Read Online Rembrandt's Mirror by Kim Devereux - Free Book Online Page B

how I got them to recognize me as Christ?’
    Was he avoiding my question on purpose? I nodded. I could hardly ask him again.
    â€˜I said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are. How slow to believe what the prophets have declared!”’
    I nodded, trying to keep a straight face.
    â€˜And then, I did this . . .’ He made the motion of breaking bread and then looked at me as if waiting for applause.
    â€˜Uhm, very good,’ I said, hoping I was a better actor than he.
    He laughed. ‘It was a captivating performance. Really.’
    â€˜Like this,’ I said. I took the apple peel and draped it around his neck like a necklace, blushing at my audacity. Instead of doing the gallant thing and looking away, he stared at me until I had to bury my face in my hands.
    â€˜You go so red,’ he said.
    I groaned, still with my face in my hands.
    He laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I even blushed when I was Jesus. Imagine this: Jesus with a face like he’s helped himself to too much wine.’
    I giggled through my fingers, but wasn’t this blasphemy?
    Then he said, ‘You understand a whole lot more than you let on, don’t you?’
    â€˜As do you,’ I said, looking at him, not caring if I was red in the face.
    â€˜All right,’ he said, ‘you want to know about the moment when you walked in, the looking , as you call it.’
    I nodded.
    He took the apple peel from around his neck, laid it on the table and scratched his temple. ‘Something strange happened when I broke the bread. I felt this ease, as if I did not have to make an effort anymore. There was peace in my heart, perfect peace. And that’s when I looked at Johann Ulrich and Dirck. They looked so different than at other times. So touchingly beautiful. When I looked into their eyes, and this is the honest truth, I felt that we were brothers. And when I looked at Rembrandt it was the same and I thought, this is what he’s been trying to teach me all this time . And then I saw something brimming behind his eyes, something I had not seen there for a long time.’ Samuel looked down. ‘I have not seen it since before his wife died.’
    â€˜What was it?’ I asked.
    â€˜That which elevates his art above all other art. It was alive in him again. And then it was gone.’
    I could not grasp the significance of this thing he’d glimpsed in Rembrandt. ‘Maybe it will come again?’ I suggested.
    â€˜No,’ he said, almost angrily, but then he looked as if he was about to cry, just as he had then. ‘He’s not the man he was. You wouldn’t know. I didn’t even know myself until that day.’
    â€˜Know what?’ I said.
    â€˜That he had lost something. He can still outdo any other artist without even trying, capture in a few pen strokes the beauty of aleaf or a wrinkle of flesh but . . .’ Samuel ran his hands through his hair as if he wanted to pull it out, ‘there have been no more miracles like The Night Watch .’
    After a pause he added, ‘A masterpiece does not merely spring from the artist’s hands and brains – it is infused with God’s breath.’
    It was hard to imagine that a group portrait of watchmen could be infused with God’s breath; besides, how was God to breathe through someone as impious as Rembrandt?
    Samuel sat silent for a few moments, looking as if doomsday was upon us. Then he met my gaze and smiled. ‘Then you walked in, with your blue skirt and a jacket the colour of dried cowpats.’ I frowned at the insult, and he added softly, ‘And eyes the colour of honey.’

Woman on a Gibbet
    It was my first day off, a chance to get away. I burst out of the house like the hens when they’d been cooped up for too long. The buildings along the canal stood tall in the morning sun. The air was alive with the trundling of cartwheels on cobbles and shouts from bargemen as they hoisted