The whiteness and the shadows withdrew from the glass as the Prinses Beatrix moved out. Night showed itself above the receding quayside and its many clustered bluish-white lights. Between us and those lights appeared a widening watershine. Bluish-white and yellow lights slid rearward; cranes and gantries, booms and cables and other marine articulations offered their detail growing smaller, smaller.
Actually, said the bluish-white lights, said the yellow, there is no place whatever, no place at all. We have told you this before in topographies of emptiness and on the roads of night, you have known it looking out of strange windows. You have always known it.
No, I said, I don’t know that. I’m not ready to know that. I have always found place, I have always had places. Death as it follows me takes away one place after another; sometimes it’s like the breaking of a string of beads; the beads all rattle on the floor, some roll into dark corners. But my places are not yet all gone.
Night and distance occupied the ship, hummed in the hollowness of it, throbbed in the engines of it, drove it like a line across a screen. I wondered if the Kraken felt the tremor of it, wondered if the blind and questing head of Orpheus swam before it, cleaving the darkness ahead of the bow wave and the marbling white wake that widened and vanished in the night. Certainly this night passage sang in the olive tree.
The train for Amsterdam, chic in yellow paint with blue blazons, stood ready just outside the customs hall. With other travellers I got into it and looked out of the window at a dark tower that lifted its head above some trees and showed an illuminated clockface. On the window that I looked through there was, instead of a crossed-out cigarette, a crossed-out bottle. What a good idea to cross things out on windows, I thought. What a convenience.
The sky as it grew lighter showed itself to be a good firm northern before-dawn sky. A resigned-looking man opposite me, very small, very moon-faced and eastern, put a black-cased radio-cassette recorder carefully between his legs like a shrine, extended the antenna, put on headphones, and sank back into the whispering of the news in his head.
The carriage filled up with people, rucksacks, and suitcases; the train stood motionless; it was not due to move for another hour. The sky grew more and more pale and more and more by-the-sea. There were dark blue streaks in it now and a few scattered marine-looking clouds. Across this paling sky flew the black shapes of silent gulls. Over the electric railway stretched a precision of gantries and wires. Between the train and the dark tower of the clock there was lifted up the black shape of a hammer-headed crane. It swung round and moved out of sight. A white light appeared above the trees. From the head of the moon-faced eastern-looking man issued tiny compressed Mozart. The sky was now dove-grey and altogether marine in its character.
At 0730 the train moved. We passed bulldozers and tractor shovels impassively moving earth, we passed cattle standing in quiet pastures while the mists of dawn rose round them. We passed sheep, blocks of flats, canals with perfect little bridges, and black ducks on silver water. There was no darkness to mirror our faces; our eyes looking out saw such world as framed itself in the windows with the crossed-out bottles.
In due course the train arrived at the beautiful Pieter de Hooch-looking red-brick station in The Hague. According to my books the Vermeer girl was at the Mauritshuis, but when I bought a map the newsagent told me that the Mauritshuis was closed for renovation and the paintings were to be seen at the Johan de Witthuis, which he marked for me.
A little after nine o’clock I arrived at the Johan de Witthuis, which did not open until ten o’clock. By that time I was longing for the conveniences as well as for the Vermeer girl. There were no signs anywhere that said anything like HERREN, no bifurcated pictographs. Until ten o’clock I walked up and down looking at shop windows and wondering whether a preoccupation with dikes had made the Dutch constipated.
When the doors opened I paid my admission and bought an illustrated catalogue on the cover of which was Vermeer’s View of Delft. I said to the man at the desk, ‘Are all the paintings from the Mauritshuis here?’
‘No, only the ones in the catalogue.’
‘But the Vermeer, the Head of a Young Girl, that’s here, isn’t it?’
‘No, the only Vermeer is this one.’ He indicated the reproduction on the cover of the catalogue.
‘Where’s the Head of a Young Girl?’
‘It’s on loan in America.’
‘Thank you.’ Pondering the complexity of this demonstration I went inside and made my way to the toiletten in the basement.
When I came back up the stairs I went into Zaal A where I found myself looking at two panels attached to each other, Nos 843a and 843b, a diptych, evidently, by G. David (1460–1523). Two narrow vertical panels offering a dark wood, many leaves, a stream, a donkey, a bird, two oxen, a road, a stone building with a tower or a silo. A mill? Unlikely. The word hospice came into my mind. Did the stream flow under an arch and into the building? Or did the road glitter, did the road flicker and shine not like a road? The dancing beast of the mystery, was it in this mystic wood? What a dark whispering in those many leaves! Come and find me, she had said. In this dark and whispering wood?
It occurred to me then that this Witthuis, this new abode, was a place that the Vermeer girl had physically departed from. She’d gone away over the water. Out of her Witts? Away from wittingness, perhaps; beyond the reach of intellect. Her old dwelling-place had been the Mauritshuis. I had no Dutch dictionary but I had my pocket German Langenscheidt with me so I looked to see if there was anything close to Maurits in German. Maurer was bricklayer, mason. The number of the railway carriage in which I had travelled here from the Hook of Holland had been 727. G is the seventh letter of the alphabet, B the second. GBG: GIRL BECOMES GONE. The Vermeer girl had moved from the house of bricks, of gross earthy matter, to the house of wits, of the mind, but intellect proving barren she had become gone while Hermes for a joke sent me to find her. No, it wasn’t just Hermes — she herself had told me to come and find her and in some way not yet revealed to me this was the place where she would be found, I could feel it.
I looked in my catalogue to see what it had to say about this dark wood painted by G. David. There was no mention of it whatever. I went to the man at the desk. ‘Those two panels by David,’ I said, ‘843a and 843b, they’re not in the catalogue.’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘they’re not. They’re in the catalogue that’s in the shop.’
‘Where’s the shop?’
‘Through there.’
I went to the shop and bought the Mauritshuis Illustrated General Catalogue and a postcard of the Vermeer girl. Two French schoolgirls were buying the same postcard. ‘But where is this painting?’ one of them asked the man at the counter. ‘We can’t find it.’
‘It’s in America.’
‘When does it return?’
‘Next year.’
Turning in the catalogue to David, No. 843, I read:
David, Gerard
Born ca 1460 in Oudewater, died 1523 in Bruges. Worked in Bruges, where he was the most important artist after the death of Memling.
Two forest scenes