Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  Famke liked when Albert looked at her, even though now, as he plotted her against the stub of pencil or a longer brush, she knew he wasn’t really seeing her at all: He was seeing his idea of this Nimue, a virginal nymph who lived in his mind but not in his bed. It was the same way as he saw the blood on Famke’s chemise not as the sign of sickness but as a signal of beauty, something he called a symbol, unrelated to the coughs that plagued her.

  Someone was coughing in the stairwell right now. A sailor, Famke guessed from the loud sound of it. She thought that the sailors who lived in Fru Strand’s rooming house liked to look at her, too; but they looked differently. They saw the same things Albert saw, the same figure and eyes and hair, but even at her age she knew it didn’t mean to them what it did to him. They were only boys, at the very beginning of their years at sea, renting a room for a week or two between voyages in much the same way as they rented girls for a night.

  “Keep your arms up,” Albert reminded her, and she brought her mind back into Nimue. I am a magical nymph, she told herself. I am enslaving an ancient wizard. I do not wish to work on a farm again.

  Her raw lungs and full bladder only increased in discomfort, but she stood steadfast and focused on Albert’s hands as they performed their infinitely delicate work, drawing her. He had beautiful fingers, long and bony, with a rainbow of paint always under the nails, and to Famke’s mind they produced wonders. They had drawn her as an earthly Valkyrie, in a cloak made of swans’ feathers (and nothing else); painted her as a nearly naked Gunnlod, the loveliest of the primordial Norse giants, watching over the three kettles of wisdom in a deep, deep cave (Albert seemed to be very fond of caves). And now this Nimue, a wizard’s lover, who could be from icy Scandinavia but would be of great interest to the English critics who could make Albert’s fortune. Famke had never heard of Merlin or of Nimue, but Albert was teaching her a great deal about the mythology of her people. He liked to set her lessons from the traveler’s guidebooks scattered over the mantel.

  “Maiden’s blood,” Albert said, repeating. He picked up a dry brush and ran it over the sketched Nimue. Famke watched from the corner of one wide eye as the charcoal lines blurred, and in blurring, came to a more vivid sense of life. It never failed to fascinate her, this transformation from paper and coal into human figure. Her figure.

  She maintained the pose until, some minutes later, Albert opened a few tubes of paint and splotched a page with shades of weak blue and stark white, marking out the rhythm of color. It was clear there was to be a lot of ice, even in her gown.

  With this, Albert nodded to her; she was through. Famke stepped off the little platform, looking askance at the pillows she’d been posing with; she and Albert did not have many, and she knew they wouldn’t be sleeping with these until the painting was finished or abandoned. The pillows must keep their pose, too.

  “What shall I call this one?” Albert asked conversationally as he mixed a thin, bright red. “The Revenge of Nimue . . . The Ravishment of Merlin . . .”

  Famke took the chamberpot from under the bed and, at last, went to a corner to relieve herself. Albert could go on in this vein for hours, and he usually chose the most descriptive and least pronounceable title possible (“The Violated Nimue, Enraged, Casting Spells Over Merlin’s Prison”) for works he would eventually disown. Very little of Albert Castle’s labor seemed to yield the results he desired, what he saw in his mind—a complete and wondrous world populated by celestial nymphs and robust goddesses, all with Famke’s white skin and wild hair, demonstrating the myths of power and betrayal that had moved him ever since he opened his first book of poetry. He expected perfection and disappointed himself each time he picked up pencil or brush; and each time, the gesture grew in importance: His father had sworn to support Albert only up to his twenty-fifth birthday, which would come on the first day of April. If Albert did not manage to produce a saleable painting in that time, he would have to join his father’s pencil-manufacturing company. But before any painting was half done, he deemed it unsatisfactory; he broke them all over his knee or tore them to bits, then took off at a run through the streets to purge his frustration.

  Even now Albert picked up a heel of their morning bread and rubbed it over half the sketched page, erasing some mistake.

  The one scrap that Famke had managed to preserve hung in a dark corner above their washtub, where he would be least tempted to destroy it. This was the first sketch he had ever made of her, and Famke looked up at it as she relieved herself: a farm girl, a tender of geese and pigs, with her cap pushed back on her head and a butterfly light in her eyes. Every detail was perfect; it was Famke exactly as she wished to see herself in those days, and it had taken him only an hour to complete.

  For all their dissatisfactions, each of Albert’s works was dense with that sort of detail and keen observation, labored over inch by inch. It was that labor that made their eventual destruction so heartbreaking to Famke. She once suggested that he sketch a rough outline first, to get an impression of the scene, but he reacted with horror: “Impressions are dangerous to a true artist,” he said. “You speak like a Frenchwoman—you know, over there a man fills five or six canvases a day with impressions. The Brotherhood know that only in precise details is there truth. It is the difference between a tramp and a good workman—impressions are a passing pleasure; patience and industry make art.”

  And yet, thought Famke, Albert was remarkably impatient. Just now he was wearing that gray heel of bread down to his fingers, and crumbs were flying everywhere. The page before him was a smear of pale blue. It was time for her to do or say something, lest he succumb to self-criticism and despair.

  She covered the chamberpot and put it back in its place. Still naked, thinking how best to distract without annoying him, she climbed into bed and buried herself up to her eyelids in blankets, then looked to the window. The sunlight was already waning, but it showed the roofs had grown dirty, the day’s warmth turning the castle ruins from a palace of snow back into mere rubble.

  “Do you think Christiansborg burns to a purpose?” she asked. “Do you think it is destroyed because it is not perfect?”

  Albert glanced out the window, too, and what he saw there seemed to calm him. “No.” He picked up his brush again. “The Danes do not behave that way. Not since the Vikings, at any rate.” He turned to a blank page and said, ruminatively, “Perfect . . .”

  The sheets now felt as warm and soft as bathwater; Famke slid down them like a happy eel and tried to imagine a world she might create if invited to do so. She had only the dreamiest sense of what it might be: warm, yes, but with jigsaw-puzzle blocks of ice and flowers and pickled herring and definitely Albert. The thick smell of linseed oil and the bite of turpentine, rainbows of paint under nails and across unexpected stretches of skin. There would be no farmwork, no housework, no church services; only art. She would never cough. Instead, she would stand in the middle of this world, or lie in it, perpetually still, with her clothes off and her eyes lost in Albert’s.

  It would be this life.

  “New pots for old!” sang a tinker passing down the street below.

  Famke looked up and suddenly the light was gone; even the keenest eye couldn’t stretch it any further. Albert sighed and put brush and palette down on the rough board table, where Famke would clean them later. Wiping his hands on what he must have thought was a rag—a camisole she’d left to dry over the back of a chair—he looked from the easel to the bed, from pencil drawing to paint sketch to the real, living girl watching him and trying not to cough.

  “I think it is going to be . . .” He paused, searching for the right word: “beautiful.”

  It was an ordinary word after all, but nonetheless exotic to her, for he said it in English. Famke felt a rush of hot feeling—not the ordinary fever of her disease but a new kind that Albert had passed on to her, a kind that felt hotter and stronger each time it came over her. She threw the covers off and held out her arms to him, unconsciously splaying h
er hands in much the same way as Nimue did.

  He came toward her, repeating, “Beautiful . . .”

  When he was undressed and in the narrow bed himself, he hoisted Famke up and—her arms braced against the sloped ceiling for balance—slid her down onto him. She wobbled, unsure just what to do now; and he kept his hands on her hips. He held her still while he began to move.

  Famke looked down into Albert’s face; and then he looked up into hers, the planes of it in twilight shadows. Famke removed one hand from the ceiling and pulled her hair to the side so that, behind her, he might look on the face and form of his Nimue, his masterwork, his violated virgin.

  “Ah . . .” Very quickly, he gasped and began to shudder.

  As she rode that wave, Famke knew that he was seeing her as his heroic nymph, and she did not mind one bit. She had a lovely warm, shimmering feeling, a feeling that—like the new fever, but different—made her want something . . . As Albert quieted beneath her, she felt the shimmering rise and then fall away, leaving in its wake a vague sense of longing and that familiar tickle in her lungs.

  Famke coughed. The contractions pushed Albert out of her, and he slid back, to where the bed met the wall.

  “Really, darling,” he said as she got up and, for want of a handkerchief, coughed further into the paint-stained camisole, “you should take something for that dreadful hack.” He swabbed at himself with the bedsheet. “I’ll get you an elixir the next time I’m out.”

  Famke shook her head, yes, no, feeling herself cold and wet and somehow bereft, but still with that sensation of wanting inside. She lowered the camisole and smiled at Albert, and he said again, “Beautiful.”

  Kapitel 2

  English is spoken at all the principal hotels and shops. A brief notice of a few of the peculiarities of the Danish language may, however, prove useful. The pronunciation is more like German than English: a is pronounced like ah, e like eh, ø or ö like the German ö or French eu. The plural of substantives is sometimes formed by adding e or er, and sometimes the singular remains unaltered.

  K. BAEDEKER,

  NORTHERN GERMANY (WITH EXCURSIONS TO

  COPENHAGEN, VIENNA, AND SWITZERLAND)

  Famke was not virtuous when she met Albert Castle. According to the Catholic precepts by which she’d been raised, she was no longer truly virginal, as she confessed to him in a bedtime conversation. Few orphan girls, even those raised by the good sisters of the Convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, could lay claim to that desirable state once they entered the wider world—and why should they bother to hold on to something that would be taken from them once they’d passed communion and were placed in service with some family inevitably headed by a prurient husband, a curious son, or a querulous grandfather who would have his way?

  “Darling, you’re so fierce,” Albert said as he squeezed her.

  “It is a fierce world,” she said. “Overhovedet, especially, for a girl.”

  Besides, immured in her orphanage, Famke had found the idea of sin exciting. It offered the possibility of something other than what she had, something that must be at least pleasant, if not delicious, since the straight-backed nuns who had married Christ were so vehemently against it.

  So Famke had taken sin into her own hands. The boys on the other side of the orphanage were just as curious as she, and intrigued by her interest. She courted them first through a crack in the wall separating the boys’ and girls’ dormitories. This was during the exercise period, when the children were encouraged to enjoy fresh air and wholesome movement, trotting up and down two barren courtyards, occasionally playing desultory games of tag or statue around the lone elder tree in each one. Famke would lean into her wall and see an eye, almost always blue, peering back at her through the rubble and leaves. They would talk, whispering arrangements for rendezvous that, under the nuns’ watchful glare, never came to pass. Once, Famke wormed her thin hand along the crack, and the boy on the other side (a Mogens, she believed, or maybe a Viggo—there were so many of both, arriving with those un-Catholic names pinned to their diapers so the good nuns felt bound to retain them) managed to reach just far enough in to touch the tip of one finger. The contact gave her a thrill she’d never known before, and for a good many months it was what she thought sin was, this furtive touch within a wall.

  She actually saw boys only during the daily chapel services; the sexes even ate separately, so as to avoid the inevitable temptation. While the priest droned on about the blessings of humility, meekness, and poverty, she flirted through fanned fingers. Breathing deeply, she smelled the strong cheap soap the older girls made in the orphanage yard from ash and fat. For the rest of her life, it would be that smell—even more than the smell from the place that the nuns would refer to only as Down There, when they admitted it existed at all—that made her heart pound with excitement.

  To the priest’s soporific cadences, in that edifice of gray-painted brick, Famke’s azure eyes winked and fluttered. The boys were helpless: She glowed like the rosy windows that Catholics could afford only in non-Lutheran countries. At the age of twelve, her breasts already brushed against the plain gray uniform, and the figure growing inside that rough sacking seemed to color it rainbow bright.

  The nuns did not fail to notice her blossoming. Soon, Famke had to sit through services sandwiched between two severe gray bodies.

  “She has always been wild,” the Mother Superior said in one of her frequent conferences with the wisest of the nuns. “We saw that from the first.”

  “And the visitors saw it as well,” said Sister Saint Bernard, Mother Superior’s second in command. “The basest peasant can recognize such a spirit, be the little girl ever so pretty. It’s no wonder they always took a different child.”

  Mother Superior said absently, “We do not speak of our patrons that way. Or our young charges.” She was thinking, as was the rest of her council, of the high hopes they’d entertained when the baby turned up on their doorstep one late October day, still wearing the black hair of the womb, wrapped in a soft wool blanket and bearing a note that said simply, “Familjeflicka.” This, they had thought, was a child destined for one of their rare adoptions.

  Young Sister Birgit, who had been born in southern Sweden, had said the word came from her country and meant either “a girl who stays at home” or “a girl of good family.” Given the quality of the blanket and the notorious fact that gravid Swedes often took the short boat ride over to Copenhagen, where mothers’ names were not required for a legal delivery, the note seemed to promise great things. But the sisters found no family portraits, no silver spoons, no precious jewels hidden about the infant’s person; only what one might expect to find in a very ordinary baby’s diaper, and that they gave to one of the novices to deal with. The baby screamed at their inspection, and screamed when she was washed, and nearly took her own head off when she was put to bed with a bottle. The sisters decided to let her cry till she slept, and in the morning they found her whimpering more quietly, but with a mouth stained from blood, not milk. Her tough young gums had broken off the glass nipple.

  Sister Birgit was delegated to pick the splinters from the baby’s lips, using tweezers and the light of a good lantern. She had to dose the squalling patient with brandy to make her lie still.

  She’s nothing but breath and bones, Birgit thought. Only breath and bones. Though it wasn’t true—the baby’s limbs were nicely rounded, her cries lusty—the phrase made Birgit feel tender. It gave her patience.

  In the meticulous work, which took all day, Birgit came to love the little girl. She murmured endearments over the drunken body and torn mouth, and it was then that she shortened the Swedish word to “Famke,” the name that would follow the girl even after her official christening as Ursula Marie. When Famke woke up enough to be hungry again, Birgit would have fed the baby at her own breast, if she could have mustered anything more than prayers. Instead she dipped one corner of Famke’s blanket in a cup of warm milk, freshly bought at the market o
n Amagertorv, and coaxed the sore lips and tongue to suckle.

  In later years, as the growing girl’s cough turned bloody, Sister Birgit would accuse herself of having missed a shard of glass somewhere. She fancied that Famke’s lungs were lacerating themselves as they tried to get rid of that last fragment. Though Birgit and many of the other nuns were also afflicted with persistent coughing, she felt, against all reason, that the unusual event of Famke’s infancy was the source of the girl’s affliction—never mind that she bore no other scars. Birgit prayed for forgiveness, and for Famke’s cure, and she nursed Famke all the way to solid food at the age of five months. Thus she made the best possible use of the “good family’s” sole patrimony; the baby sucked the blanket down to meager threads.

  “Sister Birgit,” the Mother Superior reprimanded her gently in private, “you have become too attached to this one child. You must divide your care among the children equally, as our Lord divides his love among us.”

  Birgit tried to do as she was told. Though she could never give the chaotic horde of orphans the impartial and impersonal affection required by her order, she could offer them the semblance of equal treatment. In everyday life, the life the other sisters shared, she nursed the orphans’ colds and coughs and combed their hair with the impartiality of a Solomon; when a child died, Birgit washed the body and lifted it into its pine box.

  But when she was alone with Famke, Birgit hugged the little girl as tight as she dared, so tight that their bones ground together. Birgit would not have chosen convent life for herself; that had been her parents’ wish, as they’d grown too old and tired by the time their seventh daughter reached adolescence to do anything more for her. Her eighteen-year-old body was starved for physical contact, and Famke’s round little arms gave her the greatest comfort she would ever know.

  In these moments of privacy, Famke took shameless advantage of Birgit’s unstated preference. She played by sliding the gold band from the nun’s finger and sticking it on her own thumb, then popped it in her mouth and impaled it with her tongue to make herself laugh. On the unusual occasions when there was candy at the orphanage, Famke knew that even after all the other children had received their justly measured shares, there would be an extra piece or two in Birgit’s pocket. She knew also that if Birgit, and Birgit alone, caught her in some wrongdoing, she had only to place her hands on each side of the nun’s face and kiss her nose to be forgiven and pass unpunished. No one else would learn of her crime, and her bond with her fellow-Swede would grow.