Chapter 2
Peter Denying Christ.
1660. Canvas.
It is afternoon and I am on my knees, pulling a string for Tijger to chase. A flash lights the dark room. Thunder rattles the windowpanes and the pictures on the walls. I am five and big and do not get scared at a silly thing like thunder. I get up on my tiptoes to look outside. Rain is coming down sideways, bouncing off the stones of the street, making little pocks in the water of the canal like the marks in Vader’s cheeks. It has beaten the petals off the tulips that grow under our tree. I look behind me. Where is Tijger? Thunder booms again.
I jump up and run to the back room and tag the bed-cupboard where Moeder sleeps.
“Moeder, wake up!”
“Nicolaes,” she whispers.
Silly moeder! “No, it’s Neeltje.”
Moeder’s eyes open. Slowly, like she is underwater, she reaches for me. Just before her hand reaches my cheek, it drops. Her eyes slowly close again.
Moeder sleeps a lot. Unless she is cleaning.
I climb up onto the bed and sit in the afternoon dark. I pick my nose until there is nothing left to pick, then try to tie the laces that have come undone on my top. I twist them one way, then another—how do I make a loop?
A skittering sound comes from across the room. The hairs prick on my arms. Last week during the night, I had awoken with a rat on me. When I screamed, Vader barked from his bed above my pallet, “Go back to sleep!”
The rat had sat on my chest, looking at me, twitching its dirty whiskers.
“But … it’s a rat!”
Vader grunted something to Moeder, then rustled the bedclothes.
The rat sprang away, its nails poking into my shift.
“All I wanted was sleep!” Vader stepped over my pallet and left the room.
I popped up. “Moeder?”
She held up the top feather bag. I crawled underneath next to her.
“It’s almost dawn, pretty puss,” she had said in a sleepy voice. “No more rats. Rats hate the light.”
Now, in the dark of the stormy afternoon, I hear the rustling again. I crawl up to Moeder’s face again.
“Moeder?” When she doesn’t answer, I put my eyes up to hers. Still asleep.
There is an unlit lamp across the room, sitting on its shelf in the wall. It’s too high for me to reach, and if I could, how would I light it? Even if I were allowed to touch a fireplace, there is only one lit and it is in the kitchen, and who knows how many rats might be hiding between here and there?
I hear a creaking overhead. Vader, in his studio. He would have light.
With all the courage I can muster, I dash up the stairs, then crawl to a corner of Vader’s room. Three lamps are eating up the darkness. If I am very quiet, Vader might not see me.
Vader is sketching at his desk, the hanging sleeve of his brown gown waggling from his elbow as he works. He stops and swallows. He sniffs. I hold my breath. His sleeve waggles again.
I stay frozen in my spot as long as I can. But the hard floor hurts my tailbone and my bottom itches because Moeder forgot to dress me in my shift after my bath yesterday and my wool skirt torments my skin. I cannot … keep … still. Look at how the firelight sputters in the lamp nearest me, the one Vader had put on the floor behind him. As quiet as the sneakiest rat, I crawl to it and put my hand in front of its light. My skin glows red as if lit from within. Inside, there are knotty sticks that run the length of my fingers. I look up at the arm floating in the jar on the shelf. The skin has been peeled back like the petals on a tulip; meaty strings float around the bone. I look at my own hand. There is a whole other being sealed up in there, an ugly one I do not want to know.
“What are you doing?” Vader says.
I jerk my hand behind my back.
“Where is your mother?”
“Asleep.”
“Then why do you not go play?”
I look at the rain pouring down outside the window. “I—I’m hungry. I have not had de noen”
“No lunch? It’s two o’clock. She should get up.” Vader frowns. “Never mind, do what you were doing.” He nods. “Put your hand in front of the lamp.”
I cannot move. Is this a test?
“Go on, Cornelia. Put your hand in front of the lamp like you were doing—but come around to this side and do it.”
I hear Moeder’s voice in my head, You must never play with fire. If I make the wrong move, I will be shut out in the dark. I bite my hand.
“What’s wrong with you, girl? How’d I ever raise such a timid thing? Just put your hand in front of the lamp.”
The front door scrapes open, slams. Footsteps pound up the stairs.
“What a storm!” Titus wipes his face with his arm.
I see the tracks his wet stockings have left on the wood floor. Moeder won’t like that.
“Titus,” Vader says, “come here and put your hand in front of this lamp.”
Titus raises his brows at me, shrugs, then squats next to me. He holds his hand before the light. “What is wrong?” he whispers to me.
Vader goes back to his desk. “Titus, move your hand to the left.”
Titus does what Vader says. He makes a face only I can see as Vader sketches over finished parts of his drawing, his sleeve flapping, flapping.
Vader stops drawing, runs to Titus, and grabs his face. “You!” he says, kissing him on both cheeks. “You gave me the heart of the picture! The light of God shining unto Peter. It shines through the maid, making her hand transparent! Brilliant! Brilliant! Son, what would I do without you?”
I crawl back to the corner, forgotten. Better that, than to be shouted at.
Later, when the painting is finished, Moeder tells me it is a picture of St. Peter, at the moment he said he did not know Jesus for the third time. But my care is for the maid in the picture, holding the lamp up to Peter. You can see into her hand, like I had seen into my own. You can see the bones of the secret stranger hiding inside. Why doesn’t it bother people that their insides don’t match their outsides? It bothers me. I don’t sleep that night, afraid that my insides will come crawling out.