When the guests would leave, the owner of the house, the widow, Mrs Fleur – whom I later met and consider an angel – would appear in Filip’s room. Filip lived in her home for quite a few more years, until he bought a house in Rijnsburg and settled down there for good. She’d bring with her a basin and a tin jug filled with hot water. Although the patient no longer had a fever, and no blood seeped out from his wound now, the woman would delicately wash off his leg and help the student bathe. She would then dress him in a clean shirt and trousers. The left legs of his trousers she had already sewn for him, and everything she touched with her clever hands looked natural, in order, as though that were precisely how God had created it, as though Filip Verheyen had been born without his left leg. When he had to get up to use the chamber pot, he would lean on the strong shoulder of the widow, which at first was exceedingly awkward, but then became natural, like everything connected with her. After several weeks she moved him downstairs, where he ate with her and her two children at the heavy wood kitchen table. She was tall and sturdy. She had wild, curly blonde hair, like many Flemish women, which she concealed beneath a linen cap, though there was always one lock of it that escaped onto her back or over her forehead. I suspect that at night, as the children slept their innocent sleep, she would go to him as she did when with the chamber pot, and get into his bed. And I don’t see anything wrong in it, for I believe that people ought to support each other in any way they can.
In the autumn, when the wound had healed completely, and upon the stump there remained only a reddish trace, Filip Verheyen, tapping his peg over the uneven paving stones of Leiden, went every morning to lectures at the university medical centre, where he began his studies of anatomy.
He soon became one of the most respected students, for he was able to make use of his drawing talent like no one else in order to transfer onto paper what at first glance to the inexperienced eye looked like a chaos of tissues in the human body – tendons, blood vessels and nerves. He also copied Vesalius’ famous hundred-year-old atlas and acquitted himself very nicely of this exercise. It was the best introduction to his own work, the result of which would make him famous. To many of his students, among whom I, too, numbered, he had a paternal relationship – full of love, but also stern. Under his supervision we carried out autopsies, and then his attentive eye and expert hand would lead us down the paths of that most complicated labyrinth. Students valued his firmness and detailed knowledge. They watched the swift movements of his tracer as though witnessing a miracle. Drawing is never reproducing – in order to see, you have to know how to look, and you have to know what you’re looking at.
He had always been rather taciturn, and today with the perspective of time I can say that he was also somehow absent, absorbed in himself. Gradually he gave up his lectures, shifting over fully to lonely work in his workshop. I would visit him often in his home in Rijnsburg. I was pleased to bring him news from the city, gossip and sensational stories from the university, but I was unsettled to notice that he had become increasingly obsessed with a single topic. His leg, dismantled into parts, investigated in as much detail as possible, always stood in its jar on his headboard or stretched scarily out on the table. When I realized that I was the only person he had any contact with, I also understood that Filip had crossed over an invisible boundary, a point of no return.
On that day in November our barge moored at Herengracht in Amsterdam in the early afternoon, and we went straight from the harbour to our destination. Since it was already the start of winter, the canals did not stink as mercilessly as in summer, and it was pleasant to walk in the warm milky fog, which before our eyes floated upwards, revealing a serene autumn sky. We turned onto one of the narrow side streets of the Jewish neighbourhood and wanted to stop somewhere for a beer. It was a good thing we had had a bountiful breakfast in Leiden, because all the inns we passed were overflowing with people, and we would have waited a long time to be served.
At the market, among the stalls, there is the Measures Building, where unloaded goods are weighed. In one of the towers enterprising Ruysch has arranged this theatrum, and this is where we arrived somewhat earlier than the hour printed on our tickets. Though none of the eager participants had yet been admitted inside, several little groups of viewers had gathered nonetheless at the entrance. I looked them over with interest, for the appearance and garments of many of them were testament to Professor Ruysch’s fame having long since crossed the borders of the Netherlands. I heard conversations in foreign languages, saw French wigs on people’s heads and English lace cuffs protruding from the sleeves of doublets. Many students had also come; they must have had cheaper, unassigned seats, because they were already crowding around the entrance, wanting to secure the best positions.
People we knew from when Filip was more active at the university – high-ranking members of the municipal council or the surgeons’ guild, interested in what Ruysch was about to show us, what he’d come up with – approached us constantly. Then my uncle, the imprimateur of the tickets, arrived, dressed immaculately in black, and greeted Filip effusively.
The place looked like an amphitheatre with benches set all around, all the way up, almost to the ceiling. It was well lit and carefully prepared for the spectacle. Along the walls down the entrance and the room itself were placed the skeletons of animals, bones connected by wires supported by discreet structures, giving the impression that the skeletons might at any moment come back to life. There were also two human skeletons – one on his knees, with his hands raised in prayer, and the other in a pensive pose, head resting on knees, the little bones of which were meticulously connected by wires.
When the audience, whispering and shuffling their shoes, entered the room and one by one took the seats indicated for them by their tickets, they also passed by Ruysch’s famous compositions exhibited in display cabinets, elegant sculptures. ‘Death does not spare even youth,’ I read on the sign beneath one of them – it represented two fetus skeletons playing together: delicate cream-coloured little bones, blistery little skulls planted around an elevation built from the equally delicate bones of small hands, rib cages. And symmetrically to them another tableau had been arranged, little human skeletons around four months old standing on an elevation of (as far as I could tell) gallstones covered in prepared and dried blood vessels (on the thickest such branch sat a stuffed canary). The skeleton on the left side held a miniature sickle while the other, in a forlorn pose, brought to its empty eye sockets a handkerchief made out of some sort of dried tissue, maybe lung? Someone’s sensitive hand had decorated the whole in salmon lace and summed it up in elegant lettering on a silk ribbon: ‘Why would we miss the things of this world?’, which meant it would have been difficult to be overcome by the sight. I was moved by the presentation before it had even begun, because it seemed to me I was seeing the tender evidence not of death, but of some death in miniature. How could they have truly died without ever having been born?