【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 eplied. It made him what he is now. When I was ready to leave the next morning my father shuffled out to the front step, feeling his way along the wall. I hugged my mother and Agnes. Sunday will e in no time, my mother said. My father handed me something wrapped in a handkerchief. To remind you of home, he said. Of us. It was my favorite tile of his. Most of his tiles we had at home were faulty in some way — chipped or cut crookedly, or the picture was blurred because the kiln had been too hot. This one, though, my father kept specially for us. It was a simple picture of two small figures, a boy and an older girl. They were not playing as children usually did in tiles. They were simply walking along, and were like Frans and me whenever we walked together — clearly our father had thought of us as he painted it. The boy was a little ahead of the girl but had turned back to say something. His face was mischievous, his hair messy. The girl wore her cap as I wore mine, not as most other girls did, with the ends tied under their chins or behind their necks. I favored a white cap that folded in a wide brim around my face, covering my hair pletely and hanging down in points on each side of my face so that from the side my expression was hidden. I kept the cap stiff by boiling it with potato peelings. I walked away from our house, carrying my things tied up in an apron. It was still early — our neighbors were throwing buckets of water onto their steps and the street in front of their houses, and scrubbing them clean. Agnes would do that now, as well as many of my other tasks. She would have less time to play in the street and along the canals. Her life was changing too. People nodded at me and watched curiously as I passed. No one asked where I was going or called out kind words. They did not need to — they knew what happened to families when a man lost his trade. It would be something to discuss later — young Griet bee a maid, her father brought the family low. They would not gloat, however. The same thing could easily happen to them. I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home. When I reached the end and turned out of sight of my family, though, it 5 Girl With a Pearl Earring246。 became a little easier to walk steadily and look around me. The morning was still cool, the sky a flat greywhite pulled close over Delft like a sheet, the summer sun not yet high enough to burn it away. The canal I walked along was a mirror of white light tinged with green. As the sun grew brighter the canal would darken to the color of moss. Frans, Agnes, and I used to sit along that canal and throw things in — pebbles, sticks, once a broken tile — and imagine what they might touch on the bottom — not fish, but creatures from our imagination, with many eyes, scales, hands and fins. Frans thought up the most interesting monsters. Agnes was the most frightened. I always stopped the game, too inclined to see things as they were to be able to think up things that were not. There were a few boats on the canal, moving towards Market Square. It was not market day, however, when the canal was so full you couldn39。t see the water. One boat was carrying river fish for the stalls at Jeronymous Bridge. Another sat low on the water, loaded with bricks. The man poling the boat called out a greeting to me. I merely nodded and lowered my head so that the edge of my cap hid my face. I crossed a bridge over the canal and turned into the open space of Market Square, even then busy with people crisscrossing it on their way to some task — buying meat at the Meat Hall, or bread at the baker39。s, taking wood to be weighed at the Weigh House. Children ran errands for their parents, apprentices for their masters, maids for their households. Horses and carts clattered across the stones. To my right was the Town Hall, with its gilded front and white marble faces gazing down from the keystones above the windows. To my left was the New Church, where I had been baptized sixteen years before. Its tall, narrow tower made me think of a stone birdcage. Father had taken us up it once. I would never fet the sight of Delft spread below us, each narrow brick house and steep red roof and green waterway and city gate marked forever in my mind, tiny and yet distinct. I asked my father then if every Dutch city looked like that, but he did not know. He had never visited any other city, not even The Hague, two hours away on foot. I walked to the center of the square. There the stones had been laid to form an eightpointed star set inside a circle. Each point aimed towards a different part of Delft. I thought of it as the very center of the town, and as the center of my life. Frans and Agnes and I had played in that star since we were old enough to run to the market. In our favorite game, one of us chose a point and one of us named a thing — a stork, a church, a wheelbarrow, a flower — and we ran in that direction looking for that thing. We had explored most of Delft that way. One point, however, we had never followed. I had never gone to Papists39。 Corner, where the Catholics lived. The house where I was to work was just ten minutes from home, the time it took a pot of water to boil, but I had never passed by it. I knew no Catholics. There were not so many in Delft, and none in our street or in the shops we used. It was not that we avoided them, but they kept to themselves. They were tolerated in Delft, but were expected not to parade their faith openly. They held their services privately, in modest places that did not look like churches from the outside. My father had worked with Catholics and told me they were no different from us. If anything they were less solemn. They liked to eat and dr