Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

From Barnes & Noble

A professor invites invites a colleague from the art department to his home to view a painting he has kept secret for decades, in Susan Vreeland's powerful historical novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The professor swears it's a Vermeer -- but why exactly has he kept it hidden so long? The reasons unfold in a gripping sequence of stories that trace ownership of the work back to Amsterdam during World War II and still further to the moment of the painting's inception.

From the Publisher

Picture this: "A most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." Susan Vreeland imagined just such a humble domestic scene, suggested it was created in 17th-century Holland, and attributed it to Jan Vermeer. Then she wrote a beguiling novel about this canvas, which so closely resembles the 35 extant works of the Dutch master

that it might as well be one of his--long, lost, finally found, and as exquisite as ever. The artistic journey Vreeland recounts begins in present-day Pennsylvania, where a schoolteacher claims he owns an authentic Vermeer, a legacy from his late father, who acquired it under heinous circumstances: a Nazi officer, the father had looted it from the home of Dutch Jews.

Moving back in time and across the Atlantic, Vreeland traces the treasured painting from owner to owner. In doing so, she demonstrates the enduring power of art in the face of natural disaster, political upheaval, and personal turmoil.

Ultimately, she ends the odyssey in Delft, where the painting's haunting subject is identified and tells her own poignant story about the picture's origins.

Each of the eight linked chapters has an irresistible painterly quality--finely wrought, artfully illuminated, and subtly executed. Together, they constitute a literary masterpiece, one that the New York Times Book Review praised as "intelligent, searching,

and unusual... filled with luminous moments; like the painting it describes so well."

Elaine Szewczyk

Cornelius Engelbrecht harbors a secret obsession-an intensely captivating painting, thought to be an original Vermeer, given to him by his father, who acquired it under highly questionable circumstances during World War II. Vreeland's novel, which starts at the end of the story and works backward to the beginning, uncovers the painting's wild, diversely layered, sometimes daunting history of ownership, tracing it all the way back to its climactic inception. We learn that the painting was once sold in desperation to pay for food, and even sent downstream with an out-of-wedlock baby. The reader lives the stories of those who possessed it and comes to understand the ways it has possessed its many owners; it serves variously as a symbol of greed, love and inspiration. This is an ambitious book that provides a peephole into the past, into an eternal source of wonder: the origins of our most captivating artistic conceptions.

Publishers Weekly

As Keats describes the scenes and lives frozen in a moment of time on his Grecian urn, so Vreeland layers moments in the lives of eight people profoundly moved and changed by a Vermeer painting a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Vreeland opens with a man who suffers through his adoration of the painting because he inherited it from his Nazi father, who stole it from a deported Jewish family. She traces the work's provenance through the centuries: the farmer's wife, the Bohemian student, the loving husband with a secret and, finally, the Girl herself Vermeer's eldest daughter, who felt her "self" obliterated by the self immortalized in paint, but accepted that this was the nature of art. Descriptions of the painting by people in different countries in various historical periods are particularly beautiful. Each section is read by a different narrator, some better than others. Several add dimension to the story and writing, while others are so intent on portraying the book's ethereal qualities they make the listener conscious of the reader instead of the language. Still, this is a delightful production. Based on the MacMurray & Beck hardcover (Forecasts, July 12, 1999). (Dec. 2001) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The eight interlinked stories in this impressive debut collection revolve around a single painting by Vermeer; as one might expect, they contain insightful observations about the worth and the truth of art. Vreeland's skill goes deeper still; these poised and atmospheric tales present a rich variety of characters whose voices convey distinctive personalities, and each offers glimpses of Holland during different historical eras. The chronology is reversed: the first story occurs in the present day, and succeeding narratives go back in time to the 17th century. Set in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, the moving "A Night Different from All Other Nights" portrays the Jewish family from whom the painting will be stolen after they have been sent to a concentration camp, and re-poses the question (also asked in the opening story) of how killers can revere beauty. Two narratives that treat the same event--the birth of a baby and a turning point in a marriage--take place in neighboring hamlets near Groningen during the St. Nicholas flood of 1717. Each fills in details the other does not have, and each provides indelible images of brutally hard life in a waterlogged land. In the penultimate "Still Life," set in 17th-century Delft, a poverty-hounded Vermeer begins the portrait of his daughter Magalena. "Magdalena Looking," which closes the book, reflects the evanescence of the moments that paintings capture. Unobtrusively, Vreeland builds a picture of the Dutch character, equal parts sober work ethic and faith in a harsh religion. Against these national characteristics she juxtaposes the universal human capacity for love--romantic, familial, parental--and a kind of obsessive love, the quest for beauty that distinguishes otherwise ordinary lives. The historical details that ground each narrative in time and place are obliquely revealed. In the same way, the Vermeer masterpiece achieves fuller dimension in each tale as small details of color, brush stroke, lighting, background, serve to create the picture in the reader's eye. Only the opening story disappoints; it seems staged rather than psychologically compelling. The remaining entries are elegantly executed; the characters have the solidity and the elusive mystery of Vermeer's subjects. There is suspense, as well; one wants to read these tales at one sitting, to discover how the Vermeer influenced everyone who possessed it. Vreeland paints her canvas with the sure strokes of a talented artist. Agent, Barbara Braun. Rights sold in Germany to Heyne Verlag. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

VOYA

The painting of the girl dressed in blue, gazing ahead with wondrous innocence, sewing forgotten on her lap, is truly an artistic masterpiece. Did the renowned Dutch artist Jan Vermeer actually paint it? By way of answering this question, Vreeland traces Girl in Hyacinth Blue from its ownership in the late twentieth century to the very moment of its creation more than three hundred years earlier. Each chapter is a story unto itself, bound together by the elusive beauty of the painting. There is the heartbreaking story of young Hannah, a Jewish girl who watches her life dissolve in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. This tale is followed by the bittersweet reflections of a middle-aged father, who watches his daughter glow in love. Then readers are treated to a hilarious depiction of a French woman and her dalliance in the Dutch country she hated. The reader also is caught in the spell of the mysterious girl of the painting, until at last Vreeland reveals the real girl with her own true story. This is not a quick read. The language is so elegant, the descriptions so evocative, and the characters so perfectly sketched that not one beautiful sentence can be rushed. Teachers and librarians working with older teens might find several ways to use this book, as it is equally art appreciation, historical fiction, and excellent literature. VOYA CODES: 5Q 4P S A/YA (Hard to imagine it being any better written; Broad general YA appeal; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult and Young Adult). 1999, MacMurray & Beck, 242p, $17.50. Ages 16 to Adult. Reviewer: Diane Masla

SOURCE: VOYA, October 2000 (Vol. 23, No. 4)

Library Journal

"Pearls were a favorite item of Vermeer," observes Cornelius Engelbrecht, the secretive and obsessive professor whose conviction that he owns an authentic Vermeer launches Vreeland's lovely first novel. The painting, we soon discover, was taken from its proper (Jewish) owner by Engelbrecht's father, a German soldier during World War II--a fact that Engelbrecht struggles mightily to suppress. The one colleague to whom he shows the painting guesses the truth and derisively recommends that he burn it--"one good burning deserves another"--but we don't learn the fate of the painting. Instead, Vreeland constructs a series of vignettes, not necessarily chronological, that takes us from the rooftops of Amsterdam Jews forced to kill the pigeons they are no longer allowed to keep, to a Dutch merchant whose possession of the painting briefly complicates his marriage, to the boudoir of a French counsel's bored wife and the second story of a farmhouse in flooded Holland, and finally to the home of Vermeer himself, where art does battle with domestic necessity. Though the connections among the vignettes could be made clearer, and the ending feels abrupt--how did that painting get from the artist to the weary professor, and what finally happens to it?--each vignette has the stillness, the polish, and the balanced perfection of a Vermeer. Not quite perfect, but definitely a pearl. Griet, the "girl with the pearl earring," may be a pearl herself--fair, soberminded, and gentle--but the novel in which we find her is not quite so polished. Chevalier (The Virgin Blue) writes a little plainly of her heroine, forced when her father is blinded in an accident to work as a maid in the home of Vermeer. Eventually, Vermeer asks her to pose for a painting--wearing his wife's earrings--which causes a scandal and Griet's determined departure from the household. The artist's coaxing of the reluctant sitter is delicately rendered, but otherwise this text fails to ignite.--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

The Christian Science Monitor - Ron Charles

Vreeland's novel possesses the strength of its subject. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a small painting by Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch master, who produced quiet paintings with exquisite color and subtlety... "In the end," the narrator notes, "it's only the moments that we have." But what exquisite moments they are in this thoughtful book.

Kirkus Reviews

Vreeland's wonderful second outing (What Love Sees, 1996, not seen) is a novel made of stories, each delving farther into the provenance of a Vermeer painting, and each capturing a moment of life, much as the great painter did himself. The only wobble in this elegant little book is at the start, where a stiffness in character may be intended but jars even so: a high-school math teacher confides to a colleague that he owns (and adores) a painting—of a girl sewing at a window—that he knows is a Vermeer. All the evidence—of technique, color, subject—is there, yet the painting lacks documentation to validate its authenticity: nor will the math teacher, one Cornelius Engelbrecht, tell just how it became his. The reader is more privileged, though, and learns quickly enough that Engelbrecht's Nazi father stole it in 1940 from a doomed Jewish family in Amsterdam. Such reader-privilege becomes an overwhelming emotional test when Vreeland goes back to visit that family, in that year, just before the theft ("A Night Different From All Other Nights"). Farther back still, a happily married Dutch couple owns the painting—and when the husband admits that the girl in it reminds him of an earlier lover, the marriage is briefly shaken ("Adagia"). Set when Beethoven's Eroica symphony is "new," "Hyacinth Blues" offers a biting bit of social satire—and lets the reader discover just how the painting's papers did in fact get lost. Still deeper back goes Vreeland, taking up with masterful insight, feeling, and control the life of a small Dutch farm family caught in the great flood of 1717; of a young engineer who loves, loses (pathetically), and hands on the painting; ofVermeer himself as he paints the picture, struggling against debt, father of 11; and, in a wondrous, bittersweet epiphany, of the daughter herself whom Vermeer chose as his model. Extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Not just museums, but families have ancestral treasures, too. My mother has a key embedded in swirling melted glass from a windowed door in the Chicago fire of 1871. I grew up with certain paintings that had snippets of lives attached, the landscapes of my mother's step-grandfather who came from England to paint America as a boy. When I was nine, he taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared on a page of real, textured watercolor paper. How many girls throughout history would have longed to be taught that but had to do washing and mending instead?

Still, I envied writers whose novels gushed out from their own growing up, rich in ethnicity or place or history. Countering my complaints about my ethnic blandness, the lack of a ready-made family story, one of my friends said, "Go back further." All I had was a love for art, a Dutch name, and a trip 20 years earlier when, to my surprise, I passed through a village in North Holland named Vreeland. I had nothing more than that -- except a library card and uninterrupted days of solitude, two years of cancer treatment and recovery, during which I could imagine my way out of my uncertain circumstances and imagine my way into a heritage alive with vitality and history and the endurance of beauty. I did have a past, longer than my own life span, and Dutch painting revealed it to me.

Poring over the National Gallery catalogue of the Johannes Vermeer exhibition, I felt a growing love for a people and a place I could call mine. I was Dutch! And all those brave Dutchmen fending off floods on their fragile, sunken land were my kinsmen. But those complacent matrons admiring their jewels, married to ship captains trading in African souls, were my kinswomen, too. A girl who had eaten her porridge from a blue-and-white Delftware bowl, crouching on a swept Delft street with her orange skirt ballooning out behind her like a pumpkin could have been me in another age. It was Vermeer who gave them to me.

Seeing domestic items repeated in many of his paintings -- a wall map showing where that captain sailed, a woman's silk jacket with fur trim, a Turkish rug, a golden pitcher, a Spanish chair, a luminous open window of pale yellow glass -- told me that he, too, had reverence for a family's possessions. Now the cords of connection tightened, and I felt free to add objects of my own imagination -- a glass of milk left by a sickly child, a sewing basket, a young girl's worn clogs and her new black shoes with square gold buckles. I had a painting -- and with news reports of so much art stolen from Holocaust victims by members of the Third Reich, I had a start. (Susan Vreeland)

Susan Vreeland's short fiction has appeared in journals such as The Missouri Review, Confrontation, Calyx, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her first novel, What Love Sees, was broadcast as a CBS Sunday night movie in 1996. Vreland teaches English literature, creative writing, and art in the San Diego public schools.

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Love Enough

Cornelius Engelbrecht invented himself. Let me emphasize, straight away, that he isn't what I would call a friend, but I know him enough to say that he did purposely design himself: single, modest dresser in receding colors, mathematics teacher, sponsor of the chess club, mild-mannered acquaintance to all rather than a friend to any, a person anxious to become invisible. However, that exterior blandness masked a burning center, and for some reason that became clear to me only later, Cornelius Engelbrecht revealed to me the secret obsession that lay beneath his orderly, controlled design.

    It was after Dean Merrill's funeral that I began to see Cornelius's unmasked heart. We'd all felt the shock of Merrill's sudden death, a loss that thrust us into a temporary intimacy uncommon in the faculty lunchroom of our small private boys' academy, but it wasn't shock or Cornelius's head start in drinking that snowy afternoon in Penn's Den where we'd gone after the funeral that made him forsake his strategy of obscurity. Someone at the table remarked about Merrill's cryptic last words, "love enough," words that now sting me as much as any indictment of my complicity or encouragement, but they didn't then. We began talking of last words of famous people and of our dead relatives, and Cornelius dipped his head and fastened his gaze on his dark beer. I only noticed because chance had placed us next to each other at the table.

    He spoke to his beer rather than to any of us. "`An eye like a blue pearl,' was what my father said. And then hedied. During a winter's first snowfall, just like this."

    Cornelius had a face I'd always associated with Nero della Francesca's portrait of the Duke of Urbino. It was the shape of his nose, narrow but extremely high-bridged, providing a bench for glasses he did not wear. He seemed a man distracted by a mystery or preoccupied by an intellectual or moral dilemma so consuming that it made him feel superior, above those of us whose concerns were tires for the car or a child's flu. Whenever our talk moved toward the mundane, he became distant, as though he were mulling over something far more weighty, which made his cool smiles patronizing.

    "Eye like a blue pearl? What's that mean?" I asked.

    He studied my face as if measuring me against some private criteria. "I can't explain it, Richard, but I might show you."

    In fact, he insisted that I come to his home that evening, which was entirely out of character. I'd never seen him insist on anything. It would call attention to himself. I think Merrill's "love enough" had somehow stirred him, or else he thought it might stir me. As I say, why he picked me I couldn't tell, unless it was simply that I was the only artist or art teacher he knew.

    He took me down a hallway into a spacious study piled with books, the door curiously locked even though he lived alone. Closed off, the room was chilly so he lit a fire. "I don't usually have guests," he explained, and directed me to sit in the one easy chair, plum-colored leather, high-backed and expensive, next to the fireplace and opposite a painting. A most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window.

    "My God," I said. It must have been what he'd wanted to hear, for it unleashed a string of directives, delivered at high pitch.

    "Look. Look at her eye. Like a pearl. Pearls were favorite items of Vermeer. The longing in her expression. And look at that Delft light spilling onto her forehead from the window." He took out his handkerchief and, careful not to touch the painting, wiped the frame, though I saw no dust at all. "See here," he said, "the grace of her hand, idle, palm up. How he consecrated a single moment in that hand. But more than that—"

    "Remarkable," I said. "Certainly done in the style of Vermeer. A beguiling imitation."

    Cornelius placed his hands on the arm of the chair and leaned toward me until I felt his breath on my forehead. "It is a Vermeer," he whispered.

    I sputtered at the thought, the absurdity, his belief. "There were many done in the style of Vermeer, and of Rembrandt. School of Rubens, and the like. The art world is full of copyists."

    "It is a Vermeer," he said again. The solemnity of his tone drew my eyes from the painting to him. He appeared to be biting the inside of his cheek. "You don't think so?" he asked, his hand going up to cover his heart.

    "It's just that there are so few." I hated to disillusion the man.

    "Yes, surely, very few. Very few. He did at the most forty canvases. And only a matter of thirty to thirty-five are located. Welk een schat! En waar is dat alles gebleven?"

    "What's that?"

    "Just the lament of some Dutch art historian. Where has such a treasure gone, or some such thing." He turned to pour us both a brandy. "So why could this not be? It's his same window opening inward at the left that he used so often, the same splash of pale yellow light. Take a look at the figures in the tapestry on the table. Same as in nine other paintings. Same Spanish chair with lion's head finials that he used in eleven canvases, same brass studs in the leather. Same black and white tiles placed diagonally on the floor."

    "Subject matter alone does not prove authenticity."

    "Granted, but I take you to be a man of keen observation. You are an artist, Richard. Surely you can see that the floor suffers the same distortion of tiles he had in his earlier work, for example, The Music Lesson, roughly dated 1662 to '64, or Girl with the Wineglass, 1660."

    I never would have guessed he knew all this. He reeled it off like a textbook. Well, so could I. "That can likewise prove it was done by an inferior imitator, or by van Mieris, or de Hooch. They all did tile floors. Holland was paved with tile."

    "Yes, yes, I know. Even George III thought The Music Lesson was a van Mieris when he bought it, but even a king can't make it so. It's a Vermeer." He whispered the name.

    I hardly knew what to say. It was too implausible.

    He cleared off books and papers from the corner of his large oak desk, propped himself there and leaned toward me. "I can see you still doubt. Study, if you will, the varying depths of field. Take a look at the sewing basket placed forward on the table, as he often did, by the way, almost as an obstruction between the viewer and the figure. Its weave is diffused, slightly out of focus, yet the girl's face is sharply in focus. Look at the lace edge of her cap. Absolutely precise to a pinprick right there at her temple. And now look at the glass of milk. Softedged, and the map on the wall only a suggestion. Agreed?"

    I nodded, more out of regard for his urgency than in accord.

    "Well, then, he did the same in The Lacemaker, 1669. Which leads me to surmise this was done between 1665 and 1668."

    I felt his eyes boring into me as I examined the painting. "You've amassed a great deal of information. Is there a signature?"

    "No, no signature. But that was not unusual. He often failed to sign his work. Besides, he had at least seven styles of signature. For Vermeer, signatures are not definite evidence. Technique is. Look at the direction of the brush's stroke, those tiny grooves of the brush hairs. They have their lighted and their shaded side. Look elsewhere. You'll find overlapping layers of paint no thicker than silk thread that give a minute difference in shade. That's what makes it a Vermeer."

    I walked toward the painting, took off my glasses to see that close, and it was as he had said. If I moved my head to the right or left, certain brush strokes subtly changed their tint. How difficult it was to achieve that. In other places the surface was so smooth the color must have floated onto the canvas. I suddenly found myself breathing fast. "Haven't you had it appraised? I know an art history professor who could come and have a look."

    "No, no. I prefer it not be known. Security risks. I just wanted you to see it, because you can appreciate it. Don't tell a soul, Richard."

    "But if it were validated by authorities ... why, the value would be astronomical. A newly discovered Vermeer—it would rock the art world."

    "I don't want to rock the art world." The blood vessel in his temple pulsated, whether out of conviction of the painting's authenticity or something else, I didn't know.

    "Forgive my indelicacy, but how did you obtain it?"

    He fixed on me a stony look. "My father, who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment."

    "An estate sale or an auction? Then there'd be papers."

    "No. No Vermeer has been auctioned since World War I. Let's just say it was privately obtained. By my father, who gave it to me when he died." The line of his jaw hardened. "So there are no records, if that's what you're thinking. And no bill of sale." His voice had a queer defiance.

    "The provenance?"

    "There are several possibilities. Most of Vermeer's work passed through the hands of one Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, son of a wealthy Delft brewer. I believe this one did not. When Vermeer died, he left his wife with eleven children and a drawerful of debts. Five hundred guilders for groceries. Another sum for woolens for which the merchant Jannetje Stevens seized twenty-six paintings. Later they were negotiated back to the widow, but only twenty-one of them were auctioned in the settling of his estate. Who got the other five? Artists or dealers in the Guild of St. Luke? Neighbors? Family? This could be one. And of those twenty-one, only sixteen have been identified. Where did the others go? A possibility there too. Also, a baker, Hendrick van Buyten, held two as collateral against a bread bill of six hundred seventeen guilders. Some think van Buyten had even obtained a couple others earlier."

    I had to be careful not to be taken in. Just because Cornelius knew facts about Vermeer didn't make his painting one.

    "Later, it could have been sold as a de Hooch, whose work was more marketable at the time. Or it could have been thrown in as extra puyk, a give-away item in the sale of a collection of de Hooches or van der Werffs, or it could have been in the estate sale of Pieter Tjammens in Groningen."

    He was beyond me now. What sort of person knew that kind of detail?

    "Documents report only `an auction of curious paintings by important masters such as J. van der Meer that had been kept far away from the capital.' There are plenty of possibilities."

    All this spilled out of him in a flood. A math teacher! Unbelievable.

    But the question of how Cornelius's father obtained the painting, he deftly avoided. I did not know him well enough to press further without being pushy. Not knowing this which he so carefully kept private, I could not believe it to be genuine. I finished the brandy and extricated myself; politely enough, thinking, so what if it isn't a Vermeer? The painting's exquisite. Let the fellow enjoy it.

    His father. Presumably the same name. Engelbrecht. German.

    Why was it so vital that I concur? Some great thing must be hanging in the balance.

    I drove home, trying to put it all out of my mind, yet the face of the girl remained.

* * *

    Merrill's funeral the day before had made Cornelius thoughtful. Not of Merrill particularly. Of the unpredictableness of one's end, and what remains unpardoned. And of his father. Snow had blanketed his father's coffin too—specks at first, then connecting, then piling up until the coffin became a white puffy loaf. That jowl-faced minister saying, "One must take notice of the measure of a man" was the only thing said during Merrill's service that he remembered.

    Cornelius had to admit on his father's behalf that Otto Engelbrecht was a dutiful father, often stern and then suddenly tender during Cornelius's childhood in Duisburg, near the Dutch border. On this lonely Sunday afternoon with snow still falling gently, Cornelius, reading in his big leather chair, looked up from the page and tried to recall his earliest memory of his father. It may have been his father giving him the little wooden windmill brought back from Holland. It had painted blue blades that turned and a little red door with one hinge missing that opened to reveal a tiny wooden family inside.

    He remembered how his father had spent Sunday afternoons with him, the only child—took him to the Dusseldorf Zoo, gave him trumpet lessons himself, pulled him in a sled through the neighborhood, and when Cornelius suffered from the cold, how his father enfolded Cornelius's small hand in his and drew it into his pocket. He taught him chess strategies and made him memorize them, explained in a Dutch museum the reason for van Gogh's tortured skies, the genius of Rembrandt's faces, and when they moved to America, a result of his father's credo to seize advantageous moments, he took him to see the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. These facts Cornelius saw now as only the good intentions of a patched-up life.

    Later, in Philadelphia, he was embarrassed by his father's hovering nervousness whenever he brought home a school friend, and understood only vaguely his father's dark command, "If they ask, tell them we are Swiss, and don't say another word." By the time he brought home friends from college, his father had moved the painting into the study and installed a lock, secreting it with a niggard's glee. His father's self-satisfied posture whenever he looked at the painting—hands clasped behind his back, rocking on his toes, then heels—became, for a time, a source of nausea to him.

    After his mother died, his father, retired and restless, took over tending her garden. Cornelius remembered now the ardent slope of his shoulders as he stooped to eradicate any deviant weed sprouting between rows of cauliflower and cabbage. Did he have to be so relentless? Couldn't he just let one grow, and say I don't know how it slipped through? Joyfully he planted, watered, gave away grocery sacks of vegetables to neighbors.

    "Such wonderful tomatoes," one woman marveled.

    "You can't get a decent tomato in the supermarket these days." Smiling, he heaped more in her sack.

    "We had a victory garden like this during the war," she said, and Cornelius saw him flinch.

    Was that his father's Luger, grown huge in his mind, cracking down on a woman's hand reaching for a bun as she was hurried from her kitchen?

    The line between memory and imagination was muddled by years of intense rumination, of horrified reading, one book after another devoured with carnivorous urgency—histories, personal accounts, diaries, documents, war novels—and Cornelius could not be sure now what parts he'd read, what parts he'd overheard his father, Lieutenant Otto Engelbrecht, telling Uncle Friederich about the Raid of the Two Thousand, what became known to academics as Black Thursday, August 6, 1942.

    From dark to midnight, they dragged them out of their houses, the raid ordered, historians said, because too few Jews called-up for deportation were reporting at the station, and the train to Westerbork had to be filled. By mid-August they moved to South Amsterdam, a more prosperous area. In September, they were still at it, carting them off to Zentralstelle on van Scheltema Square.

    Just like the assembly line at the Duisburg plant. From somewhere, his father's voice.

    The rest was a tangle of the printed and the spoken word, enlarged by the workings of his imagination. He played in his mind again the Duisburg memory of creeping back downstairs after bedtime and overhearing his father telling Uncle Friederich the story he, a ten-year-old, didn't understand then. This time he staged it as though his father, after too much Scotch, and bloated by a checkmate following too many losses to Friederich, told his brother when in family circles it was still safe to speak, "You've got to see opportunities and seize them on the spot. That's how it's done. Or, if a quick move isn't expedient, make a plan. Like that painting. When my aide spotted a silver tea set in some Jew's dining room, he made a move to bag it. Wrong time. I had to stop him. Property of the Fuhrer."

    Cornelius had read of that, the Puls van following the raids the next day, street by street, to cart away ownerless Jewish possessions for the Hausraterfassung, the Department for the Appropriation of Household Effects.

    "That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. We'd almost missed him. My aide glared at me, full of accusation that I could slip like that and be distracted. With any excuse—the painting, for example, or my reprimand—he might even have reported it."

    What always rang in his mind with the crash of dishes, Cornelius would never now be sure was memory or his own swollen imagination: "So I shoved my boot up the Jew-boy's dirty ass. But I took care to note the house number."

    What had happened next wasn't difficult to piece together. As soon as they delivered their quota, at 1:00 or 2:00 A.M., while other Jews still lay frozen in their hiding places and when the streets were dead quiet, his father went back. The painting was still there, hanging in spite of Decree 58/42, reported in several histories: All Jewish art collections had to be deposited with Lippmann and Rosenthal, a holding company. But this was not a collection, only a single painting, blatantly displayed, or ignorantly. What could his father have thought? That therefore it deserved to be taken? And then would come his father's voice resounding somehow through the years, "By the time I got there, the tea set was already gone."

    Going over the same visions he thought his father had, hoped his father had, kept Cornelius awake at night, filled his dreams with the orgy of plunder, mothers not chosen lining up to die, pain not linked to sin, smoke drifting across fences and coating windows of Christian homes, children's teeth like burnt pearls. Driven by imagination, he read like a zealot on two subjects: Dutch art and the German occupation of the Netherlands. Only one gave him pleasure. Only one might dissolve the image of his father's hat and boots and Luger.

    Compelled by his need to know, Cornelius traveled to Amsterdam one summer. He avoided van Scheltema Square, went straight to the Rijksmuseum, examined breathlessly Vermeer's works, and in one delicious afternoon, convinced himself of the authenticity of his family's prize by seeing layers of thin paint applied in grooved brush strokes creating light and shadow on the blue sleeve of a lady reading a letter, just like those on the sleeve of his sewing girl. A few days later he went to The Hague. At the Royal Cabinet of Paintings in the Mauritshuis, he saw points of brilliant pink-white light at the corners of the opened mouth and in the eyes of Vermeer's girl in a red feathered hat, the same as on his sewing girl. In the musty municipal archives of Delft, Amsterdam, Leiden and Groningen he poured through old documents and accounts of estate sales. He found only possibilities, no undeniable evidence. Still, the evidence was in the museums—the similarities were undeniable. He flew home, hoarding conviction like a stolen jewel.

    "It is. It is," he told his father.

    Then came the slow smile that cracked his father's face. "I knew it had to be."

    Together they went over every square inch of the painting, seduced anew by its charms, yet the rapture was insufficient to drown out the truth Cornelius could no longer deny: If the painting were real, so was the atrocity of his father's looting. He'd had no other way to obtain it. Now with Friederich and his mother gone, only two in the whole world knew, and that, together with the twin images in their dreams, bound them willingly or not into a double kinship.

    He started to tell someone else once, his onetime wife who had laughed when he said it was a Vermeer. Laughed, and asked how his father got it, and he couldn't say, and her laughter jangled in his ears long afterward. She claimed he turned cold to her after that, and within a year she left, saying he loved things rather than people. The possible truth of the accusation haunted him with all the rest.

    After his father's stroke, when the money from such a painting would set him up finely in a rest home, Cornelius agonized. Even an inquiry to a dealer might bring Israeli agents to his father's door with guns and extradition papers efficiently negotiated by the internationally operating Jewish Documentation Center, and a one-way plane ticket to Jerusalem, courtesy of the Mossad. More than a thousand had been hunted down so far, and not just Reichskommissars or SS Commandants either, so Cornelius moved back home to care for him.

    Finally, when there would be no more afternoons of wheeling him, freshly bathed and shaven, out to the sun of the garden, when pain clutched through the drugs, his father murmured fragments, in German, the language he'd left behind. In a room soured by the smell of dying, a smell Cornelius knew his father could recognize, Otto whispered, "Bring the painting in."

    When they both knew the end was close, Cornelius heard, faintly, "I only joined because of the opportunity to make lifelong friendships with people on the rise.

(Continues...)