Vermeer's Daughter

Rilke

PROLOGUE

EFORE ME, the paintings my father made for Mijnheer van Ruijven: the world I once knew. Extraordinarily, vigorously, and delightfully painted, according to the auction catalogue. There are twenty-one of them, and Father has been dead now twenty-one years. They have fared better than we children at staying together without him. There were eleven of us when he died, and all of us have gone our separate ways.

But that is another story. I have not come here to mourn the loss of my family. Nor have I come to mourn the loss of that earlier time, only to see it once more in the paintings my father made of it. And here they are, full of light. The auction house is full, the mood expectant. Who will leave with the most desirable of them when the day is through? Who will settle for the girl I once was?

Let me explain. I am not the beautiful daughter. Not Maria, there on the easel, the one who looks over her shoulder at you, caught turning for one last glance before disappearing into the darkness behind her. I am Carelina, the plain girl in the portrait that hangs beside her. Dull brown hair, thin lips. Even my gray-blue robe is dull, the color of a dove. My sister is color and motion and promise. I am pale, as if lit by moonlight, and still. Then and now, all I know, all I am remains inside me.

Only once, briefly, did I wish to be Maria. I do not wish to be Maria now. Nonetheless, when I hear whispering beside me, I bow my head and pray not to be recognized.

Ah, the girl with the pearl earring!

Exquisite.

They say it is his daughter.

Yes. And the little plain one, too—another daughter.

They grow quiet then, pitying me I suppose.

It is all right, I tell them silently. I know that the portrait my father painted of me is nowhere near as pleasing as the one he painted of my sister. You would not be alone if you did not understand why he wanted to paint me at all. Upon glancing into the painting room to see Father arranging the gray robe on my shoulders, my own grandmother had stopped and asked why he did not paint, instead, a picture he might hope to sell.

Come, Mother Thins, he said. Look at your granddaughter. Do you not see the light inside her?

But she remained in the doorway, scowling. I do not have time for looking at light, Johannes, she said. I must use the light. That is what the day is for: working. And she turned away, into the dark corridor.

Father smiled at me. God help her, he said. She does not understand.

The whisperers probably would not understand either. One looks at my father’s paintings and either sees what he saw, sees why he had no choice but to follow his heart; or one does not see. It is true that if he had been a more sensible man he would have painted many more pictures, the kind that fetched hundreds of guilders. It is true, too, that sometimes I wonder how different our lives would have been if he had done so and thus freed himself, freed all of us from Grandmother’s dark, joyless home. He might have grown old and wise. I might be with him yet, mixing his paints, making his brushes, helping him to arrange those same loved objects to catch the light in ways that were ever new.

But looking at the glorious pictures before me, I think—to earn so many guilders he would have had to paint differently. And that I do not care to imagine. Nor do I care to imagine any life I might have led, no matter how comfortable, if it did not have in it this portrait that my father made of me. There is nothing I would trade for the memory that looking at it brings: his eyes upon me, his hands at work, claiming me particle by particle for the canvas.

Suddenly, he is present, fluttering through me. As true and elusive as the girl in the portrait. The girl I was.

I should go now, I think. I stand to go. I had only wanted to see my father’s pictures one last time, to steal a few moments to honor him. Now I have done so. But I am made weak by their light. It pours into me. I vibrate with their color.

Are you ill, Vrouw? the whisperer asks.

No, no, I say. Please. Do not trouble yourself about me.

But gently he places his hands on my shoulders, lowers me to my chair. He does not make a fuss. With the palm of his hand, he says, Stay. And I do. I am grateful for the wine he brings, grateful that he nods kindly at my thanks and then, as the auctioneer raises his gavel, leaves me to drink it alone. To remember.

VIEW OF DELFT

Y SISTERS were fast asleep all round me—Maria, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Beatrix, Aleydis. But I woke, crossed by a slice of light sneaking in through the worn green curtains of our sleeping cupboard, and I could not stay abed. I whispered a waking prayer, climbed out, and slipped on my clothes. Then, tying my cap under my chin, I climbed the steep narrow stairway, tiptoeing past the room where Grandmother slept, to the big room at the corner of the house where Father made his paintings. He was always there at first light, preparing his materials before he settled at his easel to paint. But this morning when I peeked in, I saw only the sun pouring through the open window. It made a path across the table, touching the objects that Father had arranged there—a wooden box, a string of pearls, a folded sheet of paper—and making them shine. There was no one there at all, except for the woman in the painting that Father had left on the easel. In time, she would become our mother, I knew. But this morning, she was still faceless: any woman standing before a window, reading a letter.

Downstairs in the cooking kitchen, Tanneke was kneading dough on the big wood table. She put a floury finger to her lips to let me know that Mother and Gretje, the baby, were still sleeping in the next room.

Father? I whispered.

She smiled and glanced toward the door, then returned to her kneading. I waited till she began to hum; then I drifted away, quiet as smoke, through the house and out into the morning, where I caught just a glimpse of my father striding along the Oude Langendijk Canal before he turned the corner and disappeared down Koornmarkt Street. His legs were so long and carried him so quickly wherever he wanted to go that I should never have hoped to catch him, but for what I knew: sooner or later, something would strike him and he would be compelled to stop a while and look at it.

I knew, too, that I should not set out alone to follow him. Grandmother had told us story after story about children falling into the canals and drowning, run over by sledges, trampled by horses. Girls spirited away by peddlers and left to beg in the streets. There were so many ways a young one could be lost. But just as I could not stay abed once the light had touched me, I could not keep from running into the light now.

Soon Father came into my view. He stood very still in the shadow of a linden tree, his head cocked to better observe whatever had caught his attention. I stopped and looked, too, wondering what it was that had pleased him. I saw lacy patterns of light on the cobble-stones, tree trunks black and shining from last night’s rain. I raised my eyes to the very top of the Oude Kerk and saw the black-faced clock with its gold numerals, its red lions and gilded town crest. Four turrets, sturdy as soldiers, lifted the spire of the church right into the sky. That’s where heaven was. God lived there, among the clouds; but I did not look for Him, for Grandmother had told me that He could not be seen by the likes of us. Only by the angels.

Father began to walk again, and I hurried after him. Past the orphanage with its two stone children above the door, past the East India Company that smelled of faraway lands, to the place where all the canals came together and made a little harbor. Housemaids, like our Tanneke, stood on the sandy quay, their shopping pails hooked over their arms, waiting for the fishermen to bring in their catch. Gulls waited, too, swooping and squawking. There was a transport boat, with a long red cabin where the travelers sat. I should like to live on such a boat, I thought, rocked by the gentle waves on the harbor, always pulling in the anchor and heading off to some new town. All of us: Father, Mother, and my sisters. Not Grandmother Thins, though, for she would not approve of living that way.

Father stopped at the bridge that would take him across the harbor and looked back toward the town. I stepped behind a tree, but not before he saw me.

Ah, Carelina, he called. Come. Do not hide from your own father. He stooped and opened his arms, and I went to him, breathed him in. His woolen doublet. Tobacco, sunshine, the piney smell of Venice turpentine. He put his big hands on my shoulders and stood, looking down at me.

I should scold you for following me, he said.

But he did not scold me; nor did he tell me that I must go back. He smiled at me and took my hand. I will show you something, he said. "It will be our secret.

We walked on, across the bridge to a house with green shutters. Father stopped in front of it and waved his hand toward the harbor. Look, he said, and I saw the Rotterdam Gate with its two blue turrets, our whole town of Delft behind it, shining in the morning sun. Father knocked on the door then, and a man opened it. He nodded, nothing more; and Father and I walked past him, through the front hall and up the stairs. At the landing, there were three closed doors. He stopped before one of them and knelt down beside me.

It is a kind of magic, what you will see inside, he said. Do not be afraid.

I was never afraid when I was with him. Still, when we entered the room and he closed the door behind us, I trembled to see our town of Delft again, this time floating before me in utter darkness. The water in the harbor sparkled. Dots of light were strung across a blue herring boat near the Rotterdam Gate and along the rooftops, like little pearls. In the distance, the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk was so bright that it seemed to have been touched by the hand of God.

Father raised my hand toward the Rotterdam Gate, and I hesitated before touching it, fearing that my fingers would go right through, just as they would if I touched a ghost. But they did not go through. Nor did my fingers feel the brick that I knew the real gate was made of. They felt the slick surface of linen, prepared as I knew Father prepared it to take paint.

This surprised me so much that I laughed in delight. Father laughed, too. He opened the door of the room, threw open a shutter, and the town disappeared, leaving nothing but a big blank canvas hung upon a wall. He showed me how all the windows had been fitted with wood shutters that were painted black, in order to keep out every bit of light; how a small, round hole had been drilled into one that faced the harbor, and fitted with two lenses. These lenses, he said, had been made by his friend, Mijnheer van Leeuwenhoek, to capture the town in a beam of light and carry it onto the canvas.

"You remember my camera obscura, Carelina," he went on.

I nodded. This, Mijnheer van Leeuwenhoek, a scientist, had made as well. It was a wooden box fitted with a lens, and if you looked into the square of glass set into the top of it, you saw a tiny picture of whatever had been placed before the lens. Father used it in his painting room to help him decide what a picture would be.

Is it the same then? I asked. Only so much larger?

Yes. He looked surprised and pleased that I had understood this.

And will you paint the picture on the wall for Mijnheer van Ruijven?

I hoped he would. If so, I might be able to go to Mijnheer van Ruijven’s house with him when the painting was hung and visit with Magdalena, Mijnheer van Ruijven’s daughter. In her sleeping room, she had a house for her dolls, a poppenhuis, and if I was nice to her, and very careful, she allowed me to arrange and rearrange the tiny china dishes and the brass candlesticks, to move the dolls from their chairs by the fireplace to their tiny curtained beds.

Yes, Father said. I will paint the picture for Mijnheer Van Ruijven. But it will take a few months’ time.

He closed the door and the shutters again, and the town reappeared. He went and stood before the place where I now knew the canvas was, so that the prow of the blue boat seemed to be painted on his face. With a piece of chalk that he took from his pocket, he followed the line of the quay, the boats in the harbor, the town wall, the Scheidam and Rotterdam Gates, the spires and rooftops behind them, the clouds above. At times, as he worked, some part of the town was cast onto his back or arm or head, and he would have to bend his body awkwardly so that the image appeared on the canvas, where it belonged, and he could outline it.

I watched. I did not know how much time had