Invisible Things (2 page)

“What should we do with them now?” Sophie asked.

She rather wished the escaped cats could have stayed escaped, but there was nothing to be gained by refusing to help round them up: some days earlier, they had been injected with a radioactive isotope of phosphorus whose uptake into the skeleton could be measured with great precision, revealing how bone was formed and all sorts of other metabolic secrets. Sophie and Mikael both helped out regularly in the basement laboratory, and Sophie knew the cats’ doom was already sealed. When the time came, the animals would be euthanized and samples of their bone and tissue burned or dissolved in acid so that the precipitated phosphate could be weighed and tested for radioactivity, using a “clicker” or counter that had been modified from the ones the telephone company used to track how many calls were made on a given line.

“Now we must test them,” Miss Levi answered, “to see which ones are ours.”

“Can’t you tell just by looking at them?” said Sophie.

“Oh, no,” Miss Levi said. “I can make a good guess, certainly, but since it’s a matter of life or death for these poor little fellows, I had rather be certain.”

“What will we do with the ones who weren’t in the experiment?” Sophie asked, feeling slightly sick to her stomach.

“We’ll release them back into the park,” said Miss Levi— she had told Sophie to call her Hilde, and she wasn’t at all old, but Sophie felt more comfortable with “Miss Levi”— “but not until we’ve made a very thorough attempt to retrieve all six of the ones that escaped. There’s no point chasing after the same cats all over again!”

It was certainly a two-person job to work out which cats were radioactive. Sophie put on a pair of heavy gardening gloves and held down an animal while Miss Levi briskly pinched each cat’s jaw with one hand and swabbed its mouth for saliva with the other. The wipe test was then passed under the clicker, which went alarmingly active in several cases, including the little gray-and-white cat, which Sophie had hoped might be spared.

They had determined that two of the five captured cats belonged to the original group when Hevesy himself entered the room. He had a charming long face like a dyspeptic turtle, with a slender build and a patina of formality to his manners that made Sophie suspect him of being privately quite sarcastic. As always, he was dressed in an elegant fashion that went against the otherwise casual sartorial culture of the institute, but his brow was dotted anomalously with sweat. He held a bloodstained white silk handkerchief to his left hand, and his clothes bore the marks of the hunt.

Miss Levi clucked over him as she examined the deep slash on the mound of his thumb.

“I take it you couldn’t keep hold of the animal?” she asked.

“I got him, all right,” said Hevesy. “I left the bag outside because the creature was writhing about too powerfully for me to keep hold of it. I deposited the sack in one of the garden rubbish bins and came to you, Miss Levi, for assistance.”

“I’ll go out and get it, Miss Levi,” Sophie volunteered. The feeling of moral queasiness based on complicity with scientific cat killing had given way, over the course of Hevesy’s utterances, to a more specific and acute sense of dismay. She left by the garden entrance and half ran, with the slight limp that was the only physical legacy of the injury she had sustained in the long-ago factory explosion that had killed both her parents, to the garden refuse bins.

One bin was rocking about on its base, an anguished and barely muffled yowl emanating from the container. Sophie removed the lid and grasped the neck of the sack with both hands. It was like trying to hold on to a portion of volcanic magma the size of a plum pudding. Clutching the sack, she felt something punch her quite painfully round about the kidney.

Once she had passed the malevolent bundle over to Miss Levi, the laboratory assistant barely had time to loosen the neck of the sack, pop it through the cage’s opening, and slam the door shut before the cat shot out like a rocket and slammed into the wire wall at the back of the cage.

“It’s Trismegistus!” Sophie cried, her pangs of guilt intensified by the black cat’s sheer physical fury. If he could have stabbed Sophie with a knife, she thought, he would have!

“It’s
what
?” Hevesy asked, the smooth surface of his politeness slightly dented by the cat’s awful yowling.

“It’s the cat that came with me from Scotland. Look, he’s got a red collar; none of yours had a collar—oh, please, let him out at once!”

A cursory visual examination confirmed the truth of Sophie’s words.

“Still,” Miss Levi said sensibly, “it will be more prudent to keep him here for now and let him back out only once we have found the others. . . .”

The cat was howling so loudly by this time that the other animals in the room had become agitated.

“Oh, please don’t say that!” Sophie said. “Really, we must let him go—look how he’s upsetting the others!”

This had to be conceded. Even the macaw was fluttering off his perch and screaming, and the cats were making an extraordinary amount of noise.

“I am not so sure,” said Miss Levi, giving the cat a wary look, “that it will be quite
safe
for us to release him inside. Sophie, what do you think?”

The cat seemed also to turn his gaze now in Sophie’s direction, and the thought came very strongly into her mind that he would prefer to be released outdoors, but not at the cost of significant further delay. The cage had two handles, and she hoisted it up in both hands and hurried over and up the stairs out into the garden.

Despite her haste and the enveloping sensation of panic, Sophie placed the cage carefully on the grass and knelt down in front of it.

“Oh, I do hope you will forgive me,” she said, though she felt very silly even as she uttered the words. “I’m terribly sorry you had to go through all this!”

Once the door was open, though, the cat stalked out with a dignity quite at odds with his earlier cannonball-like activity. He slowly picked up speed, first to a brisk trot and then to a low sprint that took him into the invisibility-granting world of the park’s dense undergrowth.

After supper with Mikael and Fru Petersen, Sophie had a quick bath to wash away the grime of cat chasing. Dressed in her pajamas, she joined Mikael in the small sitting room. It was still light outside, but the evening had become quite cool. Summer was over.

Fru Petersen brought them each a mug of cocoa and waved away Mikael’s invitation to sit down.

“I am going to bed,” she said firmly. “I am not fifteen years old; I prefer to go to bed at a reasonable hour, even if it
is
Saturday tomorrow. . . .”

Once she had left them, silence fell over the room. Sophie and Mikael sat across from each other on the two upholstered chairs. It seemed to Sophie that they hewed to an unspoken agreement at home that even the slightest physical contact was forbidden, though outside Mikael had more than once taken Sophie’s hand and held it gently in his own for a few moments as they walked along together.

Sophie considered this almost heart-stoppingly bold. What if someone saw them? Would Mikael really not mind people thinking Sophie was his—what was the right word?—sweetheart, and he Sophie’s beau?

Her thoughts roamed to the laboratory downstairs.

“Did you ever think it might be wrong,” she asked Mikael, “to keep animals in cages and do things to them that would be considered unacceptable if they weren’t directed toward scientific ends?”

“It’s crossed my mind,” Mikael admitted. He slurped the last dregs of his cocoa—how had he finished his so much more quickly than Sophie?—and set the mug down on the end table. “We eat animals, too, though, don’t we? And wear leather shoes and jackets and belts? Experiments like those ones they’re doing in the basement are almost the only way to come to grips with even the most elementary aspects of physiology, in humans as well as animals—it’s not possible, after all, to experiment on people!”

“No, of course not,” Sophie said, “and I know that Professor Hevesy is engaged in truly important research; only I hope that his next experiment does not require him to kill so many dear little cats!”

As if his appearance had been scripted, the black cat materialized in the doorway, wedging the door a little wider open and weaving his way around the edge of the room toward Sophie. He rubbed his muzzle along the hand she offered him, then sprang up onto the arm of the chair and settled down in the pose preferred by the Egyptian sphinxes.

“He is amazingly intelligent, isn’t he?” Sophie said, giving the cat a series of strong, firm strokes over his brow ridges and ears, a form of patting that made the cat purr like a dynamo.

“Hevesy?”

“No!”

“Oh, you’re talking about Blackie. . . .”

Sophie gave Mikael a reproachful look, and he started to laugh.

“I suppose you wish I’d call him Trismegistus! But it’s a ridiculous name for a cat, Sophie; it makes the wretched beast sound like the prop of some charlatan of an occult practitioner. Just because he once belonged to a spiritualist medium doesn’t mean he’s not a perfectly ordinary, common-or-garden-variety black cat! Bet you he prefers to be called Blackie—look! Here, Blackie, do you want the last bit of cocoa?”

He picked up the mug and held it about a foot from the ground, tipping it forward in the cat’s direction and jiggling it to slosh the scant remaining liquid around at the bottom. The cat remained impervious to the cocoa’s charms, perhaps because of the affront to his dignity, but more likely because Fru Petersen had already given him herring for supper; Sophie could still slightly smell the residue on his face and whiskers, though he was an irreproachably clean cat who groomed himself at every opportunity and sported an exceptionally thick and glossy coat.

“I agree it’s a bit silly,” Sophie said regretfully, “but really I think he must be called Trismegistus. It suits him, in a slightly sinister way. Perhaps he wouldn’t object to being called Tris for short. What do you think, Tris?”

When she reached under his chin and began rubbing along the bottom of his jaw, his purring swelled to such a degree that Mikael could hear it all the way on the other side of the room.

“Tris it is, then,” he said, with a sigh of resignation so dramatic that Sophie couldn’t help but laugh.

In the absence of anything better to do—his mother would be very annoyed if she saw the mess!—Mikael was plucking the white blossoms off a flowering branch that Fru Petersen had arranged in a sleek white modern vase. The petals mounted in a heap, Mikael registering what he had been doing only when every twig had been stripped bare of blossom; he looked surprised, then picked up the pile of petals in both hands and heaved himself out of his chair to cast them in Sophie’s direction.

The petals descended over Sophie and the cat like snow.

With the last petals still fluttering to the ground, Mikael’s mother leaned her head around the door.

“Still up?” she said. “You two had a long day—I’d say it’s bedtime around now. What a mess you’ve made!”

Sophie cleaned her teeth in the bathroom. Mikael had taken to leaving his toothbrush and the little tin of cleaning powder by the kitchen sink and brushing his teeth there to avoid either enduring or instigating a bathroom wait; Sophie would have been glad to let him go first in the bathroom, but Mikael’s notion of the obligations of the guest-host relationship entwined the pair of them in a merciless web of mutual courtesies.

She left her door open a crack, and a few minutes after she had turned out the bedside light, Trismegistus padded into the room and jumped up onto the bed with the funny little revving-up noise that Sophie found so endearing.

She turned onto her side, and the cat tucked himself into the space between her arms and stomach like a hot, fat, furry sausage. The cat’s companionship was one of Sophie’s greatest consolations in her new Danish life. It wasn’t a bad life, on its own terms, but it had made all of the futures her past self had spent so much time pondering go quite blank.

All she seemed able to do now was wait. When would the dynamiteur Alfred Nobel send word that he was ready to see Sophie? Just before she’d left Scotland, she’d spoken to Nobel on the telephone, and he had promised all sorts of revelations about Sophie’s long-dead parents, but she had never expected such a long time to pass before his next communication. When Nobel did finally reach out to her, would the message be brought by her old chemistry teacher, Mikael’s older brother, Arne?

Would Mikael—but Sophie could hardly stand to think about it, the idea so thoroughly and confusingly excited and shamed her—ever want to kiss her?

Just then the cat reached out his left paw and laid it on Sophie’s forearm, kneading her flesh for a moment and giving her a short, sharp dig with his claws.

“Stop that!” Sophie said, outraged and rolling away from him.

No sooner had she turned her back than the cat raised himself up and picked his way around the blanketed outline of her body to set himself back down along Sophie’s front.

“I do not see why you have to lie on my front side,” she said with fond exasperation, but the cat only purred and settled himself closer by.

For Saturday-morning breakfast, Mikael’s mother always made them crepes filled with apricot jam and sprinkled with powdered sugar, which seemed almost criminally delicious for a meal that in Sophie’s Scottish life had usually been more penitential than mouthwatering—oh, but she must stop making these comparisons! Even when the advantage fell to København, as often seemed the case, there was something reproach-worthy about looking constantly backward. It was better not to let the words
In Scotland . . .
or
At home . . .
ever cross her lips; it was the lesson of Orpheus and Eurydice, or of Lot’s wife looking back and being turned into a pillar of salt.

After helping with the washing-up (and
goodness
, it was nice having hot running water and electric wiring— but there she went with another “In Edinburgh”!), Sophie spent an hour on her history essay. Mikael went to the boys’ school where Niels Bohr had sent his sons, but Sophie had been enrolled as a pupil at a very good English-language coeducational school founded and directed by Bohr’s aunt Hanna Adler. Sophie liked the Fællesskole quite a bit. It was a progressive school, which seemed mostly to mean that children so inclined were allowed to behave very badly, but that lessons were considerably more interesting than at an ordinary school. All but the most daunting teachers were called by their first names, a custom Sophie judged strange but pleasant: the verdict she had reached on almost every aspect of her new life.