The Anatomy Lesson

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Nina Siegal

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.nanatalese.com

Doubleday is a registered trademark of Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

This page
:
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
(1632), by Rembrandt van Rijn. Canvas, 169.5 × 216.5 cm. Reprinted by permission of the Royal Picture Gallery
Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
Front jacket images: top and inset © The Bridgeman Art Library / Getty Images; bottom © traveler1116 / Getty Images; tulips © IgorGolovniov / Shutterstock. Back jacket image © DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI / Getty Images.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Siegal, Nina.
The anatomy lesson : a novel / Nina Siegal.
pages cm
1. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606–1669—Fiction.
2. Amsterdam (Netherlands)—Social conditions—17th century—
Fiction. 3. Medical fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.I37A53 2014
813′.6—dc23
2013034642

ISBN
978-0-385-53836-7 (hardcover)
ISBN
978-0-385-53837-4 (eBook)

v3.1

For Joseph, Cameron, and Sonia

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

I: Hanging Day

II: The Heart

III: The Mouth

IV: The Eyes

V: The Mind

VI: The Heart

VII: The Mouth

VIII: The Heart

IX: The Body

X: The Heart

XI: The Mouth

XII: The Eyes

XIII: The Body

XIV: The Eyes

XV: The Heart

XVI: The Mouth

XVII: The Hand

XVIII: The Eyes

XIX: The Heart

XX: The Body

XXI: The Mind

XXII: The Eyes

XXIII: The Eyes

XXIV: The Body

XXV: The Eyes

XXVI: The Mouth

XXVII: A Winter Festival

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

Dumb integuments teach. Cuts of flesh, though dead
,

for that very reason forbid us to die
.

Here, while with artful hand he slits the pallid limbs
,

speaks to us the eloquence of learned Tulp:

“
Listener, teach yourself! And while you proceed through the parts
,

believe that, even in the smallest, God lies hid.
”

—CASPAR BARLAEUS
, 1639

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I knew Rembrandt’s masterpiece
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
as a child, for a print of it hung in my father’s study, but I never knew its title or its origins. During an art history seminar in grad school, I was assigned to “read” a painting—i.e., unravel the narrative within it. We were allowed to pick any painting; and as my professor clicked through slides of potential examples, it showed up on the screen and I thought: That one! I’ll finally find out the real story behind that painting.

I moved to Amsterdam, drawn by the idea of writing a novel about the dead man in the painting, Adriaen Adriaenszoon, or Aris Kindt. I had a grant to research the period and to walk the streets and absorb sights of Rembrandt’s world. I lived in a house built in 1624; I worked in an office that was once the warehouse for the Dutch West India Company. Horses clip-clop through the still-cobbled byways of the Old Center, now packed with international sightseers, who, if you squint in a certain way, could be sailors
and traders. And in Amsterdam’s city archives, I was able to find the complete dossier of the crimes committed by a recidivist thief named Aris Kindt.

One afternoon when I was sitting in front of the original Rembrandt portrait in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, I looked at the nearly naked corpse on the dissection slab and I thought: Before he became the centerpiece of this anatomy lesson, someone had cared for that man. Someone had touched that body, loved that body. That someone was a woman. I named her Flora. And that’s where my story began.

THE BODY

At the first toll of the Westerkerk bell Adriaen Adriaenszoon bolts awake in a dank stone jail inside Amsterdam’s town hall. He is shivering and sweating at the same time. Shivering because winter gnaws through his meager leather jerkin, sweating because of the nightmare out of which he’s just awakened.

What he remembers is no more than an assemblage of symbols—a dog, a wall made of doors, an old woman with a pail full of sand—but fear is pounding through him insistently, demanding he return to sleep to see out the dream. There is the promise of solace through one of those doors, and a bed to lie on, something tells him. But his eyes will not close again. His other senses are already registering the day.

Horse’s hooves tromp in the puddles somewhere nearby. There’s
a whinny and the sound of clacking steel on cobblestones. The street, which he can see only through the tiny window, is glistening from last night’s downpour. The air smells of mineral soil, sweat, and piss.

He crosses himself before remembering where he is, then glances around nervously in hopes that no guards have seen this. He presses his callused palm through his coarse hair and slumps against the cold wall. There’s only his cell mate, Joep van de Gheyn, the fishmonger killer, still asleep on the plank against his own wall. Aris wipes his sweat from his brow with his left hand, then rubs the stump over its bloody bandages, stifling the throbbing of the limb, which pulses with every heartbeat. “That’s all right now. Easy there,” he says, massaging the limb.

Hearing the bells ringing out the final chimes of the morning hour, he slaps himself to full wakefulness. This is his last day living. Each time the bells ring he’s one step closer to the gallows.

Outside, there’s a festive feeling in the frigid air. Damp and cold as it is, with clouds that hang so low they form a ceiling over the city’s tile rooftops, there’s still a raw excitement that pulses like a current through Amsterdam’s quiet canals and byways. Some would call it bloodlust.

The streets echo with silence, hollow and expectant, like an empty tankard waiting to be filled. As dawn starts to creep across the water and the wharves from the swampy eastern marshlands, workers from the docks arrive with wood planks to build the hangman’s scaffold. They drop the boards like pieces of a coffin on the square and the hammering begins. Nearby, vendors are setting up
their stalls to sell delftware, wool mittens, or fresh-baked bread to all who’ll come to gawp.

Tacked to the town hall door is the Justice Day schedule:

•  R. Pijnaker, age fifteen, will receive a birching for willfully stealing from a tavern keeper’s till.

•  Brothel madam S. Zeedijk shall be beaten upon her neck with a rolling pin for general lewdness, moral corruption, and running a house of debauchery.

•  Three burglary conspirators, R. Tolbeit, A. Schellekamp, and F. Knipsheer, to be flogged and branded with the Amsterdam
A
on their chests before being banished from the city for their brazen attempt to break into a diamond cutter’s shop.

•  A confined convict H. Peeters shall be whipped and marked with burning spears for his violation of confinement and other evil acts before his lifelong imprisonment is renewed.