Girl in Hyacinth Blue (10 page)

It wasn't only Jantje who needed it. The Orien tal tapestry on the table, the map on the wall, the engraved brass latch on the window—since Saskia couldn't have these things in reality, then she wanted them all the more in the painting. For the moments when she was filled with the joy of Jantje blowing bubbles out his tiny mouth, or when Piet made her laugh at his antics, or when Marta ate her bread with her little finger extended like a lady at tea, the grip of wanting left her and she was at peace. But that wasn't constant.

"This boy came from a fine family," she told Stijn one night. He looked at her, apparently too tired to ask with words how she knew. With shoulders slumped, he waited for her explanation. "Just look at that lace on the edge of the girl's cap. She isn't hur rying to sew on those buttons. She has the leisure to look out the window, and it doesn't matter if they are sewn on that day or the next. That's the boy's mother when she was a girl, I'm thinking. Only fine folk have their portraits painted. I want him to know her. It wouldn't be right to claim him as ours."

"Marketday in Groningen tomorrow," Stijn said.

"Oh, no, Stijn. Let's just wait a little."

"We'll be needing money soon."

She slept that night not touching him in the narrow bed. In the morning, she opened the shut ters to find ash-gray fog obscuring everything so that she could barely make out their own barn. "Thank you, Heavenly Father," she whispered. Stijn certainly wouldn't send her out on pathless waters in a fog. She'd be sure to get lost. The next marketday, she feigned sickness, but thought he suspected. The next, Piet actually was. In this way the issue of the painting retreated. Often she stud ied his face, the lines forming around his eyes thin as hairs, to see if he still thought of it.

"How many more potatoes?" he asked one night after the children were asleep.

She knew he meant the eating potatoes, for no farmer, not even a starving farmer, would touch his store of seed potatoes, the new crop Stijn was pio neering in the northland.

"Almost a barrel," she said vaguely.

He didn't ask about the pickled meat. They both knew by her smaller portions that they didn't have much.

"I heard some news on the dike as might inter est you."

"What's that?"

"There was a hanging in Delfzijl the day of the flood. A wild witch girl hanged for murder."

"So?"

"So a few days later a baby appears. They always wait for the birth if a woman who's carrying is to hang. Seems to me there's no question."

"This child's mother wasn't a murderer. She wasn't even a shiftless country girl."

"You don't know that for sure."

"Why, just look at the painting. Look at the floor. Stone tiles. Maybe even marble. Look at the tapestry on the table. That's not the home of a wild witch girl, or a peat digger, or even a farmer." She saw his lips press together slightly at her last word. The invention of Jantje's parentage became more real to her as her need for it grew greater. "Jantje came from a good home. In Groningen or Amsterdam. A home with a map on the wall and nice furniture and a mother who wore blue."

"Jantje?"

She flushed when she realized what she said.

"The babe wasn't brought to any other house, Stijn. The Lord has given us a covenant."

"And you break it if you don't sell the paint ing."

"Can't we just wait? He's not costing us any thing. Just a little milk."

"A little milk that would better be going into cheese. A little milk as could be sold. And don't forget, Katrina'll go dry long before our fields do."

She turned from him. He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. "I'm not ask ing you to give up the child, Saskia."

She nodded, acknowledging his concession, and stood still to enjoy the weight of his hands. He put his face next to hers and she held her breath.

"Go to Groningen tomorrow. It'll fetch five guilders, surely. Maybe eight if we're lucky. It'll keep us in meat."

"But—"

"See that you shop it around. By the university. Don't accept anything less than eight. Try for ten. And show that paper."

The next morning at dawn, she lowered Piet and Marta, the painting wrapped in a bedsheet, and then the baby into the rowboat. She rowed inland follow ing the bare trees lining the Damsterdiep. The dike road was still under water at first, but farther inland, it slowly began to emerge. Through shallow water pierced by sedges and busy with ducks, she rowed as far as Woldijk, the first dike that held, where it crossed the Damsterdiep. She tied the rowboat to a dike cleat and climbed out, stiff in the legs but feel ing the exhilaration of solid ground. She paid a boy half a groat to watch the skiff. Immediately Piet and Marta ran down the dike road crying, "Land, land!" and she let them, until a small barge towed by a horse was ready to leave for Groningen.

The sight of winter fields waiting for planting on the inland side of the dike filled her with hope. But even that wouldn't have the same effect on Stijn. It wasn't hope that lay between that man and God. Nor was it thankfulness. Or appreciation for a bird or a leaf. Or a kiss. Fear lived in that space in stead. The horror of seeing the last of the grain and the fields still wet. The fear of having to abandon the farm and starve beside a canal in Amsterdam, the whole family inching forward their alms bowls in front of the poorhouse. But that wasn't the God she cared to know.

In the distance the tower of the church of St. Martin rose above the plain, and as they ap proached Groningen's tall, stone Water Gate, the children squealed their merriment and jumped up and down. When or where or through what cata clysm do men and women pass that makes them lose that bursting soul-freedom?

They rode past the sugar beet refinery and the metal workers' alley where the children put their hands to their ears, so much banging and hammer ing there was. To Piet and Marta, Groningen was a dream city, full of magical buildings and arches and windows all containing mysteries. They plagued her with questions—What's that man doing? What's in that cart? What's that metal thing for?—she couldn't keep up with them. And people. So many people, the children marveled.

At the dock Saskia asked directions to the uni versity and entered a stationer's shop full of books and portfolios and papers, some few paintings, and a wealth of detailed drawings of plants and animals and the human body. She laid the painting on the counter and untied the sheet. If she had to do it, she wanted to do it quickly.

The wizened shopkeeper took one look and asked, "Where did you get this?"

She felt Piet and Marta squeeze up against her legs from both sides. "It was given to me." She un folded the paper for him to see. He held out his hand for it but she wouldn't let it go. She didn't want him to see the back.

As he read, the fingers of his right hand curled in. He gave her a penetrating look, and his eye brows twitched in a most unpleasant way that made Piet snicker. She squeezed the back of his neck to make him behave. She knew that all the way home in the boat, he'd twitch his eyebrows and then burst out laughing.

The man's gaze crawled down her homespun skirt of black fustian to her old clogs. "Given to you?"

"Yes, sir." She held tight to the paper.

"Do you know who Jan van der Meer is?"

"No, sir."

"I'll give you . . ." he paused, and Marta lay the tips of her fingers along the edge of the man's desk. Saskia shook her head at her slightly, and Marta swept her hands behind her back. "Twenty-four guilders, for it." He turned away and reached for his cash box as if to conclude the deal.

Her surprise made her blurt out, "Twenty four?" Jantje gave a little cry, and she realized she was holding him too tight. She shifted him from one hip to the other.

"Twenty-five. Not a stuiver more."

Stijn would be jubilant with that. Twenty-five guilders would make him tender to her, and it would make keeping Jantje certain.

But the man wouldn't look at her. He just sat there stacking up the coins. His fingernails were long and yellow. She couldn't trust a man with long fingernails. The painting must be worth even more. It was certainly worth more than that to her.

"No, thank you." The firmness in her own voice astonished her. Piet gave her a quick look of confusion. She wrapped the painting in the bed sheet, tying the corners carefully, feeling the man following her to the door, his protestations a blur of sound.

Once outside, terror seized her, and she broke out in a sweat. What if she had made a mistake? What if she was only offered less everywhere else? Twenty-five guilders! Besides feeding them until their next crop, twenty-five guilders would buy a sow and a mating hog. Stijn's dream of breeding stock could come true, and she'd be the reason.

"Twenty-five guilders," Piet said with exagger ated authority, and twitched his eyebrows so vio lently that his whole face quivered. Marta burst out laughing.

Saskia walked briskly but aimlessly through the streets, bought the children a cinnamon waffle at a street cart, and worried. She peered into the window of an antiquarian shop and saw paintings on the wall. She made Marta hold onto Piet and they went inside. Drinking horns and beakers and goblets and tankards stood in a clutter on chests and tables. "Don't touch anything," she warned. Marta and Piet were beside themselves, demand ing in whispers that the other one look at each new thing—books, brocade cushions, carvings from the East Indies, and when they found a large mirror, they couldn't resist making faces with their eyebrows, noses, cheeks, lips, everything twitching at once, and giggling at themselves. "Ssh," Saskia commanded, and stifled her own chuckle.

The woman was concluding some business with a man, so Saskia had an opportunity to examine a yellowed, scrolled map hanging on the wall. The place names were all strange. She could find neither Oling nor Westerbork. Her breath leaked thinly out her lungs and she felt that she was from nowhere. Piet and Marta were giggling louder so she pushed them gently to the door and was about to leave when the woman said, "Is there something you might want?"

Saskia started at the sound. "No, thank you," she murmured, and gave an apologetic smile. She paused at the doorway and turned back. "Well, per haps one thing. Do you happen to know who Jan van der Meer is?"

"Of course. From Delft. The painter from Delft. Vermeer." The woman noticed the painting wrapped in cloth. "You have something to show me?"

Saskia came back in and unwrapped it and the children became serious again. As always when she let herself, Saskia felt sucked into the clean, spare, sunlit room with the young girl in the painting.

"Light. He painted light, you know. Lovely." The woman carried the painting to the window. "Look at her skin. Glazed smooth as silk. Could be. Could very well be."

"Could be what?"

"A Vermeer, my dear."

Saskia unfolded the paper and handed it to her. The woman read it several times, then turned it over. She gave Saskia a long look, then smiled at the baby on her hip.

"Where are you from?"

"Oling. It's only a hamlet. Near Appingedam. We're flooded, and—"

"You take this painting to Amsterdam. It'll fetch a far sight more there than I can pay. Or any one in Groningen. Take it to the shops along the Rokin. Accept nothing less than eighty guilders. And keep it out of the rain."

"Eighty!"

Her voice rose so high that Piet shrieked, "Eighty!"

After more assurances and some shared admira tion for the painting, Saskia sold the woman her grandmother's blue linen table scarf with the fine tatting, and then made her way, with the wrapped painting, through the market square to the butch ery stalls.

On the row home from Woldijk, her mind flew like a caged sparrow. What would she tell Stijn? That she couldn't sell it? That it only fetched four guilders and so it wasn't worth selling? She'd sell her small spice chest instead. They would get by on that. He'd never know what the first man offered. Or what this woman said. He would trust her. She'd never given him any reason not to.

At home she uncovered the painting and hung it on the peg and put no clothes in front of it. Eighty guilders!

The story she'd imagined came to life for her. Why would such a young woman who could afford to have her portrait painted by a great artist, why would she, how could she have given away her son? She wasn't at peace the way that artist painted her. She was leaning forward, and the rigidness of her spine showed the ache in her soul. She was a des perate woman with frailties just like her, tempta tions just like her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there be ing no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, want ing to believe rather than believing, else why would she give away her son? A woman who prayed, "Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief." Saying the words to herself clamped shut her throat and made her cry.

She tried to get the children to go to sleep be fore Stijn came home. The Lord forgive her or not, she would not tell Stijn. Four guilders, if he asked. After the children were sleeping. Even though the pain of that lie would strike again at the discovery of each new beauty in the painting, truth would drive a wedge between them no tenderness could bridge.

She watched Stijn's eyes when he came in through the window. The first thing he saw was the painting. The second was the pot of beef stew. They hadn't had beef since the flood. She put a bowl of it before him so the aroma would soften him. "I sold grandmother's handworked table scarf," she explained. He took one spoonful stand ing up and hung his mud-caked reefer on the peg in front of the painting.

She gasped and could barely restrain herself from whisking it away. Marta and Piet poked their heads out from below the cabinet bed. "We saw lots of bridges and churches and beggars," Marta said, and Piet mimicked a blind man holding out his bowl.