The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 13





What Was Lost Was Returned

Over the next few days, I became intimately acquainted with the sound of the wind. It advanced windmill by windmill and then passed over us, setting up a slow shudder that could be felt in the very floorboards. Surely everyone in that moment stopped what they were doing and noted the change before they turned back to curing herring, planing clogs, or weighing the Edam. The Hollanters constructed their lives up against the encroachment of water, for the windmills emptied the marshes and the storm tides reclaimed them.

I’d barely regained my footing after days of rocking on the Rhin ship, only to arrive in a place where one never forgot that land was temporary.



“Signorina Gabriella, haven’t you heard me calling you?” Olmina was clearly annoyed, having been drawn away from bread making. I looked up from my notes to see her hands gloved in dough, her brow dusted with flour, like some poorly applied face powder. I smiled at her.

“Oh, I forgot, you’re in that other world.” She raised her eyebrows, then repeated, “A gentleman from Piamonte is at the door on some important errand. He will speak only to you about it.”

I drew on my slippers and glanced for a moment in the small wavy mirror hanging in a blue frame on the wall. I suppose the gardener who’d occupied this cottage didn’t need to see much of himself; the mirror only reflected half a face at a sensible distance. But now that I was more freely a woman again, I longed for a larger mirror. I could see that my feathery hair sprang like the pluckings of a pheasant around my face, in a length too long for a man now, but too short and unruly for a woman. I struggled to push it into Cousin Lavinia’s snood, which ill served the purpose of containing it. She would have been amused. I could almost hear her back in Venetia saying, Just throw away the snood, Gabriella. Let your hair wander.

At the door, I saw a man with lively, close-set eyes and a fine auburn beard woven with gray. He presented himself as Signor Vincenzo Gradenigo, a merchant of dry goods. His two young servants stood behind, clearly bored. They held mules with bolts of cloth poking out, no doubt cambrics, fine silks, damasks, and brocades, and probably also unseen scissors, needles, and threads of different weights.

A ring hung on a yellow cord around Signor Gradenigo’s neck, signifying Jewish descent, and his accent conveyed a cultivated tone. My ear was delighted by the slant of familiar sound, for Jewish physicians and scholars had often attended our midday table at home. The strict edicts of the Council of Ten forced them to return to the quarter built near the old foundry, the Ghetto, at night—though even this nocturnal exile within our city was not harsh enough for certain brittle minds, who wanted to banish Jews altogether.

“Signorina Mondini.” Signor Gradenigo removed his broad red hat and smiled at me in a friendly manner, and then he bowed, exposing the swarthy orb of his bald head as he bent forward. “I have the honor of your acquaintance several times removed. First through the good offices of the fine Widow Gudrun, at whose inn you stayed in Überlingen. Then through a certain student of botany in Tübingen, Wilhelm Lochner.” Here Signor Gradenigo paused and rose out of the bow to which he’d slowly descended. An involuntary jolt shot through me at the mention of Wilhelm. I struggled to keep a bland expression, though I doubt I’d fooled the merchant. At his full height, Signor Gradenigo examined my face, looking up slightly as he continued to speak. He was a little shorter than I, so I gained the rare advantage of a downward perspective toward a man.

His nose was narrow and handsome. His upper lip lay hidden beneath his mustache, while the lower lip formed around his words with great vigor. His brows joined in the center, and the veins were clearly written upon his temples. He drew back a little, and then I noticed that in fact his shoulders slumped (a habit of cloaked despondency, perhaps?) beneath the sumptuous broadcloth of his black shoulder cape.

He frowned slightly. He must have sensed that I wasn’t fully listening to him. I brought myself back in time to hear him say, “According to the instructions of Widow Gudrun, then, I have your medicine chest in my possession and have come to return it to you.”

“Oh!” I cried out in joy.

Signor Gradenigo extended his arm toward the mules, like a conjurer. I leapt forward and startled the poor man by clasping his shoulders in my elation. “Come in, then, dear gentleman!” I cried. “I’m truly indebted to you and would grant you a reward! At the very least you must take dinner with us.” I turned around. “Lorenzo, Lorenzo! Come and take care of the gentlemen’s mules!”

He appeared at once, as if he’d been waiting just behind the door.

“I’d be glad to accept your hospitality,” Signor Gradenigo said, nodding. “But first I must settle us in our lodgings. Perhaps the signorina would like to renew her acquaintance with the inestimable chest, which I’m sure has its own story to recommend. There are certain things that contain more than their own history.”

“Certain things too that erase history,” I responded without thinking, and then, sensing my color rise, I quickly thanked him again.

The gentleman nodded graciously and delivered the medicine chest into my arms, with a slight pressure of his hand against mine as he released it.



I couldn’t wait to take an inventory of the chest’s contents. I instructed Olmina to leave me undisturbed for the rest of the day. I carried the chest to my room and touched the lid gently, in the way one would welcome an old friend, as I examined the brass hinges and handles, read the nicks and scratches that formed an account of its passage.

I say “read,” but the chest was also largely illegible to me. I was shaken by the sense that it was no longer entirely mine. In truth it had become a foreign object, smelling of foreign goods. Woolen carpets, cinnamon, and oranges…perhaps rose water? And something sour I couldn’t identify.

It had been my intention this very week to commission a new chest here in Leiden. I’d delayed so long, refrained from purchasing a plain chest, because nothing could replace the old one, and now the Venetian chest was back in my possession! What was lost was returned, but I could see immediately the contents had been viewed and handled by strangers. I realized this would also be an inventory of the lost, the stolen, and the damaged. Though a few things were reduced (the mercury one-fourth its original amount) and other things were missing (someone had broken a bottle of black salsify water and spilled chamomile powder all over the bottom of the chest), the actual losses were few. (Had the lake, the widow, or the merchant spirited away the rare and expensive Spanish oil? I wouldn’t begrudge anyone this if it were so…) The Widow Gudrun had appeared sympathetic while we stayed at her inn, but perhaps she’d already discovered and hoarded the chest? It may have been close by, in the attic, where she’d ascended each night.

Gudrun (or Signor Gradenigo?) had taken out all the drawers and trays, all the pewter- and parchment-capped bottles—round, square, triangular, and rectangular—and examined them. Someone had manipulated the bowls, scales, and small brass weights, marble mortar with agate pestle, pewter boxes, brushes, lancets, and needles and put everything back in the wrong order, though clearly some attempt had been made to arrange them, and this attempt was more disconcerting to me than a random shuffle. Someone had insinuated herself or himself into the scheme of things. Someone had stroked the wood with uncomprehending hands and scribbled words at the edges of the drawers, words whose meaning I’d have to inquire of Professor Otterspeer later.

The chest had suffered from the cold. The oak had tightened and warped against the brass corners and hinges. One night, I imagined, the widow must have understood she couldn’t keep it, as her brittle hands wavered across the dolphin handles and the cartouches of a woman’s head mounted upon them. Perhaps she looked upon the inner lid, the god Asclepius and his daughter Hygieia staring back at her as if they would ask, Would you take what isn’t yours? and she became frightened. So Gudrun gave up the chest to one of her guests, the cloth merchant who was also on his way north, among his destinations Tübingen and Leiden. If this was all so, then I was glad that she chose her courier well. Another might have been sorely tempted to sell its valuable contents.

Though these intrusions into my medicine chest unsettled me, I was more surprised by what had been added. I soon found a needle, like an amulet or hex slipped into a person’s clothing, the thin silver spike driven into the drawer groove in such a way that I couldn’t easily remove it. A short length of red thread ran through the eye. Was this the widow’s way of protecting herself against bad luck? Or was it the merchant’s needle and thread?

I would have to find out.

Through the window shutters I could hear voices clamoring in the lane below. I cracked open the shutter, and the chill evening crept in. Stars pricked the sky like dull tacks, and a thin membrane of ice shone dimly on part of the canal below. To my amazement, the insubstantial had grown solid: the whole canal was covered with a frozen skin webbed with pale capillaries, cracks that formed as it wavered slightly from the motion of the water beneath. The canals in Venetia rarely froze, and I’m sure my father would’ve liked to see this. Perhaps he had seen it.

Why—I suddenly questioned myself—did I always wish to see things companioned by his eyes?

In a letter from Hispania in the summer of 1587, my father had written:



Remember when Avicenna noted, “The eye is like a mirror, and the visible object is like the thing reflected in the mirror.” The orb of the earth, like an eye, collects the light from the sun, passing it through a crystalline atmospheric lens to retinal purpose, envisioning us. Maybe that’s all we are, the little figures at the back of the vitreous humor of night, moving, gesturing, dying. Upside down like the creatures reflected on a spoon. And we think we are so large! We are so important! But we are socketed in our illusions. I am large to you, dear Daughter, and you are large to me. But we only flicker like insignificant sparks upon this earth.





That evening, though I knew well enough it was foolish for a woman to go out alone, I yearned to breathe fresh air, if only for a little while. So I dressed in warm stockings and breeches—I’d kept the men’s clothing I’d purchased in Tübingen—and crept downstairs. No one in the cottage awakened. My companions (truthfully, after all that we’d been through, I could no longer simply call them my servants) lay snug in their bed upstairs. Lorenzo’s snores reassured me.

I put on my boots and went out.

Frost on the ground crackled underfoot as I strode briskly along the canal. I liked being outside alone in a city of sleepers. Feeling myself a sort of ghost, I slipped through the town gate, which had been neglectfully left unlocked, and found myself outside Leiden’s walls on the south bank of the Rhin.

Such a relentlessly horizontal country, the Netherlands! My life would thin out here. Rarefy. Where was the night watchman? The river was black and loud now, and though ice had begun to sheet at the edges, the currents carved away at it.

I stood there motionless for a long time.

When I turned my eyes back to the shadowy gateposts, two men moved there. One slid open the side of a lantern and lifted it toward me. The watchman. I also recognized Lorenzo’s voice. He’d followed me.

“Signora!” he called out. “There you are…” He was breathless as he approached me. “Where…where are you going?” Lorenzo kept an eye on me far beyond call of duty, as if I were the daughter he’d lost so long ago, the baby with the caul who’d lived barely a day.

I couldn’t find the words to explain why I had left. All at once I was very cold. I took his arm in silence as he led me to the gateposts.

As we walked back toward the house, I was astonished to see the whole aspect of the town altered from solitary to festive. How long had I been gone? No more than an hour, surely! But here and there along the canals, bonfires had been kindled. Bundled children looking like animate loaves tested the ice with long sticks and tossed stones that either punctured the surface or skipped across the white rind like mice. One boy taunted his fearful younger brother, pushing him down the bank onto the congealed crust. The younger boy, red eyed and puffy faced, lay sprawled and motionless, while the older boy strode back and forth across the ice-covered canal, bragging, “I can go anywhere I want, I can walk on water!”

I stood near one of the bonfires with Lorenzo, my arm hooked through his, as we watched the little spectacles play out up and down the canal. Someone passed us small mugs of aquavit, pungent with caraway and pepper. How odd I felt, warmed by a sudden affection for Lorenzo. How upended my life had become! I was at the bottom of Fortuna’s wheel now, hanging on by my ankles. And yet fatherless, was I not also free?

The bells sounded—it was six o’clock in the morning.

We had been outside for hours.



The next morning I determined to find Signor Gradenigo, to reward him and inquire about the red thread. Was the intent gift or guile?

When Lorenzo located his lodgings, he left my invitation to a simple supper at the cottage, though later I thought it foolish of me. What if they enforced a curfew on the Jews in the city? But when I located the caretaker, who was raking pruned twigs in the winter garden, he assured me, “No such law exists for Jews here in Hollant.”

“Ah, that’s fortunate,” I said, explaining to him the edict of the Jews in Venetia. “They must be careful, or they’ll be locked out of the Ghetto and into the dungeon.”

“Deplorable!”

“I don’t understand it myself,” I agreed. “The council, you know, must draft its edicts, must convert all the little fears into dictates, or God knows”—I threw up my hands theatrically, delighted to speak so openly—“chaos will surely envelop us all!”

“Houses will collapse!” added Lorenzo, who’d been listening nearby as he filled a bucket at the well.

“Families will go hungry!” said the caretaker, joining in the spirit.

“Women will sprout tusks!” joked Olmina at the door. Then she looked to me to finish the game.

“Men will crawl about on all fours!” I said, imagining the guild and the council in that position, and—remembering their censure of my work, which had first sent me on this journey—it was not without some pleasure that I reveled in this vision.



When Signor Gradenigo arrived at the door that evening in his black coat and broad hat, he carried a small wooden box. It gave off a faint scent of cedar and something else I couldn’t identify, although I could call it moldering, ancient leaves. Lorenzo welcomed him into the entry adjoining our humble kitchen and dining corner, and asked, “What’s in the box, my good man?”

The merchant’s eyes shone as he waved us away from it. “This is a surprise for all of you, but we’ll not enjoy it until after the meal. I’ve had excellent profits today and I’m glad to share my good fortune with you.” He set it upon a wooden shelf in the kitchen near the cobalt-blue jar of flour.

“Is it some kind of rare sweet?” asked Olmina, her interest piqued. She stood near the little iron stove, stirring the soup in a black pot.

“Loukum!” guessed Lorenzo, for he loved the chewy Ciprian sweet of honeyed nuts and oranges that we sometimes savored in Venetia.

“Oh no, unfortunately not. But that would be delectable, wouldn’t it?” Signor Gradenigo laughed. “I regret to say I always devour my store of that delight long before I travel this far north.” He removed his coat, hung it on a bent nail by the door, and patted his rotund belly beneath a rich brocaded doublet.

“And in spite of our longings, it doesn’t smell sweet,” I added. “But please have a seat at our plain table, Signor Gradenigo.”

He nodded his head. “Call me Vincenzo, and I hope you don’t mind my calling you Dottoressa Mondini, for I do hear that you are well versed in medicines and the humors.”

I smiled. “Thanks to you, signor, I have my means of treatment back now. Though there is something unusual in my medicine chest—”

“Thanks be to the saints, supper is ready!” Olmina interrupted. She set bowls of soup and a board of spiced herring upon the wooden table laid with a dun linen cloth, along with a basket of fresh bread. The turnip and onion pottage smelled pungent with thyme and marjoram.

As I sat down next to her on the bench opposite the men, I asked, “Where did you find the lovely herbs?”

“Ah, in the Hortus under the snow, tender and fine as you please, once revived in warm water,” she answered.

“And wouldn’t that be theft of the cooking garden?” I prodded her.

She shrugged. “Who’s out in this cold to catch me?”

“No one, apparently, and we are the lucky beneficiaries!” said Vincenzo as he dove into the soup with a large pewter spoon.

The room steamed with the fragrance of Olmina’s soup, as if she’d infused it with the last ripening days of autumn. For a long while our conversation yielded to her talent. After we’d finished the meal, Vincenzo rose with mock ceremony and brought his box to the table, where he undid the brass clasp and lifted the lid. We were greeted by the most delicate smell, suggestive of old light and the faint scent of water in a still pool.

“Here we have the uncommon Yunnan tea that the Dutch nobles enjoy for over a hundred silver ducats a pound!” He circled his hand smartly. Inside, dark leaves were compressed into small round cakes. He passed the box to Olmina, who sat directly across from him.

Olmina set her sharp eyes upon him. “And why would you bring this tea to us, if you don’t mind my asking?”

The merchant gave us a distant smile, though his eyes remained somber, as if he were thinking of some other place, a tea drinker’s pavilion, perhaps, in a more temperate clime. He said, “Because it’s a melancholy thing to drink tea alone. I’d rather share my tea with good company.”

Olmina’s face softened as she sniffed the rare cakes.

“Thank you, dear sir,” I said. I closed my eyes when the box came to me. Yes, it was the smell of leaves, light, and water. They suggested something sweet and, even though shadowy and rich, still luminous, like a tree at the edge of water, reflected and reflecting. “This is the kind of tea that could help someone find a lost memory,” I said, and I opened my eyes. I didn’t want to let go of the scent and reluctantly passed the box along to Lorenzo.

“Mmm,” he murmured as he stuck his nose into a tea cake.

Olmina set an iron kettle on the stove. When the water rolled to a boil, the merchant got up and moved the kettle to the back of the stove, lifted the lid, and carefully flaked a tea cake straight into the hot water, then quickly set the lid on again.

“I’ve heard that it’s excellent for a clear mind and heart,” he announced, obviously enjoying the simple preparation. He poured the tea into our mugs and we cupped our hands around the brew, enjoying leaves from the mountains of China. Outside, it began to snow, and we sat quietly for a while, alone and yet companioned in our thoughts, as if the tea’s gift were not just its glorious scent but also this silence in common.

“Mens sana in corpore sano,” I said, recalling Juvenal.

“And to ‘Sound mind, sound body’ I might add ‘sound heart,’ ” said Vincenzo, smiling slightly.

“Ah, sound heart,” I repeated. The snow fell harder now, making a muffled pelting sound on the roof. “I’m curious, to return to my medicine chest, about the needle and red thread. Do you know where it came from?”

“Hmm, yes, I noticed that after Tübingen.” Vincenzo hesitated. “For I confess, Dr. Mondini, that I examined the chest a few times. It was of utmost interest to me, for though I’m not a doctor, the study of cures has been my avocation.”

“And did you write upon the drawers, then?”

“Yes, I identified some of the medicaments in German. For I thought I might not find you… I hope you’ll forgive me.” He looked down into his tea.

I sighed at my own foolish indignation, letting it go as quickly as it came. “Well, it’s no matter,” I said. “So… the thread?”

“I can only guess, Dottoressa. When I reached Tübingen, I asked about you, and my innkeeper referred me to a student lodger down the way from the inn. I met the gentleman, Wilhelm Lochner, and we shared supper for several nights, getting on quite well. One evening I invited him to my room to see the medicine chest—it is rather a marvel, as you well know. I lent it to Wilhelm for a few hours, as he wanted to make a list of the remedies within, being the avid student. I stayed there in the room with him, recording my transactions for the day in my account book.”

I clenched my mug, nodded, and sipped, but said nothing.

“I didn’t see him slip anything into the chest, but I wasn’t watching the whole time either. I must tell you that it was his express intention to follow you. I believe, Dr. Mondini, that he thought very highly of you and your cure, for his leg was no longer marred by the ulcer.”

Everyone stared at me now, anticipating some kind of response, but I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Did I want to see him? Yes, a little. But no, I didn’t want to become entangled. “I’m not certain I wish to see him,” I said carefully at last. “If you should encounter him here, I’d appreciate your discretion.”

“You shall have it, but I must say the red thread may be a binding charm such as you can find sometimes from the traveling Romani. Maybe he meant it as a kind of message?” Vincenzo suggested.

Lorenzo snorted at this. “Why wouldn’t he come right out and speak his mind?”

“The signorina left without seeing him,” Olmina said. “How could he?”

“The Greeks say Atropos, the Fate who cannot be turned, snips the thread,” I mused.

“And some Gypsies do come from the lands of Macedonia and Thrace,” the merchant said.

“Then it may be a curse,” I said uneasily.

“Or a charm, especially for a doctor, don’t you think? For one must always bow to the goddess of necessity,” the merchant said. “The Fates alone spin, measure, and sever our red vigor. Perhaps your little needle and thread is a reminder of this.”

“But none of the Fates holds a needle—the doctor’s art is in sewing, drawing things together again, closing the wound.”

“If you can,” Vincenzo said, in a solemn tone. “Some wounds, like some wrongs, can never be righted.”

Olmina rose to clear the dishes and said quietly, “No doubt it’s a love charm from Wilhelm, if you ask me.”

I glared at her. “We need speak no more of this.”

Vincenzo glanced away to spare me embarrassment.

“But I have another question for you,” I said.

He turned his sharp brown eyes to mine.

“In all your travels, have you ever encountered another Dr. Mondini, my father?”

“Not exactly. That is, I didn’t meet him myself, though I overheard a gentleman in Edenburg speak of his book…something about a vast taxonomy of diseases, though…”

“Though what?”

“I don’t like to repeat rumors.”

“Go ahead. I’ll accept it as such.”

“He said it was a very sorry thing when such a doctor had compiled a work of great breadth and excellence and yet was secretly unbound himself. Forgive me, but those were his words.”

“And if that were true, how could that man create such a fine encyclopedia of diseases?” I asked rather heatedly.

“We often flirt with the very thing we create, don’t you think? I myself create an appetite for beautiful bolts of cloth, which I may also be prone to love too much.” He unbuttoned his doublet and patted an elegant violet and silver-wrought waistcoat.

“Ah, it’s wonderful!” cried Olmina with admiration, for she understood quality cloth far more than I did, since she’d worked it into so many garments for our household.

“And you, Dr. Mondini, what edge do you play?”

“I am single-minded to a fault, perhaps, in my need to heal others, to heal my father, to find him.”

“And your own ailment?”

I laughed a little. “I’m overly stubborn. I don’t know.”

“Not stubborn, oh no, Gabriella,” said Olmina. “Unrelenting, hooked as a fish on a line!”

“Really? I’m not sure I like the sound of that. Hooked on what?”

“On your father, other doctors, the universities. What about your own instincts?”

“I know my own talents, don’t worry. And I’m bringing them to the tasks at hand.”

Lorenzo spoke up. “Of course you are. Olmina misspoke, didn’t you, my dear?”

She folded her hands on her lap. “Yes, yes, I did. I just wish…”

“What?”

“I want to go home.” She began to cry.

I put my arm around her. “Forgive me for dragging you on this journey. I am so grateful. And I too grow weary with the insubstantial traces of my father. But I must exhaust every lead, every place.”

“Of course you must.” She bent her head to my shoulder.

Vincenzo stood up. “And I must be on my way if I’m not to lose it in this snowy night. A wonderful repast, dear ladies and gentleman.” He wrapped himself up tightly in his coat and pulled his hat down snugly upon his balding head.

“Just a moment,” I said, and I quickly ran upstairs. I descended with a small purse of florins. “This is for your trouble, Vincenzo. Thank you for the chest and the message.”

He pressed my hand kindly and nodded, saying, “I wish you good fortune in your journey, Dr. Mondini. May you find what you are seeking.”

Lorenzo opened the door to the thick and darkening night.

Vincenzo raised his hand. “Good night to you all,” he said. Then he turned and immediately vanished into the snowfall, even with his conspicuous black coat, as Lorenzo held up the lantern.



The next morning, Professor Otterspeer finally sent along a message with his servant, saying that he’d returned to Leiden and that he would come to collect me so that we might attend a dissection.

A few hours later, I watched him approach from between the half-open shutters of my room. I recognized him from the frontispiece engraving to his volume on anatomy, which my father possessed in Venetia, for the artist had rendered a fine likeness. He trudged through the snow along the canal and knocked loudly upon the door. From my second-story vantage, his black scholar’s cap bobbed outlandishly above the frothy lace of his collar, like an overturned bowl on a river.

I gave a last tug to arrange my own ruffed collar, attached to a bit of silk covering my chest. Olmina brought me my new indigo woolen cape with a hood trimmed in ermine. What a luxury! I’d ordered it from a tailor off the Rapenburg Canal the second day after we’d arrived, to stave off the cold. Olmina requested a skirt the color of butter and was much pleased with the finished garment. The Dutch are truly master weavers, I marveled now. Tailor Zander, an uncommonly tall man, had stooped with great flourishes to present the serges from the coarsest thickness to the lightest nap, in tones of red, yellow, blue, brown, cream, and black. I was distracted by his fingers, surely the longest and deftest I’d ever witnessed. He kept a silver thimble on his third finger, even though he wasn’t sewing at the time, and a row of straight pins in his waistcoat.

The anatomy theater would be quite cold, so I hurriedly grabbed my gloves from the windowsill, where I’d thoughtlessly laid them the previous night. The lambskin was crisp, but the wool inside quickly gained warmth from my hands. I stepped out of my room and descended the narrow flight of stairs.

Lorenzo was nodding in an amused fashion at Professor Otterspeer, who stood just inside the door and spoke an Italian in which he fancied himself fluent. When the professor saw me, he smiled imperiously, red cheeked with rosacea, which blossomed like a map upon his face.

“Signorina Mondini, my dear lady! A pleasure to meet you at last, in person,” he declared. “Please forgive my inconvenient delay.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about it, dear Professor,” I replied. “It’s good to meet you as well. I must thank you for procuring our lodging. If you don’t mind, I prefer to be called Dr. Mondini.”

He raised both shaggy eyebrows then as he took stock of me. I was about to step outside, but he stopped me, holding my arm as he lifted up a small cloth sack I hadn’t noticed, and announced, “I have something here that your father left behind.”

I opened it and peered inside to find a pair of gored black shoes, slightly worn, smelling of neglect. Olmina took them from me quickly, saying, “Go now with the professor. You can ponder these later.” She glanced at Lorenzo with a knowing look, as if to say, The father is growing ever more distracted, or was it me of whom she was thinking?

“Go on,” said Lorenzo, giving me a little push toward the professor, who’d already stepped outside.

Was my father leaving parts of himself behind, like bread crumbs in the old tales, to tell the path? First the glasses, now these shoes.

“I trust you have viewed an anatomy before?” the professor queried me, somewhat condescendingly, as we began to walk along the canal.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve observed a corpse cutting several times in Padua with my father”—that last word stung—“but I look forward to witnessing the Dutch manner of dissection, if indeed it’s distinct from the Italian.” I added mechanically, “I appreciate your kind invitation,” taking small, hesitant steps on the icy ground.

“Your father would have wished it, though I don’t know if it is kind or not,” he said, “since this morning is thick as unshorn wool.”

We proceeded to tunnel through the fog, which hung so densely now it remained open behind us like a corridor that slowly folded in upon itself.

“Professor,” I said, measuring out my concern in small words, “can you tell me more about my father and his stay here?”

“There is nothing much to tell,” he said curtly, squinting ahead into the dim wall of white. “Your father lodged here for several months in the very cottage you’re renting.”

“Really?” I’d imagined my father in finer receiving quarters.

“Yet he remained a very closed man. It is dangerous to be so closed. He would lock himself up for days at a time. Now, while I’m respectful of the solitary sort, if you’re not a hermit pressed into the discipline of prayer—and maybe even if you are a hermit—the mind can become an extravagant thing, lose its bearings or, contrariwise, become so bent upon a certain object that all manner of balance is lost. Especially for one who is not accustomed to our winters.”

A few other people, spectral, moved past us as we spoke, though we could scarcely see them. It seemed we were alone in a pale room of indeterminate dimensions.

“Did he behave strangely otherwise or say anything untoward?”

“Once, he said he was studying the edifying effects of the grave and needed to be left alone.” My companion shook his head.

“Do you remember any pattern to his moods?”

“What do you mean?”

“Certain days, certain times…?”

“Ah, I see what you mean.” He stopped, looked up, and appeared to be searching the air. “No, I can’t really say that I took note, for I lost patience with him a bit and gave him what he wanted—a self-imposed isolation. I informed him that he could be edified all he wanted, but to let me know when he wished to discuss medicine again, like the good doctor he was. I was somewhat offended, you see, by what I perceived as a lapse in collegiality.”

“Did he ever come round?”

“Yes, the day he left. Your father seemed genial enough then, apologized for his abruptness. He attributed his attitude to the cold and the perpetual dusk of the Rhinlandt winter. He explained that he must further his studies in Edenburg—”

“Ah,” I said quietly, considering my next destination. I had thought we’d go to London, but I decided to go on to Edenburg.

The professor didn’t seem to notice. He continued, “And so graciously, upon departure in the early spring, he embraced me and I forgave him, for I’m affected by the winters myself, and they’ve grown worse and worse these past years.”

The professor stared down toward the canal, which lay solidly frozen, where small boats sat like so many shoes stuck in ice. Occasional objects studded the surface—a barrel, a rasping log, the odd coil of rope, a broken wooden skate.

One question nagged at me, but I didn’t speak it aloud: Why did he leave his shoes behind?

When we crossed the bridge toward the Beguinage, I shuddered at a bloated gray piglet that stared blankly at the sky, half its body lodged beneath the ice, two legs stuck out like the tines of a pitchfork.

“What a waste of good sausage,” gibed Professor Otterspeer.

I drew my hood close about my face with an involuntary shiver, thinking of the pigs I’d observed as a child, hung from the stable eaves when they were to be butchered, near my great-aunt’s house in Fossatello. Their trussed bodies twisted like the pupae I plucked from bark when I wandered in the woods. The pigs shrieked in the blue morning hour as the butcher and his wife held buckets beneath the brisk red streams issuing from their stuck throats. Even now I couldn’t touch roast pig. Wise Ovid was not altogether wrong when he wrote:



Peace filled the world—until some futile brain

Envied the lions’ diet and gulped down

A feast of flesh to fill his greedy guts.





When at last we reached the anatomy theater, the professor paid our admittance, as was customary, and we entered the hall. We were among the first to arrive, part of an audience that he assured me would be mostly students, some wealthy burghers, a small number of their wives, and other curious townspeople willing to pay the fee. The corpse lay outstretched on the dissection slab, his body beneath a coarse linen sheet.

“And who is the unfortunate youth?” I asked.

“I believe he was some vagrant, probably searching for work in the mills. He was found on one of the back roads, naked and rigid as a block of wood in the ditch next to his bony mule. Someone had stolen his clothes and boots,” Professor Otterspeer informed me. “The wretch lay unclaimed for several days. An ignorant foreigner, no doubt.”

His comment upset me, but I said nothing.

We approached the subject and the professor lifted the cloth.

“He appears nearly intact,” I observed, avoiding the man’s face, “unlike those cadavers removed from the gibbet, which have been scavenged by wild dogs and ravens.”

He lowered the cloth with a peculiar tenderness. “I’m surprised that you can view the corpse so candidly, Signorina Mondini. Most women keep their distance. As perhaps they should, don’t you think?” There was a slight gleam in his eye, which led me to believe he didn’t speak seriously, though he wasn’t entirely in jest either.

I ignored the fact that he would not address me as Dottoressa. I asked, “So you haven’t brought your wife to attend an anatomy, then?”

“Oh no, my wife would never come, though she has no trouble chopping the head off a pullet and yanking out its entrails! I’ve actually tried to persuade her to visit, for I believe the demonstration to be most enlightening. But she sees no point in it, calls it an unsightly spectacle. But there are other wives here I could introduce you to.” Professor Otterspeer sniffed slightly and withdrew a petit-point handkerchief for his florid nose.

“That won’t be necessary,” I replied. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I didn’t ask how they came by permission to dissect the body. Even though unclaimed, such a corpse in Italy would be buried in a pauper’s grave. In Padua, where for the most part the bodies of criminals were used, dissection was considered the worst possible punishment, inflicted in addition to the death sentence. Some people believed that when the dead were resurrected on Judgment Day, the dissected corpse would wander about searching for its lost parts.

“Well, my dear, your father has certainly raised you with the independence of a good son. I’ll leave you, then, to view our fine collection of skeletons. If you’ll excuse me, I must speak to some of my students.” He bowed and retreated.

When he spoke the word “father”—in fact, every time he’d spoken the word—I felt a numbing cut at the center of me. Now, in this setting, I missed my father more than ever.

I looked once more upon the cadaver, foreshortened from a distance, the head closest, the legs pointing straight away from me. Professor Otterspeer hadn’t replaced the cloth all the way, and the face lay partly exposed. The dark yellow stubble of the dead man’s beard stood out on his chin like random bits of chaff, and his stringy blond hair fell away from his broad brow.

I felt the vague shock I always felt in the presence of the dead, the unsettling sense of defilement, which usually passed like a brief nausea. The man’s life, after all, was gone. He was no more than a carcass of days, but one that would yield up its secret structures, the marvels of the inner body, even in death apparent. I couldn’t allow myself, though, to imagine the color of his eyes, nor what they had sought out in life. The plump young woman, perhaps, who would caress his face, the impoverished family he’d left behind. Or the joy afforded by his mule’s hot breath upon his frostbitten fingers. Nor did I wish to know his name.

Still, the nausea didn’t pass.

I turned away and surveyed the room. I remembered my father’s caution from the very first occasion I viewed a dissection. “If you fear the corpse,” he’d said gently, “be sure not to look at the face or the hands, Gabriella, for they are the most human.” What if my father was such a corpse now, mistaken for a vagrant, his parts cut open and identified, then tossed away in some foreign land as victuals for dogs, rats, and vultures? But I pushed this thought violently from my mind and continued to look around the wooden amphitheater.

Skeletons were arranged in various postures, the human ones holding banners with Latin phrases such as PULVIS ET UMBRA SUMUS and HOMO BULLA. The skeletons didn’t sadden me but felt familiar and faintly ridiculous, one with a plumed helmet, seated upon a fleshless nag, crossbow in hand, and one in the corner casually leaning on a shovel.

All around me, men with slit pantaloons and doublets, and a small number of women, some with many short slashes in their sleeves and bodices, according to the current fashion, gathered and conversed, their vivid colors alone making the chamber warmer now. I glanced out the long windows on either side of the room but could see nothing of the frozen garden. The fog had orphaned us from the rest of the world.

I walked around the amphitheater and examined the animal skeletons. The wolf, singularly designed for the hunt, seemed almost friendly to me, in that it so resembled a dog. On impulse I stroked the chalky, smooth slope between the eyes. How benign was bone that once was threatening. The weasel presented a sleek form and egg-shaped skull, as if the meal it so relished corresponded to the form of its thoughts. The still deer relayed the quickness of its bones.

But I was most drawn to certain animal skeletons that I hadn’t observed before, such as the elegant swan, emblem of poets. The skeleton was no less pure than the creature. The swan, by virtue of its very size, exhibited mythical bones. Yet along with its beauty there was a kind of monstrosity, especially in the serpentine neck, which seemed inordinately long and curved, surmounted by the skull, which resembled a leper clapper, while the heavier skeletal body and great wings hung behind with a contrary force. The pinions, broad as they were, could mirror those of a seraph. If swans were as fierce as geese, though, then they would be demon and angel in a single creature.

“Signorina?”

The professor had returned. He led me to one of the privileged benches near the front, clasping my elbow through my sleeve most firmly, as if I might fall without his support.

Most of the amphitheater afforded standing room only, between narrow wooden aisles and railings. The demonstrating physician—“a doctor, not a barber-surgeon, like those at the Royal College of Physicians in London,” whispered Professor Otterspeer—made his entrance with his two assistants, along with three musicians, who would be accompanying the event on viol, lute, and viola da gamba.

Dr. Zuyderduin, a man of middle age, robust figure, and copper hair, began with a small introduction and courtesies in Dutch, very little of which I understood. He began incising the skin evenly in each region, drawing from a remarkable assortment of flaying knives, scissors, scalpels, forceps, needles, spatulas, and grossing tools. He was assisted by the two students, one with sponge and bowl to sop up blood and fluids, and one who held back portions of skin or tissue when necessary, tacking the muscles on a wooden block, tying up or arranging segments of flesh.

The musicians behind them, meanwhile, bowed and plucked away at their instruments as if we were seated in a pleasant chamber among friends. The viol player sawed rather dreadfully, the viola da gamba man performed well enough, but the lutenist lingered with the notes as if he found their melancholy resonance in the corpse, sheep-gut strings companioning the man’s ligaments. His plucked notes came with an almost imperceptible delay born of deep courtesy. He watched the dissection as he played, while the others, perhaps repulsed, gazed toward the audience and the skeletons at the top of the amphitheater.

As Dr. Zuyderduin worked, he swayed when the lutenist played alone.

I never ceased my amazement at the calm demeanor of such doctors who, while fishing about in the soupy viscera, could pull out the definitive organ and expound upon its position in the body. The soul seated within the liver, the heart, and the brain or (some have argued) within the ephemeral pineal gland. How the body yielded itself, both capacious and densely pressed, like the thick pages of a foreign text that we must translate.

The doctor droned on in mingled Latin and Dutch now, as he disrobed the cadaver down to its pink bones. The audience murmured with the revelation of each new part as the commonplace body gave way to the secret body. The Dutch were more respectful in this regard. The audience in Padua often grew rowdy with discourse and raillery, which on occasion required a few sturdy men to push back the crowd and restore order or to remove some jeering youth from the balcony while the doctor waited, scowling, with his finger on a crucial tendon.

I glanced at the half-hidden face that I’d avoided, as if to test myself. From this angle I could see that the chin was unimposing and the lips generously curved even in their rigid state.

Wielding the scalpel with great precision, Dr. Zuyderduin proceeded, after finishing with the abdomen (as the viscera were the most susceptible to putrefaction) and the torso (displaying the lungs and heart), on to the head (sinking his hand deeply between the lobes of the brain, searching for the pineal gland, which corrupts so rapidly, though he didn’t find it) and then approached the sinewy arm.

As the demonstration progressed, the effluvium of the cadaver caused us to press handkerchiefs and sleeves to our faces. The sprigs of rosemary cast about the floor did little to help, for the organs reeked with an acidic, musky, almost palpable stench. Fortunately the good doctor motioned for his assistants to remove the entrails in a bucket provided for that purpose. He turned down the flaps of skin to cover the abdomen and drew the linen sheet up around the cadaver’s chest.

He began to dissect the arm and the hand, which lay half-open, loosened from its previous state of rigor mortis, in a manner that seemed to invite a handclasp.

Let my death, then, be your gain. Let the touch that wounds, heal; the incision, instruct. These words, unbidden, seemed to come from my father, though I couldn’t recall the exact occasion on which he had spoken them—but some other presence that was not my father burdened me too. I struggled to push it out of mind.

Under my breath I recited the Latin names along with the doctor as he described the flexor muscles and their insertions into tendon. This calmed me. The corpse-fingers curled as he lifted the muscles. My father once told me that the great Vesalius and his fellows blindfolded one another and fingered bones from the charnel house outside Paris in order to memorize every one by touch.

In my lap, my left hand lay within the right, and I felt the fasciae, muscles, ligaments, and tendons as Dr. Zuyderduin communicated their placement and sectioned each part, turning back one palmar muscle and then another until the hand fairly bloomed upon the table among the scissors, pins, and clamps. How odd to be the subject of one’s own inquiry, as if the hand had an existence of its own, like a small, clever animal that carried out my wishes or clenched itself against me. According to Galen, the hand truly exemplified the whole. From the hand of God to the hand of flesh…

Professor Otterspeer touched my arm. The demonstration was over. The doctor, his assistants, and the viol and viola da gamba players were leaving. Only the lutenist remained, staring up at me.

My body trembled. Something was wrong.

“What is it, my dear?”

I quickly stepped down to the table, to the left side of the corpse, and noted his hair tied back with a thin red thread. I turned him on his side before anyone could stop me and felt him open in front, unexamined parts slipping out.

“What are you doing?” cried Professor Otterspeer.

There it was on the left leg. The small puckered mouth of the healed ulcer. I pressed my palm over the scar, scarcely able to breathe as I spoke: “I know this man.”

The professor pulled me away from the table. “How could you possibly? You’re overheated, my dear. Come outside, the brisk air will do you good.”

“No, I’m certain. He was no vagrant!”

“You’re mistaken, my dear. Come, I will take you home—”

“I know him, he is Wilhelm Lochner!” I cried, feeling sick. “That is his name!”

The men and women in the lingering crowd gawked at me. I stumbled ahead, refusing the professor’s dark blue sleeve, with its many small slits flashing russet cloth beneath. For the first time, I saw in that fashion a mockery of dissection.

I too owned such a blouse, and as I stumbled outside, gasping to draw in the cold air and clear my head, I vowed I would never wear it again.