The Anatomy Lesson (22 page)

He’d leave my bed for the tavern, and later come back with his hands clenched to fists and sleep by himself on the doorstep. Sometimes he’d get angry when I tried to care for him, and he’d tell me I were no nun and my house were no convent. Sometimes, he’d just say, “Go find some soul worth saving.”

Adriaen wanted to touch me, too. But he didn’t. Not when he were still in bed with bruises. I touched him and he felt my hands. But he did not want to mishandle me, he said. He said he had too many misdeeds in his hands. They had too much ease for evil. He said his hands took more than they deserved. His hands claimed what were not his to take, and it always got him in trouble. He did not want to take me with those hands.

I wanted to feel his hands on me. Even if they were rough, even
with a callused touch. On my back and on my breast. Maybe he thought that if he got that close, he’d never be able to leave again. Leaving were his nature, it were his way.

The day came at last. It were a warm day and there were a spot of sun in the garden. I were out back, tugging with a scuffle hoe at some weeds in the beds. The earth were sodden and rich from a few days of rain. I were going to plant a row of turnips and some vines of peas along the fence. I stopped for a moment and felt the sun fall on my face. Hard to think on it now, in this dead winter. To remember that it can be like that. Sometimes there is sun. Sometimes it is warm. I stood there and let the sun warm me, as if it were only for me.

When the sky shifted and the sun fell behind a cloud, I opened my eyes and saw Adriaen there in the doorway, leaning on a broomstick.

“Rain is on the way,” he said.

“Always is,” I said.

I picked up my scuffle hoe and went on digging.

“I wish I could do that for you,” he said.

“You can. When you’re well.”

“I’d like to plant a few things and see them grow.”

“Just a few months and it’ll be a harvest. Turnips, potatoes, peas, carrots, and clover. I’ll be drying the peas for winter soups soon.”

“Already?”

“By September.”

I could see in his eyes that he were imagining himself already gone by then. Where would he be? Under what bridge? Beside what city gate, on what river?

“Come inside before the rain,” he said.

“A few more minutes.”

When I got back inside, he were sitting up on the bed and he asked me to sit by him. “Flora, when I’m well, I’ll go. You know that?”

I didn’t answer him. I reached out and took his hand and brought it to my breast. I held it there until he knew it were his. Until he knew I knew he were not taking. I were giving. Then he touched me gently with no promises and no demands. He held my breast and moved his hand inside my blouse and up along my neck. He ran a finger along my chin and touched my lips. He pressed his palm against my cheek and put his fingers through my hair. He used both hands. He drew my face to his face and kissed me. He kissed me with full lips and a full heart, a heavy heart. I felt all his want. He moved his hand along my shoulders, down my back, over my hips. His hands took him on a journey he’d been long wanting to make.

I stood and took off my blouse, apron, and skirt, and stood before him so that he would know it were all his whether he stayed or not. We lay down together on the bed. In the same way I had let my fingers travel along his scars, his fingers traveled my skin. He watched where his fingers went, seeing all the crests and folds, the landscape of skin. They found the dark path from my breast down to my belly. They found the white rivulets of stretched skin upon my hips. They traced the blue tributaries of veins that wind along my legs. They moved slowly. They did not seek to take. They sought to touch, to see, to know. He had two good hands.

His smell were so familiar, a smell I had always known. It were the smell of the heath and the hay, of sweat and ale and burned wood. I relaxed into his arms and breathed him in. He smelled like a man and like a home.

The last time Adriaen left the mill house, we stood together at my cottage door. He didn’t know about the babe then. Neither of us did. He said he wished he were a different kind of man. What I needed, he said, were someone who would live with me in the house beside the mill, and earn a living by the sweat of his brow.

“I wish I was like that,” he said. “If I had it in me to be that way.”

I should have told him he did have it in him. I should have told him he could have been any way he wanted to be. Or maybe I should have just said, “Don’t go, Adriaen. Stay with me. Don’t go.” Odds are, he would have gone anyway.

A few weeks after that, they told me he were in the Leiden jail. He’d done a housebreaking with some other thief. They told me they were to saw off his hand. To take his hand for thieving. I didn’t think they could do that, but they did. They did it right there in that sentencing hall. They brought a doctor in and had ten men hold him to the table. I screamed and cried and wept. What good did it do? What good does it ever do? Adriaen just went on like that.

When he came out of that hall, he would not let me guide him home. Not that time, he said, no more. “You won’t want me now,” he said. “You couldn’t possibly want me now.” But I did want him. I wanted him home. I wanted him by the hearth. I wanted to tend him and mend him and make my house our home.

I saw that they had come. By foot from Dam Square, by skate down the frozen canals, by barge across the Haarlemmermeer, by skiff from the wharf, by carriage from New Town, and by hook and by crook they had come to see Aris the Kid, who’d gone hanging in Dam Square. They’d heard of his bravery on the scaffold, of his brands and his stump and his naked, branded, breast. Now they wanted to see him on the chopping block. They wanted to howl for his flesh.

Nieuwmarkt was as busy as the Monday stock exchange, and just like the traders on that floor, everyone was waving hands in the air for a ticket.

Have you seen our anatomy hall, sir? It is a cramped space, high and circular and narrow and we can barely fit two hundred men in for the lectures, packed like herring into a herring buss. We are badly in need of a better hall, and the guild has already drafted up plans, but for the moment all we can do is strictly limit the tickets. Members of the guild, of course, have priority, after the magistrates
and burghers and town councilmen. Tulp himself draws up the list and he is very precise about his guests. They must be men he seeks to cultivate as colleagues, sponsors, supporters, and friends. It’s strictly politics, you see, who gets on the list.

By the time I heard the ruckus in the square outside, the crowd had grown so large you could’ve used it to man a ship. It was only me there—me against a roiling crowd—and I had no more tickets to sell. I heard them pounding, pounding at the door, and I stood behind it for a while, trembling, before I even dared look out the peephole.

My work was all done by then, the corpse prepared, the candelabras lit, the incense smoldering, the dissection table arrayed with all the necessary knives, saws, cleavers, scalpels, forceps, and ropes. I put one ear to the door and crouched beside it, listening, until at last it was too late anymore to keep waiting.

As dusk began to fall, the right and proper invitees—the barbers and surgeons, magistrates and merchants, traders and nobles in their finest doublets, stockings, and lace—at last arrived, pushing past the crowds, claiming their positions by the door. I hoped that the crowd might disperse, seeing the city fathers claiming their rightful places, but instead the crowd cackled and hissed and cursed the ticket holders and wouldn’t let them pass. Then, too, I reasoned that somehow all the jostling would separate the wheat from the chaff, but I was wrong there, too. Immediately it went to fisticuffs as arguments erupted at the door.

I threw open the door and stood staring at the crowd with what little authority I could muster. “Ticket holders for the anatomy lesson of Dr. Tulp may now step forward and form a line right here,” I announced. “Ticket holders only, please. I’m afraid tonight’s
dissection is sold out. Please, if you do not hold tickets, you must disperse.”

The gentlemen composed themselves and tried to make a queue, but the crowd only became more agitated at the news that they could not get in. I was jostled and elbowed and yelled at to my face. I can still show you the bruises I received from that mob. Here, here’s one on my arm and here on my hip. I’ll roll down my hose to show you the welt upon my shin. That was where a lady kicked me, before demanding to be let in. A lady! I swear, I thought there would be a riot in Nieuwmarkt square.

Somehow, I got control of the door. I used it as a sieve and received each ticket holder one by one. A steady stream of cloaks and ruffs.

Once inside the anatomy chamber, I thought I’d finally achieve some sense of civility, but then, there, too, was more dispute. This time the jostling was among the guild members and other city nobles about where they’d take their seats.

Tulp’s universe had its own logic, and it was manifest in the arrangement of guests in the rings: the optimal seats in the auditorium are those on the second ring—close enough to the dissection platform to observe every incision and movement of the forceps, yet far enough to shield the audience from the stench of tissue decomposition. City burghers would take the first row, because Tulp is running for city office and wants them to be especially familiar with his face.

Now, some surgeons claimed that they deserved to sit in the front row, in front of the city burghers, since it is their guild, but the burghers wouldn’t budge. Already riled by the crowds outside, they seemed ready to roll up their sleeves again to claim their spots.
There was no winning with these men. Honor their status in whatever way you will and still they find reason to quibble. Well, at least they were finally all seated—and I managed to slip back down the stairs and see if I could sell the few final tickets for the standing room in the back.

I have, in a sense, always been a
famulus anatomicus
. My work is as close to my soul as my hand is just now to this tankard. I began this noble profession when I was five years old. My father worked for Carolus Clusius at the
hortus botanicus
at Leiden University. He was a specialist in tropical plants from the Indies and subtropical flowers from the Cape Colonies—a curio collector, too, in his way, but of the leafy vein.