“You’re tired,” Annetje repeated sourly. Then a shrug.
Hannah knew only a passable amount of Dutch, and Annetje less Portuguese, so their interactions were often terse and limited. Not limited enough. Hannah-fool, fool, Hannah-had trusted the girl too much in those early days. She’d trusted her pretty smile and her sweet temper and sea-green eyes. In the hours they spent together, toiling like equals-scrubbing walls, washing the stoop, sweating puddles onto the kitchen floor-Hannah had come to like the girl and to confide in her. Annetje taught her as much Dutch as Hannah could learn, and she tried patiently to learn Portuguese. She taught Hannah how to scrub the front stairs of a house (which no one had ever done in Lisbon), how to pick the best produce from the merchants on the Dam, and how to tell if a baker added chalk to whiten his bread.
Hannah had come to look on the girl as her only true ally. She found few friends among the other Jewish women of the Vlooyenburg, and she hardly had time for idle friendship with her chores. Floors to scrub, clothes to launder, meals to cook. Breakfast before dawn, dinner when Daniel returned home from the Exchange-anywhere between two and six, so it had always to be ready-and later, depending on when he had his dinner, a light supper. There were the Sabbath meals he hosted, and the havdalah gatherings. Sometimes when he invited friends or colleagues for meals, he would supervise as Hannah and Annetje prepared the food, making foolish suggestions and getting underfoot.
Hannah had never been made to do so much work in her life. In Lisbon she’d been asked to sew and mend and to help cook on the holidays. She’d minded children for older relatives, and she’d cared for the sick and the elderly. Nothing like this. After a week, Annetje had found her huddled in the corner, weeping so hard she could hardly keep from banging her head against the brick behind her. The girl had pleaded for her to say what was wrong, but where to begin? What was wrong? Amsterdam. Jews. Prayer. Synagogue. Cooking. Scrubbing. And Daniel. It was all wrong, but she could say none of it aloud, so she’d let the girl comfort her and bring her hot wine and sing songs to her as though she were an infant.
Then she began to tell Annetje secrets, like how she had, unbeknownst to her husband, gone to see the witch woman who lived outside of town for a charm that would help her get with child. She told her about Daniel’s quirks and foibles and coolness. For example, he would never, under any circumstances, take off all his clothing. She told Annetje how after he used his chamber pot he would return, hour after hour, to sniff at it.
And she told the girl other things too, things she now wished she could take back. Even as she’d said them, she knew she had confided too much. Maybe that was even why she’d done it. The thrill of speaking the forbidden, of asking for help in doing what must not be done-it had been all too delicious. And it would most likely be her undoing.
“We’ll go tomorrow?” Annetje asked now, as though she sensed Hannah’s thoughts.
“Yes,” Hannah said. These furtive trips had been exhilarating at first. Warm and welcoming, but also exciting in the way forbidden things always were. Now it was a terrible duty, one she could not avoid without seeing a little sparkle in the maid’s eyes, a sparkle that said Do as I instruct or I’ll tell your husband what you would not want him to know. She’d only uttered the threat aloud once, when she’d been very angry at Hannah for not wanting to give her more than the secret ten guilders a week above what her husband paid her. That one time had been enough. Now she only hinted. “I’d hate to say things best left unsaid,” she would tell her mistress, or “I fear sometimes that my tongue is too loose, and if your husband is around-well, we’d best not talk of that.”
Hannah looked again at the dull knife. In Lisbon she might have been tempted-truly tempted-to plunge it into the girl’s heart and be done with her. Who would have asked questions if a kitchen girl died in the home of a rich merchant? In Amsterdam, though, with its leveling politics and merchant culture, a housewife would hardly get away with killing a servant. Not that Hannah could really bring herself to murder another human being, no matter how much she might hate her. Still, it was better to have the option.
Daniel’s teeth were bothering him today. She could see that when they sat down for dinner. He had fingers from both hands in his mouth and was fishing around for who knew what. He would do that at night too, digging for hours on end, paying no mind to where his elbow flew or whom it struck.
After months of this she had urged him to see a surgeon-a tricky business, since Daniel took great offense if she suggested anything to him. If his hand were on fire and she suggested that he dunk it in a bucket of water, he’d glare at her and let himself burn. To soften the advice, she’d given it in anecdotal form: “Jeronimo Javeza’s wife tells me her husband had a problem tooth pulled by a skilled dentist who works near the Damrak. She says he hasn’t been so comfortable in five years.”
So Daniel had gone but come back with the same troubling teeth with which he’d left the house that morning. “The brute of a surgeon wanted fifteen guilders to pull five teeth,” he’d said. “Three guilders a tooth. For fifteen guilders, a man should get new teeth, not lose old ones.”
Now, at the table, Daniel looked almost ready to aid his excavation with a knife while Miguel blessed the wine. Miguel prayed over everything they ate, over anything that didn’t move. He might pray over his own turds, for all she knew. When Daniel ate alone with her, he would mutter the Hebrew words or mutter some of them if he couldn’t remember the rest. Often he forgot to pray at all. He would always forget when he ate alone, there being no one to impress or instruct. Miguel, however, would bless his food whenever he ate. She’d seen other men of the Vlooyenburg with their Hebrew and their blessings, and often they seemed to her angry or frightening or alien. With Miguel there was delight in his utterances, as though he were remembering something wonderful each time he said the prayers. It was hard not to hear these strange words anew each time he spoke them-not mumbled and swallowed, the way some men did, but clearly articulated, like oratory. She heard the poetry of a foreign tongue, its cadences and repetitions complementary sounds. And she knew things would be different if Miguel, instead of Daniel, were her husband.
This wasn’t just some idle fancy born from her constant reflection that Miguel was far more handsome and robust than his brother. Where Daniel was thin and looked like a beggar in merchant’s clothes, Miguel was round and pink and hearty. Though Miguel was the elder brother, he looked more youthful and healthy. His large black eyes always darted here and there, not nervously like Daniel’s, but with delight and wonder. And his face was so round-delicate and somehow still strong. What would it be like, she wondered, to be married to a man who loved laughter instead of resenting it, who embraced life instead of squinting at it with suspicion?
That was fate’s little irony. She knew her father had been seeking an alliance with the Lienzos and wanted his daughter to marry the elder son. Hannah had never met either or them, so it was all one to her, but then the elder son had upped and married a penniless girl without his family’s approval, so her father had opted for the next Lienzo in line. By the time Miguel’s wife died, only four months later, Hannah was already married to Daniel.
What would these prayers mean to her if she had married Miguel? Daniel knew almost nothing of the liturgy. He went to synagogue because the parnassim expected it of him, particularly his friend Solomon Parido (whom Hannah was inclined to dislike because of his sour attitude toward Miguel). He had often enough spared her the tedium of going herself, but now that he had got her with child, he made her come along so the men of the congregation could be reminded of his virility. More than one had wished him a son so he might have someone to say kaddish for him when he died.