Flowers had been placed on Meg’s doorstep. Small, bent, and uneven. She could not remember the last time she received a gift. She picked them up and saw a scrap of paper was attached. Instinctively she looked around to see if she was being watched. Nobody was there, so she unfolded the paper: a tiny scratched D with a line running through it. She knew that mark as well as she knew her own—an M with a line running the opposite way. Dircx, it was Dircx’s mark. She pressed the flowers to her lips and burst into tears. A sign that her son was alive and thinking of her. She held them to her heart and went inside the house. Doubt followed her—surely this was a trick, a cruel prank to give her hope. Who would do such a thing? She needed Grietje at a time like this; her insight and wisdom would have set this incident right, or wrong.
During the last few days, it had become clear that the other women were looking to Meg to unite them and to give them a voice against the authorities and against their husbands. How was this possible? What had she said to give such a startling impression? Fear was rising in her. This was not her life. She had nothing to say. What had she said against all those men? She needed Grietje’s guidance and resolve, but wasn’t that what she had been given?
Suddenly Meg recalled a memory, from before they had become real friends, when Grietje had given her a present. At the time, she did not understand it. It was a picture, a small drawing on wrinkled paper. What did Grietje say about it? She had seemed like a difficult person then; many of Meg’s friends eschewed the Wise Woman, saying she was dangerous and would get people in trouble, always talking in riddles so. When Grietje gave Meg the gift, Meg hadn’t absorbed the woman’s words or the drawing itself—she had never planned on talking to Grietje again. But now she was certain: the picture was indeed the last present she had been given before today’s flowers. But the memory of it was smudged and unpleasant, wrong in a way she did not understand. All its detail had been erased, along with so many other things, after Dircx’s abduction.
Now she wanted to find the drawing, to recall what she had done with it. Even though she had little recollection of what it actually was. The truth was that she must have spent more time hiding it than looking at it. She certainly had not shown it to anyone else; of that she was sure. She had hidden it in her forgetfulness, but where? It must be in a place that Cluvmux and Dircx would not go, nor have any interest in.
The kitchen. Apart from eating there, they knew nothing of it, having never prepared a meal for themselves in their lazy lives. Meg held the flowers closer to her bosom and looked at the array of pots and pans, jars and bins, dried leaves, beans, smoked meats and vegetables. The butts and barrels of her domain, shelved and standing in her kitchen and her pantry.
She wove her distant, younger self through all these things, seeking that moment, years ago, when she had tucked the picture safely away from sight. She tried to layer the reality and weight of all these goods against the cobweb of memory to see if anything fit. But nothing adhered, agreed, or revealed itself. Automatically, she gave up on her sight, closed her eyes, and started touching objects, hoping she might feel a trace of the gift attached to that long-ago day. She was midway through this scanning when her instinctive sense of smell engaged in the search. A scent came back to her: earth…earth and musk…beans, broad beans…dried broad beans. The kind her family disliked but that were a favorite of hers. She had not used them for a long time. She opened her eyes and looked through all the containers until she found the one she wanted on a high shelf.
Meg climbed up onto a kitchen chair to reach the wooden box. Opening it, she cast her hand deep inside, blindly feeling amid the very old beans and the dust and the weevils. Her fingers touched paper, and she brought out the drawing; it was rolled into a loose scroll, fragile and uncertain. Carefully she climbed down and carried the gift to the kitchen table. Meg dusted off the paper before attempting to unroll it, but her eager efforts tore the frail tube before she could get it flat. She blew away all the legume and weevil dust and stared at the drawing. Finally, she placed a precious glass plate that her husband had stolen from a grand house over the paper, and then she looked at it. There were about thirty tiny drawings scattered and crowded within its confines. Detailed drawings of beggars and people with missing or disjointed limbs—some of which were craftily faked to gain sympathy—hopping, crawling, and limping in all directions. Under the glass, they looked so clear.
“Horrible,” she said to herself.
Still, Meg could not take her eyes away from the accuracy of the depictions. Unknown to herself, she was smiling. Each figure’s twisted portrait seethed and shouted in knotted character. They were alive and captured in the drawing. Their arrangement in the small paper rectangle also gave them a vivacious presence, as they tried not to fall over one another while staying aware of the outside viewer. Two even looked as if they were waving to her.
Then she saw one that looked like Cluvmux. It was not entirely him, but the bulbous, dumb, grinning expression could have been a sudden glimpse of her husband. The artist had made his particular deformity a comic swelling of a belly that needed its own crutches for support. Meg was now laughing out loud. Why had she not remembered this paper? Her quaking hand accidentally shifted the heavy glass plate, and all the figures changed. A very slight distortion occurred beneath the handmade glass; all the human debris of the street transformed. Minute adjustments had been made to each tiny drawing, so she was now staring at a page of Woebegots and Filthlings. The bent limbs, crutches, and wooden feet had become living extensions, absorbing the biological anatomies and peculiarities of other species. A sideways evolution had occurred.
Meg dragged her eyes to the Cluvmux beggar and saw the truth of her husband in another world, and in some way, its revelation excavated part of what Grietje had said about the drawing: “ ’Twas given me by him in Den Bosch. Says it was an answer to be passed on. Now it was mine, and one day I would know when and who to pass it on to.”
Meg had not understood back then and said so.
“Neither does I,” Grietje had replied.
“But what is it?”
“That’s what I asked, and he said, ‘It’s a mirror in which, like vampires, the ignorant cannot be seen.’ And he just laughed at me and said I should go back and hold the beam that was sticking out from the wall, because the light was going.”
Meg remembered the funny way Grietje had looked at her when she said those things, continuing, “I was slender and comely in those days, and undressed, pretending to be naked and hanging in a tree. That’s the way he painted me, looking like somebody else.”
That was the last memory Meg could drain from the gift. She took the drawing out from under the glass and stared at the page of beggars. Puzzled, mystified, and curiously elated, she rolled up the scroll and reinterred it back with the beans. But the evolution and meaning of all those creatures stayed with her and began to replace the questions that had so worried her just before. Every time some apprehension or doubt tried to gain her attention, the creatures would troop out from her memory and block the path of such miserable wraths. They were doing it now as she picked up the wilting flowers and brushed off some of the bean dust with her careful fingers. Looking again at her son’s signature and knowing that it was true.