Invisible Things (10 page)

He consulted his watch, then took several bills from his wallet and pressed them into Mikael’s palm. “Meet me back here at half past ten, perhaps?”

“I’ll say!” Mikael exclaimed.

As they walked the short distance from the station, Mikael rhapsodized about København’s most famous attraction.

“Sophie, you’ll love the Tivoli Gardens,” he said earnestly. “They’re far better than anything you’ll have seen in Scotland. They were laid out about a hundred years ago, with a grand fun fair modeled on the famous ones in Paris and New York, in order to distract everyone from the awfulness of what was going on in politics—it worked then, and it works now!”

By this time they were well out of earshot of the physicists, and Sophie could not resist asking a question that had been weighing on her mind.

“What do you think Mr. Wittgenstein would have done,” she said, “if he hadn’t found those handkerchiefs soft enough?”

Mikael started laughing.

“He’d have given them right back to me! My mother looked for a long time to find the ones she knows he likes— they had a terrible argument right when he first arrived about the laundry having overstarched his handkerchiefs. He said that starch irritated his nasal membranes, and my mother said something unprintable!”

“Yes, I’m sure she did,” Sophie said. “Mikael, do you think it’s all right for us to go off and enjoy ourselves when we promised your mother we’d look after the professor?”

“She knows it’s a difficult proposition to stay close by him the whole time, and she trusts us to do what’s needed. He’ll be fine as long as he’s with Wittgenstein, and we’ll make sure to be back well before Wittgenstein’s due to leave.”

“What is it that she’s afraid will happen to him if he’s left alone?” Sophie asked timidly. “Not . . . ?”

Her voice trailed off. It was the sort of thing one preferred not to put into words, but the melancholic exhaustion that was known to strike Bohr regularly had seemed intense enough recently that she couldn’t help wondering if he, like Tabitha Hunter, sometimes harbored thoughts of doing away with himself.

“Nothing so awful as suicide,” Mikael said thoughtfully. He knew, of course, that Sophie’s guardian’s death had been declared a suicide; it was all over the Scottish papers. Otherwise Sophie had still not brought herself to take Mikael into her confidence, a failure of courage for which she frequently reproached herself. “It’s just that he gets so gloomy and oppressed when he works too hard. I’ve seen him much worse than this, though, believe it or not.”

When they were first built, the Tivoli Gardens had been just outside the walls of the original fortified city of København, but the town had expanded to such an extent that the park was now nestled right in the heart of the city. Sophie and Mikael paid their entrance fees at the ornate gates and walked through into what seemed almost like another world. The walks were tree-lined, with restaurants and cafés dotted here and there; there were bandstands and grottoes and decorative ponds, everything illuminated with electric lightbulbs so that it seemed almost as bright as day.

Sophie and Mikael wandered around an artificial lake and gasped at an illuminated pagoda-type palace, a grand pavilion like something from a picture book. As they came toward the bandstand, a smiling girl dressed in a top hat and a dinner jacket and a very short skirt indeed accosted them and urged them to see the show.

“Is there a separate charge for admission?” Mikael asked.

“Yes, but it is only two kroner.”

“For one of us, or for both?” said Mikael suspiciously.

“For each of you,” the girl allowed.

They were talking in Danish, and Sophie was pleased to find she could understand them, though admittedly it was the kind of simpleminded conversation that featured disproportionately in the pages of elementary language textbooks.

“What is the show?” she asked carefully.

“An astonishing display of the powers of the human mind,” the girl said, “by the distinguished mentalist Hermes Trismegistus!”

Mikael’s expression of disgust was so pronounced that Sophie had to choke back her laughter.

“Do let’s go and see it, Mikael!” she said, taking the change purse from her pocket and beginning to look through for the right coins. “We can tell Tris when we get home that we saw his namesake!”

Mikael put his hand on hers and made her reclasp her purse.

“I’ll pay, Sophie,” he said grandly.

He gave the girl a bill in exchange for two tickets and some change, and they made haste to enter the stands, as the show was about to start, and sat down near the back. The audience seemed to be made up of equal parts courting couples and families with small- to medium-size children. Sophie felt awkwardly in between stages, and wished (as she often did) that she looked more grown-up.

A cigarette girl was circulating up and down the aisles, and Mikael bought them ice cream to eat while they waited. It was a delicious slice of vanilla ice cream coated in a thin chocolate shell and wrapped in silver paper that, if one used the appropriate technique, could be folded back in stages while keeping one’s fingers perfectly clean, leaving one with a neat, compact rectangle of foil at the end.

It was not long before Hermes Trismegistus appeared onstage. He looked very much as one might have expected: a stout but imposing figure in evening dress, dark hair brilliantined to reveal a significantly receded hairline, the requisite carnation in his buttonhole. His lovely assistant Lilly—a different girl from the one outside—wore a white floor-length velvet dress and had her hair up in an elegant manner that Sophie associated, though she couldn’t have sworn to its being the dictionary definition, with the word
chignon
.

The opening routine did not entirely hold Sophie’s attention, as she was too busy wondering about what sort of facilities were required for housing and transporting the half a dozen white doves featured.

The next bird the mentalist brought out was an altogether more impressive specimen, a parrot of some sort with a hoarse voice and a surprisingly large wingspan. Hermes Trismegistus asked a fellow a few rows ahead of Sophie and Mikael to stand up and hold a ten-kroner note at arm’s length, and the parrot left his perch on the magician’s knuckles and flew directly to the man with the banknote. He took the note carefully in his beak and flew back to the magician onstage, who made a great show of taking out his wallet and putting the note into it before relenting and sending the money back—by bird!—to the fellow in the audience, who was pretending to be a good sport about it but looked immensely relieved at the return of his money.

“This isn’t bad,” Mikael whispered to Sophie, “but I thought he was billing himself as a mentalist! This is just an ordinary magic show with trained animals. . . .”

“Let us wait and see what he does next,” Sophie suggested, and indeed the next thing the magician did was to get a few people up onstage and ask each of them two or three questions before guessing their birthdays—evidently correctly, judging by the look of amazement on each participant’s face, and by the questioning or reproachful glances they directed at their companions once they returned to their seats.

Mikael assured Sophie that this trick could be accomplished by way of a simple algorithm, and she believed him—yet it was hard not to be slightly awed by the performer’s showmanship and by the collective gasps of an appreciative audience.

The strangest thing happened next. Sophie did not attribute psychic powers to Hermes Trismegistus—his show was almost certainly made up of different bits and pieces of trickery attractively combined and packaged, and she was determined to enjoy it for what it was. But she had to credit him with an amazing ability to read an audience, because the following bit involved his lovely assistant being blindfolded securely enough that there could be no suspicion whatsoever, even in the heart of the most inveterate skeptic, that she could receive any visual cues from the mentalist himself—and the person he called up onstage to perform the blindfolding and satisfy the skeptics was Mikael!

Together, Mikael and the mentalist went through a slightly comical pantomime that was admirably readable even from the very back of the amphitheater. The mentalist took out from his seemingly inexhaustible pockets a number of different strips of cloth—first a light-colored gauzy-looking one that Mikael indignantly rejected as too diaphanous, then a strip of gray felt that met with his grudging approval, and after that an old-fashioned blindfold made by rolling up a black silk square into a tight band. Under the magician’s supervision, Mikael fixed each one in turn over the assistant’s eyes, until the upper part of her face was entirely swathed in cloth.

Mikael was growing noticeably restless and irritable, but this was all part of the entertainment, as far as the audience was concerned. Laughter broke out each time he tried to leave the stage and had his hand tugged back by the magician, who finally drew from his pocket an ample black hood and made Mikael try it on.

“Does any light penetrate this barrier?” the magician asked.

Mikael shook his head.

“Can you see anything at all?” the mentalist persisted.

“Nothing whatsoever,” said Mikael, his voice slightly muffled by the hood, but not so much that one could not understand what he was saying.

The magician plucked the hood from Mikael’s head, then handed it back to him so that he could put it on the assistant himself. He had been very careful throughout to make sure that only Mikael secured the materials about the young lady’s head. She was seated on a stool, and the magician spun her around upon it now until she came to rest with her back facing the audience.

“The technique that I am about to demonstrate,” he announced, “was once the exclusive preserve of a coterie of Buddhist monks living and studying in a monastery in remotest Tibet. Their isolation gave them unimaginable freedom from any notion of the mind’s having limits, and they learned over the years to transcend the confines of the body in the most extraordinary ways.”

Mikael had made his way up the steps by now and rejoined Sophie. Meanwhile the strains of the small orchestra in the pit became vaguely Eastern, with some plangent, unfamiliar melody emerging on an oboe, accompanied by a soft drumming and the high-pitched throb of bells and cymbals.

Mikael snorted.

“The mysterious East!” he whispered contemptuously to Sophie.

She kicked him to keep him quiet.

“On my own journey of spiritual inquiry—”

Mikael was groaning, but Sophie did not bother trying to shut him up this time—she was thoroughly enjoying the magician’s implausible but vivid recycling of the clichés of Eastern enlightenment.

“—I found myself on the doorstep of the lamasery. I presented myself as a searcher and a seeker, a man of some spiritual acuity who little dreamed of the secrets to which I would become privy within those walls. . . .”

He proceeded to describe the monastery routine: rising before dawn for hours of prayer, participating in a series of physical and mental exercises of exceptional stringency whose particulars he was forbidden to disclose on pain of death. (It was not clear how the sentence would be executed, but as an enthusiastic sometime reader of the popular fiction of the late nineteenth century, virtually the only light reading to be found on the shelves of the library in Heriot Row, Sophie had a vaguely Orientalist notion of opium-smoking thug assassins dispatched to do the bidding of villainous potentates.)

The upshot, the mentalist continued, was that he had learned—there was no occult component, just the sustained practice of spiritual discipline and the repetition of mental exercises, and in fact anyone who aspired to acquire such skills could purchase his small pamphlet setting forth a program for transforming a mental weakling into a veritable Hercules of the mind—how to transmit a vivid mental picture of anything he saw to another person.

“No trickery,” he said solemnly. “The feat I am about to perform is nothing more or less than a testament to the amazing powers of the human mind!”

“When is he going to start the actual trick?” Mikael muttered under his breath.

“I believe he’s about to,” Sophie whispered. “He has to build up the suspense first, I think, or else there won’t seem to be nearly enough to it. That’s what the blindfold business is all about—this way he’s giving people their money’s worth.”

“Lilly!” the mentalist called out.

“Yes?” she responded.

Her voice could be heard quite clearly despite the layers of cloth covering her face.

“Lilly, on your oath, can you see the slightest thing?” he asked.

“Not the slightest thing,” she said.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing!”

“Not the least little peep of light?”

“Not the least little peep!”

“So that when I ask this lady”—he reached out his hand to a thoroughly respectable-looking middle-aged Danish lady, who let him raise her to her feet; she looked flustered but flattered, hitching her handbag up under her arm for fortitude—“when I ask her to hold up some object she has about her person, so that I can see it and the members of the audience can also see what it is, will you swear by the mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids and the sacred temple at Eleusis—”

Mikael snickered, and Sophie could feel, forming in her cheek, the dimple that preceded laughter.

“—that you can see nothing whatsoever?”

“Nothing whatsoever,” said Lilly the assistant.

“Madam,” the magician said to the lady next to him, “pray choose something you have about you and reveal it to us.”

The lady unclasped a bracelet from her wrist and gave it to the magician, who held it up and placed his finger on his lips. He gave it back to the lady, then called out, “Lilly!”

Lilly’s voice assumed a strange tranquillity as she began speaking.

“A silver bracelet, very pretty, with a band of red-and-blue enamelwork around it—is it birds or flowers? I can’t quite see—flowers, I think, though. . . .”

Of course, the bracelet was too small and too far away for Sophie and Mikael to be able to discern all of its particulars, but it was clear from the response of those in the immediate vicinity of the bracelet’s owner that Lilly had described the piece of jewelry to a T.