Flights Read online

  Van Horssen is tall, with lush, curly hair and a joyful face. He goes over to the kitchen table and sets down the things he bought en route: a wheel of cheese, a loaf of bread, apples and wine. He talks loudly, brags about tickets – this is the reason for his having come today. Filip has to make an effort not to let his face betray his irritation with the grimace of a person who’s just landed in the middle of some horrendous clamour. He guesses that the reason for the arrival of this fellow – a nice fellow, at that – is explained in the letter that lies uncut in the entrance on the little table. As the guest lays out the victuals, the host cleverly hides the letter, and will henceforth pretend he knows its contents.

  He will also pretend he hasn’t been able to find a hostess, although he hasn’t actually sought one out at all. He will pretend that he recognizes all the names his visitor will mention, although in reality his memory isn’t good. He is a rector at the University of Leuven, but since the summer he has been holed up in the countryside, complaining of his health.

  Together they kindle a fire and sit down to eat. The host eats reluctantly, but then it’s clear that each bite further awakens his appetite. The wine goes well with the cheese and meat. Van Horssen shows him the tickets. They look at them in silence, and then Filip goes up to the window and sets the lenses of his glasses so as to better see the intricate drawing and lettering. Because even the ticket itself is a work of art – below the text at the top there is a beautiful illustration by Master Ruysch, a tableau of skeletons of human fetuses. Two of them sit around a composition consisting of rocks and dried branches, holding in their hands some musical instruments, one of which looks like a trumpet, another like a harp. Looking carefully at the tangle of lines, there are even more bones and skulls, fine and delicate, and any attentive observer would certainly make out of them still more little fetuses.

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ asks the guest, looking over the host’s shoulder.

  ‘What about it?’ Filip Verheyen answers off-handedly. ‘Human bones.’

  ‘It’s art.’

  But Filip can’t be dragged into discussion, bears no resemblance to that Filip Verheyen whom van Horssen knew from the university. The conversation doesn’t exactly flow, and you might get the impression that the host is absorbed by something else, perhaps solitude has stretched out his thoughts into long strands, and accustomed him to internal dialogues.

  ‘Do you still have it, Filip?’ asks his old student after a long interlude.

  Verheyen’s laboratory is located in a small outbuilding, reached through a door in the entrance. He is not at all surprised by the sight inside, more reminiscent of an engraver’s workshop, full of plates, etching basins, chiseling sets hanging on the wall, ready prints drying everywhere, and tangles of tow scattered across the floor. The guest unintentionally walks up to the printed sheets of paper – all of them show muscles and blood vessels, tendons and nerves. Carefully marked, absolutely transparent, perfect. There is also a microscope here, first-rate, an instrument that would be the envy of many, with lenses ground by Benedictus Spinoza, through which Filip observes the bundles of blood vessels.

  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 t
empo 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.

  Filip was a peaceful, quiet boy. He helped his father on the farm, but it soon became clear that he would not follow in his footsteps. He would not pour milk out every morning and mix it with the powder from calves’ stomachs in order to shape giant wheels of cheese, nor rake out the hay into even piles. He would not observe in early spring whether in the furrows of ploughed earth there hadn’t collected any water. The pastor of Verrebroek made his parents understand that Filip was gifted enough that it would be worth educating him further after he completed his studies at the church school. And thus the fourteen-year-old boy began his education at the Heilige-Drievuldigheids lyceum, where he demonstrated his outstanding ability at drawing.

  If it is true that there are people who see the small things, and those who see only big things, then I am certain that Verheyen belonged to that first group. I even think that his body from the beginning felt best in that particular position – inclined over a table, with his legs resting on the bars of his chair, his spine curved into a bow and his hands furnished with a feather pen that took not even the slightest interest in far-reaching goals, aiming close, within the kingdom of detail, the cosmos of little details, dashes and points, where the image is born. Etching and mezzotint – leaving in metal little traces, signs, the drawing of the smooth indifference surface of a metal sheet, ageing it till it became wise. He told me that the obverse always took him by surprise and confirmed his conviction that left and right are two completely different dimensions: their existence ought in fact to show us the suspect nature of what we naively take to be reality.

  And although he was so adept at drawing, so occupied with engraving and etching, dyeing and printing, in his twenties Verheyen set out for Leiden to study theology, and like the pastor from Verrebroek, his mentor, become a pastor.

  But even earlier – as he told me in connection with that excellent microscope that stood on his table – every so often that pastor would take him on short expeditions, a few miles down battered roads, to see a particular grinder of lenses, a brash Jew cursed out by his own, as he called them. This man rented out rooms in a stone house and seemed so exceptional that each such expedition was for Verheyen a great event, though he was too young to take part in any conversations, which he could only barely understand. The grinder apparently comported himself in a rather exotic, somewhat eccentric manner. He had a long gown, and on his head a tall stiff cap, which he never removed. He looked like a line, like a vertical pointer – so Filip told me and joked that if you were to put that oddball in a field he might serve the people as a sundial. Different people gathered at his house, merchants, students and professors, who would sit around the wooden table beneath a large willow tree and have endless discussions. From time to time the host or one of the guests would give a lecture merely in order to get the discussion to flare up again. Filip recalled that the host spoke as though he were reading, fluidly, without mumbling. He’d build long sentences, the meaning of which would immediately escape the little boy, but the speaker governed them perfectly. The pastor and Filip would always bring something to eat. Their host would supply them with wine, which he lavishly diluted with water. This was as much as Verheyen remembered from these meetings, and Spinoza remained for all time his master, whom he would read and battle fervently. Perhaps it was these meetings with this ordered mind, with his power of thought and need to understand, that prompted young Filip to study theology in Leiden.

  I am certain that we cannot recognize the fate grooved into the other side of life for us by the divine Engravers. They must appear to us only once they’ve taken a form intelligible to mankind, in black and white. God writes with his left hand and in mirror writing.

  During his second year at university, in 1676, on a May evening, Filip, going up the narrow stairs to the little floor he rented from a certain widow, tore his trousers on a nail, also – as he saw only the following day – harmlessly injuring his calf. A red mark was left on his skin, drawn by the sharp part of the nail, a dash of a few centimetres adorned by drops of blood in little points; the careless movement of the Engraver on the delicate human body. After a few days a fever had begun to consume him.

  When the widow finally called the medic, it turned out that the little wound had already been infected; its edges kindled to red and had swollen. The medic prescribed poultices and broth for strength, but already by the next evening it had become clear that there would be no way to stop the process, and that the leg would have to be cut off just below the knee.

  ‘Not a week goes by that I don’t have to amputate something off someone. You still have another leg,’ the medic apparently said to cheer up Filip. The medic would later become his friend, and he was my uncle, Dirk Kerkrinck, for whom Filip executed quite recently several anatomical engravings. ‘You’ll have a wooden crutch made, and at worst you’ll just be a bit noisier than you have been until now.’

  Kerkrinck had been a student of Frederik Ruysch, the best anatomist in the Netherlands, and perhaps the world, so the amputation was an exemplary one and came off perfectly. The part was divided from the whole smoothly, the bone sawed evenly, the blood vessels closed, cauterized precisely
with a glowing hot rod. Before the operation, the patient grabbed his future friend by the sleeve and begged him to preserve the removed leg. He had always been very religious, and he must have taken it literally that in our resurrected bodies we would rise from the grave in our physical form, with Christ’s coming. He told me later that at the time he was very fearful that his leg might rise on its own; he wanted his body to be buried, when the time came, as a whole. Had it been an ordinary medic and not my uncle – had it been someone off the street, an ordinary barber-surgeon, the kind who cuts off warts and pulls out teeth – he would not, of course, have fulfilled this bizarre request. Ordinarily the severed limb would travel, shrouded in cloth, to the cemetery, where with solemnity, though with no religious formalities, it would be placed in a small hole, which they wouldn’t even mark out. But my uncle, while the patient slept, knocked out by rectified spirit, took meticulous care of the leg. Above all with the aid of an injection of a substance, the composition of which his master had kept a secret, he removed from the blood and lymphatic vessels all the contaminated blood and infiltrations of gangrene. When the limb had been thus drained, he placed it in a glass vessel filled with a balm of Nantes brandy and black pepper, which was to permanently protect it from destruction. When Filip awoke from his alcoholized anaesthesia, his friend showed him the leg drowned in brandy, just as mothers are shown newborns after giving birth.