Invisible Things (15 page)

They would leave at eight that evening. Under ordinary conditions, one might reach Elsinore in less than an hour by car, but it would certainly take much longer than that tonight. The ferry left every hour, though, and ran all through the night, so they would take whatever one they could.

In the meantime, Sophie and Mikael clattered downstairs to see what was going on. The library was off-limits—it was serving as a dormitory for patients no longer ill enough to need the infirmary but not well enough to return to their own lodgings. Bohr was much too busy to be interrupted, and the ground-floor auditorium had been given over to a fierce and argumentative blackboard-style debate among chalk-wielding physicists—Frisch and Meitner were both there, but too immersed in the cloud of symbols on the board to notice Sophie and Mikael at the door.

In the basement they found Hevesy and Hilde Levi at work. On the face of it, things here were so exactly as they always were that Sophie was able to forget for a moment how upside down everything had been turned by the invasion. Miss Levi was tabulating a set of data, and Hevesy himself was engaged in some sort of chemical procedure.

Then Sophie saw that before Hevesy on the countertop was an actual heap of gold medals.

“The Nobel Prize medals!” Mikael cried out.

He moved to them, almost involuntarily, and picked them up, cupping them in his hands and then turning his gaze on the Hungarian scientist.

“What are you doing with them?” he asked accusingly.

“Bohr has been worrying about what will happen if an occupying army finds them here,” Hevesy said, carefully measuring out five hundred milliliters of acid and pouring the beaker of liquid into a jar with a seal. “These medals belong to various members of the institute, all of them Europeans who directly contravened the federation law that prohibits gold from being taken out of the empire. Their names are engraved into their respective medals, of course, and Bohr is worried that the discovery of the medals might have very serious consequences for the individuals concerned.”

“Are you going to hide them?” Mikael asked.

“At first I suggested that we should bury them in the back garden,” Hevesy confessed, “but Bohr was concerned that they might be too easily unearthed. So instead I am dissolving them in acid—I will hide them, as it were, in plain view.”

As they watched, he detached the first medal from its ceremonial ribbon and plopped it into the acid, where it began rapidly to dissolve.

“I will put the bottle on a shelf,” he added, “and even the most suspicious intruder will have no idea what it is.”

Miss Levi had paused in her work to give Hevesy a long glance of affection and amusement.

“You needn’t sound so gleeful,” she said, “even if it is a chemist’s dream come true! Sophie, are you going to go to Sweden with the others?”

“Yes, Mikael and I both are,” Sophie said regretfully. She felt the tears spring into her eyes and shook her head to make them go away. At almost any other time in the past few years, a trip with Mikael would have been absolute heaven, but now she feared she would be traveling with a virtual stranger.

“Safe travels, then,” Miss Levi said, standing and coming to give Sophie a parting embrace. “Mikael, you will look out for Sophie, won’t you?”

Mikael was poking at the macaw with a stick and didn’t respond, but Sophie hugged Miss Levi tightly and promised that she and Mikael would look out for each other.

“When the war is over,” said Hevesy thoughtfully, “we will mint the medals again.”

“But they won’t be the same medals!” Sophie cried out.

“It depends upon how you define the word
same
,” said Hevesy. “If I call a place ‘home,’ does that simply mean the place where I live? What if I call more than one place home— and what if the first and foremost place I think of when I hear the word
home
no longer exists in the world, but only in my memory?”

They stood and looked at the jar of acid. The medals had vanished. One would never have known the gold continued to exist in any way, shape, or form.

The name Elsinore was romantic to Sophie because of Hamlet, the character and the play, but whatever turrety erections might grace the Danish coastline, the trip that night was so chaotic, and the evening so dark and overcast, that Sophie was left with only the vaguest impression of crenellations and looming battlements. The drive had taken longer than one would have thought possible, giving credence to Mikael’s gripe—repeated so many times that Otto Robert Frisch finally told him to hold his tongue—that they would have been faster on their bicycles, which were strapped to the car’s roof. In the backseat, Sophie clutched the basket holding Trismegistus to her chest.

The roads were packed, not just with cars but with carriages and horse-drawn carts and bicycles attached to homemade trailers and people walking on foot and pushing things in perambulators or shopping carts, all determined to escape the country before the anticipated crackdown on border crossing. When they arrived at Elsinore, they learned that the ferries for hours to come were already sold out. They finally got places on the five-o’clock boat, and spent the brief early-morning journey drinking very nasty hot chocolate topped by an unappealing form of whipped cream that Mikael said—Sophie had never heard the term before— was
ersatz
. Mikael seemed withdrawn and quiet, but Sophie found this less worrying than the bursts of manic energy that had characterized his behavior in the time since his recovery.

The doctors still hadn’t worked out the exact nature of the chemicals in the attack, or whether the vicious little metal pellets had been intended to do anything more than collateral damage, but changes similar to the ones Sophie could see in Mikael continued to be observed in many others who had been present at the party. Nobody knew whether the effects would wear off in time or whether they would be permanent, and Sophie had already come to think of Mikael as containing something like Jekyll and Hyde’s two selves—a stomach-churning prospect.

When they disembarked onto Swedish soil at Helsing-borg, the lines for getting papers checked were very long, and Sophie was dismayed to find, once they had finally cleared customs and immigration, that they were due to part ways with their traveling companions immediately.

She had not really slept the night before, other than a frigid, stiff hour or so in the car en route to Elsinore, and she was not at all sure that she had the mental fortitude for the long bicycle ride—it was about thirty miles to Stockholm—but Mikael told her to buck up, and Trismegistus supplemented the brusque instruction with a plangent, imperative meow that made Sophie laugh and think that perhaps she could do it after all. The cat was as heavy again as Sophie’s modest luggage, but once everything was properly balanced, Sophie felt fully capable of managing it, especially as Tris seemed to understand that it made things easier when he did
not
yowl as they went round a corner.

Mikael consulted his pocket atlas regularly. They stopped, too, for him to repair a puncture in his front tire. While she waited, Sophie drank some of the glass thermal bulb of tea that Fru Petersen had instructed them to refill on the boat. Once Mikael had finished patching his tube—and drunk his own share of tea and eaten the other half of the rather sickly bar of Swiss chocolate Sophie had bought at the refectory in the ferry terminal—they got back on their bikes and continued along their way.

It was nearly dark by the time they arrived at Mr. Petersen’s lodgings. The building was in a bleak outskirt of Stockholm, with grand but slightly dingy buildings and boulevards with the air of having rather come down in the world. Arne had left word with his landlady to let them in but was not himself home from work yet, which hit Sophie with a pang. It was unpleasant to think of feeling almost afraid at the prospect of being alone with Mikael.

Mikael would share his brother’s bedroom, sleeping on a cot in the corner, and Sophie was relieved to learn that rather than being relegated to the sitting room couch, as she had at first feared, Mr. Petersen had arranged for the landlady to give Sophie a bedroom of her own in another part of the house.

It was a dank little room, with a strong smell of tobacco and a mysteriously greasy sheen on everything, and one had to go out into the hallway to use the toilet, but there was a sink in the corner, in which Sophie now very thankfully brushed her teeth. She fell into bed with all her clothes still on.

Sometime later she heard indistinct murmurs outside the bedroom door, but whoever it was must have decided it would be better to let Sophie sleep. Though she woke several times during the night in an utter panic, with no idea where she was and a strong sense of imminent danger, she was able to go back to sleep each time. Finally the combination of full daylight outside, a sharp feeling of hunger, and the pressure on her bladder prompted her to throw back the covers and brave the world outside these four walls.

She had somehow forgotten where to find the toilet and had to try several different doors, with a sick, nervous feeling of shyness, only overwhelming need forcing her to persist. Once she found the lavatory and had splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth, though, she felt considerably better. She left her sponge bag in her bedroom and went in search of Mikael and sustenance.

She found Mikael surrounded by the detritus of breakfast and a huge heap of partially disassembled newspapers. He looked up briefly and greeted her, and told her to ring the bell for Arne’s landlady, who appeared immediately and promised to bring Sophie eggs, toast, and tea.

In the meantime Sophie began to leaf through the bits of the paper that Mikael had finished with, but was disappointed to find that many of them were in Swedish, and that her basic Danish could do little for her.

Mikael tossed over some pages of the English- and French-language coverage he was currently perusing, from which Sophie was able to glean that Denmark was now officially occupied. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand people had left the country before the borders were closed that morning; the general of the European forces had promised that while a small number of people would be interned, every effort would be made to accommodate the Danish people and their national traditions and preferences.

“Arne was here for a bit this morning,” Mikael said.

Sophie had finished eating her breakfast and was drinking a second cup of tea.

“You should have woken me!” Sophie said.

“He thought you needed the sleep,” said Mikael. “He’ll be back later this evening, in any case, though he told us not to wait for him to have supper.”

Sophie looked round at the shabby furnishings and the gray skies outside.

“Do we have to stay here, or can we go out?” she asked.

“Once the landlady gives us a key, we can do what we like,” Mikael said. “It’s a lark! Oh, I’m sure that by next week we’ll have been sorted out with some kind of school—Arne’s going to visit the headmaster of the English school and see if they have room for us both in the sixth form.”

“Won’t we go and see Alfred Nobel first, though?” Sophie asked, feeling unsettled by her lack of familiarity with the setting and the routine here. “He must live quite nearby, mustn’t he?”

Mikael didn’t know.

“I’ve been out already,” he added, “to explore the neighborhood. It’s a bit quiet, but I’m sure we’ll find things to do—we’re not that far from the center of town, really. Let’s go!”

“I must have a bath first,” Sophie said fervently. Breakfast was a very good thing—she felt considerably more human than she had upon first getting up—but the sheer greasy griminess of her skin was making it impossible to greet her current predicament with equanimity.

“Oh, what a bother, Sophie,” Mikael grumbled. “Must you really? The morning’s half-gone already!”

But he rang the bell, and the landlady came in and whisked Sophie off with her. Strange to say, she was a very pleasant Scottish lady called Mrs. McGregor. She had some sort of family connection with the Petersens and had been letting rooms in Stockholm for at least three decades, but was still very proud of the Scottish connection, telling Sophie that she was a native of Edinburgh and how good it was to hear another Scottish voice.

The bathroom was cold and cavernous, and the towels rather threadbare, but the hot water was very hot indeed and came forth in ample quantities. Having put on a clean set of underpants and a vest, Sophie did not find it overly penitential to put back on the trousers and wool jumper she had been wearing before. The clean socks in particular were bliss—socks became somehow almost
crusty
if one wore them for more than one day. It was unsavory to contemplate.

It was beginning to get dark by the time Sophie was dressed again, and she resisted Mikael’s entreaties for her to come outside with him. He went without her, and she was left to regret her choice—there was very little of interest to read, and she had too much time to sit and fret about what might be happening back at the institute.

What if Europe decided to ignore Sweden’s neutrality and invade the country anyway, en route to complete domination of all the formerly independent Hanseatic states? Scotland must be in danger, too—the papers had reported nothing in particular about a European initiative in that direction, but it did not seem at all plausible that the armies of the federation would not soon have a stab at it, though Sophie felt sure that her compatriots, unlike the Danish, would go down fighting rather than allow for a bloodless occupation.

And what if Mikael—but the thought did not bear contemplating!—never returned to his true self?

Mrs. McGregor gave them supper—cock-a-leekie soup, ham sandwiches, and a delicious apple pie—and they sat for a time afterward in Mr. Petersen’s sitting room. It was after nine o’clock by the time Arne got home, and he seemed very tired and not at all inclined to provide nonlaconic answers to the barrage of questions that Sophie and Mikael leveled at him.

“Does your mother know we’ve arrived safely?”

“Yes.”