more around the amphitheater hoisted flags with deadly reminders in Latin: Mors ultima linea rerum (Death is the final end). One carried Horace’s dictum, Pulvis et umbra sumus (We are but dust and shadow). I was only a boy, but I remember Pauw’s chamber as well as my childhood cupboard bed. All my darkest nightmares came from there.
Both my parents died in a single week during the great pox of 1616. The only reason I lived on was fright. One day I found my parents both abed, their faces pale and hollowed, red blisters covering their necks and arms. My mother told me to stay away: “A monster has come,” she said. “Quick, escape to the woods. We will come find you.” I did as she said; I ran away and made my home in the woods for a week, terrified that the monster would get me. At last I got so hungry I had to go home. When I returned their bodies were already gone and a foreign woman was tending our hearth. I ran to Pauw, the only other person I knew. The great anatomist took me in as an additional set of hands.