by Lisa Strømme
Tullik marched ahead of me and did not stop until she reached Munch’s gate. He was already outside, working at three different easels. We crept around the house, and I waited at the back stairs while Tullik went to speak to him.
“Edvard, darling,” she said. “May I talk to you?”
He turned from his canvases. One was the man in despair, standing on the bridge by the fjord; another was a different version of the same motif. It was sketched out in the same dimensions, but the figure on the bridge had become more abstract. The third was not a canvas but a piece of cardboard, a sign that Munch was running out of money. On it he had sketched the outline of the motif, the wavy sky and fjord and the bridge, but in this one there was no figure at all, and the lower half of the painting was still empty. He was thinking. Developing.
“Johanne has picked red currants,” Tullik said sweetly. “Would you like some?”
“I’m working,” he said, greeting her with an awkward kiss on the cheek. “I shall have more guests on Sunday. The Krohgs are arriving. They will want to come paint.”
“Christian and Oda?” Tullik said, eyes ablaze.
“That’s right. You must meet them. You will meet them,” he said, waving his brush in the air.
“I will go inside now,” she said. “I do not want to disturb you. Johanne and I will make red currant juice—there are more berries here in your garden.”
He mumbled something incoherent. Before he returned to his paintings, he hesitated. “Johanne may paint, if she wishes.”
Tullik scowled at me.
“She’ll make juice first,” she said. “She is the maid, after all.” She snatched the red currants from my hand and climbed the stairs to the back door. “Go find more, Johanne,” she said. “Enough to make juice.”
I crossed the garden, finding a spot of shade by the hedge where the red currants hung. I took as many as I needed, gently plucking them from the bush and dropping them into my apron pocket. I stretched and bent, moving steadily down the garden. When I came to the end of the bush, I reached around to pick my last bunch, a small cluster dangling on an outer stem.
“Johanne! What are you doing in there?”
Fru Jørgensen was standing on the other side of the hedge, talking to a neighbor.
I clung to the red currants, unable to let go. My face flushed and the heat spread, my own skin becoming berry red.
“I followed the hedge. I was looking for red currants,” I said as absentmindedly as I could.
“You’re in Munch’s garden,” she said. “Does your mother know you’re in there?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I didn’t realize. I just followed the hedge.”
A voice came calling from behind me, a lick of fire I was incapable of stopping.
“She’s picking fruit for me,” Tullik said. “She’s my maid. I ordered her to do it. Is there a problem?”
Fru Jørgensen felt the slap of Tullik’s snobbish Kristiania tongue.
“No,” she said, insulted. “I own this property and lease it out to Munch. Is he aware that you’re taking fruit from his garden?”
“Perfectly aware,” Tullik said rudely. “Come, Johanne. We’re all getting thirsty.”
Fru Jørgensen was livid. Her mouth was a tight fist. There was nothing I could say in my defense, no appeal I could make to her. Word of this would reach my mother quickly, before the sun dipped in orange ripples on the fjord. In the morning I would be thrown onto the Jarlsberg and sent to Kristiania to seek salvation from this odious sin.
“I said Johanne could paint,” Munch said as we walked back up to the hut. “Your painting is there in the studio where you left it, Johanne,” he said. “It’s very good. You are painting what you feel, not what you see. This is the only way to paint. Tullik, you can make the juice. Let Johanne paint while she is here.”
I thought Tullik would attack me. She came striding up to me, hands stretched out toward my neck as if to strangle me. She reached for the cord of my apron and ripped it from my body, ruffling my hair as she pulled it off.
“Very well,” she said. “I will make the juice.”
The studio was hot, and the mix of oil paint and turpentine was suffocating, but I could not risk being seen in the garden again and set up my painting in a space at the far end of the room, safely out of sight. In my picture the woman with her back turned toward the sun was wading out through a green shadowy quagmire into a darkness I had not predicted. It had created itself when my brush touched the canvas. In contrast to the fireball of the sun, the dark green had a murky depth that sucked the woman under. She appeared to have no feet, nothing to stabilize her. I needed to work on the sky. Patches were still bare, and blank canvas peeped through the holes.
The sky was not blue. It was amber. Tinted by the color of Tullik’s hair. Tainted. Layers of copper, cooling behind the sun. Spewed like lava from a volcano, settling. Hardening. Tullik footless. Sinking beneath the smoldering air. Threads of her hair catch the sun’s fire. Their flames stretch up like fingers, joining the waves of the sky. Merging. Tying. Knotting together. Golden. Yellow. It is Tullik who links it all together: the sun, the sky, and the darkness of the earth. It is Tullik. Sinking.
She appeared at my shoulder.
“I can’t make juice,” she said. “There’s no strainer, no muslin. He doesn’t even have a bowl. And now Delius has arrived, and they’re drinking absinthe, so I doubt red currant juice will interest him.” She came to stand beside me and slipped her arm around my waist. “It’s me, isn’t it? In your picture?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said.
“It is me. I can see it,” she said. “I’m sorry I was mean earlier. I just need to be with Edvard. My heart is so heavy, my mind so insistent. I don’t want to need him, but I do. I love him like breathing. I fear I might go mad if I am not with him. We are joined, you see, Johanne. Our souls. They’re tied together like threads. Just like my hair, here,” she said, pointing at my painting. “Joined. Forever. Up there in the sky and down there in the earth.”
I put my brush down. Tullik drew me closer in.
“I must be with him, Johanne. Or I shall be mad.”
I could hear Delius laughing in the garden. The heat rose, and a spinning panic encompassed me. Long afternoons. Strange talk that made no sense. Sun. Intense. Absinthe. Dizzying. Work to be done. Mother. I must get away from him. I must get away, or I shall be mad.
“Tullik, I think we should go back. I still have all that work to do, and Fru Jørgensen has seen me here. There will be talk.”
“Oh, let them talk,” Tullik said, “if that’s what amuses them. We will stay.”
“There will be consequences, for me,” I said. “I cannot stay.”
I packed away my brushes and palette and went out into the garden. Delius and Munch were standing at the three easels.
“Johanne!” Delius called.
I flinched. Was Fru Jørgensen still there? Could she hear him? Who else could hear his deep voice calling my name? My mother? Andreas? Thomas?
“Herr Delius,” I said quietly. “May I speak with you?”
Delius smiled and strode up the garden, swinging his long arms and spilling his drink. He towered above me, and I squinted against the sun as I looked up at him.
“I need to get back,” I said, shading my eyes. “I have a lot of work to do today. But Tullik wants to stay here, with Munch. Can I ask you to see that she gets home safely? And not too late? She’s so…”
I wanted to say troubled or disturbed but stopped myself as it felt like a betrayal. But then Herr Delius seemed to say it for me, as if he knew, as if they all knew about Munch and the consequences his friendship brought.
“Poor Tullik,” he said. “He can’t possibly know the effect he’s having on her.”
“You see it too?”
“We all reac
t to his paintings, Johanne. I do. Don’t you? They affect each of us in different ways. His illness—this anxiety, this fear that he feels is so necessary to his work, and this endless search for absolute authenticity. It takes a robust soul to withstand it.”
I wiped beads of sweat from my brow and wondered if anyone could walk Munch’s path with him. Even those who loved him?
“You can trust me,” Delius said. “I will bring her home. But we will see you on Sunday, won’t we? Christian and Oda will be here.”
“It’s church on Sunday,” I said.
He continued to grin at me as if I’d made a joke.
“Then the Lord can come too,” he said.
I smiled politely and walked away, leaving Tullik, alone, in Munch’s garden.
• • •
The afternoon’s chores were long and brutal. It was dinnertime when Tullik returned. She joined the others at the table but made little conversation. She was drunk. Again.
Caroline had received a letter from Milly. It was lying open beside her plate. Fru Berg strained to read it while she laid out the bread. Caroline did not read it aloud but responded to its various points by periodically making remarks.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said, followed by, “Oh dear, the poor thing,” and later, “Of course she would.”
“Nusse, darling, do tell us Milly’s news. Don’t just keep it to yourself,” Julie said as she daintily sipped at her soup.
“She says the Krohgs are coming to Åsgårdstrand.”
“Oh,” Fru Ihlen said, dabbing the edges of her mouth.
“The Krohgs are friends with Munch,” Tullik said boldly, “and Jæger.”
“Jæger. That lunatic,” Caroline said. “You know that he would rather we kill ourselves than live within the sacrament of marriage? Perhaps I should mention that to Olav?”
“Why?” Tullik said. “Do you think he would rather commit suicide than marry you?”
“Tullik!” Admiral Ihlen said, raising his eyes.
“Oh, it’s all right, Father,” Caroline said. “She’s only pretending to support that view because she knows no one will ever want to marry her.”
“Girls, really! That’s enough,” Julie said. “What else does Milly say, dear?”
“Oh, just that the ribbons on Lila’s new bonnet were too tight, and Ludwig has a recital at the National.”
“Well, isn’t that fascinating?” Tullik said, throwing down her napkin. “Isn’t that just the most interesting thing? Doesn’t it make you want to ponder the entire meaning of our existence? Think about it, Mother! The ribbons on Lila’s new bonnet were too tight. What could it mean? What could it really mean?”
Julie patted the edges of her mouth again.
“Tullik, are you quite well?” she said. “Perhaps you should go rest.”
“Rest!” Tullik said, leaping to her feet. “Rest from what? From this demanding life we lead? From this taxing and stimulating conversation?”
“Tullik!” the admiral shouted. “How dare you speak to your mother in that way? What’s gotten into you? Go to your room at once and lose this disagreeable manner.”
Tullik’s mouth opened wide, and she laughed. She stared at their three incredulous faces with hard condemnation and laughed at their ignorance.
Fru Berg ordered me back to the kitchen. She took me by the elbow and dragged me outside to the hen coop.
“Where has Miss Tullik been all afternoon?” she said, hurrying the words from her mouth before anyone saw us. “Tell the truth now.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She puffed out her cheeks.
“Those people they were talking about in there,” she said, dipping her jowly chin toward the house. “Has Miss Tullik been with them?”
I looked into the hen coop and watched Dorothea and Cecilia peck at the ground. I said nothing.
“Your mother’s told me how she hears them at night. At his house. Even ladies. Dancing, drinking, screeching. If Miss Tullik is mixed up in this, there will be talk.”
“What kind of talk?” I said nonchalantly.
“The kind of talk that would finish Fru Ihlen…and the rest of this family.” She moved her weight from one foot to the other and with her free hand swiped a mosquito from her brow. “It’s your job to see that there is no such talk. I won’t have Fru Ihlen suffering any shame. She’s a fine lady. You’re close to Miss Tullik. You talk to her. You tell her to stay away from Edvard Munch and those friends of his.”
“Why is it my job?” I said.
“You have her ear.”
“She is not obliged to listen to me. I’m just a housemaid. I’m the one who serves her.”
Fru Berg tightened her grip and shook my arm like a piece of linen. “You talk to her,” she said. “If you know what’s good for you—what’s good for us all.”
When the rest of the family had retired to bed, I slipped into Tullik’s room. It was late, but she was standing at the window, nibbling at her thumbs.
“Tullik, why are you not in bed?”
“I can’t sleep,” she said. “He’s with her now, isn’t he?”
“Who?”
“Milly. He’s with Milly.”
“Milly is in Kristiania,” I said, confused.
“But in his head? In his head? Who is he with, Johanne? Is he with her or me? I cannot tell. EM. It says EM.”
“Where?” I said.
“There. In there. On all the paintings.”
Her eyes crossed to the wardrobe. Fear hung dark across her face.
“EM. E and M. Edvard and Milly. He even writes it in full view. For me to see. Is that his message to me?”
“They are his initials, Tullik,” I said. “Edvard Munch. EM.”
She turned her thumb across her mouth and bit the skin at her knuckle, still staring at the wardrobe. Ignoring me.
“He did not speak to me this afternoon. He drank with Delius. Then he painted. Delius and I walked along the beach. When I left, Edvard didn’t care. He didn’t even say good-bye. Didn’t look at me. What’s happening, Johanne? I don’t understand.”
“He’s working,” I said weakly.
“Working? Drinking. He’s drinking. I must go to him again. I must know that it is me he loves. I can’t bear it. I will go on Sunday, when Oda Krohg is there.”
“Do you think it’s wise, Tullik,” I said, approaching her slowly, “when he is working so intensely like this? And everyone’s saying there will be talk—that your mother won’t be able to bear the shame of it. Please, Tullik. Don’t go. Not yet.”
“I must be with him,” she said desperately. “I must be with him or I will go mad.”
“But it is church on Sunday,” I said. And Thomas. I remembered Thomas wanted me to go with him on his father’s boat.
“After. After that. I must go. You will come with me,” she said.
“I cannot come to Munch’s again, Tullik,” I said, brushing her arm. “There will be talk. And Mother’s threatening to send me to Kristiania.”
“But you must come. We will tell them we are going berry picking together. It’s my heart, Johanne. I must follow it. I have to follow it. What else is there? If we do not follow our hearts, what else is there?” She reached out and held my face in her hands. Her thumbs were bleeding. Her eyes were so full of love and pain. “You must follow your heart, Johanne, to the exclusion of everything else.”
• • •
Her words entered my body and lingered there for two days. At night I lay awake in Milly’s bed, reading the book, trying to understand the color of Tullik’s heart. I read about the nature of color, the force of color, and how only the slightest change has to take place in the component parts of bodies for the color to change. Was I changed? Had I been mixed with Tullik’s reds and Munch’s blues? I conjured Thomas to my
mind and stirred him into my palette, pouring the words over him to see if they would blend. Follow your heart, to the exclusion of everything else. Was Thomas my destiny in the same way that Munch was Tullik’s?
When Sunday arrived, I was still asking the question. I was sitting in Borre church beside my mother. With its stone walls and aged flagstones, the church provided a refreshing coolness, but the ladies were still fanning themselves furiously with Bibles and hymn books. The Ihlens sat at the front. The four of them were composed, fine and tailored. A clump of sadness lodged in my stomach. This pretty tableau would not last. Tullik’s heart and soul were racing toward their very destruction. I clasped my hands together and prayed that she would not go. Not to Munch’s. Not without me. Not today.
After the service we all poured out into the burning sun. The ladies rushed to seek the shade beneath the linden trees, and the men made polite conversation in the stifling heat. I watched the familiar groups form, making boundaries with their backs. The Ihlens’ circle was closed. Tullik was hidden within them.
We trailed home through the woods. The walk was laborious in the heat. Andreas and I walked together in silence with our parents. Thomas was behind me, further back; I sensed his presence, a budding thrill. When we reached the huts, a group of youngsters broke away.
“We’re going to the beach!” one of the boys called. “Who’s coming?”
Some girls brushed past me, and I seized my chance.
“I’ll come!” I said. “Mother, I’m going with them. I’ll be back later, for dinner.”
I was running before she even had a chance to protest, and I rushed away, aware of Thomas’s eyes on my back.
By the time he caught up with me, I had already reached the pier.
“So are you coming with me then?” he said, turning me around to face him. “The boat’s ready. It’s all mine for the afternoon.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “Yes, I’ll come, but I have to be back for dinner.”