Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
“Van Ruijven,” my father interrupted.
“Yes, van Ruijven. All that can be seen of him is his back, his hair, and one hand on the neck of a lute.”
“He plays the lute badly,” my father added eagerly.
“Very badly. That’s why his back is to us—so we won’t see that he can’t even hold his lute properly.”
My father chuckled, his good mood restored. He was always pleased to hear that a rich man could be a poor musician.
It was not always so easy to bring him back into good humor. Sundays had become so uncomfortable with my parents that I began to welcome those times when Pieter the son ate with us. He must have noted the troubled looks my mother gave me, my father’s querulous comments, the awkward silences so unexpected between parent and child. He never said anything about them, never winced or stared or became tongue-tied himself. Instead he gently teased my father, flattered my mother, smiled at me.
Pieter did not ask why I smelled of linseed oil. He did not seem to worry about what I might be hiding. He had decided to trust me.
He was a good man.
I could not help it, though—I always looked to see if there was blood under his fingernails.
He should soak them in salted water, I thought. One day I will tell him so.
He was a good man, but he was becoming impatient. He did not say so, but sometimes on Sundays in the alley off the Rietveld Canal, I could feel the impatience in his hands. He would grip my thighs harder than he needed, press his palm into my back so that I was glued in his groin and would know its bulge, even under many layers of cloth. It was so cold that we did not touch each other’s skin—only the bumps and textures of wool, the rough outlines of our limbs.
Pieter’s touch did not always repel me. Sometimes, if I looked over his shoulder at the sky, and found the colors besides white in a cloud, or thought of grinding lead white or massicot, my breasts and belly tingled, and I pressed against him. He was always pleased when I responded. He did not notice that I avoided looking at his face and hands.
That Sunday of the linseed oil, when my father and mother looked so puzzled and unhappy, Pieter led me to the alley later. There he began squeezing my breasts and pulling at their nipples through the cloth of my dress. Then he stopped suddenly, gave me a sly look, and ran his hands over my shoulders and up my neck. Before I could stop him his hands were up under my cap and tangled in my hair.
I held my cap down with both hands. “No!”
Pieter smiled at me, his eyes glazed as if he had looked too long at the sun. He had managed to pull loose a strand of my hair, and tugged it now with his fingers. “Some day soon, Griet, I will see all of this. You will not always be a secret to me.” He let a hand drop to the lower curve of my belly and pushed against me. “You will be eighteen next month. I’ll speak to your father then.”
I stepped back from him—I felt as if I were in a hot, dark room and could not breathe. “I am still so young. Too young for that.”
Pieter shrugged. “Not everyone waits until they’re older. And your family needs me.” It was the first time he had referred to my parents’ poverty, and their dependence on him—their dependence which became my dependence as well. Because of it they were content to take the gifts of meat and have me stand in an alley with him on a Sunday.
I frowned. I did not like being reminded of his power over us.
Pieter sensed that he should not have said anything. To make amends he tucked the strand of hair back under my cap, then touched my cheek. “I’ll make you happy, Griet,” he said. “I will.”
After he left I walked along the canal, despite the cold. The ice had been broken so that boats could get through, but a thin layer had formed again on the surface. When we were children Frans and Agnes and I would throw stones to shatter the thin ice until every sliver had disappeared under water. It seemed a long time ago.
A month before he had asked me to come up to the studio.
“I will be in the attic,” I announced to the room that afternoon.
Tanneke did not look up from her sewing. “Put some more wood on the fire before you go,” she ordered.
The girls were working on their lace, overseen by Maertge and Maria Thins. Lisbeth had patience and nimble fingers, and produced good work, but Aleydis was still too young to manage the delicate weaving, and Cornelia too impatient. The cat sat at Cornelia’s feet by the fire, and occasionally the girl reached down and dangled a bit of thread for the creature to paw at. Eventually, she probably hoped, the cat would tear its claws through her work and ruin it.
After feeding the fire I stepped around Johannes, who was playing with a top on the cold kitchen tiles. As I left he spun it wildly, and it hopped straight into the fire. He began to cry while Cornelia shrieked with laughter and Maertge tried to haul the toy from the flames with a pair of tongs.
“Hush, you’ll wake Catharina and Franciscus,” Maria Thins warned the children. They did not hear her.
I crept out, relieved to escape the noise, no matter how cold it would be in the studio.
The studio door was shut. As I approached it I pressed my lips together, smoothed my eyebrows, and ran my fingers down the sides of my cheeks to my chin, as if I were testing an apple to see if it was firm. I hesitated in front of the heavy wooden door, then knocked softly. There was no answer, though I knew he must be there—he was expecting me.
It was the first day of the new year. He had painted the ground layer of my painting almost a month before, but nothing since—no reddish marks to indicate the shapes, no false colors, no overlaid colors, no highlights. The canvas was a blank yellowish white. I saw it every morning as I cleaned.
I knocked louder.
When the door opened he was frowning, his eyes not catching mine. “Don’t knock, Griet, just come in quietly,” he said, turning away and going back to the easel, where the blank canvas sat waiting for its colors.
I closed the door softly behind me, blotting out the noise of the children downstairs, and stepped to the middle of the room. Now that the moment had come at last I was surprisingly calm. “You wanted me, sir.”
“Yes. Stand over there.” He gestured to the corner where he had painted the other women. The table he was using for the concert painting was set there, but he had cleared away the musical instruments. He handed me a letter. “Read that,” he said.
I unfolded the sheet of paper and bowed my head over it, worried that he would discover I was only pretending to read an unfamiliar hand.
Nothing was written on the paper.
I looked up to tell him so, but stopped. With him it was often better to say nothing. I bowed my head again over the letter.
“Try this instead,” he suggested, handing me a book. It was bound in worn leather and the spine was broken in several places. I opened it at random and studied a page. I did not recognize any of the words.
He had me sit with the book, then stand holding it while looking at him. He took away the book, handed me the white jug with the pewter top and had me pretend to pour a glass of wine. He asked me to stand and simply look out the window. All the while he seemed perplexed, as if someone had told him a story and he couldn’t recall the ending.
“It is the clothes,” he murmured. “That is the problem.”
I understood. He was having me do things a lady would do, but I was wearing a maid’s clothes. I thought of the yellow mantle and the yellow and black bodice, and wondered which he would ask me to wear. Instead of being excited by the idea, though, I felt uneasy. It was not just that it would be impossible to hide from Catharina that I was wearing her clothes. I did not feel right holding books and letters, pouring myself wine, doing things I never did. As much as I wanted to feel the soft fur of the mantle around my neck, it was not what I normally wore.
“Sir,” I spoke finally, “perhaps you should have me do other things. Things that a maid does.”
“What does a maid do?” he asked softly, folding his arms and raising his eyebrows.<
I had to wait a moment before I could answer—my jaw was trembling. I thought of Pieter and me in the alley and swallowed. “Sewing,” I replied. “Mopping and sweeping. Carrying water. Washing sheets. Cutting bread. Polishing windowpanes.”
“You would like me to paint you with your mop?”
“It’s not for me to say, sir. It is not my painting.”
He frowned. “No, it is not yours.” He sounded as if he were speaking to himself.
“I do not want you to paint me with my mop.” I said it without knowing that I would.
“No. No, you’re right, Griet. I would not paint you with a mop in your hand.”
“But I cannot wear your wife’s clothes.”
There was a long silence. “No, I expect not,” he said. “But I will not paint you as a maid.”
“What, then, sir?”
“I will paint you as I first saw you, Griet. Just you.”
He set a chair near his easel, facing the middle window, and I sat down. I knew it was to be my place. He was going to find the pose he had put me in a month before, when he had decided to paint me.
“Look out the window,” he said.
I looked out at the grey winter day and, remembering when I stood in for the baker’s daughter, tried not to see anything but to let my thoughts become quiet. It was hard because I was thinking of him, and of me sitting in front of him.
The New Church bell struck twice.
“Now turn your head very slowly towards me. No, not your shoulders. Keep your body turned towards the window. Move only your head. Slow, slow. Stop. A little more, so that—stop. Now sit still.”
I sat still.
At first I could not meet his eyes. When I did it was like sitting close to a fire that suddenly blazes up. Instead I studied his firm chin, his thin lips.
“Griet, you are not looking at me.”
I forced my gaze up to his eyes. Again I felt as if I were burning, but I endured it—he wanted me to.
Soon it became easier to keep my eyes on his. He looked at me as if he were not seeing me, but someone else, or something else—as if he were looking at a painting.
He is looking at the light that falls on my face, I thought, not at my face itself. That is the difference.
It was almost as if I were not there. Once I felt this I was able to relax a little. As he was not seeing me, I did not see him. My mind began to wander—over the jugged hare we had eaten for dinner, the lace collar Lisbeth had given me, a story Pieter the son had told me the day before. After that I thought of nothing. Twice he got up to change the position of one of the shutters. He went to his cupboard several times to choose different brushes and colors. I viewed his movements as if I were standing in the street, looking in through the window.
The church bell struck three times. I blinked. I had not felt so much time pass. It was as if I had fallen under a spell.
I looked at him—his eyes were with me now. He was looking at me. As we gazed at each other a ripple of heat passed through my body. I kept my eyes on his, though, until at last he looked away and cleared his throat.
“That will be all, Griet. There is some bone for you to grind upstairs.”
I nodded and slipped from the room, my heart pounding. He was painting me.
“ Pull your cap back from your face,” he said one day.
“Back from my face, sir?” I repeated dumbly, and regretted it. He preferred me not to speak, but to do as he said. If I did speak, I should say something worth the words.
He did not answer. I pulled the side of my cap that was closest to him back from my cheek. The starched tip grazed my neck.
“More,” he said. “I want to see the line of your cheek.”
I hesitated, then pulled it back further. His eyes moved down my cheek.
“Show me your ear.”
I did not want to. I had no choice.
I felt under the cap to make sure no hair was loose, tucking a few strands behind my ear. Then I pulled it back to reveal the lower part of my ear.
The look on his face was like a sigh, though he did not make a sound. I caught a noise in my own throat and pushed it down so that it would not escape.
“Your cap,” he said. “Take it off.”
“No, sir.”
“No?”
“Please do not ask me to, sir.” I let the cloth of the cap drop so that my ear and cheek were covered again. I looked at the floor, the grey and white tiles extending away from me, clean and straight.
“You do not want to bare your head?”
“No.”
“Yet you do not want to be painted as a maid, with your mop and your cap, nor as a lady, with satin and fur and dressed hair.”
I did not answer. I could not show him my hair. I was not the sort of girl who left her head bare.
He shifted in his chair, then got up. I heard him go into the storeroom. When he returned, his arms were full of cloth, which he dropped in my lap.
“Well, Griet, see what you can do with this. Find something here to wrap your head in, so that you are neither a lady nor a maid.” I could not tell if he was angry or amused. He left the room, shutting the door behind him.
I sorted through the cloth. There were three caps, all too fine for me, and too small to cover my head fully. There were pieces of cloth, left over from dresses and jackets Catharina had made, in yellows and browns, blues and greys.
I did not know what to do. I looked around as if I would find an answer in the studio. My eyes fell on the painting of The Procuress—the young woman’s head was bare, her hair held back with ribbons, but the old woman wore a piece of cloth wrapped around her head, crisscrossing in and out of itself. Perhaps that is what he wants, I thought. Perhaps that is what women who are neither ladies nor maids nor the other do with their hair.
I chose a piece of brown cloth and took it into the storeroom, where there was a mirror. I removed my cap and wound the cloth around my head as best I could, checking the painting to try to imitate the old woman’s. I looked very peculiar.
I should let him paint me with a mop, I thought. Pride has made me vain.
When he returned and saw what I had done, he laughed. I had not heard him laugh often—sometimes with the children, once with van Leeuwenhoek. I frowned. I did not like being laughed at.
“I have only done what you asked, sir,” I muttered.
He stopped chuckling. “You’re right, Griet. I’m sorry. And your face, now that I can see more of it, it is—” He stopped, never finishing his sentence. I always wondered what he would have said.
He turned to the pile of cloth I had left on my chair. “Why did you choose brown,” he asked, “when there are other colors?”
I did not want to speak of maids and ladies again. I did not want to remind him that blues and yellows were ladies’ colors. “Brown is the color I usually wear,” I said simply.
He seemed to guess what I was thinking. “Tanneke wore blue and yellow when I painted her some years ago,” he countered.
“I am not Tanneke, sir.”
“No, that you certainly are not.” He pulled out a long, narrow band of blue cloth. “Nonetheless, I want you to try this.”
I studied it. “That is not enough cloth to cover my head.”
“Use this as well, then.” He picked up a piece of yellow cloth that had a border of the same blue and held it out to me.
Reluctantly I took the two pieces of cloth back to the storeroom and tried again in front of the mirror. I tied the blue cloth over my forehead, with the yellow piece wound round and round, covering the crown of my head. I tucked the end into a fold at the side of my head, adjusted folds here and there, smoothed the blue cloth round my head, and stepped back into the studio.
He was looking at a book and did not notice as I slipped into my chair. I arranged myself as I had been sitting before. As I turned my head to look over my left shoulder, he glanced up. At the same time the end of the yellow cloth came loose and fell over my shoulder.<
“Oh,” I breathed, afraid that the cloth would fall from my head and reveal all my hair. But it held—only the end of the yellow cloth dangled free. My hair remained hidden.
“Yes,” he said then. “That is it, Griet. Yes.”
He would not let me see the painting. He set it on a second easel, angled away from the door, and told me not to look at it. I promised not to, but some nights I lay in bed and thought about wrapping my blanket around me and stealing downstairs to see it. He would never know.
But he would guess. I did not think I could sit with him looking at me day after day without guessing that I had looked at the painting. I could not hide things from him. I did not want to.
I was reluctant, too, to discover how it was that he saw me. It was better to leave that a mystery.
The colors he asked me to mix gave no clues as to what he was doing. Black, ocher, lead white, lead-tin yellow, ultramarine, red lake—they were all colors I had worked with before, and they could as easily have been used for the concert painting.
It was unusual for him to work on two paintings at once. Although he did not like switching back and forth between the two, it did make it easier to hide from others that he was painting me. A few people knew. Van Ruijven knew—I was sure it was at his request that my master was making the painting. My master must have agreed to paint me alone so that he would not have to paint me with van Ruijven. Van Ruijven would own the painting of me.
I was not pleased by this thought. Nor, I believed, was my master.
Maria Thins knew about the painting as well. It was she who probably made the arrangement with van Ruijven. And besides, she could still go in and out of the studio as she liked, and could look at the painting, as I was not allowed to. Sometimes she looked at me sideways with a curious expression she could not hide.