I filled my large pot with water. “I had the idea from Theo. He took in a lodger after Vincent moved from their shared Paris flat to Arles. But I am starting to learn that managing an entire boardinghouse is quite a bit different from managing an apartment. The villa comes with a list of never-ending problems.”

Wil began feeding Saskia with the spoon—better than he had fed himself, since he could see her mouth, but he could not see his own.

“Say thank you, Saskia,” Anna patted her daughter’s little head before addressing me again. “What has gone wrong now that requires Janus’s assistance? The Widow Ballot complaining about her drafty windows again?”

I left the water on the stove to boil, then settled down next to the potatoes at the table. “All repaired. Now she complains of mice.”

Anna snagged my spare apron from the peg by the stove, slipped it on, then took the chair across the table and held her hand out. “She has six cats.”

I handed her a paring knife from the drawer. “She wants a seventh.”

“And you will allow her?”

“She pays the rent. The room is hers. I cannot very well refuse. The vagaries of running a boardinghouse, I’m afraid.”

“But you don’t regret moving here?”

“There’s violence in Paris.” Dries had been right. Mere days before I moved to Bussum, troops had shot at the May Day crowd demonstrating for an eight-hour workday. The bullets killed nine people and wounded thirty. “The papers predict more trouble on the way. And here, I’m closer to my family.” Only twenty-five kilometers from Amsterdam.

“Even your parents can’t complain.”

“Mama does, as if I moved to Saint Petersburg.”

Anna laughed. “Well, I am glad that you came.”

“I’m glad too. Thank you for bringing me out of my melancholy.”

She stopped by often with Saskia. And I was invited to her home, always filled with visiting artists and poets. It had healed my heart some to be included in their lively gatherings. Unlike in Paris, everyone spoke Dutch, so I could understand everything.

I was bettering myself, learning.

“Did I tell you my book starvation has been solved? Martha and Frederik van Eeden offered me unlimited use of their library.”

Martha was a writer and translator, while Frederik was the top editor at the New Guide, the publication with which most of the members of our group of intellectuals were, in one way or the other, associated.

“Aren’t they a lovely couple?” Anna pushed the curled potato peels back from the edge of the table so they wouldn’t fall on her lap, and in the process squinted toward the darkest corner of the kitchen. “Do you really have mice?”

“Who knows? I might.”