I did as he commanded. He was studying me. He was interested in me again.
“The light,” I said. “It’s cleaner now.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
The next morning the table had been moved back to the painting corner and covered with a red, yellow and blue table rug. A chair was set against the back wall, and a map hung over it.
He had begun again
1665
My father wanted me to describe the painting once more.
“But nothing has changed since the last time,” I said.
“I want to hear it again,” he insisted, hunching over in his chair to get nearer to the fire. He sounded like Frans when he was a little boy and had been told there was nothing left to eat in the hotpot. My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again.
March was the month I was born.
Being blind seemed to make my father hate winter even more. His other senses strengthened, he felt the cold acutely, smelled the stale air in the house, tasted the blandness of the vegetable stew more than my mother. He suffered when the winter was long.
I felt sorry for him. When I could I smuggled to him treats from Tanneke’s kitchen—stewed cherries, dried apricots, a cold sausage, once a handful of dried rose petals I had found in Catharina’s cupboard.
“The baker’s daughter stands in a bright corner by a window,” I began patiently. “She is facing us, but is looking out the window, down to her right. She is wearing a yellow and black fitted bodice of silk and velvet, a dark blue skirt, and a white cap that hangs down in two points below her chin.”
“As you wear yours?” my father asked. He had never asked this before, though I had described the cap the same way each time.
“Yes, like mine. When you look at the cap long enough,” I added hurriedly, “you see that he has not really painted it white, but blue, and violet, and yellow.”
“But it’s a white cap, you said.”
“Yes, that’s what is so strange. It’s painted many colors, but when you look at it, you think it’s white.”
“Tile painting is much simpler,” my father grumbled. “You use blue and that’s all. A dark blue for the outlines, a light blue for the shadows. Blue is blue.”
And a tile is a tile, I thought, and nothing like his paintings. I wanted him to understand that white was not simply white. It was a lesson my master had taught me.
“What is she doing?” he asked after a moment.
“She has one hand on a pewter pitcher sitting on a table and one on a window she’s partly opened. She’s about to pick up the pitcher and dump the water from it out the window, but she’s stopped in the middle of what she’s doing and is either dreaming or looking at something in the street.”
“Which is she doing?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it seems one thing, sometimes the other.”
My father sat back in his seat, frowning. “First you say the cap is white but not painted white. Then you say the girl is doing one thing or maybe another. You’re confusing me.” He rubbed his brow as if his head ached.
“I’m sorry, Father. I’m trying to describe it accurately.”
“But what is the story in the painting?”
“His paintings don’t tell stories.”
He did not respond. He had been difficult all winter. If Agnes had been there she would have been able to cheer him. She had always known how to make him laugh.
“Mother, shall I light the footwarmers?” I asked, turning from my father to hide my irritation. Now that he was blind, he could easily sense the moods of others, when he wanted to. I did not like him being critical of the painting without having seen it, or comparing it to the tiles he had once painted. I wanted to tell him that if he could only see the painting he would understand that there was nothing confusing about it. It may not have told a story, but it was still a painting you could not stop looking at.
At the time my father and I talked, my mother had been busy around us, stirring the stew, feeding the fire, setting out plates and mugs, sharpening a knife to cut the bread. Without waiting for her to answer I gathered the footwarmers and took them to the back room where the peat was stored. As I filled them I chided myself for being angry with my father.
I brought the footwarmers back and lit them from the fire. When I had placed them under our seats at the table I led my father over to his chair while my mother spooned out the stew and poured the beer. My father took a bite and made a face. “Didn’t you bring anything from Papists’ Corner to sweeten this mush?” he muttered.
“I couldn’t. Tanneke has been difficult with me and I’ve stayed away from her kitchen.” I regretted it the moment the words left my mouth.
“Why? What did you do?” More and more my father was looking to find fault with me, at times even siding with Tanneke.
I thought quickly. “I spilled some of their best ale. A whole jug.”
My mother looked at me reproachfully. She knew when I lied. If my father hadn’t been feeling so miserable he might have noticed from my voice as well.
I was getting better at it, though.
When I left to go back my mother insisted on accompanying me part of the way, even though it was raining, a cold, hard rain. As we reached the Rietveld Canal and turned right towards Market Square, she said, “You will be seventeen soon.”
“Next week,” I agreed.
“Not long now until you are a woman.”
“Not long.” I kept my eyes on the raindrops pebbling the canal. I did not like to think about the future.
“I have heard that the butcher’s son is paying you attention.”
“Who told you that?”
In answer she simply brushed raindrops from her cap and shook out her shawl.
I shrugged. “I’m sure he’s paying me no more attention than he is other girls.”
I expected her to warn me, to tell me to be a good girl, to protect our family name. Instead she said, “Don’t be rude to him. Smile at him and be pleasant.”
Her words surprised me, but when I looked in her eyes and saw there the hunger for meat that a butcher’s son could provide, I understood why she had set aside her pride.
At least she did not ask me about the lie I had told earlier. I could not tell them why Tanneke was angry at me. That lie hid a much greater lie. I would have too much to explain.
Tanneke had discovered what I was doing during the afternoons when I was meant to be sewing.
I was assisting him.
It had begun two months before, one afternoon in January not long after Franciscus was born. It was very cold. Franciscus and Johannes were both poorly, with chesty coughs and trouble breathing. Catharina and the nurse were tending them by the fire in the washing kitchen while the rest of us sat close to the fire in the cooking kitchen.
Only he was not there. He was upstairs. The cold did not seem to affect him.
Catharina came to stand in the doorway between the two kitchens. “Someone must go to the apothecary,” she announced, her face flushed. “I need some things for the boys.” She looked pointedly at me.
Usually I would be the last chosen for such an errand. Visiting the apothecary was not like going to the butcher’s or fishmonger’s—tasks Catharina continued to leave to me after the birth of Franciscus. The apothecary
