Ely Town.
The Great Level.
August and September, 1649.
That evening I meet Jacob Van Hooghten in an inn, hoping that the darkness of the room will make it easier for me to tell him what has happened. I want to open my heart to him, to show him that it beats faster and more strongly. In this strange place Van Hooghten has become my friend, the first that I have found, and I have placed my confidence in him more than I have dared with any other person, either man or woman. But I stumble before I can find the words, and at that moment feel my courage drain away. I say nothing, and the evening goes on in the way of countless others. We drink the weak beer of the country and smoke pipes of rough tobacco. Through the smoky fog we talk of progress and how, if our surveys proceed with speed, a map will be ready by the winter.
So I do not speak out, but hide you straightaway from the world. From a small boy I have been easy with secrets, neither my mother nor my father having looked to talk about themselves or hear what was in my heart. So I have become apt to hold both joy and insult fast inside and grow them as grit grows pearls.
I do not then think to myself I will continue to hide you, or whether you will yourself come out of the shadows. Though in all things a methodical man who plans step by step, putting one foot before another, I do not look ahead, but simply fail to speak out. If Van Hooghten notices my halting speech, he says nothing; besides, he is not a man to force a confidence from another.
• • •
By this time, Van Hooghten is the picture of a healthy man, with skin as brown as his chestnut boots. Whenever we meet he clasps me close and smiles. His teeth are very white now in his round face, his eyes deep blue, and his mood is high. We both sleep soundly, a circumstance he attributes to the nature of the work, which is arduous and steady. We measure and draw, calculate and note, he with his band of Dutchmen on the drier ground from where they can triangulate with ease, I with mine on the water. We are the first engineers to map this whole wilderness, and take pride in that fact, as if we were explorers out on the ocean.
I send my men to the south, and spend days out on the meres alone. I sleep under my upturned coracle, concealed in the darkness of its shell. You tell me later that spirits live on the meres, but that my coracle protects me. Its skin, taken from a living being, serves as a shield. This I do not believe, and yet the rough feel of the wicker frame brings a kind of comfort, though there is no animal abroad large enough to menace me. My instruments and food I keep with me, and I myself, should it rain, am preserved from damp and ague. In my schooldays I have read of the sage Diogenes, who lived thus in a barrel, and understand, as I lie alone, that his folly was less than I thought it as a child.
With this comes a picture of the school on Tholen, my parents’ house by the canal and my little sisters Katrijn and Anna, head to toe asleep in the large bedstead in the parlor wall. The bedstead doors open a crack for air, but like me my sisters lie in their wooden box, warm and safe. A quilt covers them, sewn and embroidered by my mother. Sometimes they upend and lie side by side. In the gloom they whisper and tell stories. Seated at the parlor table my mother pretends not to hear. She leans her sewing into the candlelight. Her brow is golden in the brown room. Katrijn and Anna have a life snug and far from wars.
A letter in the hands of the postmaster at Ely goes aboard ship at King’s Lynn and arrives on Tholen in a few weeks. To my mother and father I send greetings and to Margriet I write that I have discovered a tiny iris here, its petals cream and blue with yellow splashed down inside. It grows on the damp banks, scarce higher than my finger. I tell her I have sent it to a learned gentleman of my acquaintance in The Hague and that if it is indeed undiscovered I shall name it for her. Beyond this, I find that I have little to say. I think of my mother pushing me, her only son, forward from the shadows, too sparing with her love and praise, and understand that I am looking for another life.
Jacob Van Hooghten also writes home. With his customary regularity he sends news to his widowed mother and three brothers all making their way in the world, one a sea captain with the West India Company, another a lawyer in The Hague, the last a schoolmaster in his village in the north, as their father was before him. He writes also to his betrothed, Maria. He tells me about her in his eager way, smiling as if he sees her in his mind. Van Hooghten never doubts her love and says simply that they will be happy when life allows their union. He has no fear about the future.
“This is Maria,” he says, and snaps open a leather case. Inside, an oval portrait nests on its velvet bed.
“Once the work is done here,” he says, “I will have saved enough to set up on my own.”
Life spools out ahead of Van Hooghten, a straight sunlit path. Time, also, in his imagination, is a steady progression, facing forward. Beyond Maria he sees children, then a good house with a piece of fertile land under a wide sky, credit at the bank, and his projects, one after another into the distance. Neither sickness nor death disturb the outline of this vision.
“Look at her, my Maria,” he says, holding out the portrait. “I’m a lucky man, Jan.”
I agree, and draw the small painting close to me so that I can see her, though in truth I feel no presence there. Eyes—blue; hair under the lip of her bonnet—fair. A young woman stares out steadily, though whether it is the painter who looks at her that way, or whether it is her own habit of looking at the world I cannot tell. I hand the little portrait back to Jacob, and nod my approbation, for that is what he wishes.
Although I have said nothing to Jacob, you are now always there in my mind. Whenever I am out on the water and closed in by walls of reed, my whole self and body is tensed and waiting. I can feel from the silence when I am observed. The white butterflies fly up and away and all around me the murmur and chirrup of the fens is lowered, leaving only the sounds made by the wind in the leaves and the gentle lapping of the water as it runs against the banks.
Sometimes the feeling fades away, but at other times, there you are, quiet and sudden. I am certain that you have watched for a time and then parted the reed stems to appear beside me. If I ask whether you have a coracle nearby or have come across the islands on paths unknown to me, you shrug and say nothing. The very way you stand, straight and solid on your feet, your head up on your neck, eyes nearly level to mine and shimmering in your face, has a challenge in it.
You watch me work, and little by little we fall into snatches of talk. You show me summer flowers and tell me the names of those that are particular to your people.
One hazy morning I am bold enough to ask, “Where do you come from?”
“Around.”
“But where is your home?”
“Here. Where then is yours?”
I turn and point to the east where Holland lies.
“It is beyond the sea.”
“A place beyond the water?”
You turn in that direction as if Holland might be visible.
“Tell me about it.”
So that day I sit on the grass and neglect my work, making a picture for you of Amsterdam and then of Tholen. You stay very still as I talk and say nothing. To speak of myself in this way is new to me, and the words come even more haltingly than usual. Each word in this unfamiliar language is an offering that I wish you to take.
Another day as you stand behind me I feel your hand on my back, distinct and strong against my spine. I am ready to turn and pull you towards me, but hesitate. I fear to anger you, as I did that first afternoon. So I tell myself it is my own desire that I feel, not anything that comes from you or runs between us.
This desire has grown with your curiosity and your presence and I have let it. I do not wish to contain it; but I fear that if you feel it in me you may disappear and never return. I do not know where you come from, and you have turned away my questions.
Then, in the last of summer while the days are still warm, there you are again, standing tall far away along the bank of the river. Once again I am in a manner struck dumb, and can only think to carry on my work and wait for you to come up to me, which you do along the narrow path that runs by the riverbank. You squeeze over and through the willow branches, solid and surefooted.
“Good day, Eliza,” I say then, when you are right by me.
You say nothing, but I know suddenly what is to happen. I cannot remember how or how much time goes past before we move, but only that we are onto each other, and fallen to the grass, and I have one hand on your back pulling you towards me, the other already under your petticoat, and you, Eliza, though I do not say your name then—you, the same, your hand in my breeches so I gasp; and then we are together, and though everything about me is disordered, everything is at the same time clear, and it is not as if I am dreaming but rather as if the whole world is bursting into life, and all of nature standing still.
Then I am lying on the grass, breeches gone, everything gone. We are down to the bones, to a nakedness that seems to have stripped away flesh. There is nothing between us. You are lit up by the sun, lying on the grass with the light pouring down onto your back. My arms run right round you, and after everything you rise from my chest, and finally I look up and see in your golden eyes first a tenderness, then an absence, as if you were one moment with me and then in another you have already left. Quite in silence you put on your shift and shirt and walk away along a path that leads through the reeds, never turning back. Such paths are not safe for me to use, but I do not in any case attempt to follow you or see where you are going. I just lie there and perhaps I sleep, because by the time I come to myself the sun is dropping into the water. The mere is glazed with beauty, the reed heads dark against the red to the west, and lit up in feathery flames to the east. The notion comes to me that God is here, and walks near me; but I sit up and find myself alone and naked still.
I gather up my things that are scattered about. The moon is rising to guide me back to Ely Isle. I row over the darkening water until I arrive at the jetty and tie the boat to its slimy stump. Then I see the river flowing north and the great dome of night coming up. I stand and watch as the light goes and the stars become a hundred, then a thousand, then too many to count, and throw their light all over the black sky.
From that day the sun shines on everything in the world. It feels to me as if I have a new knowledge, and that the change that came over me when you first fixed me with your glance was the beginning of it. This knowledge is not from a person or a book. It is a knowledge of what is, neither sacred nor profane, but just the world itself.
Now, years later, the day comes back to me, sometimes in fragments, sometimes to my moving sight. Though I see you and hear the sound of the whole Great Level as it lay stretched out in the summer sun, my mind is not the only vessel that holds the past. In my flesh and bones memory stirs and wakes. You have not gone from me but wait beyond the round curve of the earth, a part of it, and alive to my touch. With the beat of my heart life quickens and time falls away to the other place where we live as real as waking day. Then I can see into your eyes, not from afar as memory sometimes sees, but there, lying beneath you. Your shadow falls onto me from above. My fingertips run up your back and move bone by bone up to your shoulders and down over your breast to where your heart beats. And still the sunshine runs through your hair like living gold.