all the while, made me feel faint.
But he was my master. I was meant to do as he said.
I pressed my lips together, then stepped up to the box, to the end where the lid had been lifted. I bent over and looked in at the square of milky glass fixed inside. There was a faint drawing of something on it.
He draped his robe gently over my head so that it blocked out all light. It was still warm from him, and smelled of the way brick feels when it has been baked by the sun. I placed my hands on the table to steady myself and closed my eyes for a moment. I felt as if I had drunk my evening beer too quickly.
“What do you see?” I heard him say.
I opened my eyes and saw the painting, without the woman in it.
“Oh!” I stood up so suddenly that the robe dropped from my head to the floor. I stepped back from the box, treading on the cloth.
I moved my foot. “I’m sorry, sir. I will wash the robe this morning.”
“Never mind about the robe, Griet. What did you see?”
I swallowed. I was terribly confused, and a little frightened. What was in the box was a trick of the devil, or something Catholic I did not understand. “I saw the painting, sir. Except that the woman wasn’t in it, and it was smaller. And things were—switched around.”
“Yes, the image is projected upside down, and left and right are reversed. There are mirrors that can fix that.”
I did not understand what he was saying.
“But—”
“What is it?”
“I don’t understand, sir. How did it get there?”
He picked up the robe and brushed it off. He was smiling. When he smiled his face was like an open window.
“Do you see this?” He pointed to the round object at the end of the smaller box. “This is called a lens. It is made of a piece of glass cut in a certain way. When light from that scene”—he pointed to the corner—“goes through it and into the box it projects the image so that we can see it here.” He tapped the cloudy glass.
I was staring at him so hard, trying to understand, that my eyes began to water.
“What is an image, sir? It is not a word I know.”
Something changed in his face, as if he had been looking over my shoulder but now was looking at me. “It is a picture, like a painting.”
I nodded. More than anything I wanted him to think I could follow what he said.
“Your eyes are very wide,” he said then.
I blushed. “So I have been told, sir.”
“Do you want to look again?”
I did not, but I knew I could not say so. I thought for a moment. “I will look again, sir, but only if I am left alone.”
He looked surprised, then amused. “All right,” he said. He handed me his robe. “I’ll return in a few minutes, and tap on the door before I enter.”
He left, closing the door behind him. I grasped his robe, my hands shaking.
For a moment I thought of simply pretending to look, and saying that I had. But he would know I was lying.
And I was curious. It became easier to consider it without him watching me. I took a deep breath and gazed down into the box. I could see on the glass a faint trace of the scene in the corner. As I brought the robe over my head the image, as he called it, became clearer and clearer—the table, the chairs, the yellow curtain in the corner, the back wall with the map hanging on it, the ceramic pot gleaming on the table, the pewter basin, the powder-brush, the letter. They were all there, assembled before my eyes on a flat surface, a painting that was not a painting. I cautiously touched the glass—it was smooth and cold, with no traces of paint on it. I removed the robe and the image went faint again, though it was still there. I put the robe over me once more, closing out the light, and watched the jeweled colors appear again. They seemed to be even brighter and more colorful on the glass than they were in the corner.
It became as hard to stop looking into the box as it had been to take my eyes from the painting of the woman with the pearl necklace the first time I’d seen it. When I heard the tap on the door I just had time to straighten up and let the robe drop to my shoulders before he walked in.
“Have you looked again, Griet? Have you looked properly?”
“I have looked, sir, but I am not at all sure of what I have seen.” I smoothed my cap.
“It is surprising, isn’t it? I was as amazed as you the first time my friend showed it to me.”
“But why do you look at it, sir, when you can look at your own painting?”
“You do not understand.” He tapped the box. “This is a tool. I use it to help me see, so that I am able to make the painting.”
“But—you use your eyes to see.”
“True, but my eyes do not always see everything.”
My eyes darted to the corner, as if they would discover something unexpected that had been hidden from me before, behind the powder-brush, emerging from the shadows of the blue cloth.
“Tell me, Griet,” he continued, “do you think I simply paint what is there in that corner?”
I glanced at the painting, unable to answer. I felt as if I were being tricked. Whatever I answered would be wrong.
“The camera obscura helps me to see in a different way,” he explained. “To see more of what is there.”
When he saw the baffled expression on my face he must have regretted saying so much to someone like me. He turned and snapped the box shut. I slipped off his robe and held it out to him.
“Sir—”
“Thank you, Griet,” he said as he took it from me. “Have you finished with the cleaning here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You may go, then.”
“Thank you, sir.” I quickly gathered my cleaning things and left, the door clicking shut behind me.
I thought about what he had said, about how the box helped him to see more. Although I did not understand why, I knew he was right because I could see it in his painting of the woman, and also what I remembered of the painting of Delft. He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.
The day after I looked in the box I went to the studio and it was gone. The easel was back in its place. I glanced at the painting. Previously I had found only tiny changes in it. Now there was one easily seen—the map hanging on the wall behind the woman had been removed from both the painting and the scene itself. The wall was now bare. The painting looked the better for it—simpler, the lines of the woman clearer now against the brownish-white background of the wall. But the change upset me—it was so sudden. I would not have expected it of him.
I felt uneasy after I left the studio, and as I walked to the Meat Hall I did not look about me as I usually did. Though I waved hello to the old butcher I did not stop, even when he called out to me.
Pieter the son was minding the stall alone. I had seen him a few times since that first day, but always in the presence of his father, standing in the background while Pieter the father took charge. Now he said, “Hello, Griet. I’ve wondered when you would come.”
I thought that a silly thing to say, as I had been buying meat at the same time each day.
His eyes did not meet mine.
I decided not to remark on his words. “Three pounds of stewing beef, please. And do you have more of those sausages your father sold me the other day? The girls liked them.”
“There are none left, I’m afraid.”
A woman came to stand behind me, waiting her turn. Pieter the son glanced at her. “Can you wait for a moment?” he said to me in a low voice.
