Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  “Lisbeth is meant for study,” he declared, and he meant the university, which was still a fairly new possibility for women. Her mother fretted that if she went to the university fewer men would want to marry her. Her father said he hoped she would need only one. Lisbeth said that she did not intend to marry anyone, ever. Her father told the two of them to stop talking nonsense. Lisbeth put her arm around her gentle, stubborn mother and told her not to worry. “But I am stubborn too,” she told Cecilia, “and I never took it back.”

  Cecilia was not sure what to make of that. It had never occurred to her for a single moment, as a girl or young woman, that she would not marry.

  Meanwhile, Lisbeth was continuing her story. Armed with her degree in history and a few letters of recommendation, she convinced Max Friedlander at Berlin’s Kaiser-Friedrich Museum to take her on as an apprentice curator. Berlin had a few women curators, while Sweden had none. In fact, her title was a glorification. She laboured away in the dusty storage rooms of the museum cataloguing, cataloguing, cataloguing.

  Her three years in Berlin were a mixture of austerity and rapture. No doubt the austerity heightened the rapture, she admitted, as it had with the medieval saints who starved themselves and had mystical experiences as a result. Her meagre salary paid for an attic room and endless bowls of potato soup with rye bread that she ate on long benches in the artist cafes on Museum Island. The rapture came from the museums, from occasionally breathing in the pure air of Herr Friedlander’s scholarship, and from her work, humble as it was. She had hoped to work with paintings from the nineteenth century, but the Kaiser-Friedrich collections were older. The Renaissance engravings she was assigned to catalogue did not particularly interest her at first, but gradually she came to love their earnest details. The care with which a messenger lifted his pointed shoe over a puddle, the guarded pride in Our Lady’s look at the chubby Saviour lolling on her lap, the methodical way a mason built a wall, icing each brick with mortar like a patissier. She still hoped to move beyond the sixteenth century someday, but she was content.

  Her colleague in the Prints Department and later her roommate in the attic room was a young woman named Marthe Schiller, who was also willing to wait. Marthe’s passion was for the ornate wooden altarpieces of the South German carver Tilman Riemenschneider. She dreamed of a position in Wurzburg, where she could be close to the master’s works, although a woman curator was unheard of in conservative Bavaria. Meanwhile, she catalogued alongside Lisbeth.

  “It’s nice you found a friend,” Cecilia said into the silence that had fallen.

  “Yes,” Lisbeth said. “Marthe was like the people in the engravings we worked with—she did everything seriously. And her oval face with its high forehead reminded me of those medieval and Renaissance figures too.”

  Friday nights, Lisbeth and Marthe would go to the public bath in Oderberger Strasse and pay their ten pfennigs for thirty minutes of cleansing. Saturdays in fine weather, they took bread, cheese and apples and picnicked in the Tiergarten. In the evenings, after their frugal supper in the attic—more bread and cheese, some broth in which lentils floated like tiny coins—they read and wrote letters at the table, on either side of the lamp.

  Lisbeth expected that she and Marthe would eventually move to more comfortable lodgings. As the years passed, Lisbeth imagined that she would be transferred to Paintings in the Neue Galerie. Marthe would find a sculptor in the Berlin collections she would love almost as much as Tilman Riemenschneider. They would spend their holidays walking in the Tyrol, and perhaps in England’s Lake District.

  But one winter Friday night, as they walked home from the public bath, Marthe had a surprise. She had accepted a proposal of marriage from a classmate at the university, a young man named Johannes who hoped to become a professor after he finished his military service. Lisbeth had noticed Marthe spending more time in the evenings writing letters, but that was all she noticed. Stupidly, she asked, “But what about Tilman?” as they called Riemenschneider. Oh, Marthe said, that had been a mad dream. The Bavarian museums would never hire a woman. Johannes had kindly offered to take a side trip to Wurzburg on their honeymoon so that she could see her favourite pieces once more.

  “A farewell visit!” she said merrily.

  With Marthe’s departure for Hanover, where she and Johannes would live, Germany lost much of its lustre for Lisbeth. People were saying that a war was inevitable, but she was ready to leave in any case. First she went to Hanover for Marthe’s wedding—a quiet ceremony in the family parlour and a breakfast in the garden, heavy with lilacs—and then she returned to Berlin to pack up.

  Back in Sweden, prospects for work were not good. The National Museum in Stockholm was not about to hire a woman. When she heard through a friend of her father’s that Lars Vogt was making discreet inquiries about a curator for his private collections, her first thought was, Water and skin. He does wonderful things with water and skin. Being around his pictures would be interesting.

  * * *

  —

  Listening to Lisbeth recount the story of her journey to Siljevik, Cecilia thought: The timing is ironic. Lisbeth had come to them already intrigued by Lars’s work, and now that she had been there some months, her enthusiasm had risen dramatically. At the same time, it was undeniable that Lars’s star was falling in some important quarters. Criticism mounted when, with no experience in restoration, he persuaded the rector at Uppsala University to allow him to restore the university’s sixteenth-century portrait of Gustav Vasa. Although his work was supervised by the conservator at the National Museum, in the end almost everyone considered it the ruin of a historic painting. Among the few who disputed the sorry outcome were Lars and Lisbeth. One newspaper cartoonist lampooned the scandal by drawing Vasa’s head on the body of a voluptuous nude woman. Cecilia had to smile, ruefully, when she saw it, but Lisbeth was furious.

  Lars had always been an eager customer for art, but his buying had recently taken on a new frenzy and credulity. Against expert opinion, he was convinced that he had bought a Raphael and then a Velázquez. Of the so-called Velázquez, he wrote to Cecilia from Munich that the modelling of the face in the portrait was one of Velázquez’s strongest. “It is grand and I’ve never been so happy about a find.” She wondered what had happened to his acuity. When they came to set up the gallery, she and Lisbeth would have heated arguments about that attribution, and others.

  Most seriously, at least to Cecilia, critics were beginning to see Lars’s work as passe. Lars and Nils Olsson still thought of themselves as modern painters who had freed the Swedish art establishment from its hidebound attitudes. Did they never notice, Cecilia wondered, that that had happened three decades ago? Compared with the younger generation of artists, who had turned painting inside out, Nils’s and Lars’s innovations had been subtle and small-scale. Lars, of course, saw no reason to change. Georg Pauli’s interest in the new French painters he could regard affectionately, if a bit condescendingly. But when Prince Eugen, whose mind and work he respected more, spent some time in Paris investigating the Cubists, he was cross. The Swedes still loved Lars’s scenes of peasant life and the Americans his society portraits. But the critics were losing interest.

  Now he gave them another reason to dismiss him: a more and more unbridled sensuality in his nudes. Some of the latest ones looked more like the pictures men pass around in privacy than those that hang on gallery walls. The criticism that came his way because of this new ribaldry amused him more than it irritated him.

  Which was why Cecilia knew she could bring it up at the midday meal, with no fear of distracting him from his afternoon work. As usual, he came into the dining room last. She and Lisbeth were at the table, and they could hear the cook pacing in the kitchen, trying to keep the dill sauce for the chicken from curdling. Cecilia thought Lisbeth looked particularly appealing that day, in a soft, rose-coloured woollen dress. Finally Lars slipped into his seat in his quiet way, and looked around expectantly for the tureen as if he had been
there for some time, waiting.

  After they finished the soup, Cecilia went over the morning’s mail briefly. There was a request or two for Mr. Vogt to do a portrait etching, a rearrangement of a sitting for a painting, a note from his engraver in Stockholm about their next appointment, and several notices of auctions and irresistible finds from dealers. Then she came to something more notable, a letter from a Zurich dealer.

  She put on her glasses and summarized. “Mr. Siebert says the police raided his premises and took some small reproductions of your nudes. The court fined him twenty francs for selling pornography.”

  Lars looked up from his plate with interest.

  Lisbeth, Cecilia could see, was appalled.

  “That is preposterous!” she said. “How dare they misinterpret your pictures…which ones have been reproduced?”

  Cecilia didn’t answer that, but added that Mr. Siebert interpreted the small fine as an admission that the police had been overzealous.

  As for Lars, Cecilia knew he enjoyed being on the opposite side of “the half-educated middle class,” as he called the Zurich police. If people could not see the poetry in his yawning nudes, their mouths gaping and their legs planted far apart, or barely awake in a dim, airless bedroom, splashing water on their warm bodies, their stretches so uninhibited that it seemed ludicrous to call them poses, so be it.

  Lisbeth would not be appeased. She talked passionately about Lars’s masterful way with shadows and skin tones in his nudes, about the way a secondary person could remain in the background but exert a powerful influence on the composition as a whole. And about the squalid minds of people who did not see what he was doing in those pictures, which was far from pandering to sordid imaginations. Cecilia wanted to put her hand on Lisbeth’s fine cashmere sleeve, feel the tense forearm underneath and tell her not to upset herself.

  Chapter Forty-one

  FEBRUARY 1916

  LARS WENT TO Stockholm, where he was beginning a few portraits, for a week. Cecilia had planned to go with him, because Bukowskis was auctioning a first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and she wanted to inspect it. But at the last minute, she decided to stay home. She and Lisbeth could work uninterrupted, and Lars would be happy to go to Bukowskis, look over the book and leave a bid.

  Early in the week, Lisbeth stayed for dinner and the two began talking about a painting of Lars’s from some twenty years ago, called The Bath. A woman, seen from the back, is reflected in the mirror as she stands in her shallow tub, squeezing a sponge against her breasts.

  “That was how we bathed,” Cecilia reminisced. “We had hip baths too, but no full bath with its own plumbing, until the beginning of the century.”

  “I remember those hip baths,” Lisbeth said. “Very uncomfortable. You were always squatting in about six inches of water.”

  “But very good for painters. The body contorted in all kinds of interesting positions.”

  “I suppose so. Where is The Tub now?”

  “We will look it up. I think probably Ernest Thiel has it, in Stockholm. But Lars took the pose, that of the woman with her arms level to her shoulders and squeezing the sponge onto her breast, and made the statue at the front of the garden in the same position.”

  Perhaps it was the talk of breasts and tubs. Perhaps it was the arrack punch they had had after dinner in front of the fire. Usually they drank no more than a glass of wine at the table, but it was such a cold night and Lisbeth had been talking about her university days in Uppsala. Arrack punch was the male students’ favourite drink, and after a few stories of punch-inspired pranks, Cecilia sent her into the kitchen to tell the cook how it was made.

  But the cook had already left and the maid was cleaning up, so Lisbeth made the punch herself and brought out the jug and glasses.

  “Punch comes from the Hindi word for five,” she said, looking through her glass as the drink heated their throats and reconciled them to the snowstorm outside.

  “I know,” Cecilia said, “because traditionally it contains five items.”

  They laughed. This had happened before: they often knew the same odd fact.

  “Alcohol, water, sugar,” Lisbeth counted, “lemon…”

  “Or fruit.”

  “And spices.”

  “Or tea.”

  It was simpler for Lisbeth to spend the night rather than fight the wind and snow to return to Mrs. Turesson’s. After they said good night, Cecilia heard her running water in the bathroom. More water than was necessary to wash her hands and face. The water kept running. It was so noisy that it cancelled out thought. Perhaps she needs fresh towels, Cecilia thought. The maids can be so careless about the bathroom. Then she thought, You fool. And before she could think any more, she went briskly to the linen closet, took out two large towels, rapped on the bathroom door and entered without waiting for a reply.

  Lisbeth was in the tub, her back to the door.

  “Oh, pardon me…” Cecilia began, but Lisbeth simply turned her head toward her and interrupted.

  “Thank you,” she said, referring to the towels. Then, as if it were the most natural thing, she asked, “Could you possibly wash my back? It’s impossible for me to reach all the way…”

  Cecilia knelt and washed her back. Conscientiously, as if much depended on how thoroughly she washed Lisbeth’s back. It was long and slim, rounding out generously below the waist, but she washed only the back. She watched herself doing this. The clinical bathroom with its black-and-white tiles was silent, except for the peaceful lapping of the water, as she dipped her sponge in and out of the tub. Finally, when no one could have denied that Lisbeth’s back was clean, she turned to Cecilia and kneeled. Cecilia washed her shoulders, her arms, her underarms, and her breasts. Carefully, she lifted the breasts to wash underneath them.

  Lisbeth stood in the tub. Water streamed off her body. She held out her arms, and said, “But you’ll get all wet.”

  “No matter,” Cecilia said.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, she rang to have breakfast in her room, something she rarely did. Along with the tea and soft-boiled egg on the tray, the maid left a letter from Sofie. Cecilia stared at the familiar writing on the envelope. Sofie. She would read the letter later.

  Although she was certain that Lisbeth was already in her office, she could not risk meeting her in the dining room. It was more than embarrassment that she felt. It was sorrow, and she wanted to be alone with it.

  Sitting at the small table, ignoring her breakfast, she turned the sorrow over and over, like a paperweight she wanted to appreciate carefully. First she thought, Something clean and pure and innocent has died, and it is my fidelity as a wife. No matter how many times Lars had broken the promises he made on our wedding day, I had stayed true to them. It was like a shawl that gave no warmth and was not particularly handsome, yet I treasured the shawl.

  Then she thought, You’re being stupid and sentimental. What is the point of a fidelity that isn’t returned? Your beloved English novels have let you down here. They are unable to imagine a moderately virtuous woman who no longer sees the point of one-sided marriage vows. French novels are more honest about these things.

  But in all her novels, she had never read anything that approached what had happened the night before.

  Chapter Forty-two

  JANUARY 1924

  EVERYTHING WAS AS usual on the night that Nils died. Tilda was practicing a new song for her choir, accompanying herself on the piano. Sofie and Nils said good night to her, and went to their rooms. Sofie still slept in the nursery, although it had been many years since children slept there. She was in her nightdress but had not turned off the light when she heard something small break and something heavy fall, almost in the same instant. Odd, he was almost never clumsy.

  By the time she had taken the ten steps into his room, Nils was on his side on the floor, with his mouth and one eye open. That eye was looking at the wall and not at her,
even when she spoke to him. His hand clutched a little at the pocket of his worn red dressing gown, and then it stopped. In the parlour, Tilda was still singing. Sofie looked at the shards of the little Japanese vase that had broken in his fall, scattered around him like petals, and she thought, I must sweep those up before Nils walks on them in his bare feet.

  In the days leading up to the funeral, she could not stay away from the loom. She stood very erect, looked straight ahead at the wool and concentrated on keeping the tension correct. She thought of Penelope keeping her suitors at bay by pretending to weave a shroud for Odysseus’s father, and for a few mad moments, she considered weaving a shroud for Nils. Since that was impossible, she kept on with the wall hanging she had been making. It was nothing special, a wedding present for Erika next door. But the clunk of the shuttle and the treadle beneath her feet made her feel as if nothing had happened.

  People said, “Sofie, come and sit down in the dining room, the Nordins have come to pay their respects,” or “Mamma, come and play with the baby awhile.” But the loom was the only place that felt right.

  When Marianne stood at her shoulder and said softly, “Mamma, it is time to go to church,” she pointed to the end of the weaving.

  “Look,” she said, “how much I’ve done.”

  She could hear family and friends worrying behind the closed door. Finally Cecilia, who had come with Lars, walked into the workshop. She tried to take Sofie’s hands, but Sofie would not let go of the shuttle, so, awkwardly, Cecilia put her arm around her shoulder, something she had never done before, even when Markus died. But that, too, interfered with the weaving, so Cecilia rested her hand on Sofie’s back.

  “Sofie, I am so very sorry.”

  Startled at the interruption, Sofie’s eyes left her loom for a second.

  “Thank you. It’s so kind of you to come all this way. But now I must just finish this blue section.”