The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,146

couldn’t see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.

Taking it out, handling it, looking at it, was nothing to be done lightly. Even in the act of reaching for it there was a sense of expansion, a waft and a lifting; and at some strange point, when I’d looked at it long enough, eyes dry from the refrigerated desert air, all space appeared to vanish between me and it so that when I looked up it was the painting and not me that was real.

1622–1654. Son of a schoolteacher. Fewer than a dozen works accurately attributed to him. According to van Bleyswijck, the city historian of Delft, Fabritius was in his studio painting the sexton of Delft’s Oude Kerk when, at half past ten in the morning, the explosion of the powder magazine took place. The body of the painter Fabritius had been pulled from the wreckage of his studio by neighboring burghers, “with great sorrow,” the books said, “and no little effort.” What held me fast in these brief library-book accounts was the element of chance: random disasters, mine and his, converging on the same unseen point, the big bang as my father called it, not with any kind of sarcasm or dismissiveness but instead a respectful acknowledgment for the powers of fortune that governed his own life. You could study the connections for years and never work it out—it was all about things coming together, things falling apart, time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

Upstairs, the tap water from the bathroom sink was too chlorinated to drink. Nights, a dry wind blew trash and beer cans down the street. Moisture and humidity, Hobie had told me, were the worst things in the world for antiques; on the tall-case clock he’d been repairing when I left, he’d showed me how the wood had been rotted out underneath from the damp (“someone sluicing stone floors with a bucket, you see how soft this wood is, how worn away?”)

Time warp: a way of seeing things twice, or more than twice. Just as my dad’s rituals, his betting systems, all his oracles and magic were predicated on a field awareness of unseen patterns, so too the explosion in Delft was part of a complex of events that ricocheted into the present. The multiple outcomes could make you dizzy. “The money’s not important,” said my dad. “All money represents is the energy of the thing, you know? It’s how you track it. The flow of chance.” Steadily the goldfinch gazed at me, with shiny, changeless eyes. The wooden panel was tiny, “only slightly larger than an A-4 sheet of paper” as one of my art books had pointed out, although all that dates-and-dimensions stuff, the dead textbook info, was as irrelevant in its way as the sports-page stats when the Packers were up by two in the fourth quarter and a thin icy snow had begun to fall on the field. The painting, the magic and aliveness of it, was like that odd airy moment of the snow falling, greenish light and flakes whirling in the cameras, where you no longer cared about the game, who won or lost, but just wanted to drink in that speechless windswept moment. When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a sunstruck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

v.

THE GOOD THING: I was pleased at how nice my dad was being. He’d been taking me out to dinners—nice dinners, at white-tablecloth restaurants, just the two of us—at least once a week. Sometimes he invited Boris to come, invitations Boris always jumped to accept—the lure of a good meal was powerful enough to override even the gravitational tug of Kotku—but strangely, I found myself enjoying it more when it was just my dad and me.

“You know,” he said, at