Askebo, 15 September 1931
Dear Cecilia,
I can’t think which is worse, a sudden death like Nils’s or the cruel waiting you have now. Lars unable to do things with his hands is unimaginable. I remember the first visit we made to Siljevik, when he took up the heel of the stocking I was knitting and turned it better than I could have done.
Believe me, dear Cecilia, we are all thinking of you and Lars, and hoping he will have a speedy release from this purgatory. As for you, I feel far away and useless. But if there is anything I can do to make this time even a little easier, I hope you will tell me.
Here, the asters are blooming by the river. Marianne’s boys were rowing on it on the weekend and it seemed like old times, to have noisy children running in and out of the house. Nils loved the clatter and mess of the grandchildren’s visits, and it is sad to think he has missed the growing up of the older ones and the arrival of the babies.
I wish I could settle into some work. Nothing satisfies me, I don’t know why. I seem to have stalled since Nils’s death. I remember what you told me on the day of his funeral, about work being a balm. I believe that. But I have not yet found what work that is.
And yet, I am no longer lonely, usually. For the first few years after Nils died, I would find myself thinking, when something interesting or puzzling happened, I must tell Nils that or I must ask Nils about that. That is over now…and yet, having had a companion for all those decades leaves its mark. If I am honest, I probably still tell him things occasionally, or wonder what he would say.
But why am I rambling on about myself, when you have very serious things to think about? I should rewrite this letter, without the last few paragraphs, but I am rushing to catch the morning mail collection, and I flatter myself you would rather have an imperfect letter from me than none at all.
With much love to you, and of course to Lars too,
Sofie
But Lars did not die. The doctors shrugged. Well, even if it was not as soon as they had expected, it would not be long. He could not last in this state. For a week or so he lay, eyes closed and barely moving. Gradually his eyes opened more and he rocked his head back and forth on the pillow, as if he were tired of the position. Lisbeth insisted that they sit him up. Against the doctors’ wishes and with the help of two men, Cecilia and Lisbeth propped him on pillows in an armchair. His right hand never moved, but curled in on itself in his lap like a small, hurt bird. The left one sometimes fluttered idly. Sometimes he seemed to have enough brain to be worried about that, to look at his hands as if to say, Well, what about you two?
He could not speak or walk and had to be fed soft things on small spoons. Here is the baby we never had, Cecilia thought, as the maids or Lisbeth fastened a big dinner napkin around his neck and began to feed him. Sometimes at that point he looked at Cecilia and she imagined that he was asking, Why do you not feed me? But she never did. For real babies, they had dozens of bibs in the textile collection that were hand-woven or crocheted, embroidered or otherwise trimmed with love and skill. For Lars, they had damask napkins at first, and later, when they saw how stained they became, they used plain muslin cloths.
After a month or so, Cecilia decided they would get a wheelchair. Even if Lars only used it for a short time, they could donate it later to the local hospital. Gradually, the doctors replaced their conviction that he would not survive with a conviction that he would never improve. Lisbeth and Cecilia wheeled him in the garden, and in the cemetery to visit his mother’s grave. Between the garden and the cemetery, they passed his studio. He looked at it, unblinkingly, but gave no sign that it was of interest to him.
* * *
—
“Come and see my plans for some of the main galleries.”
Lisbeth took Cecilia’s hand, and drew her into her office, where she had made a little model of the art gallery they were planning.
“Wherever did you get these toy logs?”
“I brought them from home. I used to play with them as a child.”
In the model Lisbeth had hung tiny versions of Lars’s paintings along with some by Ernst Josephson, the Rembrandt etching, the Frans Hals portrait and others that were important to him. A few dollhouse pieces stood in for the Renaissance chest from his Montmartre studio and some rugs. The furniture was all right, Cecilia decided, although it did not seem essential.
She said, “I don’t think we should combine his work with his influences.”
“But it shows people whom he learned from, and to what he aspired.”
“It’s distracting. These galleries should be only Lars’s work. Pieces by others from the collections will go in separate rooms.”
“I don’t agree. It puts him in a larger perspective.”
Cecilia turned away, angry, not wanting Lisbeth to see her fluttering eyelid. She said what she expected would finish the argument. “It’s not what I want.”
“But this is the way it should be.”
At lunch, they wheeled Lars in to the dining table, and Cecilia saw how grotesque their argument was. Here was the man who had taken what he needed from other painters and done his work. Nothing in their disagreement could diminish that or add to that. Cecilia had his chair placed close to hers, so that she could caress his shoulder, pat his knee, put her hand on his arm. He looked straight ahead while Gerda, the new maid, fed him soup and carefully blotted up the spillage.
“You’ve never touched him so much,” Lisbeth said, that evening when she and Cecilia were alone, sitting on the porch where they faced Lars’s statue of the bathing woman.
“That’s because he was never still enough before,” Cecilia said, but that wasn’t true. He had never moved quickly, except for his hands. She had caressed him when they were engaged and newly married, but Lisbeth had not known them then. Now she touched him because there was a new element in her feeling for him: pity. It had nothing to do with Lisbeth, and everything to do with the fact that he could not draw or paint or carve.
* * *
—
Just after his stroke, when she had thought Lars’s death was imminent, Cecilia asked Christian Eriksson to design their gravestone. After some time, Eriksson returned with his ideas, produced in miniature versions, much like Lisbeth with her little log museum. Cecilia thought, Lars has become a baby with bibs and diapers, and everyone is making toys. Eriksson’s models were almost comical, as if a dollhouse had come with its own churchyard. There were the usual rectangular and spade shapes, but there was one that looked like a cradle—or was it a bedstead?—high and rounded at one end, and lower at the other end.
She touched that one, and looked up at him.
“Yes,” he said. “It is based on the Romanesque coffin. There is a hint of Viking too. I would make it in something stark and heavy, like pock-marked iron.”
Cecilia nodded. There would be nothing like it in the churchyard.
She showed the model to Lisbeth, because she had to. She found a good time, as they were celebrating buying back Lars’s portrait of his mother and grandmother from a collector in Lund. The letter agreeing to their terms had arrived that morning.
Lisbeth stared at the model, bewildered.
“But it’s a bed.” It was an accusation.
“No, it isn’t. It’s Mr. Eriksson’s interpretation of a Romanesque coffin.”
And what if it were a bed? Cecilia thought. After all, we are husband and wife.
“And why Romanesque? It isn’t a period Lars particularly liked.”
“I think Mr. Eriksson wanted a strong shape more than a particular period.”
Lisbeth did not say, “And where will I be buried?” But everything about her—the full eyes, the tense posture, the way she turned away—asked that question.
It is not that she wants to be buried next to me, Cecilia thought; she wants to lie next to him. No, that was unfair. She remembered how once, when she and Lars were visiting Boston, Isabella Gardner took them to see a famous cemetery. It was romantic, a
park full of hills and dales and emotional statues and lachrymose inscriptions, far from the level Swedish churchyards they knew, full of blunt stones and iron crosses. On the crest of a little rise, underneath a willow, they stopped for a moment at a family plot. The parents’ graves were two full-size stone bedsteads lying on the ground, complete with stone pillows. Between them lay a small bedstead, the grave of their child. The parents sheltering their child for eternity. That is what Lisbeth wanted, to lie forever between her and Lars.
Cecilia thought, I have had two partners in work, Lars and now Lisbeth. She had hoped for more from Lars, but that was not to be. She had hoped for something different from Lisbeth too, something less obstinate and headstrong, but perhaps what she had made a better balance. She had been so certain that Lars would not seduce Lisbeth, and she could not have been more wrong. But this was a different kind of seduction: Lisbeth loved his art. Now she and Lisbeth competed to be the one who understood his art and knew what he would have wanted. When he died, they would compete to be the perfect widow. But it was on the whole a bearable rivalry, a polygamy she could live with.
As for their partnership in the night, as hers with Lars, it happened less often now. But not because Lisbeth wandered. And when it happened, it was like throwing a stone in the lake. The circles spread for days.
Chapter Forty-nine
1931
THE WORKSHOP HAD become a whole world. Haltingly at first, Sofie had begun spending a few hours there, and then retreating for a few days, as if the work made her shy. But that period was brief, and now she spent every day there. Outside the workshop, there was another world—of economic failure, worries about Germany, grandchildren growing up and the house falling into disrepair. But more and more, that world ceased to exist when she opened the workshop door each morning. In there everything was possible, and there was no time she had to keep track of, no meals to plan or even attend if she was absorbed in work. Anna cooked what she wished, and if her mistress did not turn up in the dining room, she would knock and ask if Sofie wanted a tray brought in.
Except in the summer, when the light lasted until past bedtime, she stayed in the workshop to watch the sun set over the river. It stirred her so much she often did forget about dinner. The preamble was achingly slow, with the most delicate pinks, blues and mauves—colours you would paint on porcelain—politely changing places in the sky. But the great moment came when the mother-of-pearl sky turned fiery red, as if to say, Yes, all those pastels are lovely but now it’s time for a surge of sheer power. A triumphant, shameless red. Marianne’s older daughter, who was good at science, told her sunsets were red because the path from the sun to the earth at sunset was longer than at noon. Only oranges and reds, which had longer wavelengths than blues and greens, could stay the course.
She was astonished by the amount of time and solitude at her disposal. She tried to conceive of it only in small pieces, in case it became intimidating. The seasons in Sweden, she thought, were so extreme, with few hours of daylight in winter and almost no night in midsummer. Marriage—or did she mean the time you had to yourself in marriage?—was like winter, with short, ecstatic sightings of light and sun. Widowhood seemed more like summer, with a light that went on forever. In theory, she saw that that might become tedious but, so far, making up for lost time left her lightheaded with gratitude. She tacked up the quotation she had written out from To the Lighthouse on the wall, where she could see it from her work. This formidable ancient enemy. This truth, this reality.
One day, experimenting with colours, she found a new one. It reminded her of her early attempts at spinning varying shades of wool together into different colours, trying unsuccessfully to produce the calm sheen of celadon. This new colour she chanced upon was not red, although it had red in it. Nor was it blue, although at first it looked much like blue. She kept playing with it, thinking she would lose it, but she did not. She loved it. It was rich but bouyant, it had depth but movement. She could use it in all kinds of ways.
Still slightly dazed with her colour, as she thought of it, she left the studio for dinner. The dining room table was set for two, on a cloth she had embroidered years ago with Japanese chrysanthemum seals. She traced one with her finger, feeling for a connection with the woman who had stitched it. And there was Sonja, sitting opposite, waiting.
“Darling, what are you doing here? I had no idea you were coming. How lovely to see you.”
“Mamma, you knew I was coming. I wrote to you about it last week. The term at Siljevik is over, and I’m on my way back to Gothenburg.”
Of course. The little girl in Nils’s picture, standing on a stool while she painted a flower border on her bedroom walls, was now this capable-looking woman who taught art at the Siljevik Folk School.
“Mrs. Vogt sends her greetings. She gave an end-of-term coffee party for the teachers. And Miss Gregorius also asked to be remembered to you.”
Cecilia, yes. Sofie did not hear from her so often these days, she was so busy taking care of Lars along with her other projects. She missed Cecilia in occasional great gulps, but she, too, was busy. Sonja was looking at her oddly, and she found it difficult to focus on her daughter’s presence, on Anna holding the tureen, on everything that was not her workshop.
Sonja asked, “What are you working on? Anna said I was not to disturb you.”
“Well, something remarkable happened today,” she said, sidestepping the question slightly. “I discovered a new colour, it fascinates me. I can’t get it out of my mind, I have so many plans for it. There is some blue in it, but it’s not blue, really. And some red too, but it’s far from red. I can’t think why we didn’t know about it.”
Sofie had more to say about the colour, until Sonja stopped her with a small smile.
“Mamma,” she said, “for quite some time now we have been calling that colour purple.”
Purple. Of course, purple. It was purple. How funny that it had looked like a completely new thing to her. But so much looked new to her these days.
Sonja had moved on to something more important. She took a sip of her soup and turned to Anna.
“Anna, your cream of mushroom soup, what a treat. No one makes it as well as you do. Even with your recipe, it never tastes the same in Gothenburg.”
Anna went back to the kitchen, looking happier than she had for months.
Sofie cocked her head toward the kitchen, turned to Sonja and waited.
“Anna told me all the village gossip,” Sonja explained, “and all about the ‘new regime,’ as she calls it. She misses the morning menu planning with you, and she misses Pappa’s exaggerated compliments about her cooking. She worries that you aren’t eating enough, and she can’t understand people—I wonder who?—who forget mealtimes. Her orders to the butcher and fishmonger are thin to the point of embarrassment. Nobody can turn back the clock, she says, but things were very different when Pappa was alive and the children were home. Poor Anna.”
Yes, poor Anna, Sofie supposed, although she did not feel terribly sympathetic. Anna was right about one thing, though. Things had been very different when Nils was alive and the children were home.
* * *
—
Marianne and Birgitta came for Sunday lunch. Anna had outdone herself, making pork with onion sauce for Marianne and semolina with red currants, Birgitta’s favourite childhood pudding. No doubt primed by Sonja, her sisters praised Anna’s cooking to the skies. Sofie wondered when everyone had gotten so interested in food.
Finally, her daughters turned their attention to her. How was she?
“Fine, but I’m finding the workshop rather small. I’m thinking of moving my work into the studio.”
They nodded quickly, without looking at each other. She could see they were surprised.
Birgitta said, without conviction, “Moving the loom could be difficult.”
That was nonsense: the loom had been moved into the workshop, so it could be moved out into the larger studio. In fact, Sofie wasn’t
thinking of moving the loom, but she didn’t mention that. Obviously, they had come to talk about something else.
“Mamma,” Marianne said, “we want you to think about coming to live with us. Or to Oskar’s farm. We both have plenty of room. It’s too lonely for you to live all alone in this rabbit warren, in a village far from most of your children. If you came to us, we are close enough to Orebro that you would have all the things a town offers, shops, a doctor, even concerts. With Oskar, there’s less of a town, but you would enjoy the farm and have his children for company.”
Sofie pretended to consider this while she served the pork. She was mildly shocked, as always these days, to see that her beautiful girls were matrons, with a bas-relief of wrinkles around their eyes and their shining hair streaked with grey. She would never move in with the children—or only when she was too old to work. They were part of her, but she didn’t want them underfoot. She needed to be able to visit her work in the middle of the night or early in the morning if the mood struck her, without having to explain herself or speak to anyone on the way.
Of course, she promised them, she would think about it. In late afternoon, after more compliments to Anna, the daughters left for the Falun station.
“The place comes to life when the girls are here,” Anna sighed, watching the hired car until it was out of sight. “What a shame they can’t come more often.”
The weather had been uncertain, and now the clouds were bright orange with blue veins. She wondered how long the light would last in the workshop.
* * *
—
Sofie leaned in for a closer look: something was happening to Nils’s screen, the one he had painted in France and used when his models undressed and dressed. It pictured a jolly scene of Scandinavian painters in a French restaurant, laughing, making toasts, teasing each other. In the background a waiter, wearing the long white apron of his trade, held a tray of drinks. But at a corner of the table, where there was a bit of space—the only emptiness in this happily crowded picture—something was changing. A figure, seated at the corner, was emerging. There had been nothing there, and now it looked as if someone was appearing out of a fog. As the pigments of the overpainting faded, someone who had been skillfully painted out was making a comeback. Sofie looked again at the returning figure. It must be Thérèse, she realized, the model who had been Nils’s mistress in Paris.
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