I remember Herr Ackerman being a rather stern man with neatly trimmed whiskers, dark eyes that seemed like olives stuck in large bowls. His wife was an unhappy woman who appeared always in his shadow, never said anything she didn’t think he would agree with. They were the parents of my school friend, Greta Ackerman, with whom I stayed that summer in their large house in the countryside. Rosa, Herr Ackerman said to me, where are your parents living? When I told him, he pulled a face, sniffed the air as if he could smell them. I am not sure that you may come and stay again after this summer, Rosa; he said stiffly, times are changing; there are people about now who take a dim view of being too associated with Jews. I nodded and was glad at least that summer I could stay with Greta and be with her in that fine house. She was very sad when I told her what her father had said. We must make the most of our time together, she said, and forget about next summer. I had only arrived that day, so she took me to the upper landing of the house where along a corridor she showed me the bedroom where I was to sleep. It was cosy, far better than my own at home which I shared with my sister Rachel. Where do you sleep? I asked. Come and see, Greta said, and taking me by the hand pulled me along the corridor to a door at the end. Here, she said excitedly, I sleep here. Come in, close the door, she whispered as if someone might hear. I entered; she pushed the door shut behind us. What do you think? She said. It’s beautiful, I said. It was the best room I had seen as far as bedrooms go. She took me by the hand, ran to the window, which looked out on the fields beyond and the hills in the distance. I wanted us to share a room like we do at school, but father said, no, Greta said, but you must visit me at night, she added softly. I said I would and she leaned forward and kissed me. It was not the first time she had kissed me; we had kissed at school, but it had been only on the odd moment when we could ****** time to be alone. Here we could be alone when we liked most of the time. Greta knew this and this made her happy. Doesn’t your father like Jews? I asked as we parted from the kiss. He has his worries with his friends and associates who have their own prejudices, he thinks it might harm the friendship if he is seen to take a different view on Jews from them, Greta said, holding me close, not wanting to let me go. We spent time going around the house and grounds, talking and laughing, running across the fields, into the small woods nearby. At mealtimes Herr Ackerman would sit stern, talk about the news, discuss things with his wife, and occasionally look at me as if there was something he wanted to say, but didn’t quite know how to say it. That night as I lay in the bed in the bedroom, looking out at the night sky thinking of home, my parents and my sister, there was a tap at the door. The handle turned, Greta stood in the gap of light from the passage behind her. Are you asleep? she asked. No, I replied. She came in, closed the door behind her, tiptoed across the room to the bed, and climbed in beside me. Her feet were cold and her hands, which touched my warm body, were cold, too. I waited for you, she whispered. I forgot the way, I replied softly. She laughed and kissed my cheek. Not to worry, she said, I am here with you. Her cold feet touched mine, her arms sought out my warm body, she sighed. What’s the matter? I asked. I am so happy to be here with you, yet I know that tomorrow Father says you must return home. I was shocked.Why? I asked. He said it is best, Greta muttered. How best? I said. He told Mother that he has no choice. If his friends found out you are staying here, it could be awkward for him, Greta said. I felt tears on her cheeks as she held me close to her. How shall I get home? I said. Father will arrange transport for you, Greta said. I felt frightened; I sensed danger. I don’t want you to go, Greta said, I want you always to be here with me. I kissed her. Father said that I am to go to a different school next term, Greta muttered. After tomorrow, I may not see you again. I felt as if someone had stabbed me, someone had opened up my brain and exposed it to a bright light that blocked out all thoughts and feelings other than that Greta and I were to be parted. We were silent. We lay in each other’s arms, feelings each other’s arms, bodies and sensing the moments passing by, the clock on the small bedside table was ticking away the minutes we had left together. Talking seemed senseless, we spoke with our bodies, our hands, and our lips, we explored each other in such depth that I remember each part of her body even all these years later. That was my first night of love, our night of love. Two fourteen-year-old girls; one German, one Jew. A year later, my parents fled Germany with my sister and me; went to America, and stayed with relatives of my father until he found employment and a place for us to live.
Herr Ackerman and his wife prospered for a while, but they were killed in an air raid in Dresden. Greta committed suicide the week before she was to begin her new school. I shall always remember Greta; remember the love we shared and the love we lost.

A Tale for the Mid-Winter Season after the Mural by Carl Larrson

On the shortest day I wake before our maids from the surrounding farms have converged on Sundborn. Greta lives with us so she will be asleep in that deep slumber only girls of her age seem to own. Her tiny room has barely more than a bed and a chest for her clothes. There is my first painting of her on the wall, little more a sketch, but she was entranced, at seeing herself so. To the household she is a maid who looks after me and my studio,  though she is a literate, intelligent girl, city-bred from Gamla Stan but from a poor home, a widowed mother, her late father a drunkard.  These were my roots, my beginning, exactly. But her eyes already see a world beyond Sundborn. She covets postcards from my distant friends: in Paris, London, Jean in South America, and will arrange them on my writing desk, sometimes take them to her room at night to dream in the candlelight. I think this summer I shall paint her, at my desk, reading my cards, or perhaps writing her own. The window will be open and a morning breeze will make the flowers on the desk tremble.

Karin sleeps too, a desperate sleep born of too much work and thought and interruption. These days before Christmas put a strain on her usually calm disposition. The responsibilities of our home, our life, the constant visitors, they weigh upon her, and dispel her private time. Time in her studio seems impossible. I often catch her poised to disappear from a family coming-together. She is here, and then gone, as if by magic. With the older children home from their distant schools, and Suzanne arrived from England just yesterday morning, they all cannot do without lengthy conferences. They know better than disturb me. Why do you think there is a window set into my studio door? So, if I am at my easel there should be no knock to disturb. There is another reason, but that is between Karin and I.

This was once a summer-only house, but over the years we have made it our whole-year home. There was much attention given to making it snug and warm. My architect replaced all the windows and all the doors and there is this straw insulation between the walls. Now, as I open the curtains around my bed, I can see my breath float out into the cool air. When, later, I descend to my studio, the stove, damped down against the night, when opened and raddled will soon warm the space. I shall draw back the heavy drapes and open the wooden shutters onto the dark land outside. Only then I will stand before my current painting: *Brita and the Sleigh.

Current!? I have been working on this painting intermittently for five years, and Brita is no longer the Brita of this picture, though I remember her then as yesterday. It is a picture of a winter journey for a six-year-old, only that journey is just across the yard to the washhouse. Snow, frost, birds gathered in the leafless trees, a sun dog in the sky, Brita pushing her empty sledge, wearing fur boots, Lisbeth’s old coat, and that black knitted hat made by old Anna. It is the nearest I have come to suggesting the outer landscape of this place. I bring it out every year at this time so I can check the light and the shadows against what I see now, not what I remember seeing then. But there will be a more pressing concern for me today, this shortest day.

Since my first thoughts for the final mural in my cycle for the Nationalmuseum I have always put this day aside, whatever I might be doing, wherever I may be. I pull out my first sketches, that book of imaginary tableaux filled in a day and a night in my tiny garden studio in Grez, thinking of home, of snow, the mid-winter, feeling the extraordinary power and shake of Adam of Bremen’s description of 10th C pre-Christian Uppsala, written to describe how barbaric and immoral were the practices and religion of the pagans, to defend the fragile position of the Christian church in Sweden at the time. But as I gaze at these rough beginnings made during those strange winter days in my rooms at the Hotel Chevilon, I feel myself that twenty-five year old discovering my artistic vision, abandoning oils for the flow and smudge of watercolour, and then, of course, Karin. We were part of the Swedish colony at Grez-sur-Loing. Karin lived with the ladies in Pension Laurent, but was every minute beside me until we found our own place, to be alone and be together, in a cupboard of a house by the river, in Marlotte.

Everyone who painted en-plein-air, writers, composers, they all flocked to Grez just south of Fontainebleau, to visit, sometimes to stay. I recall Strindberg writing to Karin after his first visit: It was as if there were no pronounced shadows, no hard lines, the air with its violet complexion is almost always misty; and I painting constantly, and against the style and medium of the time. How the French scoffed at my watercolours, but my work sold immediately in Stockholm. . . and Karin, tall, slim, Karin, my muse, my lover, my model, her boy-like figure lying naked (but for a hat) in the long grass outside my studio. We learned each other there, the technique of bodies in intimate closeness, the way of no words, the sharing of silent thoughts, together on those soft, damp winter days when our thoughts were of home, of Karin’s childhood home at Sundborn. I had no childhood thoughts I wanted to return to, but Karin, yes. That is why we are here now.

In Grez-sur-Loing, on a sullen December day, mist lying on the river, our garden dead to winter, we received a visitor, a Swedish writer and journalist travelling with a very young Italian, Mariano Fortuny, a painter living in Paris, and his mentor the Spaniard Egusquiza. There was a woman too who Karin took away, a Parisienne seamstress I think, Fortuny’s lover. Bayreuth and Wagner, Wagner, Wagner was all they could talk about. Of course Sweden has its own Nordic Mythology I ventured. But where is it? What is it? they cried, and there was laughter and more mulled wine, and then talk again of Wagner.

When the party left I realized there was something deep in my soul that had been woken by talk of the grandeur and scale of Wagner’s cocktail of German and Scandinavian myths and folk tales. For a day and night I sketched relentlessly, ransacking my memory for those old tales, drawing strong men and stalwart, flaxen-haired women in Nordic dress and ornament. But as a new day presented itself I closed my sketch book and let the matter drop until, years later, in a Stockholm bookshop I chanced upon a volume in Latin by Adam of Bremen, his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, the most famous source to pagan ritual practice in Sweden. That cold winter afternoon in Grez returned to me and I felt, as I had then, something stir within me, something missing from my comfortable world of images of home and farm, family and the country life.

Back in Sundborn this little volume printed in the 18th C lay on my desk like a question mark without a sentence. My Latin was only sufficient to get a gist, but the gist was enough. Here was the story of the palace of Uppsala, the great centre of the pre-Christian pagan cults that brought us Odin and Freyr. I sought out our village priest Dag Sandahl, a good Lutheran but who regularly tagged Latin in his sermons. Yes, he knew the book, and from his study bookshelf brought down an even earlier copy than my own. And there and then we sat down together and read. After an hour I was impatient to be back in my studio and draw, draw these extraordinary images this text brought to life unbidden in my imagination. But I did not leave until I had persuaded Pastor Sandahl to agree to translate the Uppsala section of the Adam of Bremen’s book, and just before Christmas that year, on the day before the Shortest Day, he delivered his translation to my studio. He would not stay, but said I should read the passages about King Domalde and his sacrifice at the Winter Solstice. And so, on the day of the Winter Solstice, I did.

This people have a widely renowned sanctuary called Uppsala.

By this temple is a very large tree with extending branches. It is always green, both in winter and in summer. No one knows what kind of tree this is. There is also a spring there, where the heathens usually perform their sacrificial rites. They throw a live human being into the spring. If he does not resurface, the wishes of the people will come true.

The Temple is girdled by a chain of gold that hangs above the roof of the building and shines from afar, so that people may see it from a distance when they approach there. The sanctuary itself is situated on a plain, surrounded by mountains, so that the form a theatre.

It is not far from the town of Sigtuna. This sanctuary is completely covered with golden ornaments. There, people worship the carved idols of three gods: Thor, the most powerful of them, has his throne in the middle of the hall, on either side of him, Odin and Freyr have their seats. They have these functions: “Thor,” they say, “rules the air, he rules thunder and lightning, wind and rain, good weather and harvests. The other, Odin, he who rages, he rules the war and give courage to people in their battle against enemies. The third is Freyr, he offers to mortals lust and peace and happiness.” And his image they make with a very large phallus. Odin they present armed, the way we usually present Mars, while Thor with the scepter seems to resemble Jupiter. As gods they also worship some that have earlier been human. They give them immortality for the sake of their great deeds, as we may read in Vita sancti Ansgarii that they did with King Eirik.

For all these gods have particular persons who are to bring forward the sacrificial gifts of the people. If plague and famine threatens, they offer to the image of Thor, if the matter is about war, they offer to Odin, but if a wedding is to be celebrated, they offer to Freyr. And every ninth year in Uppsala a great religious ceremony is held that is common to people from all parts of Sweden.”
Snorri also relates how human sacrifice began in Uppsala, with the sacrifice of a king.

Domalde took the heritage after his father Visbur, and ruled over the land. As in his time there was great famine and distress, the Swedes made great offerings of sacrifice at Upsal. The first autumn they sacrificed oxen, but the succeeding season was not improved thereby. The following autumn they sacrificed men, but the succeeding year was rather worse. The third autumn, when the offer of sacrifices should begin, a great multitude of Swedes came to Upsal; and now the chiefs held consultations with each other, and all agreed that the times of scarcity were on account of their king Domalde, and they resolved to offer him for good seasons, and to assault and **** him, and sprinkle the stall of the gods with his blood. And they did so.

There it was, at the end of Adam of Bremen’s description of Uppsala, this description of King Domalde upon which my mural would be based. It is not difficult to imagine, or rather the event itself can be richly embroidered, as I have over the years made my painting so. Karin and I have the books of William Morris on our shelves and I see little difference between his fixation on the legends of the Arthur and the Grail. We are on the cusp here between the pagan and the Christian.  What was Christ’s Crucifixion but a self sacrifice: as God in man he could have saved himself but chose to die for Redemption’s sake. His blood was not scattered to the fields as was Domalde’s, but his body and blood remains a continuing symbol in our right of Communion.

I unroll the latest watercolour cartoon of my mural. It is almost the length of this studio. Later I will ask Greta to collect the other easels we have in the house and barn and then I shall view it properly. But for now, as it unrolls, my drama of the Winter Solstice comes alive. It begins on from the right with body of warriors, bronze shields and helmets, long shafted spears, all set against the side of Uppsala Temple and more distant frost-hoared trees. Then we see the King himself, standing on a sled hauled by temple slaves. He is naked as he removes the furs in which he has travelled, a circuit of the temple to display himself to his starving people. In the centre, back to the viewer, a priest-like figure in a red cloak, a dagger held for us to see behind his back. Facing him, in druidic white, a high priest holds above his head a gold pagan monstrance. To his left there are white cloaked players of long, straight horns, blue cloaked players of the curled horns, and guiding the shaft of the sled a grizzled shaman dressed in the skins and furs of animals. The final quarter of my one- day-to-be-a-mural unfolds to show the women of temple and palace writhing in gestures of grief and hysteria whilst their queen kneels prostate on the ground, her head to the earth, her ladies ***** behind her. Above them all stands the forever-green tree whose origin no one knows.

Greta has entered the studio in her practiced, silent way carrying coffee and rolls from the kitchen. She has seen Midvinterblot many times, but I sense her gaze of fascination, yet again, at the figure of the naked king. She remembers the model, the sailor who came to stay at Kartbacken three summers ago. He was like the harpooner Queequeg in Moby ****. A tattooed man who was to be seen swimming in Toftan Lake and walking bare-chested in our woods. A tall, well-muscled, almost silent man, whom I patiently courted to be my model for King Dolmade. I have a book of sketches of him striding purposefully through the trees, the tattooed lines on his shoulders and chest like deep cuts into his body. This striding figure I hid from the children for some time, but from Greta that was impossible. She whispered to me once that when she could not have my substantial chest against her she would imagine the sailor’s, imagine touching and following his tattooed lines. This way, she said, helped her have respite from those stirrings she would so often feel for me. My painting, she knew, had stirred her fellow maids Clara and Solveig. Surely you know this, she had said, in her resolute and direct city manner. I have to remember she is the age of my eldest, who too must hold such thoughts and feelings. Karin dislikes my sailor king and wishes I would not hide the face of his distraught queen.

Today the sunrise is at 9.0, just a half hour away, and it will set before 3.0pm. So, after this coffee I will put on my boots and fur coat, be well scarfed and hatted (as my son Pontus would say) and walk out onto my estate. I will walk east across the fields towards Spardasvvägen. The sky is already waiting for the sun, but waits without colour, hardly even a tinge of red one might expect.

I have given Greta her orders to collect every easel she can find so we can take Midvinterblot off the floor and see it in all its vivid colour and form. In February I shall begin again to persuade the Nationalmuseum to accept this work. We have a moratorium just now. I will not accept their reasoning that there is no historical premise for such a subject, that such a scene has no place in a public gallery. A suggestion has been made that the Historiska museet might house it. But I shall not think of this today.

Karin is here, her face at the studio window beckons entry. My Darling, yes, it is midwinter’s day and I am dressing to greet the solstice. I will dress, she says, to see Edgar who will be here in half an hour to discuss my designs for this new furniture. We will be lunching at noon. Know you are welcome. Suzanne is talking constantly of England, England, and of course Oxford, this place of dreaming spires and good looking boys. We touch hands and kiss. I sense the perfume of sleep, of her bed.

Outside I must walk quickly to be quite alone, quite apart from the house, in the fields, alone. It is on its way: this light that will bathe the snowed-over land and will be my promise of the year’s turn towards new life.

As I walk the drama of Midvinterblot unfolds in a confusion of noise, the weeping of women, the physical exertions of the temple slaves, the priests’ incantations, the riot of horns, and then suddenly, as I stand in this frozen field, there is silence. The sun rises. It stagge

I

That twitch in the schoolgirl’s eye
Isn’t caused by snowy mountains.
There’s Guildhall in her twisted lip.

II

I was of three minds.
Greta Thunberg took all of them
And cloaked them in a yellow hood.

III

A small part of the pantomime was never Greta’s style.
She has miles to go before she lets us sleep.

IV

Of the things schoolgirls hate
The sun is not among them.
The blackbird’s wings and the oil fields of Manitoba
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The thought that they might one day bring out
Greta Thunberg bobbleheads
Or the fact that bobbleheads exist at all,
The fact that we’re ******
Or the fact that we’re enjoying it.

VI

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O pigtailed teens of Stockholm,
Please remember
What Wallace Stevens said
About birds of golden feathers
And of black.  

VIII

What is involved in what I know?
Like Socrates, I don’t know.
But it’s more than 99.9 per cent
Of climate scientists could ever dream
And less than a signpost
To the wrong city in the snow.

IX

When Greta sailed two weeks to New York
She was in a circle of close friends.
I bet they ate tinned kippers
And had those sweets the Swedish love.  

X

To cry out sharply is what we do
If we are lucky enough to cry.
And so I have more compassion
For Greta than you know.  
Some women have no time.
Their children dying
Takes up the best portion of the day.

XI

I can’t remember the part of the campaign trail
He rode over to tell a waiting crowd
How the size of his equipage
Compared to his small hands.
There are good reasons why Greta hates his guts.
This is not the best of them.

XII

The river is full of plastic.
The thermometer must be rising.

XIII

It is snowing
And it is going to snow.