Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier Page A

into the bucket of water. “I should have asked you first. But you are not painting anything at the moment and—”
    He looked puzzled, then shook his head. “Oh, the windows. No, you may continue what you were doing.”
    I would rather not have cleaned in front of him, but as he continued to stand there I had no choice. I swished the rag in the water, wrung it out and began wiping the panes again, inside and out.
    I finished the window and stepped back to view the effect. The light that shone in was pure.
    He was still standing behind me. “Does that please you, sir?” I asked.
    “Look over your shoulder at me again.”
    I did as he commanded. He was studying me. He was interested in me again.
    “The light,” I said. “It’s cleaner now.”
    “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
    The next morning the table had been moved back to the painting corner and covered with a red, yellow and blue table rug. A chair was set against the back wall, and a map hung over it.
    He had begun again

1665

    My father wanted me to describe the painting once more.
    “But nothing has changed since the last time,” I said.
    “I want to hear it again,” he insisted, hunching over in his chair to get nearer to the fire. He sounded like Frans when he was a little boy and had been told there was nothing left to eat in the hotpot. My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again.
    March was the month I was born.
    Being blind seemed to make my father hate winter even more. His other senses strengthened, he felt the cold acutely, smelled the stale air in the house, tasted the blandness of the vegetable stew more than my mother. He suffered when the winter was long.
    I felt sorry for him. When I could I smuggled to him treats from Tanneke’s kitchen—stewed cherries, dried apricots, a cold sausage, once a handful of dried rose petals I had found in Catharina’s cupboard.
    “The baker’s daughter stands in a bright corner by a window,” I began patiently. “She is facing us, but is looking out the window, down to her right. She is wearing a yellow and black fitted bodice of silk and velvet, a dark blue skirt, and a white cap that hangs down in two points below her chin.”
    “As you wear yours?” my father asked. He had never asked this before, though I had described the cap the same way each time.
    “Yes, like mine. When you look at the cap long enough,” I added hurriedly, “you see that he has not really painted it white, but blue, and violet, and yellow.”
    “But it’s a white cap, you said.”
    “Yes, that’s what is so strange. It’s painted many colors, but when you look at it, you think it’s white.”
    “Tile painting is much simpler,” my father grumbled. “You use blue and that’s all. A dark blue for the outlines, a light blue for the shadows. Blue is blue.”
    And a tile is a tile, I thought, and nothing like his paintings. I wanted him to understand that white was not simply white. It was a lesson my master had taught me.
    “What is she doing?” he asked after a moment.
    “She has one hand on a pewter pitcher sitting on a table and one on a window she’s partly opened. She’s about to pick up the pitcher and dump the water from it out the window, but she’s stopped in the middle of what she’s doing and is either dreaming or looking at something in the street.”
    “Which is she doing?”
    “I don’t know. Sometimes it seems one thing, sometimes the other.”
    My father sat back in his seat, frowning. “First you say the cap is white but not painted white. Then you say the girl is doing one thing or maybe another. You’re confusing me.” He rubbed his brow as if his head ached.
    “I’m sorry, Father. I’m trying to describe it accurately.”
    “But what is the story in the