by Lisa Strømme
Afraid of the garden. Afraid to go out there. I hear their voices. Deep and dark. Laughter rough. Scratches like sand. I hear their glasses. The chime. The knell. Blue. Cyan. They come to me.
In paint I hide.
A man is behind me. Humming a tune.
In paint I hide.
“Are you going to hide yourself away in here all afternoon, Johanne?”
I circled my brush in the jar of turpentine before turning.
He sucked at a pipe. On his breath, alcohol.
“I like it in here,” I said. “I like painting.”
“She’s a beauty. Haunted. And with her back toward the sun? Is she hiding from something too?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just practicing. Munch lets me borrow his things.”
“I like it.”
The man had an extraordinarily long nose, and his hair was receding, not even starting until some unseen midpoint high up on the top of his head. His pointed chin was inclined as he studied my painting. Scrutinized it.
“I’m sorry, Herr—”
“Delius, Fritz Delius.”
He spoke Norwegian through a thick accent, clipping my language in places, rounding it and hollowing it out in others.
“Perhaps Tullik and I should be getting back?” I said.
“Oh, nonsense! You’ll stay a while longer. Let me get you a glass. Something to help you hear the notes.”
He held his arm to the studio door, where a shaft of light was pouring in. I stepped into the light where the motes were dancing, and he followed me out.
“Jens!” he called to a man in the garden. “Johanne needs a drink. Worked up a thirst. Been busy painting.”
Jens, a small man with a dark beard and mustache, disappeared into Munch’s hut. Munch and Tullik were sitting with a third friend at a table in the middle of the garden. He was an odd little Danish man with a prominent nose, an inwardly sloping chin, tiny ears, and a high wave of dark hair. He moved his arms elaborately as he spoke.
“Come, Johanne,” Delius said. “Come sit at the table. We were talking about light.”
Tullik was pinned to Munch’s arm. Barely moving, she listened intently to the conversation.
“He’s stealing my play, Delius,” the Danish man said.
“Surely not, Helge! The man’s a painter.”
“The idea I had, Dansen Gaar, The Dance Goes On!” the Dane continued. “My character, the artist, he says, ‘My picture shall be called The Dance of Life! There will be a couple dancing in flowing clothes on a clear night through an avenue of black cypresses and red rose bushes. The earth’s glorious blood will gleam and blaze in the roses, Claire. He holds her tightly against himself. He is deeply serious and happy. There will be something festal about it. He will hold her to him so firmly that she is half sunk into him. She will be frightened—frightened—and something will awake inside her. Strength is streaming into her from him. And in front of them is the abyss.’”
“Life’s dance! What a marvelous idea!” Delius said. “I can hear the overture already. Send your play to me, Rode. I would like to read it.”
“Does anyone know where the absinthe is?” Jens said, returning from the hut.
“Here,” Munch said, lifting a bottle from under his chair.
“Well, fill her up then. She’s empty.”
Jens handed Munch a glass, and he poured a green syrupy liquid to the brim.
“There, Johanne,” Delius said. “Down the hatch.”
I waved the glass away, but he insisted.
“Come on, Johanne,” Tullik said. “It’ll help you paint.”
I took the glass from Herr Delius and sipped at the surface. The green liquid passed through my lips, and I gulped it down quickly as the strong aniseed taste coated my tongue and snaked down my throat. My eyes fired, and I forced my mouth to smile.
“There!” Delius applauded. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
“So, Munch,” Jens said, ushering me to the table. “What’s this? You’re painting a dance now?”
“I have some ideas. Not just a dance, but an entire frieze. A frieze of life. A study of life and love and death.”
“I can hear it spinning, climbing, and falling,” Delius said, sitting down beside me, “and it must be played out here, in this beautiful landscape of yours. Here, in this dramatic country. Deep in the mountains and the fjords. How I wish I could stay here forever.” He lifted a glass and gulped down the green aniseed liquid. “Here in Norway, my second home. Or is it my third? Or my fourth?”
“England is your first home,” Jens said. “Or is it Germany?”
“Or Florida, perhaps?” said Delius. “Perhaps America is my home?”
“But you are headed to France next,” Munch said. “Is that not home for you too?”
“Then let the world be my home,” Delius said, “and Norway—let Norway be my soul.”
The drinking continued, and the conversation blurred. From the scraps I understood, I deduced that Fritz Delius was an English composer of German descent. Munch had met him through mutual friends in Paris, and from the way Munch referred to Delius’s letters and postcards, it seemed they had maintained a regular correspondence. Helge Rode, the Dane, was a poet and writer. The occupation of the third man, Jens Thiis, remained unknown to me, but he followed their thoughts and seemed to know a lot about art, quoting the names of foreign painters I had never heard of. They were all friends with someone called Gauguin, whose name was mentioned frequently.
Their conversation regarding Rode’s play and the idea surrounding the dance of life continued sporadically throughout the afternoon. I held on to it, without mentioning that the same concept had just occurred to me the day before. Poetic, soulful thoughts about the earth’s blood, then Munch’s own blood sinking into the earth and fertilizing the flowers circled the table like prayers, then splintered into coarse jokes about prostitutes in the back streets of Paris.
I followed the metronomic tick of their voices. Dulled by the absinthe, I tuned in and out according to topic and volume. One particular wave of sedation was broken by Munch.
“This force, flowing between man and woman,” he was saying, “you have it the wrong way around, Rode. It is not the man who holds the woman tightly, but the woman who holds him. The woman clasps the man, grabs onto him. And the abyss that lies before him, it is the abyss into which one is thrown by the arms of love.”
Tullik smiled at him proudly, not quite understanding the warning in his words.
The sun’s rays intensified as the afternoon wore on, and I withered and dizzied in the heat. My eyes saw double, my lungs were tight, my stomach nauseous from the drink. We had been there for hours, against my will, against my judgment. Tullik had forced me here under the cover of another lie. I was about to drop to my knees and beg her to leave when Munch stood up abruptly and ordered us all to go.
“I must work,” he said, scraping his chair back and slamming his glass down on the table with a loud smack. “You can go now. All of you.”
At first his friends laughed. Helge poured himself another drink.
“No, Helge. I must work and cannot if I am not left in peace. Please, leave now.”
The three drunk men peeled themselves from the table. Delius wobbled unsteadily to his feet.
“We hear you, we hear you,” he said, patting Munch on the shoulder as he staggered away. Helge Rode and Jens Thiis followed ruggedly behind him. The three of them wandered off down the garden, commenting incoherently on the canvases that lined their path.
When they had gone, Tullik sidled up to Munch and slipped her arm into his. She stretched her neck up and puckered her lips for a kiss.
“You too,” Munch said, pulling his arm free. “I must work. Don’t you see that? Go!”
Tullik stumbled away from him as though she had bee
n slapped.
“Edvard, darling…won’t you let me—”
“Go!” he shouted.
“Edvard?”
“Get out!”
Exasperated, he turned from her. He had to escape. Her presence was contaminating, suffocating.
“But…Edvard?”
I reached for Tullik’s arm and gently goaded her down the hill.
“It’s time to go home now, Tullik,” I said. “We’ve been gone all day. Your parents will be getting worried.”
“What if this is my home now?” she said, yanking her arm away from me and going after him.
“It isn’t, though, Tullik, is it?”
“What if it is?” she said. “What if I can do whatever I please? What if I can go wherever I like—be anyone I like? What if my home is right here, with Edvard and our friends?”
“Come, Tullik,” I said. “He needs to work.”
“What would you know about it?” she said spitefully. “You’re only a maid.”
Her words stung. She was drunk.
“Tullik, please, leave him.”
Munch was setting up his easel and laying out paints in his newspaper parcels. Engrossed in his process, he had already forgotten we were there.
“Tullik,” I whispered, “it’s time to go home.”
She gazed up at him, watching him, willing him to lift his sad eyes and see her. He squirted some colors into his palette and hooked it around his thumb, then lifted a large canvas onto the easel. It was the man on the bridge below the swirling skies. Munch’s brush dabbed at the wavy, unsettled waters of the fjord. Immersed in his paint, he was gone.
• • •
My fingers were stained with jade-green oil paint. I didn’t notice it until we got home. My main concern had been getting Tullik to her room without anyone seeing she was drunk. I couldn’t use turpentine, so I found soap in the kitchen and took a scrubbing brush to my hands. I scraped at my skin until my fingers were a deep shade of purple. But the paint held.
I returned to my work under Ragna’s vicious glare. She saw the specks of green on my skin and raised her eyebrows. Her thin lips curved down. She was disgusted with me, repulsed at my behavior: stepping over the lines, neglecting my duties, and now this, painting.
“Miss Tullik missed dinner again. Why?” she said, her eyes dark with interrogation.
“She is tired,” I said. “She retired to her room for a nap.”
“There’s a smell of aniseed in the air,” she said.
“Is there?”
“Where were you today?”
“Åsgårdstrand.”
“Where in Åsgårdstrand?”
“Seeing Tullik’s friends. Ladies from the city.”
“You don’t fool me,” Ragna said, taking a knife from the drawer and tightening her grip on the handle. “I know where you go. It would only take a word to the admiral. Fru Ihlen, no, she could not bear the shame of it, but the admiral, he will stamp it out before its evil spreads. You start advising Miss Tullik. Advise her against this path, Johanne, or soon she will lose everything. They won’t suffer this a second time.”
“Why would she listen to me? I’m only a housemaid.”
Ragna didn’t say anything else. She took a dishcloth and wiped the blade of the knife with it, sliding the serrated edge between her thumb and fingers, perilously close to the skin. I did not look at her again, but felt her black eyes lashing my back as I left the kitchen and climbed the stairs.
Tullik was lying on her bed facedown with her head and shoulders hanging off the edge, staring at the floor. She had taken Munch’s sketches out from the back of the wardrobe and scattered them about the floor. Mermaid was unraveled. A book at either end held it flat.
“Tullik, what are you doing?” I said, gathering up the pictures. “Anyone could come in at any minute. Do you want them all to know you have these?”
“What if I do?” she said.
She rolled back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. Her eyes were two dark wells of gray.
“He does love me, you know, Johanne. It’s not what you think.” She started picking at her thumb cuticle again. “He’s an artist. He needs room, that’s all.”
“Of course,” I said.
“But then, does he? I mean, does he know what love is? Does he know how to love? He needs me to show him—that’s it. We will go back again tomorrow.”
“Is that really a good idea, Tullik? If he’s working?”
She sat up on her bed and leaned against the wall, digging her nail into her cuticle and peeling back the skin.
“I can show him better than Milly did,” she said, biting at her thumb. “She knows nothing about him. Look at her,” she said, pointing at Munch’s sketch of The Voice, Tullik herself in the woods. “Look at her, with her dark eyes and her hands clasped behind her back. She didn’t know how to seduce him. She didn’t know how to love him, did she, Johanne? What does Milly know about life? Nothing. Look at her, hiding in those trees, trying to enchant him. And there, in the water. What was she thinking? She can’t love him. Not the way I do. Not with her soul. My soul and his are connected, don’t you see that, Johanne? Joined together.” Her thumb was bleeding, and she sucked it clean. “It’s not me,” she said, waving at the pictures as though they were waste paper. “It’s not me. It’s not me!”
“Tullik, Tullik,” I said, gathering up the scrolls and returning them to the wardrobe. “Of course it’s you. He said so himself. And they look like you. Here, in the woods—I was there. I saw you, exactly as he sketched you. And here, in the water. I was there that day. What is this all about?”
She was crying now. Pulling at her hair. Tugging. Twisting. Making loops around her bloody thumbs.
“You’re hurting yourself, Tullik,” I said. “Won’t you lie down and get some rest?”
“I will go to him again tomorrow. You will come,” she said. “You will see how he loves me, just as I love him. He doesn’t love Milly, he loves me.”
“Shh now,” I said, closing the wardrobe door, then easing her down to her pillow. “You must rest.”
“He does love me, doesn’t he, Johanne?”
“I’m sure he does, Tullik.”
She slumped on her side and finally released her hacked thumbs from her own onslaught.
She frightened me. She was just as I was painting her, moving away from the sun and into the dark unknown, falling into the abyss that Rode and Munch had spoken of.
• • •
It was late morning when she found me in the garden, beating the rugs from the parlor.
“Are you ready?” she said, tying a wide-brimmed straw hat in place with a bow under her chin.
“Tullik, I’m busy,” I said. “I have all my jobs from yesterday, and Fru Berg needs help with the laundry today. She’s doing the beds.”
“It can wait,” she said. “All of that can wait. It’s not important, is it?”
“It is to your mother and father. They hired me to do it.”
“But you must come. I’ve told Mother we’re going to the beach.”
“When am I to get my chores done?” I said.
“You hate your chores.”
“That’s not the point.”
“But you are my housemaid, so you must do as I say,” she said, reaching for my hand. She was trying to be playful, but I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted to warn her about him. How could I make her understand? He needed space to work. Another visit now would distract him too much. He needed time to develop the motif.
“He will be working,” I whispered.
“So I will let him work.”
“But he needs peace to work. You don’t—”
“I don’t what?” she said. “I don’t understand? Why? Because I’m not a painter? Because I’m not a painter, like you? Is that
why I don’t understand?”
“No, Tullik,” I said. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then get ready,” she said. “I’m waiting for you.”
Fru Berg was sitting by the chicken coop. Her arms were submerged in the tin tub. The cloudy water came up past her elbows.
I tried to cross the garden unnoticed, but she caught me at the scullery door.
“What’s this? Where are you swanning off to now?”
“Miss Tullik wants me to go to Åsgårdstrand with her,” I said. “I can finish the rugs later.”
“You will finish the rugs now,” she said, her cheeks puffing and reddening.
“She’s coming with me,” Tullik said. “She’s my maid, not yours.”
“She has work to do, Miss Tullik.”
“And it will be done,” Tullik said.
“Will it be done today?”
“Of course.”
“Can you promise me that?”
“Of course,” Tullik said without a care for whether the work would be done.
My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. No matter what time we returned, I would still have to heat the irons on the stove, press the linen, beat the rugs, dust the house, and mop the floors. When would I ever sleep?
Tullik led me away like a prisoner. Fru Berg rearranged her cap and shook her head as she returned to her tub. In the kitchen, Ragna was watching us. Her black eyes followed me, and her arm circled menacingly as she mixed something in a bowl out of sight. Like a witch brewing a potion, she cursed us, smirking as she stirred, knowing that she held our fate in her arms. Ragna was catching up with us. The deceit could not continue.
13
YELLOW
This is the colour nearest the light. It appears on the slightest mitigation of light, whether by semi-transparent mediums or faint reflection from white surfaces.
—THEORY OF COLOURS, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
I picked a handful of red currants at the edge of the woods. Gleaming like marbles with a gold and crimson sheen, they were irresistible. The summer had reached its pinnacle, the height of its power, and the warm scent of flourishing fertility laced the air. In the woods I forgot about Tullik and Munch, and Ragna and Fru Berg. I saw nothing and felt nothing but nature, the rich and plentiful gifts of the forest, nothing but Åsgårdstrand, my home. Nestled in the steep hills, lit by the bright sunshine, here at the fjord’s edge the summer sang its fecund chorus.