Except that, at the moment I am writing of, he was standing in the doorway.
He nodded courteously at me and then looked at my mother.
“Give the boy some money, Annike,” he said. “Give him as much as we can afford, get him to Rotterdam and England. I am not proud, but I will have no son of mine flogged in public.”
Again, he nodded kindly at me and vanished. Before I had drawn three deep breaths, before even my mother could begin to speak, he reappeared and thrust a fat volume into my hands.
“Read,” he said. “Then read again. Get it into your mind.”
I have the book in front of me as I write: it is Flavius Josephus on the History of the Jews, printed by Marten Schagen in Amsterdam in 1736; Haverkamp’s edition, bound in speckled calf. I must read it one day, to appease a gentle ghost who was once the best and kindest cobbler in our Province.
My mother finished dressing my wounds in haste, then bustled about, putting all my good clothes into a bag made of carpet and filling up a little canvas bag with food.
“Now,” she said, “quick. Down to the wharf. Old Gerrit’s barge is tied up there for the night and he will be at the inn, drunken old fool that he is and a shame to his wife. Get under the tarpaulin and sleep. Not in the middle part of the boat, it is full of German coal; in the forepeak there is a cargo of Delft, your clothes will not get so dirty. Mind, when I say Delft, I talk of the rubbish they call Delft nowadays.”
Her eyes roved the room, as did mine; this time, perhaps, for the last time. From every wall and dresser, interspersed with lustrous copper-ware, twinkled the finest accumulation of blue-and-white Delft in Gelderland — and Noord Brabant. My mother had a passion for it; she would walk twenty miles through our flat countryside, divided by canals like rulers, to haggle for a fine old piece she had heard of. In the diamond-glazed corner-press were perhaps twenty pieces of the real Ming blue-and-white porcelain, some of them were of the true eggshell-ware, quite different from the so-called eggshell sold to common sailors, which my mother contemptuously called “dock-ware”. She had often told me of the long journeys by camel along the Silk Road from China of the real porcelains; their arrival in Venice (where some of the plainer pieces were “klobbered” with gilt and Venetian red over the original glaze, obscuring the simple blue brush-strokes) and so to our United Holland Provinces where the clever men of Delft had long ago imitated them almost to perfection — except that the “body” (they called it the arcanum, the secret matter) long remained a mystery, for the Chinese were as secretive about their China clay paste as they had been about the silkworm hundreds of years before; and except, too, that the slick miracle of the Chinese glazes was never quite repeatable. The old plateelschilders of Delft did wonders (and by 1720 they had winkled out the secret arcanum) but they could never quite recreate the ringing body, the succulent glazes, the delicate, off-hand brush-work of the Chinese. And they could not fool people like my mother, much as she loved the work of De Paeuw (The Peacock), Het Jonge Moriaenshooft (The Young Moor’s Head), De Dobbelde Schenkkan (The Double Jug) and all the other fine little workshops (named after the breweries they took over after the great fire of 1654 when the gunpowder-boat almost destroyed the town of Delft). Fortunately for them, there were few people like my mother. Fortunately for me, I was one of those few because, from my very childhood, she had played games with me and her treasures until I could tell pottery from porcelain with one flip of the back of my finger-nail, soft-paste from hard-paste with one nibble of the tooth, lead-glaze from tin-glaze with one caress of a wetted finger. Blindfold.
To speak plainly, I was not over-interested and had at times almost suspected that her preoccupation with pots was unwholesome, especially since my remote father sometimes gave me a moment of his time to explain that earthly treasures were but ordure and the only true riches were in the mind, where heaven existed. At my age, of course, I knew that heaven was neither earthly treasures such as Ming porcelain nor the recesses of my spiritual mind, but was contained in the bodices and drawers of young women. I am older now but I shall not pretend that I am much wiser.
“In the morning, early,” my mother continued, “I shall go down to Gerrit’s barge in the neighbour’s cart and shall explain things to him and give him some money. I shall give you some money too; not very much but enough to get you to England. I shall bring, in the cart, a chest of Delft — not of the choicest but good enough for the English. My sister’s cousin writes that in London today they are crazy for blue-and-white wares and cannot tell Wan-Li from De Metalen Pot. You shall walk around and about and listen without talking and so find out what the English will pay, then you shall take a little shop to sell the Delft from. Slowly, patiently; don’t push, don’t hawk; they will hear about you and they will come to you. The money I bring tomorrow will be enough for you to get established. If you do not whore too much, that is.”
“Such a mother as I have!” I cried with real affection, clasping her in my arms so far as the fatness of her little body permitted.
“Such a son as I have,” she said, without expression on her face, pushing me away. “Some more of this good chicken broth? No? You are a fool, where will you get such broth in England, where they eat beef rolled in suet every day? Now go, quickly, before the angry fathers arrive with dogs and whips. Go. I have to spend the whole night packing pieces of Delft in soft cloth, there is no time to listen to bad sons talking from the fronts of their mouths.”
I kissed her, picked up my bag of clothes and my bag of food and went out of the door, closing it gently. It opened again in an instant and my mother thrust a soft bundle inside my coat. Before I could ask what it was she was telling me.
“It is the blanket your grandmother wove for you before you were born. You well know that you have never been able to sleep without it. People you don’t need, not even me after the milk in my breasts dried. I understand you, my son; I looked into your eyes ten minutes after you came out of my belly. You will never understand yourself, thank God. Take the blanket and run.”
Then once again I was running, but now very gently and quietly; listening and running, running. All the dog I could hear barking was the Schipperke — “the Little Skipper” on Old Gerrit’s barge at the wharf ahead of me — and he would know me as soon as I drew near enough to speak to him and give him the piece of bread, dipped in chicken-broth, which I had thoughtfully slipped into my pocket.
He bit me gently about the ankles as I stepped aboard, then he ate the piece of bread and remembered that he liked me. I crept forward and undid enough lashings of the tarpaulin to enable me to creep in amongst the cases of pottery. The little dog, Kees — all Schipperkes are called Kees just as all dachshunds are called Waldmann — came in with me and licked my nose, while I rummaged in the food-bag. There was a little bundle of the greenish, twisted Sumatra cheroots such as my mother knew I loved, along with a box of waxed lucifer splints. I bit the end off a cheroot, moistened it carefully, relishing the treacly taste of the outer leaf, and struck a lucifer. The little dog, as quick as lightning, reached forward and patted it out. I had forgotten that all barge-dogs learn to put out sparks before they learn anything else. I tied him up with my neckerchief and fed him morsels of smoked eel while I lit another splint. There are few things nicer than smoked eel eaten with a green, sticky Sumatra cheroot.