a flirtatious titter, and he flicked his hat again in grudging pleasure. Famke pulled her shawl over her mouth. And at last the crowds and other carriages swallowed him up.
When he was well and truly gone, Famke trudged up the stairs she’d so often flown up with a fragrant dinner or some other little token for her lover. Fru Strand’s wrath had renewed as Albert disappeared, and she dogged Famke’s steps.
“Good window glass, to say nothing of the wall, and now I’m left to find workers to replace it all in dead of winter!
“Coming and going all hours of the day and night, and banging the doors each time . . .
“You told me he was gentry, but I never saw it . . .”
At last they reached the studio, now open to elements that included the stiff breeze that would soon bear Albert away. They found the cheap clothes closet in fragments, Famke’s few garments scattered over the floor.
Fru Strand crossed her arms over her beer-stained bosom. “I’ll never rent to artists again,” she said.
Albert had meant to leave Famke enough money to get through the spring, but he hadn’t bargained on Fru Strand. She was not used to lodging single females, and though she didn’t mind the sailors’ occasional cohabitation, she very much minded the suspicion of housing a prostitute. Famke protested that she was no such thing, and that she and Albert were married; indeed, as Fru Strand grudgingly admitted, Famke never received a single visitor, man or woman. Nonetheless, guessing that Famke had some means and wasn’t going anywhere while they lasted, Fru Strand began to chip away at the girl’s modest hoard.
“Your . . . husband,” she said one day, hesitating over the word just long enough to make her point, “nå, he didn’t leave enough for the windows.”
It was useless for Famke to argue; there was no one to back her up, and Fru Strand could, with little trouble to herself, have had her thrown into the street. So Famke handed over the sum demanded. Of course the glass did not materialize; Famke dwelt in the darkness of boards nailed over the huge hole Albert had left, and she paid through the nose for candles.
Another time, Fru Strand announced that Famke had fallen behind in the rent.
“I’m certain Albert paid up till summer,” Famke protested.
But Fru Strand shook her head. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before,” she said with crafty kindness—the girl was young, she thought, and a little sympathy goes a long way with those who have recently left their parents. “Do not think you are the first girl to have been used and left in the lurch. Just be grateful it’s only a few Kroner you lack—thank God he didn’t leave you missing your monthlies.”
Silently, Famke laid the money in the beer-stained palm.
“I am right, am I not?” Fru Strand asked, hovering on the threshold. “He didn’t leave a bit behind, did he?”
“No,” Famke snapped, her hand on the doorknob. “He did not!”
It was a pleasure to slam the rickety thing in Strand’s disappointed face. And to know she now had every right to stay until mid-May, if she wanted to.
No, Albert had left precious little of himself behind. She had done his packing and knew very well that, except for the tinderbox he’d given her and the sketch he’d used to woo her, she’d been scrupulous about returning everything he’d ever touched or used. She had even returned the bits of costume he’d assembled for her to wear in some of his tableaux: Nimue’s filmy shift, Calafia’s tin sword and the shield she’d used to hide her missing breast, the shiny tears shed by the love goddess Freya when her husband lost himself among the nine Norse worlds. Freya had wept liquid gold; all Famke had had were a handful of spangles she’d stuck on with Albert’s pomade, and even those were now rattling in one of his trouser pockets.
For the most part she avoided intercourse with the outside world. While she wasn’t with Albert, she would be alone; she would wait. But one day, drawn by curiosity as much as by the idea of making some money, Famke roused herself to visit the Royal Academy of Art. Her pulse fluttering with nervous excitement, she presented herself as a professional model, and as it happened one of the life-drawing classes needed a girl that very day. Famke disrobed and sat as the instructor told her to do, with her knees pulled to her chest and head bowed, her neck and spine exposed. It was a relatively easy pose. When the students filed in she peeked around a kneecap and searched their faces eagerly: Perhaps, she thought, there would be another Albert among them—not a replacement, for no one could replace him, but someone with the same sort of vision. Maybe several such someones.
But it was not to be. The boys, a few of them younger than herself, darted quick, dispassionate glances at her, saving their true focus for their sketchpads. Of course, she thought as she shifted her pose after the first fifteen minutes, Albert had parceled out their time together in much the same way. But even when one of his artistic fevers took him, he had reflected her back at herself in that form she found so appealing.
She had expected that Albert must have been that way as a student as well. But he was nothing like these pimply-faced boys with their noses to the drawing boards, their bodies slouching almost as if the task at hand bored them. Albert must always have been different.
When she strolled among these students at break time, Famke realized the difference was that he wanted more than these boys—more detail, more beauty, more of the world. She felt less exposed now than she ever had been with him, and she was the one getting bored. All she saw on the students’ sheets was a collection of body parts, arms and legs and ribs and, occasionally, a cloudy rendering of her area Down There. In these sketches she was just a woman.
The Kroner she was given for posing were as negligible as the artworks; she spent them on the way home, buying an orphan’s treasure of licorice and chocolate, most of which went stale before she had a chance to taste it.
So Famke stayed in Albert’s studio—now reverted to a garret, and a murky one at that—and spent her days in silent meditation. She ate little but didn’t seem to feel hungry. She rubbed the tinderbox, thinking sometimes of her days at the orphanage, sometimes of the farm in Dragør, but most constantly of Albert and those few happy months. She even took out the matches, always slightly frightening to her with their potential for harm, and lined them up like soldiers. There were twenty-three of them: a number in which she could invest no significance.
There were, of course, times she’d walk out to the market and occasionally to the King’s Garden, to look at the still-intact Rosenborg castle and turn her face briefly to the sun. Feeling reckless and extravagant, she paid the two Kroner which gave her the right to enter the gates during certain hours, brush away the frost, and sit on the dark benches there, surrounded by maidservants, nurses, and a few strolling prostitutes of exceptionally high class. With warmer weather, the wealthy ladies came out, too, twirling their parasols above bonnets and curled fringes, letting their bustles bounce beneath their short jackets in a way that Famke found very fine. She imagined that someday these ladies would stroll past Albert’s paintings—perhaps his Nimue—in a big museum; they would wonder about the artist and the model. She felt a thrill of anticipatory pride, and again of hope. It was as if these elegant ladies had promised her that when he achieved his success, he would come back. After all, he found Denmark inspiring, and Pre-Raphaelite painters sometimes married their models.
While Famke waited, she did a few small things to improve herself. She visited one of the new department stores and bought herself the much-coveted corset. Though it did indeed make her waist even smaller, she didn’t like it. No one had told her it would be so very tight, that it would cut off her breath and make her feel as if she were being smothered with a pillow. Albert didn’t like corsets anyway; he thought they distorted the body, made the spine unnaturally straight and the waist unsupple. She put it at the bottom of the little pile of her clothing.