As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds.
Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is never possible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray. Naive.
THREE HUNDRED KILOMETRES
I dreamed that I was looking from above at cities splayed out across valleys and on mountain slopes. From that perspective it was very clear that those cities were the felled drunks of once-enormous trees, probably gigantic redwoods and ginkgoes. I wondered how high the trees must have been, since today their trunks contained whole towns. Excited, I tried to calculate their heights, using a simple ratio I remembered from schooclass="underline"
A is to B as
C is to D
-------------------------------
A x D = C x B
If A is the surface of the cross section of the tree, B its height, C the surface area of a town, and D the height of the town-tree I was trying to work out, then assuming the average tree had a cross-sectional area of around 1m2 at its base and a height of 30m, then the town (or rather small settlement) would be 1ha (or 10,000 m2):
1 – 30
10 000 – D
-------------------------------
1 x D = 10 000 x 30
which gives a result of 300 km.
This was the answer I got in that dream. The tree would have been three hundred kilometres high. I fear this slumbering arithmetic can’t be taken too seriously.
30,000 GUILDERS
‘It’s not such a great sum, really, in the end. It’s the annual income of a merchant trading with the colonies, on the assumption that there is peace in the world and the English aren’t arresting Dutch ships, resulting in interminable legal wranglings. It is in fact a reasonable sum. To it must be added the cost of strong and stable wooden crates, and transport.’
Peter I, Tsar of the Russian Empire, had just paid this sum for the collection of anatomical specimens amassed over the years by Frederik Ruysch.
The Tsar was travelling all around Europe with a retinue of two hundred people in 1697. He greedily took in everything, but he was most drawn to the Wunderkammers. Perhaps he, too, had some sort of syndrome. After Louis XIV refused the Tsar an audience, he remained for several months in the Netherlands. Several times he came incognito, accompanied by several sturdy-looking fellows, to De Waag, to the Theatrum Anatomicum, where with a look of concentration on his face he watched the fluid movements of the professor as his scalpel opened and displayed to the public the bodies of the condemned. He also initiated a kind of friendship with the master. It could be said that they became close, as Ruysch taught the Tsar how to preserve butterflies.
But what he liked the most was Ruysch’s collection – hundreds of specimens enclosed in glass jars, swimming in fluid, a panopticum of the human imagination broken down into component parts, a mechanical cosmos of organs. He got chills when he looked at human fetuses, and he couldn’t take his eyes off them, so fascinating was the sight. And the dramatic, fanciful arrangements of human bones that got him into a pleasant, contemplative mood. He had to have the collection for himself.
The jars were carefully packed into boxes lined with tow, tied with twine, and taken by horse to the port. Some dozen sailors spent an entire day loading the valued goods below deck. The professor himself supervised the loading, cursing and flying into rages because one careless movement had already destroyed a beautiful example of acephaly, a very rare specimen. Ordinarily he didn’t keep aberrations, preferring to focus on pieces which reflected the beauty and harmony of the body. Now the glass cover had broken, his famed conserving mixture pouring out onto the pavement and soaking in between the paving stones. The specimen, meanwhile, had rolled down the dirty street, rupturing in two places. On one shard of glass a label inscribed carefully in the hand of the professor’s daughter was visible, with an ornate inscription in a black frame: ‘Monstrum humanum acephalum’. A rare specimen, extraordinary. A shame. The professor had wrapped it up in a handkerchief and, limping, carried it home. Perhaps something could still be done with it.
It was a sad sight – rooms now empty after the sale of the collection. Professor Ruysch cast a lingering gaze over them and noted on the wooden shelves some darker stains – flat projections of the three-dimensional jars, traces in the ubiquitous dust, barely a width and length, without a hint of reference to their contents.
He was getting close to eighty now. The collection was the product of his work over the past thirty years, for he had started fairly early. He can be seen in a painting by someone named Backer, conducting the best anatomy lessons in town at the age of thirty-two. The painter managed to capture the particular expression on young Ruysch’s face – self-confidence and mercantile cunning. In the painting we also see a body prepared for dissection, the corpse of a young man perspectivally foreshortened, looking fresh. The body looks alive – the skin colour is a milky pink, not at all that of a corpse, its bent knee brings to mind the movement of a person lying naked on his back but instinctively about to cover the shameful part of his body before prying eyes. It’s the body of hanged convict Joris van Iperen, a thief. The surgeons cloaked in black are to this embarrassed and defenceless dead body an unsettling contrast. It shows what thirty years later made the professor’s fortune – that mixture of his creation preserves the freshness of tissues for a very long time. Likely the same composition that Ruysch used to conserve his rare anatomical specimens. Deep down he worries he won’t have time to reproduce it now, although he feels exceptionally well.
The professor’s daughter, a fifty-year-old woman entirely dedicated to him, with delicate hands hidden in cream-coloured lace, is just organizing the girls to clean up. Almost no one remembers what her name is, and she’s perfectly content with ‘Professor Ruysch’s daughter’ and ‘Miss’, as the cleaning women call her. But we remember – it’s Charlotta. She has the right to sign documents on behalf of her father, and the signatures are impossible to tell apart. In spite of her delicate hands, that lace, and her extensive anatomical knowledge, she will not go down in history alongside her father. She will not be immortal like him, in human memory and in textbooks. Even the specimens will outlive her, the same ones she prepared with such enormous dedication, anonymously. All those beautiful tiny little fetuses will outlive her, leading their quiet paradisal lives in the golden liquid, in their Stygian elixir. Some of them, the most valuable ones, rare as orchids, have an extra pair of hands or feet, because unlike her father, she is fascinated by what is flawed and imperfect. The microcephaly she managed to track down and bribe midwives for. Or the gargantuan intestines, hypertrophied, she got from surgeons. Medics from the provinces made Professor Ruysch’s daughter special offers of particular tumours, calves with five legs, the dead fetuses of twins with conjoined heads. But it is to the city’s midwives that she owes the most. She has been a good client, although she knows how to strike a bargain.
Her father will leave the business to her brother, Henrik, who appears in the painting done thirteen years after that first one – Charlotta sees it daily on her way down the stairs. In it her father is now a mature man with a carefully trimmed Spanish beard. He wears a wig; this time his hand, equipped with surgical scissors, is raised over the open body of an infant. The abdominal walls are already spread, revealing the order of the interior. Charlotta associates it with a beloved doll that had a pale little porcelain face and a rag torso stuffed with sawdust.