Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban Page A

stood motionless; it was not due to move for another hour. The sky grew more and more pale and more and more by-the-sea. There were dark blue streaks in it now and a few scattered marine-looking clouds. Across this paling sky flew the black shapes of silent gulls. Over the electric railway stretched a precision of gantries and wires. Between the train and the dark tower of the clock there was lifted up the black shape of a hammer-headed crane. It swung round and moved out of sight. A white light appeared above the trees. From the head of the moon-faced eastern-looking man issued tiny compressed Mozart. The sky was now dove-grey and altogether marine in its character.
    At 0730 the train moved. We passed bulldozers and tractor shovels impassively moving earth, we passed cattle standing inquiet pastures while the mists of dawn rose round them. We passed sheep, blocks of flats, canals with perfect little bridges, and black ducks on silver water. There was no darkness to mirror our faces; our eyes looking out saw such world as framed itself in the windows with the crossed-out bottles.
    In due course the train arrived at the beautiful Pieter de Hooch-looking red-brick station in The Hague. According to my books the Vermeer girl was at the Mauritshuis, but when I bought a map the newsagent told me that the Mauritshuis was closed for renovation and the paintings were to be seen at the Johan de Witthuis, which he marked for me.
    A little after nine o’clock I arrived at the Johan de Witthuis, which did not open until ten o’clock. By that time I was longing for the conveniences as well as for the Vermeer girl. There were no signs anywhere that said anything like HERREN, no bifurcated pictographs. Until ten o’clock I walked up and down looking at shop windows and wondering whether a preoccupation with dikes had made the Dutch constipated.
    When the doors opened I paid my admission and bought an illustrated catalogue on the cover of which was Vermeer’s
View of Delft.
I said to the man at the desk, ‘Are all the paintings from the Mauritshuis here?’
    ‘No, only the ones in the catalogue.’
    ‘But the Vermeer, the
Head of a Young Girl,
that’s here, isn’t it?’
    ‘No, the only Vermeer is this one.’ He indicated the reproduction on the cover of the catalogue.
    ‘Where’s the
Head of a Young Girl?’
    ‘It’s on loan in America.’
    ‘Thank you.’ Pondering the complexity of this demonstration I went inside and made my way to the
toiletten
in the basement.
    When I came back up the stairs I went into Zaal A where I found myself looking at two panels attached to each other, Nos 843a and 843b, a diptych, evidently, by G. David (1460-1523). Two narrow vertical panels offering a dark wood, many leaves, a stream, a donkey, a bird, two oxen, a road, a stone building with a tower or a silo. A mill? Unlikely. The word hospice came into my mind. Did the stream flow under an arch and into the building? Or did the road glitter, did the road flicker and shinenot like a road? The dancing beast of the mystery, was it in this mystic wood? What a dark whispering in those many leaves! Come and find me, she had said. In this dark and whispering wood?
    It occurred to me then that this Witthuis, this new abode, was a place that the Vermeer girl had physically departed from. She’d gone away over the water. Out of her Witts? Away from wittingness, perhaps; beyond the reach of intellect. Her old dwelling-place had been the Mauritshuis. I had no Dutch dictionary but I had my pocket German Langenscheidt with me so I looked to see if there was anything close to Maurits in German.
Maurer
was bricklayer, mason. The number of the railway carriage in which I had travelled here from the Hook of Holland had been 727. G is the seventh letter of the alphabet, B the second. GBG: GIRL BECOMES GONE. The Vermeer girl had moved from the house of bricks, of gross earthy matter, to the house of wits, of the mind, but intellect proving barren she had become