From the gallery I saw the back of the mother bent over a photograph. Never had I heard such a cry from a human being. The courtroom fell still.

I looked up to the interpreters’ booth where they waited, no translation possible.

After a long, long time Jasmina had to breathe, and she looked around as if the sound had come from someone else. William Steyn stepped between her and Dragić to try to block her view of him. Judge Banda tipped her chin down toward the witness as if ready to call a break.

Then Jasmina looked up into Judge Banda’s eyes and spoke, That is my daughter. Hana.

—

At the recess I had to get out. I went to the Mauritshuis gallery, a half-hour walk from the courts. I did not want to be alone. I often went to that gallery because I like the art of the Golden Age, the radiance in the paint, Protestant wives who tucked their hair under scarves and hats and plucked chickens in kitchens and lice from each other’s hair and men who played lutes. Warm domestic scenes. Beyond the walls of their homes were the bloody battles of the Reformation. We could not guess from those domestic paintings that in the Battle of White Mountain four thousand Bohemian Protestants were killed in one hour.

I stopped in front of a painting of a woman in a white smock worn over full blue-green skirts, her feet on a warming block. In the large canvas, she is bent over her sewing. A man stands with his hand on her right shoulder and he is twisted over her, his open left palm thrusting coins at her. Her eyes are fixed on her needlework but she is awkwardly turned away and acutely aware of him and the insistent pressure of his fingers on her flesh.

I was startled to hear a Dutch woman beside me say in English, It is a remarkable painting. Judith Leyster painted it when she was twenty-two years old.

Hmmm, I said.

She painted only six years, said the woman. And then she married a painter and had five children. She may have painted in her husband’s atelier. This was common but we do not know.

I nodded.

We almost lost her. Her signature was JL with a star. Franz Hals stole her paintings and painted his signature over hers and showed them as his own. The fraud lasted for three hundred years. Finally someone with sharp eyes at the Louvre detected something in the style.

I could smell coffee on her breath. The room felt close and threatening. I had to get out before the man in the painting made her drop her sewing. His eyes were piercing. She was trapped.

I turned away from the woman and she leaned in and said, You know, in Dutch our word for sewing is slang for sex.

I escaped to the cobbled courtyard, walked quickly through the iron gates and onto the street. I had to clear my head. I thought, What is wrong? Strangers discuss paintings all the time. I thought, This trial will not let women’s lives be painted over and lost.