The Anatomy Lesson (12 page)

“I am meant to be there now, as a matter of fact.”

Then the artist’s face seemed to change. “I am to be there tonight as well,” he said, picking through what was in his palm for the small coins.

I paused before answering. “Why, I should expect as much, master. All the city’s important men will be attending.”

Van Rijn gave me a quizzical look. “I’m glad we had this transaction today,” he said, handing me four stivers, which seemed to be payment, not for the bird but for the information about the gibbet.

Still, the coins felt paltry in my hand, since I’d spent so much in sweat to earn that damned paradise, and yet I took the money and bowed deeply. It was an absurd and unnecessary gesture, but a man has to stay in the good graces of his clients.

“Stand up, Fetchet,” Van Rijn said. “We are not in Italy. Tell me: When will you have your corpse?”

I straightened. “In moments, I hope. It is a noon execution.”

“Then you are already late,” he said. “Be off.”

I ran down the stairs and out the door and up the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, and across Old Town and back to the Dam, and arrived
in the square just in time to see the hangman raise the noose over Joep’s head.

As I caught my breath, I felt relief. Though it would’ve been natural for me to have pangs of sadness for doomed Joep, I was more like a turkey hawk circling its prey. My hunger trumped my mercy. I thought: At least I will get this bird.

Just as the hangman tightened that cord, a shriek arose from the crowd so high and piercing it forced all of Dam Square to turn to look. The crowd parted around the font of this eruption, as it might be trying to protect itself from a rearing horse. There was a wench, dressed in tattered rags; her bodice was undone, revealing nearly her full bosom, and her hair wildly sprouted from her head.

“Stop, devil!” she screamed. “No man shall be hanged! Save the innocent!”

Oh, she cried and cried like a Greek siren so no one could ignore her. She screamed that she was a witch who’d already borne five tigers out of her womb, and “I’ll birth ten more here and unleash them upon the square unless you halt this execution!” Though I have seen many a true witch in my day, there were more theatrics in her than sorcery. Her hands outstretched attempted to summon lightning but none came. Her eyes, though red and wide open, were not demonic, only at wit’s end.

It was whispered through the crowd that her name was Trijntje van Dungeon, from Antwerp, the widow of the slain fishmonger. Some wenches pushed her forward, and a few men lifted her onto the scaffold next to the hangman to plead her cause.

We could all see her more clearly. Her face was round like a plate and smeared from tears; her hair was a mass of curly locks with threads of gray poking out among the fairer hues. She was like some kind of wild Medusa, writhing out of the sea. Her arms were like
two great oars stolen off a war galleon. This was no witch, but some proud specimen of Nordic womanhood, who could crush a frail man as easily as a passing carriage wheel would flatten a mouse.

Instead of trying to press her back off the stage, the hangman seemed as awed by her presence as the rest of us. She did not go directly for Joep, as I anticipated, but instead took the scaffold as if it were her own stage and launched her soliloquy upon the crowd.

“This man is innocent,” she cried out, now that she’d gotten the full attention of thousands of spectators. “He did not kill my husband.” Seeing them standing next to each other on the scaffold, it was hard to believe that there was supposed to be a link between this fleshy Medusa and the timid, pious tailor. It was like imagining a bull wed a wood ant. “I stabbed my husband myself out of pure malice and without a moment’s regret,” she went on. “I hated him with all my guts and knifed him right in the throat and watched him bleed.”

The crowds gasped but I doubt it was because anyone thought she wasn’t capable of it.

“Oh, I hated him truly,” she went on. “Joep loved me, and he stumbled in during the act and, poor blessed man, took the blame. The sheriff hauled him off and he never argued. All these months, he paid for my crime, now I am here to die for him.” She turned and gazed kindly on her beloved. He exchanged the gaze and anyone could see it was real love between that twig and the hearty pea stew.

Turning back to her audience, she began to shout: “Take me! Take me instead. It is I, I, who should have the hangman’s rope. I’m the murderer and I have no remorse. I was crazy with hatred. I killed him with my own hands.”

She scratched at her breast with exaggerated histrionics to prove her point, crying that the crowd must prevent the unjust execution.
She would not be silenced unless the hangman removed the rope from her beloved Joep and put it on her neck instead. She even tried to push the masked man aside and to draw down the rope, accidentally beginning to strangle her own lover with this force … but here the scaffold carpenters and several men from the crowd stepped in. They managed to wrangle her off her stage, but she kept screaming and pounding her massive chest.

I was moved by this scene, I must admit. I was happy for Joep. I’d always found him to be a kind and gentle soul in the months I’d courted his flesh. I’d never wanted to pluck his eyeballs and put them in a cup.

The crowd would’ve been more than happy to see the hangman swap the rope from Joep’s neck to Trijntje’s. Soon enough the whole of Dam Square was chanting for his acquittal, and her damnation.

The cry went up as they were hauling her out of the square toward town hall: “Cut him down, cut him down! String her up! String her up!” Even I got swept up in foment. Waving my fist in the air, I chanted, “Joep, Joep! Free the innocent! Kill the damned!” I shouted and cheered, too, when the hangman started to cut Joep down from the rope, and even raised a child on my shoulders to give the lad a better view.

It was only moments later that I realized what had transpired: my cadaver—the one I’d spent so many months cultivating—was not going to die. Though the crowd demanded that crazy Trijntje be dangled from Joep’s intended rope, the hangman wouldn’t take action until the magistrates had a say, he said. What cowardice! She was clearly the murderess! She’d be a perfect Joep substitute, too. With the body of a woman for dissection, I could charge six or even seven stivers a head for door admission, and certainly her organs would be full of evidence of her ignominy.

I cried out, “Don’t waste another moment!” with such fury a few people around me turned in amazement. The hangman didn’t heed me. Trijntje was put in irons and dragged off to the Sint Ursula’s
spinhuis
instead. As she was being led away in front of the chanting crowd, I climbed the scaffold myself and begged the hangman.

He shook his head at me. “Won’t hang a witch,” he said bluntly. “You never know what’ll come of that.”

So instead, this witch would sit in the
spinhuis
, sewing and knitting her days away rather than serve the noble purpose of scientia. It was a scandal.

My troubles were now grave, if you’ll forgive me a pun, one obvious pitfall of this profession. What a day! Everything was turning against me.

“But what about my body?” I said to the executioner. “The papers are all signed! The fee paid! The annual anatomical lesson is this very night!”

“There’s yet another hanging,” said the hangman. “Talk to the magistrate.”

That barge finally got to the Haarlemmer Port, and the gates there were still open, thank the Lord. But now they said we were far from the Dam and the streets were too full of carts to pass. We’d need a skiff to get to the square, and even so, the canals were clogged to bursting. It were getting closer and closer to noon, and my heart were jumping.

The boy said he’d find us a boatman, and before the barge were even docked, he’d jumped across onto land and gone to find one. I watched him run the shore while the barge slid into the berth.

I had to get to the Dam, but the city made me afraid. It were noisy and crowded and the stench of garbage were heavy like a mist. That port were full of sailors, tradesmen, militiamen, scavengers, vagabonds, and all kinds of foreigners in silks and velvets and turbans. Whoever weren’t shoving down the lane were standing in the way, trying to sell something. This side, a toothless beggar barking out handmade wares; there a little lass no more than six selling
caps and collars; here a bawdy lady tugging down her bodice, selling herself. Men pushing barrels of beer onto carts; boys handing out oysters still wobbling in their half shells. I were afraid in this city like I never were in Leiden.

Guus came back with a big burly fellow in clothes so tattered I took him for a galley slave. “I found him,” the boy said breathlessly. “He’s got a rowboat.”

I could see there weren’t no others who would take our fare.

“We must go quickly to Dam Square to stop the hanging,” I said. I took one coin out of Father van Thijn’s purse and pushed it to him. “We are already late.”

The man nodded like he knew all about it. “Keep your money hid,” he said. “These streets are teeming with thieves.” He smiled a strange smile.

His skiff were close by. He offered me his hand to help me down, and I sat on the seat behind his. Then he climbed down into the boat himself, nearly tipping us all over, and took up his oars. “Are you ready?” he asked.

“Go as fast as you can,” I said. “Please.”

“We’ll have to go around into the harbor,” he said. “The canals off the port aren’t passable. It’ll take till sundown to get through.”

“Take us so we get there,” I said.

Once we were out of the port, the boatman got into a rhythm with his rowing. I could see he were strong and able, and that he were sure at the oars. He were facing us, his back to the open water, but he knew where he were going. He looked me up and down for a while, and I were sure he were judging me when his eyes fixed on my belly.

“You married to Aris the Kid?” he asked. I knew who he meant.
My Adriaen. “The Kid” were his nickname. The boy had told him our story.

“We never married,” were all I said.

“I knew your man,” the boatman said. “We were in the same house of corrections in Utrecht.”

“Adriaen?” I didn’t believe him.

“I got the brand of Utrecht,” he said. Holding both oars with one hand, he loosened the strings on his shirt to show me a marking on his neck. His skin were paler than Adriaen’s, and his neck were strong and wide. It weren’t like Adriaen’s branding. It looked longer and twisted, like he’d pulled away when they’d burned him.

Guus watched with an open mouth.

“You want to see it?” the boatman asked, motioning for the boy to get a closer look.

Guus slid forward in the boat. “Wow,” he said.

I waited until the boatman tied his shirt. “You must’ve been saved, then. Because here you are a freeman and a workingman, and Adriaen is being readied for the noose.” I felt a sudden chill in me. “Will we be there soon?”

The harbor of Amsterdam must be the busiest place in the Lord’s kingdom. It were like a forest where the trees were masts and the birds were flags and ribbons whipping in the wind of ivory sails. Everywhere around us were giant galleons carved with wooden ladies and imperial crests. Sloops ferried men out from the shore, their shoulders burdened with trunks.

Ours were a small vessel, and we tossed side to side in the wakes
of them bigger boats. I asked the boatman if we were to die out there. “Don’t be afraid, lass,” he said. “She’s a small but sure craft.”

That’s when I saw it. There on the other side of the IJ waterfront. The gallows field where there were crosses lined up and bodies hung from them, they call the Volewijk. That’s where they take the dead to let their bodies rot after a hanging. They were like a small orchard of weird trees. The bodies looked like black rags half fallen off the clothesline except when you looked longer they started to round out as they swayed in the wind. My heart started to race, and I could hear the blood come into my ears. I imagined Adriaen there among them, another drooping bundle of black rags, beaten by the sun, sinking in his flesh, the buzzards circling.

The boy at my elbow by the rail said, “He out there?”