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. . for Some Time, He Had Been Living with Hendrickje

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. . for Some Time, He Had Been Living with Hendrickje For some time, he had been living with Hendrickje, and this remarkable woman (setting aside those of Titus, only the portraits of Hendrickje seem somehow steeped in tenderness and the splendid old bear’s gratitude) must have amply satisfied his need for both physical and emotional tenderness. Jean Genet 1649 God has been good. He gave our ancestors the strength and courage to win the sea-locked lands of our fathers. I believe in God, the All-Powerful Father. The Protestants are the people of the Bible, the Dutch are the elect. God is good, but you have to obey Him. If you forget Him, He will unleash tempests against you, and the dykes will burst. He already has done. The angry water floods the land that men have lost through their sins. In this new flood, amid terror and screaming, the water drowns, it washes away. In the distance, a few steeples still rise out of the milky mud of the countryside. The doors slammed and the word echoed. And again, and once too much. A whore, that’s what I was, yours, Rembrandt’s whore. Shaking and pinned to the ice-cold wall. Breathless, speechless. Panting. Whore, she said, and the word resounded up the stairs across the russet rays of the sun. Long after the echo, it reverberated in my head, so I was a whore now, yours for Geertje Dircx. I’ve always known it, even in my sleep, even when dreaming of those revolting little white squirming worms. I’m asleep and I think that these creatures of God’s are full of horrible little teeth at work. Living means working, everyone knows that, even the poor women in the Spinhuis.* When they’re disobedient, they shut them in a cellar and open the pump. The water slowly rises. In a quarter of an hour the cellar will be full of water. If you don’t want to drown, you have * Women’s prison 2 · sylvie matton · to pump. And fast. It’s more tiring than work. More danger- ous too. It’s you I’m talking to, and memories are still talking to me about you. You’re everywhere in me, in my life, in the air I breathe, in the cherry tree in the garden, in my belly. It’s you, my love, I’m talking to. It’s God I talk to when I pray. I always pray. Without thinking, words grow in the tunnels of my head. I can’t write or read, but I can stop time. I capture the moment and remember it later, even the screams, I can still hear them. I’ve let go the brass door-knocker, I’ve stepped back on the bricks of the Breestraat to get a better look at the house, bigger than I’ve ever seen. She’s opened the door. Legs apart, hands on hips, round face flattened in the sun. Her eyes on mine. In the blink of an eye, she’s judged my strength, my smile, my pallor and the bundle of dirty blue cloth at my feet, the poverty and courage of my family, my honesty. She said ‘Come in,’ and the heavy door closed behind me. He was conceived of the Holy Ghost. He was born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate. He was crucified, words one after the other, the prayer wells up in me. My eyes get used to the shadows everywhere. You’d think there were no walls in Rembrandt van Rijn’s house, you can hardly see them between the paintings, but I know there must be walls behind the paintings to hang them on. There’s that smell I’ve never come across before; it smarts and brings tears to my eyes. Geertje Dircx is staring at my muddy clogs, her glare tells my feet not to come any further. On a white tile on the floor, against the wall on the right, her finger shows me a pair of mules*. Naked on a table, two plaster children have fallen asleep. Beside * Dutch leather slippers · rembrandt’s whore · 3 them, beneath a painting with a pink sky (so pink I want to climb into the picture), a human skull with two eye holes, as dark as a rabbit’s burrow. I hurry out of my clogs, put on the mules and tiptoe behind Geertje across the transparent floor. I don’t know how to write. Where I was born, the schoolmaster taught the boys the letters of the alphabet, even the butcher’s two snotty-nosed sons, and by heart the Our Father and the Ten Commandments. Some days he asked them whether Eve ate an apple or a pear. I didn’t go to the village school, though, girls didn’t. But I always listened to the Bible tales of love and vengeance, which my mother used to tell every evening, and the great toothy mouth of the preacher on Sundays. I thank thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. I can’t write or read, and I never will. I let my eyes rest on those who look at me, and I hear the thoughts their eyes hide. That’s what I call reading. I hear, fear and lies especially. And in the distance, very far off, the lash of waves on the dykes, singing and moaning, beating and breaking. I’ve left my childhood and family behind, I’ve not yet come of age* but, where I come from, money is scarce. Especially since the Treaty of Westphalia.†’ As they wait for the next battle, soldiers with no families and war wounds in one or more parts of their bodies beg all along the canals through the small towns. They stretch out their hands, and they carry around the death of a part of them where the dismembered bones and spurting blood were burnt. In the street, I turn away: it’s not the sight of them, it’s the smell. When they stretch out their hands, the worms stir in their bodies. * Boys came of age at 25, girls at 24. † On 30 January 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia (or Mu¨nster) assured the United Provinces their independence from the Spanish. 4 · sylvie matton · Before I left Bradevoort where I was born, my mother cried and men talked. ‘The city is a dangerous place, and Amsterdam is a big city’: my sister’s husband told me – he’s never been there, and never said anything that someone else hasn’t already thought before him. It’s like swallowing food someone else has already chewed. For once, I said what I was thinking out loud, and anger shone in my sister Marina’s eyes: ‘Go, go to Amsterdam. Go and be a servant-girl in that house our mother has the address of. Go, since you’ve never liked our country people.’ Some people always say what they think, even when they’ve not been asked. I didn’t reply, I don’t like fighting. But I did want to leave. It’s not really the countryside where we live, and our little town isn’t a real town, it’s a garrison town. In winter the soldiers take up quarters in houses where families take them in, and in spring, when the horses have had their feed and the garrisons pitch camp, many’s the girl whose belly is swollen with child. I may be the child and sister of soldiers, but I shan’t become a soldier’s wife like my sister Marina. Since the Treaty, she’s been putting black henbane and belladonna in her husband’s beer at breakfast, so his passions aren’t aroused till later. And then I could pass right by him without him putting out his hand with that missing finger. Always trying to touch me up. The wound in his stomach has never really closed up, it’s a great fire that rages inside him, that’s what Marina says. I’d never look at an open wound that shows the little worms inside. I believe the fire from outside will never leave his innards. Men love war. The fire is the poison the Devil casts on the Earth. I followed Geertje Dircx. I told myself the young servant- girl was following the older one. We repeated each other, two shimmering figures in the black-and-white-tiled floor that shone so brilliantly that it seemed I could see myself on the other side. · rembrandt’s whore · 5 ‘You’re to wash in front of the house every morning with three buckets of water. Use the little brush to scrub between the bricks, and also clean the planks over the drains on either side of the road.’ Rotting matter falls to the bottom of the canals, and the rats eat it. What they haven’t cleaned flows out to sea, where it’s washed and reduced to nothing. Father often used to say the United Provinces of Holland is the cleanest country in the world. It’s got the least vermin and the least Plague, thanks to the canals and the rats. She seemed to glide noiselessly towards us from a long way off, quick little steps across the shining tiles. Judith’s arms clasped the month’s great basket of washing with dried blood on the linen. Red in the face from the weight of it. She looked straight into my eyes until she passed me, right up to the last moment, and then she smiled, with that smile of hers that draws her whole face up towards her wide forehead.
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