Invisible Things (9 page)

“If I wrote her a letter,” Sophie asked, “do you think she would be able to tell me anything valuable about my parents?”

“I don’t know, Sophie,” Bohr said gently, though Sophie thought he looked wary. “I’m not a great admirer of Miss Blix, in case you hadn’t gathered. I suppose she may well know something that would be worth learning, but I’d approach the whole project of contacting her with considerable caution.”

Sophie felt discouraged. In any case, it wasn’t as though one could just write a letter to Elsa Blix and inscribe the word
Spitsbergen
underneath the name and expect it to reach her. But her mood brightened when Bohr added, “Let me ask a question or two to put things in motion, Sophie. Alfred Nobel will almost certainly be able to tell me how to find her. I will also see if I can learn exactly what she’s up to these days—I would like us to have a little more information before we proceed.”

He looked so tired as he uttered the words that Sophie was stabbed with a pang of remorse for having troubled him, and when he asked if there was anything else she wanted to talk about, she muttered a denial and rose to leave him to get back to work.

At breakfast the next morning Mikael asked his mother what they would do if war were declared.

“I have discussed it with Niels Bohr,” she answered him, “and in the event of war, it may be best for you and Sophie to leave the country.”

Sophie laid down her spoon. Trismegistus took note and assumed a waiting position beside Sophie’s chair. He did not eat porridge, but he would lap up the milk from around the edges, with its hint of cinnamon-cardamom and brown-sugar sweetness.

“What would happen to Tris?” she asked.

“The cat will be fine, Sophie,” Fru Petersen said patiently. “It’s by no means certain that you’ll need to travel in the first place, but if you do go, I’ll take good care of him for you while you’re away. You can’t have him in your luggage!”

Trismegistus’s hackles were rising, and it was almost as if Sophie could actually hear the thought pass through his head:
Me—luggage?!

“You can’t expect me to leave him behind—it will be better to bring Tris than a suitcase of clothes, if I can really carry only one thing at once!”

“If he weren’t so enormous, it wouldn’t pose such a problem,” Mikael said, assessing the cat with a look. “You’d better stop giving him porridge, Sophie! I suppose you need some easy way of moving him, perhaps a basket or a trolley. The bicycle shed is full of all sorts of old parts and tools and so forth—I’ll do a bit of work on your bike tomorrow, Sophie, and it won’t be any trouble at all to give you a couple of panniers and a basket at the front for the cat to ride in.”

“Mikael, what kind of ideas are you putting into Sophie’s head?” his mother asked, staring at him. “There is absolutely no reason to think that we would be fleeing the city with our belongings strapped to bicycles—you are painting a distinctly disturbing picture. I do not want you to give Sophie the wrong idea!”

“It’s quite sensible to make sure one has an alternate means of transport in the event of evacuation,” Mikael said calmly, “or so they were telling us at school assembly the other day.”

Mikael’s mother made a grumbling noise that spoke to her disagreement without actually insisting on making an argument out of it.

That afternoon Sophie was doing her mathematics homework when Mikael came into the room to find her.

“Sophie?” he said.

She kept her eyes very firmly fixed on her work.

“Yes?” she said.

“I don’t want to persecute you, but I thought you might want to talk about that letter from your great-aunt.”

Sophie felt unaccountably annoyed, almost
savagely
annoyed. She wished she could punch him, only she was afraid that any physical contact might lead to her simply and mortifyingly melting into his arms. She felt the strangest mix of wanting to tell him everything—
everything!
—and wanting to flee his company and avoid him resolutely for the rest of her life.

“Well, if you do not want to talk about it, I will not press you,” Mikael said.

Even the kindness in his voice made Sophie irrationally more furious, and she blinked to catch the tears she was afraid might spill over the lids of her eyes.

“If you do not want to talk,” he said (oh, she did not deserve someone so nice as this!), “let us go and investigate the shed—at least we can get this business of the wretched cat’s transportation sorted out; that will be one less thing for you to worry about.”

His words were affectionate rather than chastising, but she still felt them as a reproach. Outside the shed, they found Bohr down on his knees weeding a flower bed; it was something he did for relaxation, and though it seemed an odd habit for such an important man, his secretary periodically shooed him out of the office to clear his head by working in the garden. His unlit pipe lay on a wooden seat a few feet away, a heap of dead matches beside it speaking to the usual struggle, but he picked it up again and came with Sophie and Mikael when he heard that they were contemplating adding a cat-carrying module to Sophie’s bicycle.

Sophie’s thoughts wandered as the other two picked through heaps of junk and exclaimed at various finds. Soon enough they had built a rig for Sophie to test, and though at first it made her feel very off balance and worry about whether she had enough side clearance given the wire baskets that had been added over either side of the rear wheel, she came to agree with the machine’s improvers that it was an admirably lightweight and convenient solution.

The contraption they had fixed to the front of the bike for Trismegistus (or “that fat cat of yours,” as Mikael sometimes called him) had a wood frame covered with netting and a sheepskin at the bottom so that the cat could rest comfortably.

“You’ll have to shut him in, I think,” Bohr observed as he showed Sophie how the latch worked on the . . . well, if Tris were not going to be asked to get in it, Sophie might have called it a trap, it was so much like one of the pots used to catch lobsters in the Atlantic fisheries, but that was a tactless word and Sophie resolved to banish it utterly from her thoughts. The
receptacle—
that was a good, dignified term.

It was nice to have a bicycle evacuation system, but it would be even better not to need it.

During the week that followed, Sophie was unusually aware of the miasma of metaphysics that seemed to permeate the whole city of København. Bohr’s musings on how light could be a wave and a particle at the same time had recently caused one pragmatic French visitor to observe that the Danish physicist’s thinking was shrouded in the mists of the north, and though København was actually no farther north than Edinburgh (the two cities were at virtually the same latitude), the Hanseatic identity of Denmark was much more pronounced than anything Sophie had ever encountered in Scotland.

She supposed there was no reason physics could not be practiced in southern climes, but sometimes she wondered whether the science itself was not thoroughly and inextricably bound up with the idea of north. She took a strange national pride in the fact that one of the great innovators in physics was a Scot, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson. He had built the first cloud chamber in 1911 at the famous laboratory in Cambridge, coming subsequently to be known as “Cloud” Wilson: a comical but romantic name. A cloud chamber made invisible things visible, with tracks of particles like squiggly glowworms caught writhing their way across the photographic paper. The idea for the invention had come to Wilson during the time he had spent in the observatory on Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland, looking at the optical phenomena of sun shining on clouds surrounding hilltops: coronas, colored rings, the shadows on mist or cloud called
glory
.

All that week Bohr was consuming vast quantities of chocolate—one afternoon his secretary actually sent Sophie back out twice to the corner shop for additional supplies—and the only reason he did not get through an even more implausibly huge supply of tobacco was that he had such a habit of letting his pipe go out, then asking helplessly, after trying and failing to get a draw on it and feeling uselessly in all his pockets, “Do you perhaps have a match?”

Sophie’s assistance was not limited to the purchase of sweets. She was enlisted to help in the office with supplementary typing, and was very glad now of having learned all those tiresome office skills at school in Edinburgh, as they offered the only small way in which she might contribute to the joint enterprise.

Excitement about Bohr’s latest thoughts concerning the atomic nucleus ran at such heights that work on matters unrelated to the splitting of the atom had virtually ceased: if it did not involve fission, nobody was interested, though Hevesy continued to toil away with his animals in the basement. (Trismegistus would no longer go anywhere near that part of the building.) Everyone else, though, seemed to be devising experiments to test the Frisch-Meitner hypothesis or covering one blackboard after another with intriguing but deeply mysterious strings of figures.

Sophie asked Bohr once or twice about whether he’d obtained any more information about Elsa Blix and her current activities and whereabouts, but his thoughts were thoroughly elsewhere, and the most she could gather was that he had made several telephone calls and mentioned the name to Nobel.

Because of the current European situation, and as a particular consequence of the new racial laws that had expelled Jews from university positions in Germany, Italy, and France, all sorts of formerly far-flung colleagues had landed up at the institute, which was clearly felt to be one of the few redeeming features of what were otherwise largely stories of displacement and loss. The chance to converse with someone in person was perceived to be so valuable that Bohr himself had been known to take a long train trip solely in order to have several hours of train-station rendezvous with some particularly stimulating colleague in Oslo or Hamburg, and those whose routes might be jigged to pass through København Central Station would telephone to see if Bohr could come to the station for coffee and conversation between legs of a journey. Not just Bohr but almost everyone else at the institute seemed to believe there to be a sort of alchemy in real actual face-to-face conversation. Indeed, many of the people there, rather than doing what an outside observer could have identified as real work, spent a great deal of their time sitting around doing what Sophie’s old nurse Peggy would have scathingly called
blethering
.

On Thursday of that week the legendary Wittgenstein, whose brilliance and oddity continued to be much discussed at the institute even several years after his departure, was due to pass through København. Best known as the inventor of the uncertainty principle, Wittgenstein had been befriended by Bohr when they were both studying at Manchester before the war, and as the Petersens’ longtime lodger he was well-known to Mikael and his mother. (When Sophie asked Mikael what Wittgenstein was
like
, though, all Mikael could say was that he had an annoying habit of running himself a bath in the middle of the night.)

Mikael was deputized to drive Bohr to the station for the meeting. Mikael had finally got his driver’s license, after a somewhat checkered career as a learner, while Bohr preferred not to drive at night ever since an accident in which one of his sons had knocked a child off her bicycle. He cycled to work every morning from the Carlsberg mansion, and rode home again as well unless the weather was exceptionally inclement. He was still much teased for his habit, while driving a car, of slowing down at a green light and speeding up at a red one, due to a cyclist’s sense of how to respond to one’s distance from a light about to change colors.

They drove to the station in silence, Bohr seemingly lost in thought and Sophie and Mikael reluctant to disturb him. They parked on the street near the station and walked the rest of the way. It was curious how similar it felt to the area around the central train station in Edinburgh—Sophie supposed that some set of topographical and architectural constraints must contribute to the uncanny resemblance, but it almost gave one a strange occult theory of things developing along more or less independent paths that were yet somehow entangled with one another.

She and Mikael both went into the station with Bohr to wait for Wittgenstein’s train, which had been slightly delayed. When the lanky physicist finally appeared, Mikael greeted him warmly and pressed into his hands a packet of fine cambric handkerchiefs, a present from Mikael’s mother, who had suffered a great deal from the laundry-related implications of her delicate former lodger’s vulnerability to hay fever and bronchitis. Wittgenstein unwrapped them and tested one out by blowing his nose, then solemnly informed Mikael that they would do.

As the two men looked about for the best place to talk (there was not much choice; it was either the station buffet or the station bar), Bohr’s eye fell on Sophie and Mikael.

“Will you two be off back to the institute now?” he asked. “It will be terribly dull for you just hanging around waiting for me!”

Mikael looked at Sophie, who knew he had promised to make sure Bohr got home safely. Equally, though, they would not want to intrude on his conversation with Wittgenstein, who was already beginning to mutter something incomprehensible about radio tubes.

“It seems a pity not to take advantage of having permission to be out on a school night by
staying
out,” Sophie finally said. She could not think of anything better to say, but it seemed to make sense to Bohr.

“Yes,” said Mikael. “In fact, if you don’t mind, it might be that there’s enough time for me to take Sophie on a quick visit to the Tivoli Gardens! And then we will be able to drive you home afterward—I know you do not like fuss, but my mother will be very annoyed if we have not actually seen you to your doorstep.”

“Yes, yes, that will be an admirable way of managing things,” Bohr said, his face lighting up. “You will go to the gardens! They will very soon be closed for the season—
carpe diem
!”