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. Accordingly, 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
