Invisible Things (14 page)

The gas seemed to have had a noticeable soporific and tranquilizing effect on many who breathed it in. Mikael had been much calmer immediately following the attack than Sophie (indeed, he was barely conscious), even as the nurse in the emergency tent—erected in a matter of minutes by a team of army medics, and heated with portable kerosene stoves—had used tweezers to remove the little pellets from his shoulder. She had placed each one carefully in a small metal kidney-shaped dish in which they rolled around like ball bearings; most of the metal was fairly near the surface, but several very deep pieces were left where they were, as it would do more damage poking around trying to remove them than leaving the flesh to heal.

As Mikael and the other victims slept, Sophie became increasingly convinced that her friend might never wake up again. What if Mikael had something like the sleeping sickness spread by the tsetse fly in Africa? What if he slept the whole rest of his life away? She pored over the newspaper each morning—a special section of the front page was now dedicated to the “Bohr Terror Report”—but found nothing conclusive.

There was only so much time she could spend doing the assignments that Miss Adler had sent over from school, and when Fru Petersen saw how frantic Sophie was getting, she sent her downstairs to Bohr’s office to help with the typing again. Now even the corner shop had to be telephoned and asked to replenish the chocolate supply by leaving boxes on the doorstep—Sophie had not realized how much she took for granted the privilege of wandering out on a minor errand, and the institute felt almost as oppressive as a sarcophagus.

By Tuesday, the patients seemed significantly more wakeful, and when Mikael sat up in bed and said he was hungry, Sophie—who had been sitting and rereading
David Copperfield
by his bedside—was so moved and relieved that she could hardly speak. She ran to find Fru Petersen, who had, of course, been cooking all sorts of delicious convalescent foods that she and Sophie could barely swallow. Sophie had never felt as strong a fellow feeling with Fru Petersen as when they sat across the dining table and gazed at Mikael eating two huge plates of stewed beef and half a loaf of rye bread with thick slatherings of butter. It was the most beautiful sight Sophie had ever seen.

The day after, Mikael’s convalescence continued to advance, and he and Sophie spent the morning playing various card games, and then checkers and backgammon. Sophie’s initial relief at having Mikael back, though, had turned to something more troubling.

Mikael was not himself.

Oh, he could think and talk clearly enough; it was not that his cognitive faculties had been impaired. His physical energy had largely returned, too—if anything, he seemed more energetic and restless than usual, tiring after a while of sedentary games and instead kicking a ball around the attic room until it bumped up against the sideboard so hard that a china plate was knocked off and smashed on the floor.

The plate had been a particular favorite of Sophie’s. It featured five strangely geometrical roosters strategically interspersed with haystacks and farming implements against a Chinese-style background and with a very beautiful border of different shades of green, everything from tangy bright apple to lush emerald and the bright, sharp color of early spring grass.

Sophie was aghast, but Mikael only laughed.

A medical assessment in the Bohr Terror Report had noted that one striking symptom among those recovering from the effects of the gas attack—the precise chemical constituents still had not been identified—was an emotional affect of recklessness and indifference to the feelings of others. The thought of chemistry affecting personality disturbed Sophie, and she found it worrying to think of Mikael as part of an afflicted cohort, all somehow transformed—at least for a little while—into impulsive creatures immune from the normal promptings of regret or remorse. The doctors had no clue why some people should have been so strongly influenced by the chemicals while others remained impervious, but the phenomenon was widespread, with men roughly four times more likely than women to have had their behavior transformed.

Fru Petersen was downstairs, in the thick of the logistical nightmare of trying to keep the essential scientific functions of the institute going under quarantine conditions while also supplying everyone with food and amusement. When she came back upstairs and saw the broken plate, she said nothing, only gathered up the pieces and said calmly that she would take it downstairs and see whether someone in one of the workshops might rivet it back together.

“I don’t know why you’d bother with that,” Mikael said dismissively.

Sophie’s eyes filled with tears, though his contempt had not been directed specifically at her.

Fru Petersen did not look hurt. Her lips pursed in a way that Sophie suddenly realized meant that she was so angry she could hardly speak.

The only thing she did, though, was to say after a moment that there was a very good cake downstairs in the reception area of Bohr’s office—his secretary had ordered it from a bakery to try to cheer him up—and they could each have a piece if they got there while there was some left. Bohr, too, was quarantined, of course, but he had been allowed a special vehicle for moving back and forth between the Mansion of Honor and the institute. It was marked with a rather frightening hazard sign on both doors, the traditional poison symbol of skull and crossbones in black and a bright, bilious yellow so lurid one felt it might even glow in the dark.

Sophie and Mikael went back downstairs with Fru Petersen for cake. Bohr was closeted in his office for an important telephone call, and the atmosphere outside seemed tense, but it was certainly a very nice-looking cake, a rectangular one with two chocolate layers bursting with whipped cream and cherry jam and an utterly lavish top bit that had lots of very rich chocolate icing of a kind that Sophie believed might be called ganache and a gorgeous pattern of white piped latticework and little pink and red roses tucked in around the edges. Sophie rather had her eye on a particularly good pink one.

When Mikael danced ahead of Sophie and cut himself a huge piece of cake, she thought nothing of it, but what he did next astounded her. She would not, of course, have minded had he taken the next bit of rose for himself. Sophie always felt slightly ashamed of her greediness with respect to cake: really, any piece of cake should be just as good as another, though it was strongly written into her nature to covet a corner piece with an icing flower.

But rather than either taking the rose with his own slice or leaving it for Sophie, Mikael first cut carefully around it, then took a fork from the supply of cutlery the secretary had placed beside the cake and, giving Sophie an impudent look, used the fork to smash the icing rose and grind it down into the cardboard bakery tray.

He laughed at the expression on Sophie’s face, and then forked off the last cluster of roses remaining on top of the cake and popped it into his mouth, smacking his lips with ostentatious pleasure.

“Mikael!” Sophie said, stricken, but he went on laughing heartlessly at her evident distress.

She tried to control her emotions as she cut her own piece of cake, but she felt quite dazed as she climbed the stairs after Mikael. She found that she could not force down more than a few bites, and put the plate and fork back on the table.

Mikael had already finished his own slice, but he now helped himself to Sophie’s without asking, finishing the rest of it in a few mouthfuls.

She did not realize, until the tears were actually rolling down her cheeks, how very upset she was. She sniffed unattractively and tried to stop, but instead found herself crying harder.

“Why are you crying, Sophie?” Mikael asked. “It makes you look quite awful. Your eyes are all red!”

“What’s happened to you, Mikael?” Sophie sobbed, trying to snuffle up some of the awful crying-related snot that was about to pour out of her nose. Oh, if only she were the kind of person who really reliably carried a handkerchief!

“There’s nothing the matter with me,” said Mikael. “It’s bunk, what they’re saying in the papers about the attack—if anything, I feel better than I ever have before in my life. Stop crying, you idiot!”

They were interrupted a second time by Fru Petersen.

“You had better turn on the radio,” she said to Mikael.

Sophie was afraid that he would refuse to do so, but after a moment he got up and turned on the apparatus in the corner of the sitting room, then went over to the casement window and began swinging it in and out on its hinge, the cold air coming into the room and blowing away a sheaf of papers that had been stacked in a neat pile on the desk.

Trismegistus had stalked into the room behind Fru Petersen, and Sophie, though she always felt it to be a slight affront to his dignity, picked him up and settled him down on her knee, pressing her hands into his thick fur for comfort. She could feel the steady vibration of his purr, a deep, reassuring rumble that seemed to resonate with her own sympathetic nervous system and helped her settle down into some semblance of calm.

The radio was tuned to the English-language news station. The journalist Sophie liked best, an English refugee named Eric Blair, whose thoughts on politics and language seemed more interesting to Sophie than almost anything she had ever heard, was reporting from a spot near København harbor.

The noise in the background was unbelievable—aeroplanes buzzing around overhead, the sounds of sirens and of blaring radios and people milling in the streets. It provided a strangely disorienting accompaniment to Blair’s calm reporting. He painted a picture of unmarked European troop ships moving in during the early morning darkness and under cover of fog and passing by the harbor forts, the security forces there having been paid off not to alert the Danish army to what was going on: paid off or, more likely, Blair said grimly, manipulated by way of their sympathies for the notion of a European-backed government committed to the strong enforcement of a rule of law.

Small groups of elite forces had then dispersed with great rapidity throughout the city—to the army headquarters, to the palace where parliament was in session—a parliament that had scrambled to come up with a plan and that, before an hour had passed, had voted in favor of a policy of nonresistance.

Now it was lunchtime, and the European occupation of Denmark was official.

Aeroplanes marked with the distinctive Napoleonic insignia could be heard flying overhead, Blair continued, and were dropping leaflets intended to indoctrinate those who read them. These manifestos stated that the federation’s troops did not set foot on Danish soil as enemies; that European military operations were aimed exclusively at protecting a vulnerable Denmark from the onslaught of a possible Russian invasion; that Europe had no intention of infringing on the territorial integrity and political independence of her Danish neighbor, or indeed on the independence of any other Hanseatic state; in short, that the people of Denmark would be wise not to offer any resistance.

“So the attack at the party really does seem to have been the precursor to a full-scale invasion,” Sophie said, more to herself than to the others.

“It seems that way,” Fru Petersen agreed.

“Will Blair be able to keep broadcasting if the Europeans really have occupied Denmark?” Sophie asked her.

“I doubt it,” said Fru Petersen. “This may well be the last we hear of him, at least from Danish soil. If he can get out of the country in time, he may be able to resume broadcasting from Sweden or Finland.”

“And—”

Sophie was about to ask another question, but Fru Petersen put her finger to her lips.

“Sophie, listen,” she said urgently. “You, too, Mikael: this is of the utmost importance. I’ve been in consultation all this week with Niels Bohr, and we are in agreement as to what must happen next. We still haven’t heard from Arne vis-à-vis Nobel’s plans for Sophie, but we feel that there may be only a very small window of time in which Sophie, as a foreign national, will safely be able to get out of the country. It might be alarmist, but her visa situation is unusual, and there has been talk of the Europeans—it certainly has happened in Poland and Lithuania—putting foreigners and other undesirables into internment camps. The quarantine has been lifted, though we expect a curfew to be imposed shortly. Lise Meitner and her nephew are traveling to Stockholm tonight—Bohr and I believe that the two of you must go with them.”

“On our bicycles, I suppose,” Mikael said sarcastically.

“Indeed, on your bicycles, at least for part of the way,” his mother agreed, ignoring the tone of his voice. “They will be put onto a rack on the roof of the car that will take you to Elsinore for the ferry. Meitner and Frisch will be met off the boat by a relative of theirs who will drive them to Stockholm, but the other seats in that car have already been promised to several old ladies who are not able to travel on their own, so you will have to cover the final leg of the trip by bicycle.”

“But where will we go?” Sophie asked. She hoped Trismegistus would be amenable to being packed into the basket on her bike—it was certainly out of the question to leave him behind.

“To Arne, in Stockholm, of course,” Fru Petersen said briskly. “He has a perfectly good set of rooms, and he has already obtained his landlady’s permission to have you there as long as is needed.”

“I know it is a difficult question for you to answer, but how long might that be?” Sophie asked anxiously.

Fru Petersen shook her head.

“It’s impossible to say, Sophie,” she said.

It did not take long to pack. Fru Petersen said to leave behind almost everything except for the bare urgent necessities, and that she would arrange for Sophie’s and Mikael’s clothes and books to be shipped directly to Arne’s, assuming such shipping was still legal under the new regime. She sewed banknotes into the hem of Sophie’s coat and the inner lining of Mikael’s jacket, and finally told them to go and leave her alone to finish sorting everything out, as they were giving her fits by being so much underfoot while she tried to work!