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muscles of his back shift under his skin. “You like the fat?”
    I nod greedily. He slides the slice of ham into my mouth. It is the most corrupt of sacraments. Ah, but it is delicious!
    “I’m committing a mortal sin,” I say, my mouth full. “Has God put His hands over His face and turned the other way?”
    Jan shakes his head. “God’s watching us. If He truly loves us, if He’s a generous God, won’t He want us to be happy?”
    I swallow the ham. “Your faith is like putty. How easily you mold it to your own desires.”
    He spills more wine into my mouth. “Drink His blood then; see if it makes you feel better.”
    “That’s wicked!” I splutter.
    Suddenly the mood is broken. “You know what’s wicked? You know what’s a sin?” Jan’s voice rises. “That you’re locked up in that great tomb with somebody you don’t love—”
    “No—”
    “Who’s caged you up, who’s sucking the life out of you to warm his old bones—”
    “That’s not true!”
    “Who’s bought you like one of his precious paintings and you’ve let yourself be bought!”
    “I’ve not! You don’t know anything. He’s a kind man. You mustn’t talk about him like this. He supports my mother and my sisters, he’s saved my family, without him they’d be destitute—”
    “Exactly. He’s bought you.”
    I start crying. Jan holds me in his arms. He kisses my wet face—my nose, my eyes. I sob because I cannot bear him to tell me this and now our moment is ruined. And all the time the sand is running out.
    “Forgive me, my love,” he murmurs. “I’m just jealous.”
    “Of him ?”
    “Of what he has—your sweet face, your sweetness in his house . . .” He stops.
    I cannot tell him the truth, not yet. How the thought of going back to my husband’s bed repulses me. I still feel loyalty to Cornelis, even while I am betraying him.
    I say: “I am not really in the house. I don’t exist there. I’m like an empty husk, like those clothes. I have disappeared from there.” This seems just as much a betrayal, but now I’ve said it and it is too late.
    Jan gazes at me. I point to the print hanging on the wall next to the dismembered plaster limbs. It’s a Day of Judgment . God, in a shaft of light, sits above the writhing bodies. “Can you turn that the other way?” I whisper.
    Jan jumps up and tears the print off the wall. It falls to the floor. Then he comes to me one last time before the sand runs out.

20

    Willem
Where the wine is in, the wit is out.
    —JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632
    Willem staggers through the streets. He is sobbing; his heart is broken. It is pitch dark; the light in his life has been extinguished. He has walked a long way; he is somewhere near the Nieuwendijk. He feels the chillness of water beside him. Why not just fling himself into the canal and end this torment?
    He hears a roar of laughter. Ahead, he sees a tavern. Light glows through its windows. He hears music and voices raised in song. He hesitates. Where else can he go? What else is he to do now his life is in ruins?
    He pushes open the door. A smell of sweat and tobacco fills his nostrils. The room is crammed with people; how oblivious they are in their merriment! A fiddler scrapes his violin. Women sit on men’s knees, weighing them down; they shift their buttocks, making themselves at home. Couples are dancing, bumping into the furniture. Customers bang their mugs on the table, singing lustily.
    “On Monday morning I married a wife Thinking to live a sober life But as it turned out I’d better been dead Than rue the day that I got wed!”
    Serving girls, holding foaming pitchers of beer, push their way between the bodies. Choking in the tobacco smoke, Willem sits down.
    “On Tuesday morning I went to the wood Thinking to do my wife some good, I cut a twig of holly so green, The roughest and toughest that ever was seen . . .”
    “What’s up with you, you miserable gek ? Come to drown your sorrows?”
    The man sitting next