The Girl Between

by Lisa Strømme

  Tears swelled in her eyes, but she did not blink them away.

  “I love him,” she said.

  “You must try to eat something, Tullik,” I said, stroking her arm. I poured her a glass of apple juice and held it to her face, but she refused it and rolled over to face the wall.

  “I’ll come back later,” I said.

  I bent down and kissed her cheek. She closed her eyes, locking herself back inside her own pain as the welling tears overflowed and rolled down her nose.

  • • •

  Tullik did not leave her room that day, or the next. Her separation from Munch was an illness so depleting that it affected us all. The house fell silent as the Ihlens’ lives collapsed under the pain that emanated from Tullik’s room. She suffered, just as she loved, in the extreme. For the first few days she could not have left her room even if she wanted to. Her body was drained, her spirit sucked out of her. All she could do was lie in bed, wasted like a flower deprived of water as the separation slowly eroded her.

  At night, lying awake in Milly’s room, I heard the sounds of Tullik’s grief pass between the walls. Occasionally, if she had the strength, she would cry. I came to be thankful for her weeping, as it was something I was able to identify with. More frightening were the groaning noises, the long empty howls. The sounds were inhuman, like an animal tearing itself apart, chewing itself up, and destroying itself from the inside. Tullik wailed and whimpered as though eating into reserves, destroying what was left when there was nothing more to expel.

  She stopped talking and instead began to babble incoherently. I tried to make conversation with her, but she could not engage me. Her eyes were constantly dark and glazed: the glassy doorways to an anxious terror that lay deep within. When the Ihlens realized the devastating effect their punishment had on Tullik, they allowed her to take small walks with me in the forest, but she refused to go. By then the damage had been done. She was lost. Tongues whispered. Where was Miss Ihlen? She is mad. She is a drunk. She is crazy like the artist Munch. She is engaged to him. She is with child.

  In an effort to quash the rumors, the Ihlens told everyone Tullik was suffering from influenza and could not leave her room. The lie was weak. Not like the strapping lies Tullik and I told. It didn’t stop the tongues and couldn’t quite clean the slate that had been so irrevocably tarnished.

  Every day I tried to tempt Tullik out, to show the world she wasn’t crazy, or drunk, or with child. But she would not be persuaded. Some days she talked, but not to me, not in proper conversation. She would ask me questions but wouldn’t wait for the answers: Is she coming? Is he with her? Is he there? Will you check? Is she coming?

  I bottled my emotions; the dark-brown hatred of Ragna, the gray resentment of Caroline and Fru Berg, the dirty rust frustration I felt toward the Ihlens. One day when I could no longer stand the torment of it, I ran to Munch’s house without a care for who saw me.

  It was a Sunday afternoon. He was standing in his garden among his paintings. His arms hung redundant by his side as he gazed out to sea. The sadness of his eyes had reached a new depth, and they seemed clouded from strain.

  “I need to paint,” I said boldly.

  He held his left hand up to my face. A piece of string had been tied around each of his fingers with a small knot.

  “I’m trying to remember,” he said. “Can you help me remember, Johanne?”

  “Remember what?”

  “Something. I tied these strings to help me remember what I was going to do. I can’t for the life of me remember.”

  “Paint,” I said. “You were probably going to paint.”

  “Is Tullik with you?” he said.

  “No. They won’t let her come here,” I said. “She’s in her room.”

  “Won’t you bring her to me, Johanne? I can’t work.”

  “Tullik is ill,” I said. “She’s not herself. She needs to rest.”

  “Then take her this picture. I meant to give it to her.”

  I followed him to the studio, where he rattled about among the canvases that were leaning against the walls. He pulled out a simple wash painting on paper of a man crouching on a beach leaning toward the water where a woman swam to greet him. Their faces were abstract, and each had only one dark eye. The washed-out sky was daubed on in layers of russet and lavender. Paint dribbled from the sky to the indigo sea. Brushstrokes visible. The woman was naked. Her hair sank like rope in the brown depths of the water. The man was so drawn to her I could almost see him move. Munch had captured that charged moment of magic and longing, as noses and lips align, just before a kiss.

  “This is beautiful,” I said.

  “I never know if she’s a mermaid or not,” he said. He rolled the paper up and handed it to me. “Take it to her when you return. Now, you wanted to paint. I’ve been rearranging things in here,” he said, moving to the other side of the studio. “I set up the easel at this end.”

  The third of the despair paintings, the one on cardboard, was on an easel in the corner.

  “Let me get this down and put yours up,” he said.

  “I can paint without an easel, if you’re using it.”

  “I’ll take this outside,” he said, lifting the painting down. “It needs a bit of air. The horse cure does wonders for them.”

  I turned to look at the painting as he took it down.

  As soon as I saw it, I heard a sound. A whine? A moaning, like Tullik in the night.

  Munch had filled in the wavy sky. It was now a vibrant bloodred vermilion layered with bright gold. Worked into the sky was a stretched elliptical shape, like an eye watching me. The fjord was stark ultramarine edged with black curving lines, and the minute, sailless boats in the distance were sailing precariously close to the yellow whirlpool at the center of the fjord. But the most shocking detail was the figure on the bridge. It was no longer a man in a hat, staring over the railings, but had become an abstract figure that had turned around to face us. It was still only an outline, but it curved like the flame of a candle in the wind. And the sound, the whining, seemed to be coming from this figure, this being, on the bridge.

  “I don’t know, Johanne. I can’t give it a face. The longer she is away, the more it feels like it’s not just me but nature itself that is screaming to be released from the hell of it. And what does the face of nature look like?”

  “It makes a sound,” I said, looking closer, listening to the painting. “It’s the same sound she makes in the night.”

  “I was told it was impossible to paint a sound, but you can hear it?”

  I swallowed. The painting evoked such nervousness in my chest, a sense of panic and confusion. Had I really heard something? I looked again, then closed my eyes.

  “Yes,” I said as the whining returned. “I hear it clearly.”

  “I’ll take it out so it doesn’t disturb you,” he said, reaching for my own painting and setting it up on the canvas. “We are both painting her,” he said as he secured my picture in place. “But you see her differently from me. In your painting she is turning away from the light. In my paintings she is the light.” His eyes drooped. His voice was soft.

  “I didn’t really think about it,” I said.

  “No, and nor must you think about it. The moment we start thinking about our paintings is the moment we kill them,” he said. “You could leave it at any minute, Johanne. It doesn’t have to be finished in the sense that every single part of the canvas is covered.”

  “I know,” I said, rubbing the outer edges of the painting with my fingertips. “It’s not the actual picture that isn’t finished. It’s the way I feel,” I said, suddenly feeling the prick of tears in my eyes.

  “Mmm. Good,” he said. Without offering a word of comfort, he left me alone.

  Face-to-face with my own creation, I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think of the woman being Tullik
. Maybe she wasn’t Tullik at all? Maybe she was someone else? Maybe she was me?

  I took out the brushes and paints and hooked a palette over my thumb, the way Munch did.

  A single deep breath.

  Lines of taupe and brick and beige. The beach in the sun. I’ve turned away, turned my back. Turned my back on my family. Wading into the green water, the muddy marsh. I hear Thomas calling after me. His voice cream. Corn. Sand. I do not turn. Shades are darker. Tan and fawn. I move through color. Feel through color. The base of the ocean, green to red. Coral and auburn. Layers. Layers like sand and silt. Like Munch and Tullik, teal and ruby. Ragna: black. Julie: olive. Caroline: brown. Milly: blank to gray. And me: yellow. Return to the sun, the light. The love. I am pulled to the fire. The source of life. The source of the soul where all is connected, all is one. All is the color of love.

  15

  VERMILION

  Whoever is acquainted with the prismatic origin of red, will not think it paradoxical if we assert that this colour partly actu, partly potentiâ, includes all the other colours.

  —THEORY OF COLOURS, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  I met Thomas on the way home. Red. Heat. Flustered. He appeared on the beach, carrying netting under his arm.

  “Johanne,” he said. His voice was uncertain, as though he wasn’t sure it was actually me. “Where’ve you been? I looked for you after church but couldn’t—”

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “What’s that you’ve got?”

  I hid Tullik’s painting behind my back. “Nothing.”

  “And what’s that on your hands? Is that paint?” he said. Fortunately he didn’t wait for an answer. “And who was that man you spoke to last week? He knew you. Who was he?”

  “No one,” I said, “just a friend of Tullik’s.”

  “Do you have any idea what people have been saying about Miss Ihlen?” he said, trying to turn me against her.

  “She has influenza,” I said.

  “You think people believe that? Haven’t you heard the talk? Folk are saying that crazy-man Munch is possessed by the devil, that he’s insane. They’re saying Regine Ihlen has shamed her family and gone that way too.” He hammered his temple with his finger. “Crazy. They say she’s engaged to the painter. Some are even saying she’s with child. Is it true, Johanne?”

  “What happened to ‘What can words do’?” I said.

  “Johanne, they’re talking about you too, you know. You’ve been seen in his garden, picking fruit, with her.”

  “And?”

  “Well, you’re being pulled into something you don’t understand.” He dropped his netting onto the beach and began unraveling it.

  “Oh, and you do understand it then?” I said.

  “You’ve changed,” he said. “Spent too much time with your Miss Ihlen. I don’t like what it’s doing to you.”

  I walked away.

  Mother was no different. There was only one topic of conversation now every time I went home. She suffocated me with her endless questions from the moment I stepped through the door. Beside herself with concern for my own reputation, and hers, she worried that we would be forever tainted by my association with Tullik. I hid the painting by the fence behind Munch’s outhouse and prepared myself for the barrage.

  “There you are, Johanne,” she said. “Where have you been?”

  “Walking.”

  “With her? Have you been with her this afternoon as well?”

  “No, Mother. I was alone.”

  “You must have known,” she kept saying. “Didn’t you know Miss Ihlen was mixing with those types? Didn’t you see it? Didn’t she tell you? Everyone’s seen the two of you around town together. And Fru Jørgensen saw you in that garden.”

  “I’ve told you, I was following orders,” I said, plunging my hands into the bowl beside her and scrubbing them hard. “I have to do what Tullik says—she’s my employer. I thought you’d be happy I was spending so much time with a Kristiania lady.”

  “Not one who squanders her reputation,” she said. “We must find you a new one. I’m expecting to hear from Fru Jørgensen any day now. I mean, what’s to become of Miss Ihlen now? You will do your work quietly, and you won’t speak to her anymore. Only take your orders from Fru Ihlen and the admiral, no one else. Do you hear me?”

  Later I lay on my bed, agitated, with my mind and heart at war with themselves. I had already strayed so deeply into the realm of my mother’s fear that I knew my own reputation would probably sink with Tullik’s. Thomas was afraid of it too, afraid of having a wife who conspired with the insane and indulged in reckless drinking and immorality for the sake of her art. Mother and Thomas were there together, taunting me, every time I closed my eyes.

  But then there was love. The irrepressible pull that Munch conveyed so well in his painting. That heave of the soul in the mingle of kisses. The voice that speaks louder than any other, that controls us and drives us, in its pursuit, to peace, or to madness. It could not be for nothing. There had to be a reason, a purpose to the love that Tullik pursued so ferociously. How could I stand in its way?

  In the morning I took the painting to Tullik. I had to bend the scroll to hide it under my shawl, and when I got to the house, I tucked it into my apron. By the time I reached Tullik’s room I was afraid I had ruined it, but the beautiful painting glowed in the morning sunlight as I spread it out and admired it again. The suspense, the longing, the pull of two souls who could not be parted. He had done it so simply, so effortlessly.

  “Look, Tullik,” I said. “He painted it for you. It’s you and him, together.”

  I wanted her to look at it and be transformed. I wanted her to leap from the bed she had not left and escape the prison of this room. If she would only find her adventurous fire again, the passion that had led her to Munch in the first place. That fire would end this suffering, I was sure of it.

  She cast her eyes over the painting with little enthusiasm.

  “When is he coming?” she said. “Is he still with her? Is he adrift? Is he in the air or beneath the sea? Where, Johanne? Where is he?”

  “Tullik, he’s at his house. He painted this for you. He said you were the light.”

  I was glad he could not see her now. Her face was ghostly white, her hair a limp, dark mass. The eyes that used to sparkle with danger were sunken and defeated. She was a shell, an empty vessel that Tullik used to inhabit. All the light had faded, and nothing but darkness prevailed.

  “Strawberry Girl,” she whispered, “bring me strawberries, in a bowl, freshly picked, juicy and sweet.”

  “Of course, Tullik,” I said, rolling up the painting and hiding it in the wardrobe. “I’ll pick strawberries for you.”

  She hunched up on her bed and lifted her hands to her ears, covering them as though the sound of my words was harming her. Her face was a sick, pale green.

  “Tullik? Are you all right?”

  “After, after,” she said. “Talk after.”

  Her condition remained the same for another few weeks. She asked for strawberries every day, and I found them for her, even though the season was coming to an end and the fruit was not as plentiful as it had been before. For a short while after she had eaten my strawberries, traces of the old Tullik would resurface.

  “How do you know where to find them?” she said one day. “You must have picked all the strawberries in Borre and Åsgårdstrand.”

  “Nature is generous,” I said.

  “And cruel. Is it not a cruel nature that makes us love so hard? Or that ties us to souls who cannot be bound?”

  She didn’t mention Munch directly but stared at the wardrobe with those glassy, fearful eyes.

  I took the empty bowl from her and returned to the kitchen. As I passed the parlor, I accidentally overheard the admiral and Fru Ihlen talking by the door.

  �
��But Gaustad?” Julie said, her voice shattering as she spoke.

  “We will have to, if she does not improve,” the admiral said. “If she gets any worse, she will be beyond our help. And you, my dear—your nerves. We can’t go through this again. I thought that business with Milly and that artist would be the end of us all.”

  “Tullik is not Milly,” Julie said.

  “No,” Admiral Ihlen said. “She does not have her strength.”

  • • •

  On Sunday I ran to Munch’s again, drawn to the paint and the peace of the studio. The studio door was locked, and he was inside the house. I sat on the back step with my arms wrapped around my knees until he came out. When the door finally opened, a woman appeared in the doorway.

  “What’s this?” she said. “You have a visitor, Munch.”

  I expected her to shoo me away, but instead, she sat down beside me.

  “Hello,” she said. “Who’s this little angel? Would you like a cup of coffee?” Her voice was gravelly and sweet. She had a kind, open face, and her eyes were soft and pretty.

  A small, dark man wearing a cap came after her.

  “Who is the angel?” he said. “Munch, Oda’s found an angel on your doorstep.”

  “What? A fallen angel?” Munch said, following the pair. “Oh, Johanne, it’s you. Won’t you say hello to my friends, Oda and Jappe? Have you come to paint?”

  “And to speak to you,” I said.

  “Another woman who paints,” Oda said, reaching for my arm and lifting me to my feet. “Thank God! There just aren’t enough of us.”

  I knew instinctively that she was Oda Krohg, wife of the famous painter Christian. I didn’t know who the man, Jappe, was.

  “Won’t you join us at the table, Johanne?” Munch said.

  “I’d rather go to the studio,” I said as my eyes swept the neighboring houses and gardens.

  “I understand,” he said. “Jappe, get the wine. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Jappe and Oda drifted to the table in the garden, and I followed Munch to the studio.