Sofie & Cecilia

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Sofie & Cecilia Page 14

by Katherine Ashenburg


  There was nothing unexpected in this. He often said such things. But there was something discouraging about this particular damp morning and the dim room overrun with painted and dried vegetation. About Nils’s letter. When she thanked him, her voice thickened and she cleared her throat. Just for a second, but he heard it.

  Suddenly, he was sitting next to her on the chaise longue, holding her arms above the elbows, as if she needed steadying to stay upright. A small Moroccan table had shuddered as he collided with it on his way to her, and at first he looked as confused about being so close to her as she was to find him there. But now he had gone too far to stop.

  “Mrs. Olsson, Sofie, I mean. I cannot do this with your last name. I meant never to tell you, but I see you are unhappy. So perhaps there is some point. I care for you, you know that. I would do anything to…help you, to make you happy.”

  There was nothing more to say, so he stopped.

  She was stone, ice, covered in impenetrable armour. A dense hedge full of thorns. But sad for him, and sad for something else, too. Of course, she had known it. But, like him, she never expected to hear it.

  “Mr. Lawrie, I am so sorry. But you must know it is impossible.”

  “Of course. It is I who must apologize. I forgot myself.” Forgetting yourself, another odd English expression. But an acute one, too. Somehow they righted themselves and the ornaments on the Moroccan table. Sofie began flipping distractedly through the pages of The Studio Mr. Lawrie had brought with him. The maid came in with coffee, which had no flavour whatsoever.

  She ached with disappointment. He had capitulated too quickly. Why had he not pressed his suit? She must be suffering some kind of aftershock. What are you thinking, her sensible side said. Would you leave the children, Askebo, Nils, Sweden?

  But he knows me, she thought, her fingers trembling ever so slightly around her coffee cup. And he loves me.

  The sensible Sofie qualified that: he knows and loves your work.

  And is that so unimportant, she thought, while Mr. Lawrie chattered on nervously about the Austro-Hungarian folk furniture in the Studio. He looks long and intently at my work, then at me. I fell in love with Nils through his work, and perhaps it is similar with Mr. Lawrie’s feeling for me. Nils never looked at my work for long, but he looked at me. Now he rarely does. But such a dense web of strings binds us together. I do not see how I could cut it.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  FEBRUARY–MARCH 1915

  NILS SAID, “SOFIE, there is no need for you to go. Or I will come with you.”

  “No, I want to go. To go alone. I’ll take the trap and be back within the hour.” And she left.

  The photographer’s premises were at the end of Kristinegatan, a long cobbled street under the spreading left wing of Falun’s Kristine Church. The door had a plaque that said “D. Helmersen, Artistic Photography Studio.” The “D” turned out to stand for Dora, a fair, youngish woman who somehow expressed her condolences with almost nothing in the way of words. If she started giving full condolences to all the customers who wanted their dead photographed, Sofie thought, she would never finish. But there was sympathy in this woman’s frank grey eyes.

  “If you can have your son brought here…”

  “No. I want you to come to our house, on Blindgatan.”

  “I can do that, Mrs. Olsson, but it would be simpler here.”

  “No. He has been moved about too much already.”

  She did not need to count the moves: they were too recent and each one fixed in terrifying high colours. From Askebo, where the pains in his stomach began, to the doctor’s here in Falun, then to the hospital, where it seemed all would be well now that his appendix was removed, then the infection, cutting through the giddy relief, and the sudden, terrible end.

  “He will stay at home now until the funeral.”

  “Yes, of course, then. Morning light is best, so if you can have your boy dressed in his suit, I suppose, at nine in the morning…”

  “Not his suit. He never liked it and almost never wore it. He will wear one of his ordinary blue-and-white striped shirts.”

  She could see that Dora Helmersen had not photographed a dead person in a blue-and-white shirt before.

  “Whatever you wish, Mrs. Olsson.”

  Miss Helmersen entered Markus’s name and the other details in a dark green ledger on a neat desk. Behind her, hung on long wooden rods, were the various painted backdrops against which people posed—a summer garden, the cathedral in Stockholm, a skating pond. There were chairs and chaises longues arranged against the walls, and tables with albums of photographs to inspire her customers.

  Sofie was so unaccustomed to her bereavement that she could not keep her attention on it. As yet, it had no content. She did not know what to do with it, so her mind went elsewhere.

  “Tell me,” she asked abruptly, “how you come to have your own business.”

  Miss Helmersen showed no surprise at the turn in the conversation.

  “My uncle had the first photography studio in Borlange, and he showed me how the camera worked when I was a girl. I liked it. And because photography is a new thing, it is not controlled by the guilds. A woman can start her own studio.”

  Sofie nodded. A dull silence fell, as her wretchedness returned.

  “And you will make your own arrangements for flowers?”

  “No flowers. Just my son.”

  Carl and his trap and horse were waiting outside Miss Helmersen’s studio. Sofie wanted to walk home, but within half a block, she saw some people she knew crossing the street to speak with her. Carl had been following her at a snail’s pace, and she climbed quickly into the trap.

  Falun, 25 March 1915

  Dear Mr. Lawrie,

  Thank you for your kind words. I will always remember Markus luring you into that very unfair game of hide-and-seek the first time you visited Askebo. We have had greater luck with our children’s health than many families. But now that misfortune has found us, it is as sad as any parent fears. Worse, really. And it seems cruel to lose him just as he was emerging into manhood. But I know it would be cruel to lose a three-year-old, or a baby, or a child of any age.

  My husband has been hit very hard.

  Perhaps when the war is over, we will meet again in England or here at Askebo. When I read the terrible numbers of young men Britain has lost, Sweden’s neutrality makes me very uncomfortable.

  And thank you for your ever-ready hospitality and friendship.

  With good wishes,

  Sofie Olsson

  In Falun she often walked down to the Miners’ Church, not far from their house. It stood tall and stoic on its lawn, where the fine old trees kept a respectful distance. The graves scattered in the churchyard were hemmed in by wrought-iron fences. Like her heart, she thought, which felt surrounded by iron. If she breathed too deeply, or let herself remember Markus in a certain way, the iron would crack, and they would be in even greater trouble. Nils had found her sobbing over an old photograph of the children grouped around the Christmas tree, and she did not want that to happen again. The ancient Greeks in mourning threw cloths over their faces. It seemed too dramatic a gesture for Sweden, but she saw the point of it.

  She went to collect Miss Helmersen’s photographs, which were not consoling. The photographer had done her best, but Sofie did not want to remember Markus dead, or sleeping, as people liked to say. She thought back to the sketches and watercolours she had done of him as a baby, and burned when they left Gothenburg. Trying to love him, the one who had turned out to be the most steadily lovable of her children. She had photographs of him, posed in calm groups with the other children, or alone for his graduation. And she had Nils’s paintings, mostly from his childhood—Markus blowing a toy trumpet on Christmas morning, or in a noisy procession to her bedroom on her name day.

  But she had nothing that she had painted of him. And there was nowhere she could close a door in this house and paint him. The workshop was lined with windows, he
r desk was still in the upstairs hall, she did not even have her own bedroom. And Nils came looking for her often, in the workshop, the kitchen, the garden. Usually he had nothing to say. He would sit for a while with her, holding her hand while his tears flowed silently. He did not sob, and his blank expression never changed as the tears welled up and washed his face, over and over. In bed at night, she listened to his breathing next door, waiting for the point when it changed from the light sound of alertness to the longer sound of withdrawal and return, like waves on a shore, that meant he slept. She never heard that now.

  While she listened, she painted Markus in her mind—launching his paper boats on the river, hurling himself joyously out of the carriage in Askebo on Friday evening after a week’s school in Falun, pulling his cowlick as he trudged through his English grammar.

  Finally, after several months, when Nils was in Gothenburg painting a fresco in the public library, she helped herself to brushes, paints and paper from his studio. At first she worked numbly, painting the subjects she had pictured during those long nights. Then sullenness succeeded numbness, and she kept on painting—Markus in the confirmation suit he never wore again, Markus hiding behind the big cupboard in the workroom while Oskar searched for him, Markus suddenly more a man than a boy. Finally, she became angry, painting her sweet boy with bitter speed, and those were the best pictures. She could not turn off a rhythm in her head that repeated over and over, “What a waste. What a waste. What a waste.” After a while, she stopped trying.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  JULY 1915

  Askebo, 1 July 1915

  Dear Cecilia,

  Do not reproach yourself for your absence. We both know you would come at a moment’s notice if Nils and I had the spirits for a visit. It’s just that we don’t, as yet. I say “as yet” because everyone puts it like that. I have to trust that they are right, and that we will not always feel this enormous inertia, this numbness that can shift unpredictably into something much worse. For now, it seems all I can do is sit with the family. We don’t have to look animated or cheerful or sad, although we can be all those things, at moments. And we don’t have to apologize for any of those moments. Every once in a while, one of us murmurs a memory of Markus.

  And yet I miss you. Nils is decorating the village church, hoping to find some peace in that. Between us, he is painting some stylized angels who do not look at home in the ground-hugging little church. They are almost fussy, and Nils is never fussy. Here and there on the white walls he has painted some fine wildflowers, primroses and violets. But on the whole the work is weak and unsteady, an echo of the painter’s state of mind.

  I too find myself stepping into churches and sitting for a time. I can’t say I feel comforted there, but maybe I feel more resigned. Grief has put me in a category too large to be resisted, as if I have joined hands with strangers down through the centuries who have lost someone. I seem to accept that while sitting in a pew.

  Forgive me if I touch on a tender spot. I think so constantly now of children and losing children, and I know we have never talked about you and Lars not having them. I am sorry about that, that is all I want to say.

  One thing I cannot do is read. Immersing myself in other people’s lives or characters seems an impossible task. I will say “as yet.”

  Your friend,

  Sofie

  Siljevik, 17 July 1915

  Dear Sofie,

  Sad as it is, I was relieved to receive your letter. Lars and I both fret even more than usual when we don’t hear from you, although we understand why letters come infrequently. We think of you every day, and of Markus, too. We talked this morning at breakfast of his first visit here, when he was eight, and his curiosity about what were considered “modern improvements” in 1901.

  Thank you for thinking of our childlessness in the midst of your great loss. Your customary generosity. We longed for children, but the sorrow of not having them is surely small compared to loving a child for more than twenty years and then having him snatched away.

  And this is the fate of so many parents and sons in this ghastly war. Just as we think the news from the front cannot be worse, it gets worse.

  In infinitely more trivial news, we are awash in decisions here, close to choosing the architect for the Vogt Museum. Miss Gregorius and I lean toward Ragnar Ostberg, Lars still sitting on the fence. I will write when we have a final decision.

  And meanwhile, may your sorrows ease, which does not mean that you or we will ever forget Markus. Lars joins me in this.

  Your friend,

  Cecilia

  Six months after Markus’s death, Sofie sat in the Kristine Church in Falun, looking at the baroque statues of the saints that lined the nave. Although she had known these statues for years, she was struck for the first time by how loose-bellied they were, as if they had given birth recently. They reminded her of the flabby middle and round breasts, stretched like drums, that came with a baby, the helplessness she had felt when she could not summon up feelings for Markus, and the surge of relief when she succeeded in loving him.

  When she left the church, she walked up the street to D. Helmersen’s Artistic Photography Studio. Miss Helmersen was dusting her painted backgrounds, moving her feather duster over a winding path in an autumnal forest.

  “Mrs. Olsson,” she said uncertainly when she turned and saw Sofie standing there. “Good day. I hope that everything was satisfactory with the pictures…”

  “Yes. As much as they could be, perhaps.”

  They shrugged in unison, acknowledging that nothing about a twenty-two-year-old’s death could be satisfactory.

  Then Sofie had to think why she had come here. She shook her head lightly, hoping that would clear it. “My son was the photographer in the family.”

  “Really,” Miss Helmersen said politely. “What kind of photographs did he take?”

  “Oh, just informal pictures of the family.”

  Miss Helmersen nodded.

  “I wondered—some time when you are not busy, of course—I would like to see something of how you develop your pictures. And, perhaps, how you organize your business.”

  She was not aware until she spoke that that was what she wanted, and even after she heard herself she wasn’t sure if that was really the point of her visit. But Miss Helmersen took her request at face value. She showed Sofie the darkroom, a small, windowless room where she moved briskly through the mysteries of developing fluids, stop baths and fixers. She demonstrated how she used filters to increase or decrease the contrast between dark and light, and how to “dodge,” reducing the light to one part of the picture, and “burn,” giving more exposure to a particular part. They talked about subjects who fidgeted, grimaced or were otherwise difficult. Miss Helmersen mentioned, neutrally, that in one way photographing the dead was easier than working with the living, who had to hold a pose for long seconds.

  As the afternoon lengthened, Sofie watched the green trees and blue sky and brick buildings outside the studio windows turn black and white, like a photograph. Was that why people accepted the black-and-white world captured in photography so easily? Because as day turned to evening, the coloured daytime world turned briefly into a photograph? Then black-and-blue, and finally black.

  On another afternoon, the two women drank tea and Sofie looked through some of Miss Helmersen’s albums. Worn Falun miners conscious of their Sunday suits, flanked by their families. Serious boys and girls in white arm bands, bearing a white candle, at their confirmation. Brides and grooms, the bride standing behind her seated husband, her hand solicitous on his shoulder. One photograph, as carefully composed as a painting, showed a boy in his confirmation suit standing by the open coffin of his twin, looking down at his mirror image.

  Then Sofie came to a loose picture of a mother and a little girl. Or was it four little girls? The mother sat in a chair and the girl stood by her knee, and played with blocks in a corner, and strolled her doll in a wicker pushcart, and teased her cat with a b
ell on a ribbon.

  “What is it?” she asked, baffled.

  A look of annoyance flickered over Miss Helmersen’s face. “It’s nothing, just a little experiment. It shouldn’t be here, with the albums. I was playing with multiple exposures.”

  “Is it a mourning picture?”

  “It’s just a little girl who lives in the neighbourhood and her mother. I was working with masking and something called lens capping, trying to see how many versions of her I could get in the picture. Why did you think it was a mourning picture?”

  “Because this is what mourning is like, that you see the child everywhere and remember him in all his little pastimes.”

  Looking at Sofie staring at the images of the girl, Miss Helmersen seemed to make a decision. She moved to a chest of narrow drawers in the alcove, and from the keys at her waist, chose one and unlocked the top drawer. Riffling through the pictures inside, she found the one she wanted and took it to Sofie.

  “This is a mourning picture.”

  A vase decorated with a painted cherub held about a dozen daisies. In the centre of each of the flowers, there was a child’s head, a different one for each flower.

  “It’s…it’s a bouquet of children,” Sofie said, trying to puzzle it out. “Why do some of them have their eyes open and some closed?”

  “It’s something I do every year, just for myself. They are all children I’ve photographed in the last year, and they have all died. The ones whose eyes are open died after I took their photograph. The ones whose eyes are closed were photographed after death.”

  Sofie stared at the vase full of dead children.

  “It’s a simple technique, really,” Miss Helmersen continued. “I cut out the heads, re-photograph them to the same size, paste them on the photograph of the vase and daisies, and then photograph that.”

  Reluctantly, Sofie looked up from the photograph.

 

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