Tulip Fever (22 page)

There is a silence. Doctor Sorgh gazes into his beer. Jan looks at the physician’s hands: long, white fingers. They stroke the side of the tankard. Jan tries not to think where those fingers have been.

“The risks,” says the doctor at last. “The risks are enormous.”

“We have to take them. You see that, don’t you?”

“Risks to the maidservant, risks to your friend.” Doctor Sorgh looks at him. “You must love this woman very deeply.”

Jan nods.

Unexpectedly, the physician sighs. “You are a lucky man.”

There is a silence. The doctor strokes the tankard with his slender, fastidious fingers. It is early afternoon. The tavern is empty except for three young sailors—comely young men who sit at a table playing cards.

Doctor Sorgh looks at them. “I once loved someone,” he says. “But cowardice . . . I succumbed to cowardice. I could not face the world’s condemnation . . . losing my livelihood . . . Too much was at stake. I’ve regretted it all my life.” He lifts the tankard; his hand is trembling, however, and he puts it down. “To be courageous . . .”

His voice trails off. Jan gazes at the floor. On it lies a broken pipe stem and an empty oyster shell. They resemble the prints in a book of emblems. Jan thinks: if this were a painting I would understand what he is trying to tell me.

“That’s why I try to help people out,” says the doctor. “All life is a risk—I’m a physician, I’m only too well aware of that. But some people sail closer to the wind and they are the ones after my own heart. I admire them for that, you see, because I have been incapable of doing it myself.”

Jan is moved by this. He is starting to like this prickly, emotional man. Then he looks at Sorgh’s trembling hands and wonders: is he fit for this?

Maybe the doctor senses this. He says: “She will be in safe hands.”

“Which she?”

“Both of them.” He rallies. “Now, the question of money.”

He tells Jan his terms. A sum in advance for himself and the services of a midwife—he will supply a midwife, a woman he trusts implicitly.

Jan counts out the money. He does this with a careless shrug. It is only money; it is just a few bulbs. Underneath his insouciance, however, he is profoundly excited. Tulipomania has claimed him too, and what a mistress she is! She flirts with other men; she leads them on. In the end, however, just when he thinks he might lose her, she surrenders to him. She gives herself up gladly to his arms, and a spasm of pleasure floods his body. For a while he is sated. Then the hunger rises again; the hunger is unslakable. That is the sort of mistress she is. Who could resist her?

A month ago, back in July, he was an innocent, a virgin. Speculators were
kappisten
; he thought they were mad. Now he has joined them and already he has tripled his investment. His Admirals led him into battle, and what booty he brought home. For their price has rocketed and now he has enough to pay this doctor today and invest in new bulbs. He hardly has time to paint. Each day he returns to the taverns where his new friends, the equally smitten, buy and sell in a feverish fog of tobacco smoke.

“And then I need your bond for the final settlement,” says the physician.

He tells Jan the amount. Jan’s jaw drops.

“You must consider the risks,” says Sorgh. “To me.”

Just for a moment, thinks Jan, I thought this man was sentimental. He gets out a piece of paper.
I, Jan van Loos, do
promise thee
. . . He writes down the sum in his big, clumsy writing. So many noughts! He draws the O’s with professional pride; they are perfectly round. His master trained in Rome, where Renaissance instruction taught him such things. They are as round as a full moon in a
Seascape at
Night
. They are as round as bubbles blown by a child in a painting by Hals, to tell us of the futility and brevity of life.

Doctor Sorgh folds up the note and puts it into his pocket. Jan shakes his hand. All life is a gamble. After all, it is a gamble that he was born at all. His parents’ lovemaking, the night before or the night after, would have produced another child. It is a gamble that he met Sophia, the love of his life.

He will get the money. He knows how to gamble with mistress fortune; he has learned the game. And when it comes to the final, biggest gamble of all, he knows that he will win. For luck, so far, has been on his side.

35

Autumn

While the dogs yelp, the hare flies to the wood.

—JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

Autumn gales sweep across the land. Rain lashes the countryside. Trees are uprooted; rivers burst their dykes and flood the fields. Great stretches lie under water, returned to the element from which they emerged. Boats sink and their wreckage is tossed contemptuously onto the beaches, as if God were throwing away empty walnut shells. Cornelis’s ships return, but the largest vessel in the Archangel-Muscovy convoy, laden with a cargo of sable, ambergris, whale train oil and iron, goes down without a trace. Church bells toll for the souls of the drowned.

In Amsterdam chimney pots topple into the street and washing is lifted from lines. A builder is blown off the scaffolding of a half-built mansion in the Keisergracht, a martyr to the hubris of wealth. Walking beside the canals is treacherous; people overbalance in the wind. Bodies are found floating in the water, casualties of drunken despair, for tulipomania has ruined many and they drown their sorrows for the final time.

Then, in mid-October, the rain stops. Fog blankets the city. Noise is muffled; the buildings, invisible. People cannot tell where the streets end and the water begins. They stumble into the canals and drift undiscovered for days, until the fog lifts.

Nights are eerily still. Fog rises off the water. Figures can slip through the alleys undetected, for the fog is so dense that a man can scarcely see his hand in front of his face. Amsterdam is a city of ghosts, of crimes that leave no trace, for those who commit them are swallowed up into the vaporous night.

36

Sophia

A fool and his money are soon parted.

—PROVERB ON TULIPOMANIA IN VISSCHER’S Sinnepoppen, 1614

I offer up a prayer of thanks. This fog is God’s smoky breath, guarding us. I can slip through the streets unseen. Specters loom up, pass and are gone; they keep their heads down, watching their step. We are all muffled in cocoons.

Jan and I have grown bolder. My bedchamber faces the street. Cornelis, in the other room, is a heavy sleeper. At night Jan throws a pebble at my window and I creep down to let him in. I cannot risk taking him into my bed. Besides, lovemaking nowadays is not the first thing on our minds. We are inflamed by a new lust and huddle on the settle, whispering.

I have written down the sums. Jan takes the piece of paper; it shakes in his hand. Time and again we have gambled and won. Jan has joined the big league now. He is trading in the white, on tulip futures. He and I speak like experts. We have long ago lost sight of bulbs; they have become an abstraction. We are buying bulbs we have never seen and for which we have not yet paid, gambling on new varieties, that their price will rocket, trading onward and upward. Bulbs have been bought and sold ten times in one day without anyone laying eyes on them. We hunch over the paper and examine our sums, those dazzling pencil marks. I am so excited that I have another nosebleed and splash them with my blood.

It is not just lovemaking that has been forgotten. Jan has long since stopped painting. Consumed by his fever, he spends the days in four different taverns, whispering the password to enter the rooms where the trading takes place. I cannot go with him and risk being seen; the whole town seems to be in the taverns now. He bids Through the Plates. Wooden discs are circulated. Unit values are written on them in chalk. The men haggle; bids are added and wiped off and the deal celebrated with a glass of wine. Jan takes out loans from his friends to finance the next deal and repays them double their money within the week. It’s magic! God is smiling on us; He is on our side.

I rub my blood off the paper, leaving a brownish smear.

OVER THE PAST WEEKS Maria has changed. She has grown big, of course, fattening up like a bulb nourished by the finest compost. The other night, at dinner, Cornelis remarked: “Have you seen the size of her? She’s eating us out of house and home.”

“She has always had a hearty appetite,” I replied.

She moves differently too, swaying like a ship in full sail. Exertion makes her breathless. For months I have been performing her heavier duties, cleaning the house and washing the floors. She mustn’t lose this baby. Exertion makes
me
breathless too. I have never worked so hard in my life. Our reversal of roles—me into servant and she into mistress, restricting herself to the lightest tasks—extends beyond housework.

“Funny, isn’t it?” she says one day. “You dressed up as me and I used to dress up as you.” She tells me that she would clothe herself in my blue jacket, the one trimmed with fur, and parade in front of the mirror. We have even exchanged hands. Mine have become maid’s hands, cracked and dry. “Rub them with goose fat.” She chuckles. “Then you will be a lady.” Hers are as soft as a gentlewoman’s.