“Everyone assumed I would be a carver,” he said, “because I sculpted birds and rabbits with a big, clumsy knife. But when I saw a friend’s set of watercolours, I changed my course.”
He was fifteen when he entered the Academy.
“Although we were not supposed to work while studying, I did odd bits of carpentry and painting portraits of the dead to support myself. My speed at portraits started there, when I raced the clock to capture the dead person’s likeness before they nailed the coffin shut.”
It sounded to Cecilia like the hero’s lonely determination in one of Hans Christian Andersen’s mawkish stories. But something about Lars Vogt—his confidence, perhaps—made her sure that, unlike Andersen’s heroes, he would have a happy ending.
* * *
—
Cecilia had learned her family history in the way most children did, through a combination of stories intended for her and other, more interesting ones that she overheard. She added to that an interest in the family wills—they were, after all, lists—that were kept in the easily opened secret drawer in her father’s desk. At the end of the eighteenth century, her great-grandfather, David Isaksson, had perfected a way to print patterns on cotton so that their colours did not fade. That transformed him from a small businessman into a manufacturer. When he died, in 1811, he left sixty pounds of coffee beans, ten pairs of linen sheets, twenty-two shirts, ten pewter plates, a pair of silver shoe buckles and a walking stick with an embossed silver knob. To the end, his favourite foods were salted peas and gefilte fish made from Pomeranian pike.
Her grandfather, Joakim Isaksson, died in the 1840s, leaving four cut-glass mustard containers, eleven dozen plates, three punch bowls, six carafes for vodka and three cummerbunds. (He was a dapper man.) Her father carried on the family business, now called Ideal Textiles, and his Stockholm factory printed calico as cheaply and quickly as possible. He died when Cecilia was fifteen, leaving three houses, eighteen million kronor and uncounted art.
Cecilia’s grandparents were Rakel and Joakim Isaksson, Sara and Moses Magnus. Like many of Stockholm’s Jews, they descended from Germans who had arrived in the eighteenth century. Wanting to be as Swedish as possible, they gave Cecilia’s parents Swedish names, Carl-David and Fanny. Her own generation kept their Jewishness for their middle names—Cecilia Rebecka, Natalie Leah, Fredrik Nathan.
Facts like those were the logical starting point of her story, Cecilia thought, as she accepted a second cup of coffee from the waiter. But those were not the kind of things she wanted to tell Mr. Vogt, or not just yet. Like most Swedes, and especially those from the country, he knew almost nothing about Jews, so she started with trifles. As her parents did, she minimized the differences between gentiles and Jews.
“Of course, we didn’t have Easter eggs or Christmas trees or Christmas hams at home,” she told him, “but we are quite used to them in the houses of our friends.”
“Are you telling me that Tomten never left you any Christmas gifts for being a good child?” Mr. Vogt asked. He shook his head, in mock pity.
“He never did,” she smiled, to show it was nothing. “But when my nephews complained that he never visited their house on Klarabergsgatan, he left them a few token presents.”
We shrugged at things like that, Cecilia thought. If we did not practice a certain nonchalance in the gentile world, we would never thrive. On the surface, there was not all that much difference between them and other prosperous Stockholmers. She and her friends lived in roomy, high-ceilinged apartments or houses on Drottninggatan and its cross-streets, borrowed the latest books from Bonniers’ lending library, read the Dagens Nyheter and ate saffron buns with their coffee on the feast of Lucia. In the summer, they rented big wooden houses on the archipelago outside Stockholm. Taking the ferry from Stockholm to the archipelago, Grandfather Isaksson had worn a navy cap and the naval insignia on his jacket—not that the Royal Swedish Navy accepted Jews, but he had the typical Stockholmer’s love affair with water and boats.
Just below the surface, of course, Cecilia understood that her family was different from their gentile neighbours. Until 1859, Jews had not been allowed to attend the public schools. Until 1863, they could not marry gentiles. They were only allowed to become full Swedish citizens in 1870. The Isakssons preferred not to make too much of those milestones, but Cecilia learned about them by osmosis.
“By the time I was twelve or so,” she said to Mr. Vogt, changing the subject, “I wanted to understand my father’s business. How many bolts of cloth was he manufacturing? What markets did they go to? Would some of these new looms and presses increase the output? My brother looked at me oddly when I pressed these questions on Pappa. Fredrik wanted to talk about pretty girls, the boat they used in the archipelago in the summer, and the change in the menu at Hasselbacken. But it was Fredrik who would take over the business.”
“What about your parents? Did they look at you oddly?”
“Pappa was only too happy to talk with me about his plans. And Mamma looked proud, thinking, no doubt, what a good wife I would make some ambitious businessman someday.”
She smiled, almost apologetically, and after a second he did too.
* * *
—
Cecilia noticed that charm has different faces. When people describe someone as charming they usually mean the person who tells amusing stories and takes centre stage easily, as if it were his natural place. You leave an evening with this type and think how delightful he is. With another sort of person, you leave thinking, I must be more interesting than I thought I was. The charm of this second person is that they draw you out and make you feel charming. There is a third type of charmer, more difficult to describe. This kind neither dominates nor draws out the other person. Something about their physical presence, the way they incline their body toward you or look at you, the way they simply are, is beguiling. That was Lars Vogt. It was not what the English call animal magnetism (although he had that too), or simply a question of living easily in his body (although he did). It was more that he had a particular quality of relaxed attention. Without seeming to exert himself, he convinced Cecilia that her annual birthday excursion as a child to the marionette theatre or the family Sunday dinners at Hasselbacken were singularly interesting. She preferred hearing how he rolled out big wheels of tunnbrod with his grandmother, baked them on the farmhouse fire and then dipped the thin, crisp bread in pans of cream. They each found the other exotic.
* * *
—
She told herself she wasn’t deceiving Mamma by not mentioning her meetings with Mr. Vogt. She was simply not worrying her mother with trifles. As long as it was in the open air or a relatively public place in the daytime, a young lady was free to meet friends. And when Mamma asked her about her day, Cecilia had plenty to say about the clothing depot and Aunt Rosa’s flyaway mind.
“It’s infuriating. She needs to make an inventory of every donation that comes in, separated out into skirts, shirts, jackets, trousers and so forth, with a rough guess about the sizes. Then when a man or a family comes in, we could make up a box for them, and cross the items off the inventory. It’s very simple. But everything is harum-scarum, nothing is sorted, and Aunt Rosa rushes around, exclaiming at the sad state of every single person who has been forced off the farm and come to town looking for work. It takes ages to find a girl’s skirt or a pair of warm socks.”
“But darling,” Mamma would say, “what a good idea. Why don’t you tell your aunt you’ll set up an inventory for her?”
Cecilia expected that eventually someone would see her strolling in the Djurgarden with Mr. Vogt and remark on it to Mamma. And then she would figure out what to say. But before that happened, Mr. Vogt suggested that they visit Professor Hazelius’s collection of peasant objects, and she had to tell Mamma. The new museum was at 72 Drottninggatan, a few blocks from their house and right in the middle of the shops where Mamma did her afternoon errands.
She did look a little taken aback,
but not for the reason Cecilia expected.
“Really? Hazelius? Isn’t he the man who has collected milking stools from all over Sweden?”
“I don’t know. But Mr. Vogt says his collection is extraordinary.”
“What can be extraordinary about a milking stool from every province? I don’t know why I think he has only one from each province. Perhaps he has even more than one.”
That possibility seemed to move Professor Hazelius in her mind from a harmless eccentric to something more pathological. She widened her eyes and set down her embroidery.
“Why don’t you bring Mr. Vogt here afterwards? All those things will probably be very dusty, and you’ll want some refreshment.”
Sofie said something about Mr. Vogt being busy with his commissions. She knew he would be happy to have coffee and cake with Mamma, but she wanted to keep him to herself a while longer.
A few days later, on a day in early summer when the Norrstrom glinted in the sun, she and Mr. Vogt made their way down the commercial blocks of Drottninggatan. At the end of the street they could see the palace, but the buildings on their side of the river were sober storefronts with just enough cut-stone trimmings to show that the businesses they housed were successful.
“Hazelius is a professor of Nordic languages,” Mr. Vogt told her. “He travels in Dalarna during the summers, and he likes watching the people around Lake Siljan setting off on Sundays in their church-boats.”
In those days she knew very little about the provinces, nor did they interest her much.
“What is a church-boat?”
“It is how people in the remote coves travel to a bigger place that has a church, for Sunday service. Each settlement has its own rowboat, big enough to accommodate the whole village. One day, Hazelius watched people boarding their boat to go to Leksand and he noticed a woman carrying an ordinary purse instead of the traditional embroidered waist bag. Another wore a modern jacket, without the folded blanket in which women hid their hymn books. Hazelius thought, This is all going to die. All these ancient ways and things. He decided that he must preserve them while he could. He began by buying the folk costumes that were just on the point of being abandoned and moved on to the contents of farmhouses when a family died out or, more often, when poverty drove them to the cities or to America.”
Professor Hazelius’s collection was kept in a stone building that looked like all the others on the block. Even though Mr. Vogt had prepared her, she never could have imagined what waited behind the plain door with the small, hand-lettered sign that said “Nordic Museum.” Professor Hazelius had not only acquired things that most people, like her mother, did not consider beautiful or interesting, but his way of displaying them was something new under the sun. Cecilia was used to the paintings hung from floor to ceiling in the National Museum. When the Isakssons visited a collector, they would be shown his Wunderkammer, a room whose glass cases were crammed with everything from ostrich eggs encrusted with silver to intricate carvings on walnut shells. But the professor had taken his spinning wheels and bed-hangings and tables and furnished whole rooms as realistically as he could, so that it was as if she and Mr. Vogt had walked into a farmhouse in Skane or a carpenter’s house in Ystad. It was like catching a grown man methodically building a life-size dollhouse. And he’d even added the dolls, wax figures who wore the leather apron of Gagnef or the short jacket of Floda, embroidered with woollen blossoms.
Cecilia had never met a woman who cared about waist bags or earthenware jugs, much less a man. But Hazelius’s things reminded Mr. Vogt of his mother and grandparents.
“Hello,” he greeted a rough blanket woven in browns and reds. “My grandmother had one something like this.”
She stared at its straightforward design of diamonds alternating with stripes and chevrons. She was willing to find this, and Professor Hazelius’s other things, appealing or impressive or splendid, but mostly she didn’t. For her, the Nordic Museum was another chance to stand next to Mr. Vogt, to listen to his voice, which sounded like a confidential whisper no matter how loudly he spoke, and to earn his approving look when she could summon up some honest praise. The more refined a piece was, the easier it was for her to admire it. When they looked at some of the fringes the Dalarna women made for their hand towels and curtains, she murmured something about the delicacy of cobwebs. She knew it was a cliche, but Mr. Vogt was pleased.
As for him, the less delicate the better. Once nostalgia brought him to a piece, he would begin appraising its line or the unknown maker’s canny ways with a limited palette.
“Look at the way this one has used the swell of the pitcher for the face he’s painted on it,” he would say, rounding his hands in the air. “He knew what he was doing.”
The Nordic Museum became one of their regular haunts. One day they stopped in front of an infant’s shirt, which Professor Hazelius had put on a most unconvincing doll lying in a carved cradle. The loose shirt, simply embroidered with rosebuds at the neck and wrists, was eloquent. Had a girl embroidered it for her first child, dreading the peril of childbirth but hoping that she and her child might be two of the lucky ones? Had more than one baby slept in its fine white wool?
She pored over it, wanting to touch it but knowing that was not allowed. Mr. Vogt must have seen something in her eyes. Just for a second, he covered her gloved hand with his bare one. He almost never wore gloves in Stockholm, which he said was like a hothouse compared to Siljevik. Then he spoke quickly, a rare sign of shyness.
“Shouldn’t we be Cecilia and Lars? Miss Isaksson and Mr. Vogt sound so unfriendly.”
She found his face, with his wide-set eyes and short, straight nose, very German. Very beautiful. His square hands and tapering fingers. The way his shoulders filled up his coat. If they moved to first names, it would end the pretense that they were merely friends. She nodded. Whenever she thought back to that moment, she saw the two of them on either side of the cradle. An embroidered baby shirt from Visby had sealed their fate.
Chapter Twenty-six
1889–1893
SOMETIMES LARS SAID it was her blue eyes that had drawn him. More often, he claimed it was her laugh. People said her laugh was bigger than she was. Her brother and her aunt Rosa, and no doubt others, thought it was horrid. Lars liked it. He said it was like being in a perfectly calm, tidy room that was suddenly overtaken by a racket.
The Isakssons’ Swedishness and gentile first names did not mean that they celebrated the feast day of the saint for whom they were named. But name days were important in Lars’s village and on November 22, the feast of Saint Cecilia, he gave her a letter opener he had carved, with her profile in bas-relief and her initials looping underneath it. The profile, almost impossibly detailed, showed her heavy-lidded eye and the tendril of hair that swung loose at the back of her neck. She ran her finger over and over its tiny perfection, but only in her bedroom. She did not show it to Mamma, or anyone else.
* * *
—
Perhaps because the Isakssons rarely went, perhaps because their going was usually timed to a holiday and a family party, Cecilia liked going to services at the Stora Synagogue on Wahrendorffsgatan. The building was like a big square cake with white frosting, banded with gold-and-white stripes. Whenever members of the congregation got together, someone was bound to complain that it looked too much like a church. Then someone else would say that, on the contrary, the architect, Mr. Scholander, had modelled it on the “Assyrian style.” Cecilia had never met anyone who knew what that meant, but it sounded better to the congregation than Gothic or Romanesque. She knew the synagogue didn’t look like a church because churches had spires.
Inside, it was painted gold and soft brown, with brocade hangings in the same colours, pattern on intricate pattern, rich but homey—as if God had the taste of an indulgent grandmother whose candy dish was always full. Cecilia loved the solemn moment when they pulled back the curtain on the altar to reveal the Torah scrolls with their silver crowns. The dark blue bac
kground on which the scrolls were propped was painted with golden stars and, although it was morning, it looked as if someone had opened a window on a starry night sky.
The Stora Synagogue had an organ, something the members’ forefathers had never known. And now some of the hymns they sang had melodies that sounded more like those of the Swedish Church than the sinuous Eastern tunes that undulated like the stems of Pappa’s nasturtiums. Old Mr. Eliason shook his head about the organ, but Aunt Rosa said, “An organ is nothing. The Jews in Gothenburg have a Catholic choirmaster!” The Gothenburg Jews were always ahead of the Stockholm Jews.
Pappa and Fredrik sat on the main floor where a little sloping compartment in front of them was labelled “Carl-David Isaksson.” Inside the compartment was Pappa’s black velvet skullcap and his tallis. With ease, although he only did it a few times a year, Pappa swung the black-and-white tallis over his jacket and the shawl seemed to know what to do. It crumpled, swooped and clung, transforming a Swedish businessman who was praying a stone’s throw from Stockholm’s music theatre into a desert tribesman.
Seated between her mother and Natalie, Cecilia looked down from the women’s balcony, where a rounded iron railing wrapped around three sides of the synagogue. Its design was like the lace mantillas Spanish women wore. She and Natalie boasted to Fredrik, We are above you, that means we’re better. Fredrik claimed that he was better, because he was closer to the ark. No one told her until later that women sat in that filigree cage because they were too tempting, too distracting, for men to see while they were supposed to be praying. Lars would have found that very sensible.
* * *
—
When Cecilia began learning English in school, she and her classmates had struggled with Our Village by Miss Mitford. But once English became easier they read more entertaining books, and now she was a habitué of her Bonnier cousins’ lending library, which stocked the latest titles from England, France, Germany and Sweden. If someone had blindfolded her, she would have known she was in Bonniers’ from the sound of the bell attached to the door, with its slight shudder at the end of the clang, and the shuffle of the clerk, Mr. Eklof. He made his way slowly from the back room through the mingled smell of glue, paper, leather and toilet water to the oak counter where she rested her gloves.
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