by Lisa Strømme
“Edvard!” she called. “I have to go now.”
“Let me take you home,” he said, scrambling across the pebbles.
They walked behind me to the edge of the woods. Something sank in my chest as I left Fjugstad and returned to Borre a housemaid once again, Tullik’s employee. In her dress I felt like a fraud. I forged on ahead, up to the church, and waited by the ancient doors. The church made me nervous, as if it had seen Thomas’s hands on me and already knew my sin. I waited until Tullik and Munch were closer, then meandered across the road to the sleeping house. The windows were dark and the house looked vacant, although I had the feeling that someone was watching me. Tullik and Munch lingered at the church, sharing whispers and kisses, pretending to leave, then clinging to each other again and again.
I let myself in at the back door and hurried up to my room. With a guilty pleasure, I hid behind Milly’s plush curtains and watched the new lovers as they prolonged their good-bye. I didn’t know why they intrigued me. Perhaps it was the feeling that Tullik, with all her fire and pluckiness, held the key to unraveling the mystery of him.
I was already in bed when she floated into my room. “Johanne,” she whispered, “are you asleep?”
“No.” I smiled. “Come in.”
She climbed into bed with me and sank her head into the pillow. Her hair spread around us like ribbons and brought with it a waft of the fresh night air.
“He’s going to paint me,” she said, turning to face me, propping her head on her hand and slipping her arm around my waist.
“I have no doubt,” I said, remembering how he had sketched her and studied every curve of her body at the dance.
“He said he would start tonight, under the moon while the sky is clear. Oh, Johanne!” She gasped. “He kissed me!” She rolled onto her back and pulled her hair out to the sides, dragging her fingers through it repeatedly. “He kissed me,” she said again, abandoning her hair and touching her lips, feeling the kisses that still lingered there. “And he touched me,” she said, taking my hand and holding it to her breast. “Here.” She stared up at the ceiling and was silent. “There’s a sadness about him,” she said after a while.
“Yes,” I said. “Something haunts him.”
“It’s a sadness I could spend a lifetime loving but never be able to appease,” she said.
Although she had a sense that Munch’s sadness could not be loved away, I knew as we lay there staring up at the elaborate cornicing on Milly’s ceiling that nothing was going to stop Tullik from trying.
• • •
On Sunday evening I was sitting at the uneven table, picking at a speck of paint with my nail. Mother was spooning gravy over Father’s and Andreas’s potatoes. Seated at the lowest of the odd chairs, I was small again, I was the Strawberry Girl. I hid there in the Painting, allowing the conversation to match my painted age. The last thing I wanted to talk about was Tullik.
“The berries will ripen this week,” Mother said. “You can pick them on your way home and sell them at the market. They should fetch over two kroner for a pound. And don’t forget the Heyerdahls. I said you’d take them some. Oh yes, and that reminds me: Did I tell you he was entertaining the Sinful Man? Did you know that, Halvor?”
My father had lost interest at two kroner for a pound.
“Hmm?” he said, cleaning the excess gravy from his knife, wiping both sides on his potato until the silver gleamed.
“The Sinful Man! At the Heyerdahls’. Poor Christine, she must have been going mad, trying to keep him away from the children.”
Andreas wiped his mouth with his sleeve to cover a smile, and I attacked another fleck of paint with my thumbnail.
“He was painting the children?” Father said, only hazily following the story.
“I certainly hope not,” Mother said. “I turned away when I saw him. In our garden! Think about that, Halvor. I hope they didn’t let him inside. The house could be infected by now—by his filth. The doctors do warn against it, you know, Halvor? I’ll have to give it a proper good clean when the autumn comes.”
Father slid another potato back and forth through a few drops of gravy to clean his plate.
“Anyway, I walked away,” Mother continued. “Of course I did. And who should I meet coming up the hill but this one, with her mistress.”
“Tullik’s not my mistress,” I said, jumping from the Painting, leaving the little girl behind me.
“Oh, really?” she said, welcoming me into the conversation like a sparring partner. “So what is she then?”
“She’s my friend,” I said.
“Ha! Did you hear that, Halvor? Miss Ihlen is Johanne’s friend. Don’t you dare, my girl. Don’t you dare!”
“Don’t dare what?” I said.
“Halvor!” Mother screeched, her face flaring hot and furious. “Did you hear that? The cheek! Tell her, Halvor! Tell her!”
Father’s plate was clean. His fork was licked; his knife was licked. Every drop of gravy was gone, and there was nothing left to polish. He slotted his knife into his fork, making a triangle of defeat on his plate.
“Tell her!” Mother yelled.
“I think what your mother means, Johanne, is that it’s probably safer for you to know your place with the Ihlens. You are a housemaid: no more, no less. There’s a line between employee and employer that should never be crossed, for when it is, a multitude of complications will arise.”
I thought about Ragna and the turpentine, and the sting returned to my hands.
“Tullik’s friendly toward me, that’s all,” I said.
“And it isn’t Tullik,” Mother raged. “It’s Miss Ihlen, to you.”
“Just be careful, dear,” Father said, picking up his empty plate. “Andreas, dishes.”
We cleared the table in silence. Mother continued to fume, taking out her rage on the table, setting about it so vigorously I thought she would rub away the specks of paint and smooth the wood down to the grain.
“Not on the Lord’s day, Sara,” Father said, returning to the table with a pot of coffee and his pipe. “Not on the Lord’s day.”
Andreas and I escaped to our room and closed the door.
“I’m on the bottom,” I said as he dived onto the bottom bunk.
“No, you’re not. You don’t live here,” he said playfully.
“You want me to wake you up before dawn,” I said, “squeaking about on that bed? Come on.” I tapped the top bunk with my hand. “Up you go.”
“Gah!” Andreas stood up reluctantly. As he walked to the end of the bunk, his foot caught on a loose floorboard, and he tripped. He flew at me, and I caught him in my arms.
“Damned thing,” he said, half angry, half laughing. “That’s the third time I’ve done that this week.”
“Can’t we nail it?” I said.
“Too big a job,” he said, kneeling on the floor. “Look at it, they’re all loose.”
One by one he lifted the floorboards from the middle of the room and rattled them all the way across to the window.
“We’ll just have to be careful,” I said, ruffling his hair. “I’ll get a mat to cover it.”
After everything that had happened since my employment at the Ihlens’, I ached for my brother, for his youth and his simplicity. He kicked off his boots and climbed to the top bunk. I changed into my nightgown and crawled into the hard bed below him. Above us the Andersens’ baby cried.
Andreas wriggled around in his bed and punched his pillow. “Is it true?” he said when he finally settled.
“Is what true?”
“That Miss Ihlen posed for Munch, on the beach?”
“Where did you hear that?” I said.
“Markus and Petter said they saw her”—his head appeared over the side of the bunk—“and they said she was…you know?”
“No, I don’t kno
w,” I said. “And don’t believe everything Markus and Petter tell you.”
“But is it true?” he said, grinning at me.
I found it hard to conceal anything from my brother. We had shared too much, suffered collectively at the hands of our mother for too many years, but this was a rumor I had to quash, for Tullik’s sake and mine.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, “but I doubt it. Those boys have vivid imaginations, that’s all.”
“But they said they saw her after too, with wet hair; they said it must have been her.”
“Let them think what they want,” I said, sounding exactly like Tullik.
“Did Munch paint her, though?” he said.
“How would I know?”
“Just that you talk to him, don’t you?”
“No!”
“You do sometimes.”
“Sometimes. Hardly ever,” I lied.
Munch and I had met many times before: along the lanes, on the beach, and in the forest where I searched for fruit and herbs from morning to night. I trailed him, shy and gawky, intrigued by the paintings he left out in the open, the way they spoke to me. Sometimes he’d see me sketching close by and come offer words of advice. He never sounded like the other adults, though. He spoke as an artist—of shadow and light, color and perspective—and he expected me to understand.
“I won’t tell anyone you know,” Andreas said.
“Tell anyone what?” I said blankly. “How can you tell them nothing?”
He rolled back onto his bed with a grumble.
“Thomas was here yesterday,” he said.
“And?”
“Brought Mother some fish, but she told him she didn’t need it. Then she argued with Father because he couldn’t understand why she’d turned down a good bit of cod.”
“Did he say anything?” I said as guilt crept across my chest: the forest, his hands, his proposal.
“Who?” Andreas sounded bored.
“Thomas.”
“Anything like what? Like, May I marry your daughter?”
I kicked the bottom of Andreas’s bunk. “Stop it!”
“You will marry him, though, won’t you, Johanne?”
“How do I know who I’ll marry?” I said.
“You can marry crazy-man Munch, for all I care,” Andreas said and twisted over in his bunk, making the slats creak.
He continued to twist and turn for most of the night, squeaking and creaking like a wheel in need of grease. Sleep held her hand out to me for hours at a time, but I could never seem to grasp her for long enough to sink into a dream. The morning found me quickly, and just as I teetered on the cusp of my hundredth attempt at sleep, Mother was in the doorway calling me to awaken while Andreas snored on.
“He’s been doing that all night,” I whispered, tripping on the loose floorboard. “And that bed squeaks at the slightest movement.”
“Stop complaining, Johanne. I expect you’ll sleep tonight after a good day’s work.”
I had not told my mother about Milly’s bedroom or my luxurious sheets and curtains, how I slept like a queen at the Ihlens’. If Mother had known, she would no doubt have complained to the Ihlens’ about it herself. I wondered how long it would be until Fru Berg started talking.
I dressed hurriedly. When Mother returned to the stove, I slid my hands beneath the mattress and retrieved the book. I stroked its gray canvas cover and ran my fingers over Goethe’s name on the spine before casting it into my pocket.
“Remember to look for strawberries this week,” Mother said, pushing a cup of coffee at me as we sat at the table. “If you get your jobs done quick enough, you might be able to get to the market, or at least sell door-to-door.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“More guests are arriving this week. The Horten and the Jarlsberg are running double service: eleven forty-five and ten past six. The hotels are filling up, so there’ll be plenty of buyers. Come on now—hurry up, we don’t want you to be late.”
I picked my boots up at the door but didn’t put them on. I walked faster barefoot and wanted to feel the cool rub of the stones along the beach as the sun came up.
Outside, the morning belonged to the birds, mainly gulls, gliding and squawking. They wheeled over the bay, scouring the beach for morsels of food. Hooked beaks and black eyes crossed overhead as I ran down to the shore, searching for new pebbles and shells among the rocks that parried the waves.
The pungent tang of the sea air laced my nose and throat as I followed the curve of the coastline and headed toward the woods. Hardly a soul moved at this hour: a few fishermen pushing off by the pier, a man loading bait under the watchful eye of the birds. I passed them without a sound, hopping expertly over the rocks. I spied a terra-cotta rock speckled with unusual white markings and stopped to pick it up. It was coarse and heavy, nestled among gray pebbles and white stones. I put it in my pocket and moved on.
The beach diminished as I approached Fjugstad forest. Trees and shrubs grew thick on my left and forced me to the water. I paddled in the cold tide as it came to meet me. The beach was sandier now, and slimy clusters of brown seaweed stuck to the soles of my feet and lodged between my toes. Clumps of thick grass sprouted through the sand, and soon I was at the path that led into the forest.
I was stamping my feet at the base of a tree trunk when I became aware of a presence, a subtle change in the air around me. When I looked back toward the sea, I saw a man sitting on a large boulder further along the shore. It was Munch. Something called me to him. A sadness sprang from nowhere and plunged through my chest. I thought I might weep. It would not be right to go to him, although that’s what my body was urging me to do. My feet wanted to run, my arms wanted to reach out, but I had to resist and dig my toes firmly into the moss and twigs of the forest bed.
His very presence held me spellbound, and I was rooted to the spot like the trees that surrounded me. I kept looking at him with longing and pain, unable to break away. Then, with a swift twist, he turned and caught me looking at him. His reaction was not what I had expected. He threw me a wave, and I waved back, then he beckoned me to him, and I began to run.
He jumped from the rock and came springing toward me, sketchbook in hand. He was not wearing a hat, and his wavy hair was messy, blown about by the sea breeze. I did not know how long he had been sitting there, but I’d often seen him in strange places at an odd hour, and it was possible he’d been there all night. His expression was determined and serious.
“Johanne!” he called, still some paces away. “I was just thinking about you.”
I stopped running and waited for him to reach me.
“And here you are! Have you ever experienced that? You think about someone and then a few minutes later they appear? It happens to me often. Do you think there’s something in it? That we have a kind of mystical power? Do you think that’s possible?”
His sad, heavy eyes fell on me, almost begging for the answers. The ache in my chest expanded. I smiled but felt horribly simple.
“I felt you before I saw you,” I said honestly.
“Then you have it too.” He nodded and seemed reassured by my answer.
I saw beauty in his face. It was in the slope of his somber blue-gray eyes and the curve of his voluptuous lips; the perfect Cupid’s bow that sat below his mustache and the strong cleft in his chin where each side of his jaw met. He was arresting: masculine yet vulnerable.
“Are you going to the Ihlens’?” he said, pulling the familiar sketchbook from under his arm.
“Yes.”
“Would you take a picture to Tullik?”
“Of course.”
He took a loose page out of the pad, and it flapped in the breeze.
“I’ll roll it up,” he said before I had a chance to see it. “Come, I’ll walk to the church with you.”
We str
ode through the woods, and I was comfortable with him, barefoot, my boots hanging from my hand.
Munch didn’t make much small talk. He was either silent or talked in an endless flow of thought that came pouring from him as though he had been saving it all up. This gush of thought was like a spiritual bleeding, a catharsis it was impossible to take part in. All I could do was listen.
“It’s not finished yet,” he said, handing me the sketch, “but I’d rather paint a thousand decent unfinished pictures than a single bad completed one. Wouldn’t you? So many artists these days think a picture is only finished when they have filled in as many details as they possibly can and it’s all glossy and neat, covered in a brown gravy glaze, but one single brushstroke can be seen as a completed work of art if it is done with feeling. More details, added to make something more realistic, only make a picture false. What could be more real than a feeling? There’s nothing more realistic than that, is there?”
His hushed voice became excitable and feverish as he spoke, his hands waved around as though he was painting, even though there was no brush or canvas, only the visions in his mind.
“One must paint true observations—the true feelings in what is being painted. You see things at different moments with different eyes; differently in the morning than in the evening. The way you see also depends on your mood, doesn’t it?”
I knew his questions were not directed at me but at himself, so I stopped trying to find answers and merely listened to his chain of thought.
“Moods change. Thoughts change,” he said. “The outer life and the inner life are connected. Our outer world changes according to our inner feelings. That is what I must convey. Just as Dostoevsky penetrates into the realms of the soul with his words, so I must penetrate the same realms in my art.”
We had reached the doors of the church, and the sun had begun its climb, its forehead peeping up over the trees in the distance.
“I must go now,” I said.
“Can you tell her I’m here?” he said. “I’ll wait, under these linden trees, or in the woods. I’ll wait.”
“I’ll tell her, yes. Good-bye, Munch.”