Tulip Fever (20 page)

Jan presses a handkerchief to my nostrils and holds back my head. Between his fingers the handkerchief reddens. Nosebleeds are strange because you bleed without pain. The handkerchief grows sodden. When Jan releases my head he has blood on his hands.

32

The Tulip Grower

Select a large bulb with several well-developed offsets. Clean off the soil from the offsets and pull them away from the parent bulb, taking care to preserve any roots. Prepare pots with a moist, sandy compost. Insert a single offset into each pot, and cover it with compost. Label, and water.

—ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, Encyclopedia of Gardening

Claes van Hooghelande is a man possessed. In his house on the Sarphatistraat he sleeps fitfully. He is a tulip grower. He used to be a tax collector but now he has given that up, much to his wife’s dismay, so that he can stay home and watch his garden. It is only a small garden, but it is the center of his universe. Beneath the soil, out there in the night, his babies are fattening.

His real children lie sleeping upstairs but he has no time for them anymore; they have been forbidden to enter the garden, on pain of a beating, and have to play in the street. When he thinks of them, which is seldom, he pictures them as nodes on a tulip bulb—offsets nestling against the parent bulge. Everything he sees speaks tulip to him. Comely women are tulips; their skirts are petals, swinging around the pollen-dusted stigmas of their legs. The taxes he used to collect are precious nodes prized from the plump bulb of a yearly wage.

He is obsessed with nodes. The more nodes, the heavier the bulb. The heavier the bulb, the more
azen
it weighs. The more
azen
it weighs, the more money for him. That is why he leaves his tulips in the soil for longer than his rivals, the other amateur growers whose gardens are now empty earth. They lifted theirs in June, but he has waited weeks longer.

It takes its toll on his nerves, however. Despite his precautions—his trip wires, his round-the-clock vigils—while his bulbs are still in the earth they are at risk. Thieves, dogs, slugs. He used to be a corpulent man with a healthy appetite; in pretulip days he could hardly squeeze through his front door. Now he cannot eat; he scarcely sleeps. His clothes hang loosely on him; his wife has had to take them in. He suffers from heartburn and has to drink tinctures of peppermint and brandy. He and his wife used to sleep in a bed downstairs, built into the back-room wall. With the money he made, last season, he bought a freestanding bed and has moved it upstairs next to the window. From here he can see down into the garden.

Compost is his secret. All autumn he prepared the soil, digging in his magic mixture—cartloads of cow dung, sack-loads of chicken excreta, fine sand, and bonemeal from the slaughterhouse. Since then he has applied thrice-weekly applications of his special fertilizer. He has worked out the ratio per foot and written it in a book, which he keeps locked in his strongbox.

“You’d dig in your children if you thought it would improve the soil,” mutters his wife. She doesn’t understand. Sometimes she looks at him strangely. He likes to squat in the garden, crumbling the earth between his fingers, sniffing it. No sweetmeats smell more delicious; he could gladly eat it.

“Maybe, my love, you should see a doctor,” says his wife. Wait until she sees the prices he will get. Sixty thousand florins in four months, that is the profit one man has made, the other side of the city. That is sixty times his annual income. See her face then.
And this man has a smaller garden
.

Claes has already lifted and stored most of his bulbs, his Miracles, his Emeralds and his main stock-in-trade, his Goudas. He has triumphed this year, perfecting several new varieties—his own homebred mutations, which he is yet to name. One of them bears an indigo blush like a drop of ink dissolving in milk. He has split off their nodes, weighed them and packed them in straw. These he has stored in his vault, under lock and key, to wait until the prices rise. His Admirals—Admiral van Enckhuysen and Admiral van Eyck—still lie under the soil. Last night he dug his hand into the earth and cradled a bulb with his fingers, feeling how it had fattened up. He felt the thrill of a deviant, rummaging under a man’s nightshirt to fondle his balls. When sailors were caught doing this they were sewn into sacks and thrown into the sea. What punishment awaited those who fondled an Admiral?

Maybe you should see a doctor
. Why? He is simply a man in love. How beautiful they were in bloom—blousy and seductive, moving gently in the wind. How vast were their flowers, nourished by his secret tonic (soot and his own urine). They were his choicest of children. They were his company of angels, trumpeting soundlessly. How he loved them, the intensity varying according to their value. The financial scale is this: first the yellow-on-reds (Goudas); then purple-on-whites; and finally the most thrilling of them all—the red-on-whites.

Semper Augustus is a name he can only whisper, as if in church. The king of kings, the holiest of holies. He has five of them slumbering under the soil. He grew them from five offsets he purchased the year before—five was all the investment he could afford. Five flowers have bloomed— petals as white as a virgin’s brow, veins as ruby-red as blood, their chalices blushing as blue as a summer sky. Solomon himself could not sing of them with greater fervor.
Behold,
thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant; also our bed is green
. They are his five dazzling maidens.
Thy lips are like a thread
of scarlet . . . Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee . . .
Thou hast ravished my heart
.

They have died down now; beige tatters are all that remain. Their beauty lies beneath the soil, to which we shall all return. Tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow he shall lift them . . . they will rise like Christ from their long sleep; their resurrection shall make him rich.

Claes sleeps. He dreams of the soil breaking open. Soldiers rise from it, their spears bright. He turns, bumping against his wife, and sinks back into slumber. He dreams of an intruder. It’s a large black dog. Stealthily, it lopes through the streets . . . lightly it vaults over the wall . . . soundlessly it lands in the garden. It looks around, baring its white teeth in a grin. It leaps into the tulip bed and starts digging. It digs up tiny arms and tiny legs, the dismembered limbs of Claes’s children.

The bell jangles. Claes sits up, wide awake. He leaps out of bed. Flinging open the window, he yells: “Who’s there?” Down in the garden more bells are ringing. He sees something move—a blacker clot in the moonlight.

And now he is out in the garden, tripping over his own trip wires, setting off the bells again. They peal dementedly, calling the sinners to be punished.

Claes examines the earth. In the moonlight he sees a footprint. Nothing has been disturbed. This particular sinner has got away. The alarm system has been Claes’s salvation.

33

Sophia

All these fools want is tulip bulbs.

—PETRUS HONDIUS, Of de Moufe-Schans, 1621

There is a knock at the door. Gerrit, Jan’s servant, stands there holding a letter.

“What has happened?” I have a sinking feeling of foreboding. “Has something befallen him?”

“No, madam.” Gerrit is a phlegmatic man—stolid, with a face as lumpy as putty. He comes from the swamps of the Marken, where the peasants move sluggishly in perpetual fog. Nothing that has been happening arouses his curiosity, for which I am grateful.

I tip him. He leaves and I tear open the letter. Jan has had cold feet. He is not going to go through with it.

Destroy this when you have read it
. I’m wrong. Jan tells me about his attempted robbery last night. See? Another crime has been added to the list. But he was interrupted, he says. The man woke up. Luckily Jan escaped without being seen.
We will have to buy the bulbs
.

This is a small setback, but we will manage. I will have to raise some money to help pay for them. We will have to buy a considerable number of bulbs, to spread our speculation and cover our inevitable losses. Upstairs I open my jewelry chest. Pearl earrings, my pearl necklace, sapphire bracelet and pendant. There isn’t a great deal of it. Though generous to my family, and to myself in many ways, Cornelis is parsimonious when it comes to jewelry. Precious stones do not interest him. He prefers to spend his money on paintings, on embellishments for his home and on our own fine clothes. His in particular. He is surprisingly self-indulgent in this respect. When I arrived at this house I counted in amazement the items crammed into his linen cupboard: thirty pairs of drawers, seventy shirts, twenty-five collars, forty pairs of ruffled cuffs, thirty ruffs, ninety handkerchiefs . . . The closet is burdened to breaking point; last week we had to call in a blacksmith to repair the hinges.

I pick out some items of jewelry and lay them on the bed. I cannot pawn it all—Cornelis will notice—but I can spirit these out of the house.

Maria comes in. She knows about our plan, of course. She has to, since it revolves around her. She agreed to it, but she still seems in a state of shock.

I tell her about the failed theft. She gazes at the few pieces of jewelry laid out on the coverlet. They look pitiful, like small slaughtered birds after a poor day’s shooting.

“I’m frightened,” she says.

Maria cannot talk like this. She is the sensible one, the practical one. I pretend not to understand. “We will get enough money, don’t worry,” I tell her. “We’ll get the bulbs and then we will make a lot more.”

“I’m not frightened of that.”