Under the single, but large, south window there stands a clean broad table, and on it, the same specimen that has been there for years. Next to it you can see a jar containing nothing but straw-coloured fluid that fills it two-thirds full.
‘If we’re to go to Amsterdam tomorrow, help me tidy this all up,’ says Filip, adding reproachfully: ‘I’ve been working.’
He begins with his long fingers to delicately detach the tissues and vessels stretched out with the aid of tiny pins. His hands are as fast and as light as the hands of a butterfly-catcher, rather than an anatomist, or an engraver gouging grooves into hard metal that acid will later turn into a negative of an engraving. Van Horssen merely holds a jar of tincture in which parts of the specimen drown in a transparent, lightly brown liquid, as though returning home.
‘Do you know what this is?’ says Filip and points with the nail of his pinky finger to the lighter substance above the bone. ‘Touch it.’
The guest’s finger extends to the dead tissue, but doesn’t reach it remaining suspended in mid-air. The skin was cut in such a way as to reveal this place in a completely unexpected manner. No, he doesn’t know what it is, but he makes a guess:
‘It’s the musculus soleus, a component of it.’
His host looks at him for quite a while, as though looking for words.
‘From now on it is the Achilles Cord,’ he says.
Van Horssen repeats after Verheyen, as though memorizing these two words.
‘The Achilles tendon.’
His hands, which he’s wiped off with a rag, now take out from under the files of papers a diagram sketched out from four perspectives, incredibly accurate: the lower leg and foot comprise a single whole, and it is already hard to believe that once they were not so put together, that in this place there was nothing at all, just some blurred image, now completely forgotten; everything had remained separate, and now it is together. How could this tendon never have been noticed? It’s hard to believe that parts of one’s own body are discovered as though one were forging one’s way upriver in search of sources. In the same way one follows with a scalpel along some blood vessel and establishes its start. White patches get covered with the network of a drawing.
One discovers, and names. Conquers and civilizes. A piece of white cartilage will from now on be subject to our laws, we’ll do with it what we will now.
But the thing that strikes young van Horssen most is the name. He’s a poet, in fact, and despite his medical training, he would prefer to be writing verses. It is the name that opens up fairy-tale images in his mind, as though he were looking at Italian canvases peopled by full-blooded nymphs and gods. Could this part of the body be named any better, this part by which the goddess Thetis grabbed onto little Achilles to bathe him in the Styx and immunize him from death for all eternity?
Maybe Filip Verheyen has happened on the trail of a hidden order – maybe in our bodies there’s a whole world of mythology? Maybe there exists some sort of reflection of the great and the small, the human body joining within itself everything with everything – stories and heroes, gods and animals, the order of plants and the harmony of minerals? Maybe we ought to take our names in that direction – the Artemis Muscle, the Athens Aorta, Hephaestus’ Malleus and Incus, Mercury Spirals.
The men go to bed two hours after nightfall, both in one bed, a double bed that must have been left here by the previous owners – Filip has never had a wife. The night is cold, so they have to pile on a few sheepskins, which with the damp prevailing throughout the house give off a smell of sheep’s fat and pens.
‘You have to return to Leiden, to the university. We need you there,’ begins van Horssen.
Filip Verheyen detaches the leather straps and sets his wooden leg to one side.
‘It hurts,’ he says.
Van Horssen understands he’s talking about the stump set out on the nightstand, but Filip Verheyen points beyond it, at the now non-existent part of his body, at empty space.
‘The scars hurt?’ the younger man asks. Whatever it is that hurts, it doesn’t lessen his great sympathy for this slender, fragile man.
‘My leg hurts. I feel pain along the bone, and my feet drive me mad. My big toe and its joint. They’re swollen and inflamed, the skin itches. Right here,’ he says, leaning down and indicating a small crease in the sheets.
Willem is silent. What is he supposed to say? Then they both lie down on their backs and pull the covers up to their necks. The host blows out the candle and disappears, then says out of the darkness:
‘We must research our pain.’
It is understandable that the ambulations of a man moving atop a wooden orb cannot be too spry, but Filip is brave and were it not for a slight limp and the clatter of his prosthesis down the bone-dry way, it would be difficult to realize that this man is missing one leg. The slower tempo also means there’s time to talk. A crisp morning, the streets are lively, sunrise, the sun’s disc scraped up by slender poplars – it’s a pleasant walk. Halfway there they manage to stop a cart carrying vegetables to the Leyden market, thanks to which they have more time for a real breakfast at the Emperor’s Inn.
Then from the harbour at the channel they got on a boat pulled overland by massive horses; they choose cheap places on deck under a tent that shields them from the sun, and because the weather is nice, the trip becomes pure pleasure.
And so I shall leave them – heading on a barge to Amsterdam, in a shadow-stain passing across the water cast by the covering of the tent over their heads. Both of them are dressed in black, wearing white starched batiste collars; van Horssen is more lavish, neater, which means just that he has a wife who takes care of his clothing, or that he can afford a servant – probably nothing more. Filip is sitting with his back to their direction of travel, comfortably leaning, with his healthy leg bent, his black leather slipper crowned by a dark purple tattered ribbon. The wooden orb leans on a knot in the boards of the barge. They both see each other against a backdrop of fleeting landscape: fields bordered with willows, drainage ditches, the piers of small harbours and wooden houses covered in reeds. Goose down floats like tiny watercraft along the shore. A light warm breeze moves the feathers in their hats.
I will only add that in contrast to his master, van Horssen has no talent for drawing. He is an anatomist, and for each autopsy he hires a professional draftsman. His working method consists in precise notes, so precise that when he rereads them everything comes right back before his eyes. For this, too, is a way. Writing.
Moreover, as an anatomist, he tries to earnestly fulfill the recommendation of Mr Spinoza, whose teachings were feverishly studied here until they were forbidden – to look at people as at lines, planes and bodies.
THE HISTORY OF FILIP VERHEYEN, WRITTEN BY HIS STUDENT AND CONFIDANT, WILLEM VAN HORSSEN
My teacher and master was born in 1648 in Flanders. His parents’ home looked like any other Flemish home. It was built of wood and covered by a roof of reeds cut evenly just like young Filip’s fringe. The flooring had been very recently done with clay bricks, and now members of the family declared their presence to one another with the clatter of their clogs. On Sunday the clogs were sometimes exchanged for leather shoes, and down the long straight road lined with poplars the three Verheyens would head out for church in Verrebroek. There they would take their places and await the pastor. Their work-worn hands would reach in gratitude for the prayer books; the thin sheets and tiny letters would strengthen their belief that they were more enduring than the fragile life of man. The Verrebroek pastor always began his sermon with the words ‘Vanitas vanitatum’. It could be taken as a greeting, and in fact, that is how little Filip always understood it.