It was not a house where secrets could be kept easily.
Another day he had me ask the butcher for a pigs bladder. I did not understand why he wanted one until he later asked me to lay out paints he needed each morning when I had finished cleaning. He opened the drawers to the cupboard near his easel and showed me which paints were kept where, naming the colors as he went. I had not heard of many of the wordsultramarine, vermilion, massicot. The brown and yellow earth colors and the bone black and lead white were stored in little earthenware pots, covered with parchment to keep them from drying out. The more valuable colorsthe blues and reds and yellowswere kept in small amounts in pigs bladders. A hole was punched in them so the paint could be squeezed out, with a nail plugging it shut.
One morning while I was cleaning he came in and asked me to stand in for the bakers daughter, who had taken ill and could not come. I want to look for a moment, he explained. Someone must stand there.
I obediently took her place, one hand on the handle of the water pitcher, the other on the window frame, opened slightly so that a chilly draft brushed my face and chest.
Perhaps this is why the bakers daughter is ill, I thought.
He had opened all of the shutters. I had never seen the room so bright.
Tilt your chin down, he said. And look down, not at me. Yes, thats it. Dont move.
He was sitting by the easel. He did not pick up his palette or his knife or his brushes. He simply sat, hands in his lap, and looked.
My face turned red. I had not realized that he would stare at me so intently.
I tried to think of something else. I looked out the window and watched a boat moving along the canal. The man poling it was the man who had helped me get the pot from the canal my first day. How much has changed since that morning, I thought. I had not even seen one of his paintings then. Now I am standing in one.
Dont look at what you are looking at, he said. I can see it in your face. It is distracting you.
I tried not to look at anything, but to think of other things. I thought of a day when our family went out into the countryside to pick herbs. I thought of a hanging I had seen in Market Square the year before, of a woman who had killed her daughter in a drunken rage. I thought of the look on Agnes face the last time I had seen her.
You are thinking too much, he said, shifting in his seat.
I felt as if I had washed a tub full of sheets but not got them clean. Im sorry, sir. I dont know what to do.
Try closing your eyes.
I closed them. After a moment I felt the window frame and the pitcher in my hands, anchoring me. Then I could sense the wall behind me, and the table to my left, and the cold air from the window.
This must be how my father feels, I thought, with the space all around him, and his body knowing where it is.
Good, he said. That is good. Thank you, Griet. You may continue cleaning.
I had never seen a painting made from the beginning. I thought that you painted what you saw, using the colors you saw.
He taught me.
He began the painting of the bakers daughter with a layer of pale grey on the white canvas. Then he made reddish-brown marks all over it to indicate where the girl and the table and pitcher and window and map would go. After that I thought he would begin to paint what he sawa girls face, a blue skirt, a yellow and black bodice, a brown map, a silver pitcher and basin, a white wall. Instead he painted patches of colorblack where her skirt would be, ocher for the bodice and the map on the wall, red for the pitcher and the basin it sat in, another grey for the wall. They were the wrong colorsnone was the color of the thing itself. He spent a long time on these false colors, as I called them.
Sometimes the girl came and spent hour after hour standing in place, yet when I looked at the painting the next day nothing had been added or taken away. There were just areas of color that did not make things, no matter how long I studied them. I only knew what they were meant to be because I cleaned the objects themselves, and had seen what the girl was wearing when I peeked at her one day as she changed into Catharinas yellow and black bodice in the great hall.
I reluctantly set out the colors he asked for each morning. One day I put out a blue as well. The second time I laid it out he said to me, No ultramarine, Griet. Only the colors I asked for. Why did you set it out when I did not ask for it? He was annoyed.
Im sorry, sir. Its just I took a deep breathshe is wearing a blue skirt. I thought you would want it, rather than leaving it black.
When I am ready, I will ask.
I nodded and turned back to polishing the lion-head chair. My chest hurt. I did not want him to be angry at me.
He opened the middle window, filling the room with cold air.
Come here, Griet.
I set my rag on the sill and went to him.
Look out the window.
I looked out. It was a breezy day, with clouds disappearing behind the New Church tower.
What color are those clouds?
Why, white, sir.
He raised his eyebrows slightly. Are they?
I glanced at them. And grey. Perhaps it will snow.
Come, Griet, you can do better than that. Think of your vegetables.
My vegetables, sir?
He moved his head slightly. I was annoying him again. My jaw tightened.
Think of how you separated the whites. Your turnips and your onionsare they the same white?
Suddenly I understood. No. The turnip has green in it, the onion yellow.
Exactly. Now, what colors do you see in the clouds?
There is some blue in them, I said after studying them for a few minutes. Andyellow as well. And there is some green! I became so excited I actually pointed. I had been looking at clouds all my life, but I felt as if I saw them for the first time at that moment.
He smiled. You will find there is little pure white in clouds, yet people say they are white. Now do you understand why I do not need the blue yet?
Yes, sir. I did not really understand, but did not want to admit it. I felt I almost knew.
When at last he began to add colors on top of the false colors, I saw what he meant. He painted a light blue over the girls skirt, and it became a blue through which bits of black could be seen, darker in the shadow of the table, lighter closer to the window. To the wall areas he added yellow ocher, through which some of the grey showed. It became a bright but not a white wall. When the light shone on the wall, I discovered, it was not white, but many colors.
The pitcher and basin were the most complicatedthey became yellow, and brown, and green, and blue. They reflected the pattern of the rug, the girls bodice, the blue cloth draped over the chaireverything but their true silver color. And yet they looked as they should, like a pitcher and a basin.
After that I could not stop looking at things.
It became harder to hide what I was doing when he wanted me to help him make the paints. One morning he took me up to the attic, reached by a ladder in the storeroom next to the studio. I had never been there before. It was a small room, with a steeply slanted roof and a window that let in light and a view of the New Church. There was little there apart from a small cupboard and a stone table with a hollow place in it, holding a stone shaped like an egg with one end cut off. I had seen a similar table once at my fathers tile factory. There were also some vesselsbasins and shallow earthenware platesas well as tongs by the tiny fireplace.
I would like you to grind some things here for me, Griet, he said. He opened a cupboard drawer and took out a black stick the length of my little finger. This is a piece of ivory, charred in the fire, he explained. For making black paint.
Dropping it in the bowl of the table, he added a gummy substance that smelled of animal. Then he picked up the stone, which he called a muller, and showed me how to hold it, and how to lean over the table and use my weight against the stone to crush the bone. After a few minutes he had ground it into a fine paste.