“Could you show me more of your experiments?”
From the top drawer came pictures that were bizarre and oddly prosaic, even banal. Miss Helmersen was seen talking with herself, pouring coffee into a cup held by another Miss Helmersen, while yet another Miss Helmersen consulted a ledger. In another picture, four Miss Helmersens held a garland. The simplest way to accomplish this, she explained to Sofie, was by making a separate negative for each pose. Then she printed the negatives together in such a way that it seemed the figures were in the same room at the same time. She would have said more about these techniques, but Sofie was not so much interested in her trade secrets as in the strange power of the pictures.
“But what does it mean? What were you intending?”
Miss Helmersen rarely had an answer for that kind of question. Sofie had seen a few photographs that commemorated her sister, who had died. In them, pictures of her sister framed on the wall, painted on a vase and on a pillow coexisted with four images of Miss Helmersen. But usually there was no rhyme or reason to her creations.
Miss Helmersen was awkward. She was not shy, exactly, but she gave no sign as to whether she enjoyed Sofie’s visits or did not enjoy them. One day, in her brusque way, she asked, “Would you like to pose for me?”
“Do you mean, for a regular portrait?”
“No, for one of these.” She indicated the top drawer of the chest in the alcove, where she kept her experiments.
“Why me?”
“I think you would suit the form.”
The picture she made showed four Sofies, one at a spindle where the thread she was spinning reached across the whole photograph and circled the other three Sofies, who were embroidering, holding a bundled doll meant to stand in for a baby, and staring off into the distance. Miss Helmersen had wanted her drawing or painting, but Sofie refused. She found the finished picture dismaying.
“There are so many of me.”
“Yes, of course,” Miss Helmersen said impatiently. As if to say, like everyone.
On another visit, Miss Helmersen said, “If you like, we could compose a picture about you and your son.”
“Do you mean, like the one you did about your sister?”
“Rather like that, yes. We could plan it together.”
Sofie brought photographs of Markus from home, and Miss Helmersen re-photographed them and put them in the room she was preparing, in frames and on a jardinière. The wonderful part came at the right edge of the picture. Using a full-length photograph of Markus, originally taken with Tilda in front of the Askebo house, Miss Helmersen placed him next to a full-length photograph of Sofie, overlapping his arm slightly against hers. It looked as if they were about to take a walk. Sofie pored over it, sometimes laughing at the legerdemain, sometimes weeping. Occasionally, when she had wept a long time, Miss Helmersen would bring her a fresh handkerchief. Tears did not bother her, and at those times Sofie was grateful for her remoteness.
She never talked to Cecilia or Nils about her visits to the photography studio. She knew what Nils would think of Miss Helmersen’s work—childish, self-indulgent, probably demented. It was strange, no question, and Sofie didn’t always like it. But she felt sure Miss Helmersen was an artist.
Chapter Twenty-three
NOVEMBER 1916
Askebo, 20 November 1916
Dear Cecilia,
Nils’s painting of our Christmas dinner, which he painted just after Christmas last year, is a great success at the Stockholm Exhibition. The critics say it pictures the Swedish Christmas at its most idyllic, and a nodding ring of visitors gathers in front of it as soon as the doors open each day.
I cannot look at it without a sinking heart.
Anna stands at the centre, holding a punch bowl and wearing the Askebo folk dress, her waist bag thickly embroidered, the silver buckles on her bodice gleaming. She looks rested, happy, hospitable, a far cry from a real cook at a real holiday dinner! All around her, other people in snow-white blouses and bright-coloured skirts and vests are helping guests at the buffet. Sometimes I think I would be happy never to see another striped skirt and tightly laced bodice.
A creche with Mary and Joseph stands on the main table, along with the platters of ham and gravlax and the tureen of meatballs. But all I can do is look at myself, dressed in plain dark blue, not at all a holiday dress, one hand at my waist and the other under my chin. I am bending over my father-in-law, who sits brooding and alone at the head of the table, and I look as if I have no idea what to do with him.
At the opposite end of the studio, Nils turns away from the party and stands, looking glumly out the window. Father and son, both retreating from the festivities. Is Nils looking for Markus, at what was our first Christmas without him? But there is nothing to see, as the window is covered with ice. Even the painting’s title, Here Is Yuletide Again, which Nils took from the Swedes’ favourite holiday song, seems to stress the weariness in the “again.”
But the Olssons are not weary at the prospect of seeing you and Lars over the holidays. Please consult your book and let us know a time when you can join us. At least for that day, we will try and forget the war, and rejoice in the company of friends.
Yours always,
Sofie
Sofie had decided to make something about the war. It was odd to try to communicate its merciless impersonality with something as domestic as a cushion, but that would be part of the point. The background would be black, with embroidery in innocent pinks and white. There would be shells, fire and tears, no comfort in the images.
She gave the cushion to Nils for his birthday. He looked at the shells exploding like holiday firecrackers and the flames like big tears. He took off his glasses and wiped them. Then he looked again. “Sofie,” he said, “this is very good. Very, very good.”
The work was clumsy, not from her usual impatience when it came to technique, but consciously, pointedly clumsy. If it had been painted by a French man instead of embroidered by a Swedish woman, Nils would have railed against it as a piece of modern art. Strange that he, who retreated more and more into the past in his own art, praised her modern efforts. This one especially, which was jarring in its juxtapositions of the cozy and the terrible. Perhaps he thought it was part of their bargain, that if she could not paint, he would at least admire her work on cloth. But, thinking about it later—after he had ceremoniously given the cushion pride of place on the sofa in the workroom—she doubted Nils had any sense that a bargain might have been called for.
Chapter Twenty-four
OCTOBER 1918
BIRGITTA WAS TO be a bridesmaid when her friend Hedy got married and Sofie was making her dress, a filmy white cotton batiste with a tucked bodice. Nils wanted to paint Sofie hemming the dress while Birgitta stood wearing it. The women protested that no one would hem a dress while the owner was in it, but Nils did not care, he liked the composition. He positioned them at one side of the picture, while the boxy Biedermeier sofa and table from their Falun parlour held the centre. On the table was a tray with cups nestled on their side, waiting to be filled from the copper chocolate pot.
“Nils, why would I be wearing a hat in my own parlour?” Sofie put up her hands, as if to unpin it. The hat was a wide-brimmed white straw, with a gauze scarf wrapped around the crown. In a long-sleeved dress and with her head down to attend to the hem, all that showed of Sofie were the sewing hands.
“That doesn’t matter, it’s good the way the white hat echoes the white dress.”
“You mean, it’s good the way the hat hides my face,” she said. Birgitta shot her father a glance, and Sofie and Nils laughed, to show her it was a comfortable old joke. Birgitta was in profile, her lovely bare arm and neck only slightly less white than her dress.
While they posed, Sofie holding up her needle and Birgitta looking down at her hem spread on her mother’s lap, they talked about Sonja, who was coming home from art school for the midterm holiday. Curiously, Nils had raised very few objections to Sonja studying art, only insisting tha
t she do it in Gothenburg and not in Stockholm. His resentment against the Academy still burned, but other than that, he seemed content with her choice—perhaps even half-proud. Did that mean that a daughter’s talent for painting was different from a wife’s?
Sofie’s mind leaped from Sonja’s arrival to Cecilia’s latest letter. Forbidden to move, she addressed Birgitta without looking up. “I wonder if you girls would like to go to Stockholm when Sonja is here and see the new production of A Doll’s House at the Svenska Teatern. Mrs. Vogt and Miss Gregorius saw it last week, and they thought it was very fine.”
Nils and Birgitta spoke at the same time.
He said scornfully, “I’m quite sure they did,” as if enjoying a production of A Doll’s House confirmed his blackest thoughts about Cecilia and Miss Gregorius as well as Ibsen.
Birgitta said, “Oh, Mamma, A Doll’s House is so old-fashioned!”
Sofie raised her eyebrows, invisible under her hat. She attended to Birgitta first.
“Miss Gregorius does not agree with you. She commented to Mrs. Vogt that the play is more than thirty-five years old, but the relationship between Nora and her husband is still being played out in houses all over Scandinavia every night.”
Nils said, with even heavier emphasis, “Yes, she would say that.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“I only mean that it doesn’t surprise me that Miss Gregorius, being a university graduate and apparently some kind of art historian, would sympathize with a story where a mother leaves her husband and young children. Keep your head down, please, Sofie. It was perfect before, when only the tip of your chin showed.”
She left that one to Birgitta, who said, “Oh, Pappa!” with a fond, dismissive roll of her eyes. Sofie could see her thinking, My father is a darling reactionary, and my mother speaks up for progressive ideas she doesn’t practice in her own life. Nils, like so many men, disliked Ibsen’s heroine, and for him the play pressed on a particularly tender spot. She remembered him telling her in the early days of their marriage that when he came home at the end of the school day, his mother was always out, doing other people’s laundry. He was so grateful, he said, that when he and their children came home, Sofie would always be there.
Without changing her position—she had been posing for her father since she was a toddler—Birgitta asked, “Pappa, do you think that Miss Gregorius and Mrs. Vogt have what the Americans call a Boston marriage?”
“A Boston marriage” was ambiguous, since it described two women who were closely bound and set up housekeeping together, with or without an erotic entanglement. Nils laughed, agreeably shocked at his daughter’s quickness. Sofie was also shocked, and not agreeably. Where did Birgitta get these ridiculous ideas?
Nils said, “Well, if it’s more than thirty-five years since Ibsen’s Nora slammed the door, who knows what can happen these days? But Mrs. Vogt already has a Siljevik marriage.”
Sofie said nothing. Birgitta’s suspicions sprang from a young woman’s overheated imagination, but she was encouraging her father in his wish to think the worst of educated women with careers.
* * *
—
The painting of Sofie and Birgitta was a diversion, but Nils was most occupied these days by a work that was as violent in its way as Sofie’s war cushion. It was a monumental painting, destined in his mind for the upper landing of the National Museum, portraying a tragic event he had half-imagined from the Nordic past. The twelfth-century Edda had told the story of the Swedes sacrificing their king, Domald, in the hope of ending a famine. In Nils’s version, the king was not captured but offered his life for the sake of his people. Having just thrown off his bearskin robe, he stood, nude, while his executioner, in a red cloak, held his knife behind his back. Noble and vulnerable, the king waited for death, his hand just touching his throat.
At one side, a writhing band of women were dressed like Samis, their patterned mittens, braided hair and anguished dance a strange melange of the folkloric and the horrific. One of them, a brown-haired woman who turned her distressed face to the viewer, looked like Sofie. At least she was not wielding a knife, Sofie thought, although other women in the painting wore knives, scissors and dangerous-looking tools at their waists that reminded her of the bride belt Lars Vogt had shown her years ago.
The museum committee wanted Nils to omit or soften the central motif, of the king sacrificing himself. Wounded to the quick, Nils threatened to stop work on the painting but, privately, Sofie thought the museum was being quite forbearing. After all, they had not commissioned this vast canvas—it was all Nils’s idea. And they had not yet officially accepted it.
Askebo, 13 October 1918
My dear Cecilia,
I confess, and only to you, I am weary of riding the ups and downs as Nils torments himself over his painting of King Domald. The painting itself is beautiful and entirely painful. Of course, you have only to think of Kandinsky and Kokoschka, of cubism and futurism or, closer to home, the work of Isaac Grunewald and Sigrid Hjerten, to see that its combination of realism and romanticism is not the way to win over today’s art world. As for the subject matter, I would not be surprised if the museum people find the ideas of ritual suicide and our stark Nordic past a little naive in 1918, if not sinister.
He takes it all so personally. I suppose that is because it is so personal. It is embarrassingly clear that he identifies with the king and his fate. By painting an unpalatable subject, he almost guarantees that his own career will have an end he sees as tragic. In one minute he crows that the Germans have bought 200,000 copies of his latest book, When the Sun Shines, and that so many soldiers carry it to the front, along with the New Testament, that it is almost standard equipment. (How indescribably sad to think of the Germans, or soldiers from any country, in their trenches poring over those serene pictures of home and family.) Then, in the next minute he is convinced that everyone is against him and his career is in ruins. I cannot imagine where this will end. I try to comfort without encouraging any more of these dead ends, but he is quick to spot that distinction.
Your friend always,
Sofie
Siljevik, 30 October 1918
Dear Sofie,
I am sorry about all this. If only it were possible for Nils to accept that he had his day—a beautiful, bright, shining day—and now we are living in a different one. I appreciate how hard it must be to stop expecting that each new work will capture the attention of the world, or at least the Swedish world. That is an ugly bridge almost every successful artist has to cross, when he is no longer the dernier cri. But, even if Nils’s work is not going to be received with the rapture he has grown used to, some of it will live forever. And the same for Lars. People will not tire of Nils’s watercolours of the Askebo house and his portraits of Strindberg and Selma Lagerlof, any more than they will of Lars’s engravings and the Siljevik paintings. Their pictures will always be part of us.
Actually, Lars does not fret about his place now or in the future. He is doggedly confident about his art. If people prefer the work of the new artists, he is sure that they are making a mistake, but he does not brood about it. It is his ebbing strength that infuriates him.
About Nils, though. This is no help to you, it is only telling you things you know already. And I am not an artist, so I had better stop writing about matters I do not understand. Just know that I am always ready to listen. And to see you, either here or in Askebo.
Miss Gregorius is keeping us on our toes. She wants so much information for the forthcoming museum that I realize we need a catalogue. Rather to my surprise, I am thinking of writing it.
Ever your friend,
Cecilia
Dear Cecilia,
Forgive all that soul-baring. I feel quite guilty writing about Nils in that way, but you will understand. I cannot talk with any of the children about it, and obviously with Nils least of all.
Our mothers would not approve. I can hear mine saying that it is a wife’s job to guard he
r husband’s good name above everything. But I am quite worried about Nils’s state of mind, and worry is a lonely business.
If my mother were here, I would assure her that Nils’s good name is safe with you!
You are quite right, there is not much help for it if Nils cannot understand the part he has assigned himself in this sad drama.
But thank you.
She would not send that letter. There was nothing especially wrong with it, but she had already said more than enough. And Cecilia knew these things without being told. She imagined her friend sitting very upright in her Louis XVI study and breaking the seal on one of her letters. It took Sofie back to the first time she had seen that study, on her first visit to Siljevik. The children had been so young: Marianne barely ten, and Tilda and Felix not yet born. More to the point, she, Sofie, had been young—even if people considered a woman in her thirties to be fully mature. Now, midway through her fifties, she saw that wife who had visited Siljevik with her husband and four children as green and ingenuous. If anyone had told her then that the daunting Cecilia Vogt would become her confidante, she would have laughed. It was an intimacy with strictly defined limits, of course—whole areas of life were out of bounds—but even so, the fact of it could still take her by surprise.
Prelude
JUNE 1901
LARS’S FRIEND NILS Olsson was bringing his family to Siljevik for the day. It was not terribly convenient, because Cecilia was busy ordering books for the village library and supervising the installation of more cupboards in the studio, but Lars had insisted on having the Olssons before he and Cecilia left for summer in the archipelago.
The visitors were all seated at the table on the porch by the time Cecilia joined them. She noticed, first, the bashful, curious boy, and his poised older sister, who looked around ten or eleven. Where did girls of that age get this precocious social awareness, while the boys stayed absorbed in their own obsessions? And there were two smaller girls, one only interested in the cinnamon rolls and the other only in her doll. Nils Olsson looked cheerful and a little jittery, an apparently indulgent paterfamilias on the watch for any lapses in politeness.
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