Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  So Albert and Famke rode away in a cloud of heavy dust, with the geese honking and the pigs squealing a charivari of farewell. The butterflies accompanied them, draining a few last drops from the wildflower garlands.

  Famke had no notion where he’d take her and was delighted to find herself returning to Copenhagen, to the harbor district of Nyhavn. This time her experience of the town was different, lighter and lovelier, though almost as sequestered as in the orphanage. She stopped wearing the servant-girl caps and utterly abandoned the crossing of her ankles while seated. She found the life of a model so restful that she put on weight, and for the first time her breasts fit the cups of her hands rather than the flats of her palms. From Albert she learned English; she learned to call the shape of her mouth a Cupid’s bow—perfectly formed even after the mishap with her infant bottle—and to appreciate the line where the red of her lips met the white of her flesh. He taught her to read English as well, in the guidebooks he had brought. From them she learned that Denmark was flat and that the Danes were thrifty people who enjoyed flowers, sunshine, and making butter and beer. She much preferred Albert’s version of her country’s history, with the thrilling princesses and long-ago warriors.

  Inevitably, she compared being with Albert to being with the orphan girls, and she quickly decided she liked him better. He pleased her in different ways, without hands or mouth, and he took pleasure from the way she sucked on his flat nipples: “No woman has ever done that before,” he gasped. And when they were working, he looked at her the way no girl had ever done—no man, either, for no one before Albert had thought to preserve her and her beauty for the generations.

  Albert once explained to Famke that he’d come to Denmark in hopes that, in a land without a significant artistic or cultural tradition, he might find some last remnant of the medieval life depicted by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to which he aspired. At home in his father’s overstuffed, overheated rooms, he had thought of Famke’s land as historically backward—or primal, he amended when she’d learned enough to protest the first term—populated by simple peasants in wooden clogs, flower crowns, and brightly colored folk costumes, still living out the stark paradigms of Nordic mythology. He’d found more of the curlicued Renaissance and overstuffed nineteenth century than he’d anticipated, but nonetheless he’d fallen in love.

  When Albert said that, Famke felt a thrill in her stomach, as if she were going to be sick, but in a good way. It left her belly tingling. But even though Albert repeated the word “love” quite slowly, she wasn’t sure exactly what it was he’d fallen in love with. Before she could muster the courage to ask, he had moved on to another subject.

  “If I hadn’t come here, I would have gone to America. To the west.”

  Famke stared up at the ceiling, which was water stained but marvelous, Albert said, for reflecting light onto color. “America . . . But that is so far away, so . . .” At Immaculate Heart, there had been a jigsaw puzzle from America, a picture of a vast snowy mountain ringed with purple wildflowers. The children had called it Mæka.

  “That American west is a new land, and it holds a host of wonders for the artist—and yet it has seen no truly great painter. Yes, had I had the funds, that is where I would have gone . . . to the forests primeval, the mountains and plains, the mines, the canyons . . .”

  Albert had reason to respect Mæka’s ancient woods, for it was from good American cedar that his family’s fortune had been made. His father would buy nothing else to make the innovative graphite pencils he manufactured, from a money-saving design that allowed six, rather than five, hexagonal cylinders to be cut from one block of wood. And just after Castle, Senior, decided to affirm his new social status by purchasing work from the era’s fashionable artists, Albert’s determination to become one of them had been born. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti came to the house to hang the Castles’ first acquisition, a portrait that reminded Albert’s father of the dear wife who had died shortly after presenting him with the boy for whom he had finally found room in his budget. Thin and hollow-eyed, but with a smile and a chin-chuck for little Albert, Rossetti had spent an hour or so in the gloomy cedar-paneled parlor. That brief moment of kindness had been a ray of moonshiney hope for the anxious little boy, who hid behind a tasseled settee and observed the careful measuring of the wall, the straightening of the frame, the earnest discussion between the sober factory man and the painter in prime of life, both widowered. That afternoon, nine-year-old Albert decided to learn this magic trick for pleasing people. He would use every technique in Rossetti’s arsenal: the goddesses, the eye for details, the colors.

  To Famke, however, the most beautiful thing he had ever made was that first plain sketch from Dragør. When he wanted to toss it in the fire, claiming it was far from perfect—even far from a likeness—she whisked it out of his hands and wept so stormily that at last he allowed her to tack it to the wall above the washtub. It was the one work that he held inviolate, and as Famke scrubbed at the paint stains on his clothing or soaped her own legs and arms, she liked to look at it.

  Her face, looking back at her, forever exactly the same.

  Kapitel 3

  The Danes had a splendid record for fighting in the middle ages and up to the last century, but have become an agricultural people, and their activity is devoted to making butter and beer, and raising poultry and hay. Copenhagen is the only city of any size.

  WILLIAM ELEROY CURTIS,

  DENMARK, NORWAY, AND SWEDEN

  In a rare moment of introspection, it occurred to Famke that other people might consider she was making a fool of herself. She’d thought the same in Dragør about a milkmaid who trailed around after the local doctor, begging for rides in his buggy and dreaming up reasons he should examine her. And at the orphanage, when one of the girls developed a crush on Sister Birgit—the last person, Famke had thought with scorn, who’d look at an orphan that way—Famke had kissed the girl herself and deflected destiny. But now it might seem that she, too, Famke of the Immaculate Heart, had developed hopes above her station.

  She was in love, with all the passion and force and urgency and trepidation of her years. She did not precisely look on Albert as a savior, but her life was vastly more enjoyable with him than without, and so he was a sort of hero. She had fallen in love by that first night, with pain and blood marking the sharp dart of love settling into her flesh. He smelled good, including the cheroots. She even loved his odd, froggy eyes, so placid in sleep that she kissed them tenderly as she watched over him. He was the first man she had known well, and because there had been nothing like him in her life before, she occasionally suspected it was foolish to hope he would always be there. And just as quickly, she dismissed those notions—after all, Albert himself told her all those nice fairy tales and myths, and hadn’t he mentioned that the Pre-Raphaelites were prone to marrying their models?

  One night, Famke felt Albert prop himself up among the pillows and gaze down at her. “‘He who loveliness hath found,’” she heard him say, “‘he color loves, and . . .’”

  Her eyes flew open at that. She rolled over and poked Albert to make him speak more. “John Donne,” he said, laughing. “Color is beauty, and you, darling . . . it would take a whole dye shop to describe you.” Then he sobered and took on that tedious tone of the bedtime lecturer, sinking back against the pillows, telling her about something called Old Masters and the National Gallery, the dulling effects of old varnish and the traditional artists’ mistaken assumption that to paint like the masters they must limit their palettes to gray and brown . . . Albert intended, like his idol Rossetti, to reintroduce color to loveliness.

  To Famke, all this meant was that he loved color; and that itself might mean . . .

  Love gave her the stamina she needed to pose the long hours Albert demanded of her; and those hours were growing longer and longer, as he had determined that Nimue would be the first picture he finished: She would be perfect, complete, in all senses of the word. Accordin
gly, he studied the pose from every viewpoint and considered every nuance within the story. He moved the angle of Famke’s arms a degree up or down, adjusted the backward thrust of one leg, tried combinations of hair braided and unbraided while Famke basked like a cat in the feel of his fingers. Again and again her lips, nails, and nipples turned blue, but Albert said that was appropriate—“because even a nymph would feel the chill.”

  At last they had the pose just right, and Albert spent some days drawing intently, sometimes in charcoal, sometimes in graphite. He tacked the studies of Famke’s face and body to the walls of their garret. And only when he had the picture fully realized—Famke in her magician’s stance, the dance of her hands shaping turrets of ice—did he begin to prepare his canvas.

  Albert had decided that this picture would be big, of a size that only a museum gallery could accommodate properly. He bought four straight pieces of Norwegian fir five and seven feet long. He nailed them together in the loft, borrowing a hammer from the landlady. When the frame wobbled, he acquired four more stakes and nailed them into an airy latticework behind.

  From an importer on Bredgade, he bought the finest canvas in Copenhagen. There was no cloth bolt wide enough to cover the entire space, so the lengths had to be sewn together. Even with Famke’s help, the stretching itself took days. They laced all four sides over the frame with a series of cords—not unlike the strings that closed a corset, thought Famke, who longed to wear such a garment herself and feel like a lady.

  No easel could support a canvas so tall and heavy, so Albert went back to the lumber dealer and fashioned six little props of wood; three he nailed to the ceiling, and three to the floor. He nailed the fir frame to these blocks, and Famke at last stopped tripping over them. The room’s peaked ceiling was scarcely more than seven feet at its highest point, so the canvas stood there, neatly cleaving the space in two. Albert bought a ladder from a bankrupt apothecary, a vast tarpaulin from a French painter who had married a Dane, and then his workspace was complete: windows, paints, and platform on one side of the canvas; bed, door, and clothes cupboard on the other.

  “Subdividing, are ye?” asked the landlady, Fru Strand, when she came to retrieve her hammer. Never having caught on to the niceties of Albert’s profession, she thought he was tiring of Famke and had erected a partition so he wouldn’t have to look at her all day.

  When Famke dutifully translated, Albert laughed and offered to buy Fru Strand a pint of frothy Danish beer, which she loved as much as her seafaring tenants did. The two of them stomped downstairs merrily, leaving Famke behind to sweep up the sawdust and bits of canvas thread.

  “Subdividing,” she muttered, having taken on Albert’s habit of repetition. She put away the broom and sat down in a chair by the window, to watch the sailors staggering up and down the street like drunken elves in their double-pointed winter hoods. Albert and Fru Strand were nowhere in sight.

  That night, and for several nights thereafter, before he would so much as touch Famke, Albert wetted the canvas; every morning he tightened it, until it was so taut it sang like a bell when she tapped it.

  Meanwhile, Albert sketched more Nimues. “She must be perfect,” he insisted, shading in a sketch he had allowed to progress rather further than the others.

  “Perfect,” Famke echoed. Then she giggled, noticing what Albert habitually omitted. “But no hair,” she said. To her, perfection meant an exact likeness. When Albert blinked at her, she touched the picture and explained, “Down There, she has no hair . . . She hasn’t even a sex. It be as if a cloud passes over.”

  “Sexual hair is not a subject for art,” Albert said on a note of reproof. “It is not for ladies to see, even if they know it must be there.”

  Famke subsided with, “That is not like nature.” She thought of Albert’s Pik, so surprisingly rosy in its dark-gold nest. She wondered if she should be shyer about looking at it—if perhaps he didn’t like her to look . . . It was the artist’s job to look, and to have opinions, never the model’s.

  When she wasn’t posing, there was little for Famke to do. She’d washed all the bedding and every garment the two of them owned, and she’d had a long wash herself. There was nothing left to clean, and no stove on which to cook (for which she, with her dislike of fire, had always been grateful). She had even grown tired of looking at sketches of herself. So when Albert took out his tubes of paint at last, Famke breathed a sigh of relief. But he explained that before he would need her again, he had to lay down a white ground. Layer by infinitesimal layer he built it up, and the seams in the canvas disappeared.

  “Let me help you,” Famke begged, eager to hurry the process along. She churned the brush through the thick gesso, and Albert lifted her hand away.

  “It must be absolutely even,” he said. “It’s really best that I do this myself.” He explained that only against a smooth, hard whiteness would his colors glow—“and I want you to glow, darling,” he finished. She almost didn’t need him to look at her then; these words were enough to keep her warm for the rest of the day.

  The time it took for the white coat to set, they spent in bed. The sun’s hours were getting ever shorter, and despite her boredom during daylight, Famke was quite happy in the dark, keeping Albert gladly distracted.

  On the morning that they woke to find the canvas’s final white ground was perfectly smooth, dry, and hard, Albert gulped. He lingered in bed much longer than was his wont, and Famke practically pushed him out of it. “You said today you should start,” she said. “So start!” When still he dallied, looking at the vast blankness with something akin to despair, she got up and led him to the chamberpot; she saw him finish, then put a morsel of dark bread between his lips and bade him chew. She fed him cheese and sausage in this way as well, and then she—still naked herself—helped him don his layers of clothing.

  Only once Albert was fed and dressed did Famke pull Nimue’s bloodied chemise over her head. She tugged Albert toward the canvas and put a stick of charcoal in his hand, climbed onto her pillowed platform, and struck the pose. “Now draw me,” she ordered him.

  After a moment, Albert began. Hesitant at first, then more sure, he marked the canvas with the line of her nose, then a bit of her shoulders, and her breasts, belly, and legs, through the cobwebby cloth. He consulted his sketches and made a few refinements to the piles of pillows. Last he did her arms and the cascade of hair. Then, having outlined his magnum opus, he threw away his pencil and with a cry raced out into the street.

  Famke, shivering, quietly picked up the pencil and put it with his other painting things. She wrapped herself in a blanket and stood before the canvas, trying to see, in the rough lines of black against stark white, the image of herself that would eventually live there.

  To her, the space looked nearly empty.

  Once the real work got under way, Albert could scarcely tear himself away from his Nimue. He swore that she would hang in the English Royal Academy’s annual exhibition, win him respect and commissions, and convince his father to continue the financial support—if Albert even needed it after his success-to-be. He congratulated himself on having chosen such a quintessentially English subject as Merlin, believing that the familiarity of the myth would help his cause.

  He divided the canvas into small spaces a few inches square and took one as each day’s assignment; sometimes he exhausted daylight trying to cover his allotment. Famke thought he was slow because his brushes were so fine that some used only a single hair, but these were part of his way of working and she said nothing about them.

  Painting, Albert started at Famke’s fingertips and worked his way slowly downward, spending as much time on the background portion of each square as he did on Famke’s body. No matter what he was rendering, she stood there locked in her dramatic pose, her stillness and exposure reassuring him that he was indeed at work. If he wanted to talk, she listened.

  He liked to tell her stories: of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their ladies, of the Nordic myths she’d nev
er heard, and of unusual events all over the world. Famke’s interest in Nimue’s lack of hair Down There suggested the tale of John Ruskin, the Brotherhood’s father-figure, who had been divorced because of unexpected difficulty with that unaesthetic region. “He had never seen a real woman without clothes—he had only seen painted ones—and he was ill prepared for it! On his wedding night, he ran from the room in a fit, and they lived together chastely until she sought annulment.” Famke laughed until she fell off her platform.

  That story reminded Albert of the Norse myth in which the trickster Loki had stolen Thor’s hammer and cut off the hair of his wife, leaving the thunder god powerless and his wife both lightheaded and angry with her husband. And then he remembered that, just a few years ago, a French matron had received a life sentence for murdering her husband, based largely on the fact that, like any good housewife, she had entered the prices of her murder weapons (shovel, hammer, boar trap) into her account book. Around the same time, an American circus master had marched twenty-one elephants across a New York bridge to test the strength of the steel. Albert dreamed aloud of pictures he might paint from these tales, collected from newspapers and pot shops in his native land. Famke listened hard, though she couldn’t visualize the pictures he described and sometimes the blood puddled so in her limbs that she could barely think, much less translate the stories in her head. She concluded that she would never know much of the world; and so she let her mind go blank and simply posed.