by Lisa Strømme
“You ever cared for hens, Johanne?” she said, scooping up a fistful of corn from her apron pocket. “You have to talk to them, you know—they understand every word, I’m sure of it. Don’t you, Dorothea? There you are, good girl, give me some nice eggs now.” She tossed the corn through the feeding hatch, and the hens raced for the grain, hammering at the ground with their beaks where it had landed. “You’d better come in and get started then,” Fru Berg said. “There’s an apron hanging in the scullery there.”
I followed her into the house. The scent of lilac laced the air as I brushed past a bush that was ripening by the door.
“They’ll be coming down for breakfast soon,” she said, pulling an apron from a peg. “Here, put this on and I’ll take you through.”
I hung up my shawl and looped the apron around my neck while Fru Berg went into the kitchen and began reciting a long list of chores and an inventory of cleaning utensils: linens, rags, and polishes, which ones were best for which surfaces, and how long fabrics should be soaked and bleached, what time of day each meal was served and how that all changed if there were guests in the house. She showed me the basin, the stove, the stack of wood that fired it, and an array of pots and pans. I tried to follow what she was saying but was too overwhelmed to focus. As she led me through the house, I was distracted by the fine ladies and important naval officers watching me from their oval frames on the walls. The smell of coffee and pipe tobacco oozed from the walls, and the floorboards creaked as we crossed them. The whole house seemed to be breathing with renewed life, like an old lady who seldom has guests.
The rooms were simple but had sumptuous furnishings. The spying windows were dressed with swags, and the floors were covered with richly patterned rugs. Decked in ferns and potted plants, the parlor was deep green like a jungle and had high-backed chairs and a round card table in the window. Along the wall a piano was ornamented with more family photographs in silver frames. In the dining room a white linen cloth had already been draped over the table, and Fru Berg hastened to smooth it out.
“Silverware’s in the drawer over there,” she said, nodding at a dresser by the fireplace. “You can set four places. Admiral Ihlen sits at the head, Fru Ihlen here, with her back to the window, and Miss Tullik and Miss Nusse on either side.”
“Nusse?” I said. “She is a miss?”
“Miss Caroline,” she said. “They call her Nusse.”
I took the cutlery from the drawer and laid it neatly on the table. I couldn’t help but think how much my mother would have admired it, with its curving handles and elaborate beveled engraving. She would have loved the soft thud it made against the cloth.
“When you’ve finished that, you can come help me with the breakfast. Ragna’s off today, so I’ve got her jobs as well as all the laundry.” She hissed the words at me as though Ragna’s absence was my fault. “You’ll have to work late and stay here tonight,” she said before returning to the kitchen and leaving me alone.
As if prompted by the prospect of night, a yawn rose in my chest, and I set it free under the watchful eye of a man with thick, black whiskers sitting in a frame on the mantelpiece. Photographs made it hard to see into a person’s eyes. They weren’t the same as paintings. This man had a broad forehead, dark eyebrows, and a deep cleft in his chin. He was wearing a double-breasted uniform with heavy brocades and holding a sword by his side. But his eyes were far away, and he seemed to be concentrating on sitting perfectly still. There was no story to be told in the image. He was simply a man in uniform.
I quietly laid the plates out and straightened the cutlery around them, then found the salt and pepper pots and put them at the center of the table. I crouched to hunt in the dresser cupboard for eggcups. While I was bent down I heard footsteps on the stairs and straightened myself up, jumping away from the silver like a thief. When the door swung open, I stiffened.
The woman who entered was small and portly but impeccably dressed in an olive crinoline skirt with a delicate striped bodice. Her hair was graying at the temples and piled on top of her head in a neat ball. She found me with clear blue eyes, almost translucent, that seemed to have caught the ripples of the summer fjord.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “You must be Johanne?”
I bowed and curtsied to her all at once, mumbling something about eggcups.
“I’m Julie Ihlen,” she said, “the admiral’s wife. Let me help you.” She came to join me by the dresser and gently rested her hand on the middle of my back. “There’s so much to remember in a new job, isn’t there, dear?” she said. “But don’t worry, you’ll soon find your way.”
Her voice was soothing and her tone was a treat, like whipped cream. Not even Thomas spoke to me in that way.
“I’m told you usually pick strawberries in the summer?” she said, opening a drawer and handing me some napkins.
“Yes,” I said. “I sell them in town.”
“Maybe you can help us in the garden as well? We have rhubarb and gooseberries and three good apple trees at the side. No strawberries, though.”
“I can bring you some seedlings from the forest,” I said. “They catch on well in the right earth. Like the ones in—”
I cut the words Munch’s garden from my throat and busied myself with the napkins, folding them into triangles and laying them on the plates.
A clock on the wall chimed, and Fru Ihlen glanced at her wristwatch.
“I’ll get the girls,” she said. “We’ll be ready shortly. The eggcups are in the cupboard, on the right.”
I finished the table and hurried back to the kitchen to find Fru Berg boiling eggs and brewing coffee on the stove.
“The hens have been generous,” she said. “Here, come spoon these out. I’ll get the bread.”
She disappeared into the larder and clattered around, gathering condiments and preserves. I could hear her heaving and cursing as she stretched to the high shelves, asking questions that had no answers. Where’s she put the…? What the devil did she do with the…? Now where does she keep those…?
She reappeared carrying a tray laden with jars and silver dishes.
“Put the eggs in that bowl and cover them with a cloth,” she said, “and bring the coffee.”
With my hands full, I followed her back to the dining room. At the door she cleared her throat, then elbowed her way in. When I saw the family gathered at the table, I hid behind Fru Berg, grateful for her size.
Admiral Ihlen was sitting at the head of the table. He was a lot older than his wife and had receding gray hair that was slicked back over his strong brow, and wild whiskers that grew straight out from his jaw like an untamed hedge. He was a mature version of the man in the photograph who had watched me yawn. I noticed that in life his eyes were deep and kindly, like the warm milky coffee my father would make and secretly heap with sugar.
One of the daughters had her back to us as we entered the room. She was dainty and poised, but I could not see her face. When I looked up to see where I should place the coffee, I caught the eye of the other daughter on the opposite side of the table. She had red hair and clear blue eyes like Fru Ihlen’s, but she had her father’s strong eyebrows. She was unmistakably the girl from the dance, Tullik Ihlen. The flame of her wild hair lit the room and gave her pale complexion a yellowish tinge that made her eyes all the more striking. She smiled when she saw me and at once I tried to hide my face. Did she recognize me from the night before? Had she seen me dancing with Thomas, kissing him in full view of all the Kristiania guests? A thread of my mother’s anxiety began to creep up my throat.
“Oh yes, everyone, this is Johanne,” Fru Ihlen said. “She’s come to help us for the summer.”
Fru Berg stood aside, and I was exposed to the Ihlens’ collective scrutiny. Caroline swiveled around in her chair. Her face was also a mixture of her parents’, but her features were sharper, more pointed than Tullik’s. It was clea
rly Fru Ihlen, rather than the admiral, that dominated their daughters’ looks: the slightly slanted blue eyes, the straight nose, and the pouty lips. All four of them looked at me, and my skin flushed.
“You live in Åsgårdstrand?” said the admiral, his rigid face unchanging.
“Yes, sir,” I said, putting the coffee down beside him.
“Sandy-beach or pebbled-beach side?” he said.
“Pebbled-beach side,” I said. “Up on the hill opposite the Jørgensen farm.”
“I’d like to live there,” Tullik said, her eyes dancing with mischief, “among all those painters.”
Caroline turned back to face her sister.
“What would you want with the painters in Åsgårdstrand?” she said, straightening the cutlery on either side of her plate.
Tullik didn’t answer but rolled her eyes as she helped herself to a slice of bread.
“I’m sure the views of the fjord are very inspiring from up there,” Admiral Ihlen said. “Some of Herr Heyerdahl’s landscapes are captivating.”
“I prefer his portraits,” Caroline said.
Fru Berg turned and looked at me. I stepped back toward the door, hoping the conversation would move swiftly away from Herr Heyerdahl and his portraits.
“Like the children he paints,” Caroline continued. “The girls in the lane are very sweet.”
Tullik was pressing a slab of butter into her bread, stabbing at it with her knife to make it more malleable.
“They don’t have the same depth as his paintings, though,” she said.
I gripped the sides of my dress. It was the way she said his.
“Whose paintings?” Fru Ihlen said.
Tullik continued to engrave the butter.
“Tullik? Whose paintings?”
Caroline shifted in her seat and flapped her napkin out by her side.
“Tullik,” Fru Ihlen pressed, “whose paintings?”
Tullik’s eyes were fixed on the butter. Now that it was more pliable, she began to spread it haphazardly around her bread. Then I remembered his hands from the night before, swirling around the page like the dancers on the floor, capturing the curves of Tullik’s body and the wispy strands of her loose hair.
“Munch’s,” I whispered.
Before I even realized the name had escaped my lips, Fru Berg was waving her arms and jostling me out of the room.
“Nils dear, do pass the coffee,” Fru Ihlen said, shooting Caroline warning signals with her sloping eyes. Seemingly unaware of the unfolding drama, Tullik continued to paint her bread with butter.
Fru Berg was trembling when we reached the kitchen.
“You can’t mention that painter’s name in this house,” she whispered. “What were you thinking? You don’t speak of him at home, do you? What makes you think you can speak of him here?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for it to come out. It’s just that Miss Tullik—”
“Miss Tullik nothing,” she snapped. “You’ll do well to say nothing, speak only when you’re spoken to, and get on with your work in silence.”
She banished me from the house and sent me out to tend to the hens. I was to clean out the coop, change their water, freshen up their hay, and feed them. The job was hot and smelly. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the stench of stale droppings grew ever more potent as I raked and scrubbed, hunched over in the coop with the hens clucking and pecking at my feet. I made trips to the well, ducking in and out of the cage, careful not to let any of the birds escape. The mixture of water and vinegar I was using stung my nostrils and made my eyes smart.
Within minutes, the matter was settled. I hated cleaning. Stuck inside the coop with Dorothea and Ingrid pecking at my fingers, I noticed the scratches on my arms from Munch’s garden. I didn’t mind those scrapes. I would have suffered any amount of stings and thorns and scratches to pick my fruit. I yearned for those bushes and cursed my mother for sending me to the Ihlens, for trying to turn me into something I was not and would never be.
As my thoughts escalated, I became more aggressive with the rake and found myself slamming the pail until the water sloshed over the edges. Lost in my anger, I almost hit a hen with the edge of a prong when a voice came chiming through the cage.
“He painted you, didn’t he?”
I dropped the rake and smacked my hand to my chest. My heart was pounding in my neck.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
When I looked up, I saw Tullik leaning against the coop.
“Miss Ihlen!” I said. “I don’t think I’m supposed to… I mean, I should really be getting on with this; I’m nearly done.”
“I’ll help you,” she said. “They’re fine girls, aren’t they? Aren’t you, Ingrid,” she muttered to the hen. “Aren’t you a fine girl?” She lifted the latch and climbed inside with me, gathering up the clucking hens in her arms, kissing them and lowering them back down again like children. “Here, pass me that scrubbing brush,” she said, reaching for the bucket.
“Are you meant to do this?” I said, confused. “I still don’t know the rules. I’m sorry.”
Tullik Ihlen laughed a voluptuous, throaty giggle.
“Rules! Who cares about the rules? Who even makes the stupid things?” she said.
She unbuttoned her lower sleeves and rolled them up, delighting in the job that was the cause of my misery. She was wearing no apron or overalls, but she got down onto her hands and knees in her fine clothes and scrubbed the ground with the brush.
“I used to do all of this myself, when I was a little girl,” she said. “I always kept hens. It was my job to look after them. I fed them and cleaned them and collected the eggs in the morning. It gave me such a sense of pride, such satisfaction. I don’t see why I shouldn’t do it now, but I don’t know what happened. I turned twenty and all of a sudden everything I enjoyed was taken from me. Now I’m expected to sit quietly, say nothing, and have no interests whatsoever. You’re so lucky, Johanne, you still have your freedom.”
I raked a pile of fresh straw to the side and turned to face her. I wanted to weep.
“I love fruit the way you love these hens,” I said, drawing a strawberry shape in the dirt with a prong of the rake and filling in one side of it to make a shadow.
Tullik gazed up at me with her exotic eyes.
“You’re the Strawberry Girl, aren’t you?” she said. “Herr Heyerdahl painted you—I heard Fru Berg say.”
“I was just a little girl then.”
“I hope I didn’t offend you. I mean, what I said about Herr Heyerdahl’s paintings.”
“No.” I laughed. “I agree with you. He paints wonderful pictures, but they don’t make me feel the same way as…”
“As Munch’s?” Tullik’s expression changed the moment she mentioned his name. She wiped her brow with her forearm and squinted up at the sun that was beating on my back. “Do you know him?” she said.
“A little.”
“Has he painted you too?”
“Goodness. No!” I said. “I’m sorry about earlier, Miss Ihlen. I don’t know why I said his name. Out loud. I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” she said. “I don’t care. It’s the rest of them. His name is like poison, salt in a wound in this family, after what happened.”
I didn’t understand what she meant but, sensing our conversation had already gone too far, I didn’t dare to ask. I laid the rest of the fresh hay and shifted to the other side of the coop. Tullik finished her scrubbing and threw the brush into the pail. We both bowed out of the cage and crossed the garden to the well to wash our hands. Tullik grabbed the pump and invited me to wash first. I rubbed my hands together under the cool water and splashed my dirty face and neck. When we swapped, I was about to start cranking the pump when Tullik laid her hand on mine to stop me. She g
lanced over her shoulder and looked back at the house, checking the door and the spying windows.
“It’s my sister,” she whispered. “She had an affair with him. They think I don’t know.”
4
CRIMSON
We are here to forget everything that borders on yellow or blue. We are to imagine an absolutely pure red, like fine carmine suffered to dry on white porcelain.
—THEORY OF COLOURS, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The room in my head was the one place in my life that adhered to Mother’s rules, being light and airy and free from clutter. If I wasn’t out roaming the forests where my mind was free to wander with me, I would collect the thoughts that sparked intrigue and sought solutions, siphon them off to that room, and store them there like insects in a jar. I’d return to them later, picking them up where I left off, the way women did with knitting.
My morning at the Ihlens’ house quickly filled that place in my head. Fru Berg kept me busy, and each fresh task required double the concentration. I was made to polish silver, mop floors, dust shelves, air linens, and help prepare food. Every second was laden with the fear that I would make another mistake. I had already offended the Ihlens by breathing his name out loud, and I could not afford to flounder again. My mind was taxed to the limit, and any thoughts of Caroline Ihlen and Edvard Munch were quickly banished to be dealt with later.
Unaccustomed as I was to the inner world of the upper classes, the pattern of their day was wearisome to follow. The admiral was by far the easiest, busy with his papers and business affairs in his room at the back of the house. I only ever heard the rumble of his voice when the family gathered to eat, and once when he called out to Fru Berg to take a letter to the post office. Twice I took him coffee and delivered the pot and the cup in silence. His dark and regimental appearance unnerved me, but he was never impolite.
The ladies’ presence was far more obvious. Tullik and Caroline argued incessantly. Tullik was disconnected from the rhythms of the house and only gave in to her mother’s demands under duress. Most of the time she seemed bored, sweeping listlessly about the house, wandering after the cat, reading books, and tending the flowers in the garden. Caroline was staid and reserved and enjoyed finding fault with her sister. I could hear them shouting upstairs, then there would be shrieking, and the two of them would tear after each other like hot-tempered children, forgetting they’d ever grown up.