Invisible Things (3 page)

At the other side of the dining table, Mikael was covering sheets of paper with intricate penciled calculations, and the example of his easy concentration helped Sophie become fully absorbed in her own essay, which was on the relationship between aboveboard diplomacy and secret operations like espionage or even assassination.

In a way it was like animal vivisection or scientific experimentation. Sophie would much prefer not to euthanize and dissect an animal with her own two hands. Just so might she recoil at the notion of ordering an assassination, let alone assassinating someone herself. But there was a kind of hypocrisy, wasn’t there, in congratulating oneself on not having to descend to such things while simultaneously benefiting from living in a world where espionage and even assassination might be the only way for one’s country to maintain its independence?

She finished a paragraph and started doodling in the margin of the page. Drawing a blank as to what to say next, she decided to consult the encyclopedia, whose gilded black-and-red volumes took up almost a whole shelf in the library downstairs. On a weekday, a noisy game of Ping-Pong might have been under way at the table by the library windows, which were always kept open to clear the haze of tobacco smoke that otherwise hung in the air; the cold air had led someone to put a joke sign above the door (but it would make more sense when winter came!) saying nordpol, with
North Pole
written underneath for English speakers, and one of the eccentric Russian George Gamow’s trademark drawings of Bohr as Mickey Mouse. Bohr/Mickey was dressed up as Father Christmas and brandished a Ping-Pong racquet at his team of reindeer; it was one of the great mysteries of life how the crude inked figure could so clearly represent all three things at once—Bohr, Mickey, Father Christmas.

Today being Saturday, the library was empty. Leafing her way through to
Intelligence Services
, Sophie got distracted by
Ichneumon
,
Ichthyology
, and
Iodine
, and she was immersed in
Ice (glacial)
when someone tapped her on the shoulder.

It was Niels Bohr himself. After checking that Sophie did not mind the interruption, he pulled up a chair, tipped back in it, and rested his feet on the table in front of them.

Bohr was kind to everybody, in his own absentminded fashion, but the great surprise of Sophie’s first days in København a month earlier had come when Mikael’s mother informed her that Bohr wished to see Sophie in his office.

Sophie had flinched—it sounded distinctly disciplinary!— whereupon Fru Petersen twisted her mouth in a comical fashion and said, “The only person who is not periodically summoned to the great man’s office is the janitor, and that is because Bohr knows the fellow will only importune him for more funds if they meet face-to-face!”

“What does Professor Bohr want to talk to me about?” Sophie asked, but Fru Petersen couldn’t give her an answer.

So Sophie had duly appeared in the outer sanctuary, the secretary asking her to sit quietly until Bohr was ready to see her. Her heart had been in her mouth as she waited, and she felt almost breathless with nerves. Would he cross-examine her about her visa status, or, worse, about her fairly sketchy knowledge of nuclear physics?

But when she was finally ushered into Bohr’s office, Sophie had seen not an ogre but a kind-faced man whose boyish manner belied the fact of his being in late middle age. The first thing he did was jump out of his seat and rush over to Sophie and clasp her hands in his own, leaning over to look closely into her face.

“A definite resemblance,” he muttered. “It would be an exaggeration to say I’d have known you anywhere—it is difficult to pick out a likeness in the face of a complete stranger on the street—but I see quite a strong look of your father. . . .”

Seeing the puzzled expression on Sophie’s face, he led her to a phalanx of framed photographs on the wall beside the window. There was a row of almost indistinguishable group portraits of the institute’s staff—the earliest ones had only twelve or fourteen people in them, while the more recent ones were populated by several dozen figures—and there in the back right-hand corner of the group photograph for the year 1917 was Sophie’s very own father, who had died (so had her mother) when she was too young to remember him.

“Alan came to the institute as a postdoctoral fellow in 1912,” Bohr had told Sophie. Then he put his finger to the smudge of a half-visible face of a young woman standing at the other edge of the group. She had turned away, as if responding to a comment from someone outside the frame of the picture, and there was something elusive—almost ghostly—about her equivocal presence. “Your mother had already been working here for a year when he came, but it took him many months to persuade her to let him take her out for coffee and cake!”

Sophie had been struck almost dumb with surprise.

“My mother and father met
here
?” she had asked, after recovering her voice. “At the Institute for Theoretical Physics?”

“Did you not know?” Bohr had said in response, frowning a little and opening a drawer from which he extracted a tin of biscuits. Taking the lid off, he had offered it to Sophie, who chose a rectangular shortbread, and then he himself carefully picked out two chocolate-covered round ones dusted with coconut. He had gone on to tell Sophie the tale of Alan Hunter’s courtship of a shy, charming fellow Scot called Rose Childs, a story hitherto entirely unknown to Sophie, before further endearing himself to her by offering her some fudge from the secret supply in his office cupboard. He had concluded by telling her that
Sophie
had been a favorite name of his ever since his time as a very junior research fellow in Manchester, when he had taught himself English by reading
David Copperfield
and looking up the words he didn’t recognize. “Dickens’s Sophie,” he had added, “lived in Devonshire and was one of ten, as I am sure you know!”

Seeing Bohr again now in the library, the pages of her history essay slightly fluttering (she had pinned them down with a malachite paperweight) in the breeze from the windows, Sophie had to fight the urge to pepper him with more questions about her parents. But though she desperately wanted to learn everything she could, she did not want Bohr to think of Sophie as a person of exclusively genealogical interests. It was hard to shake the sense instilled by her stern guardian, Great-aunt Tabitha, an elderly lady of supreme rectitude who had seen fit to keep Sophie almost entirely in the dark about her antecedents, that questions about one’s deceased parents represented idle curiosity of the most frivolous sort.

The encyclopedia volume still open before her, she asked Bohr the question that had been troubling her as she wrote her essay.

“Say that someone’s leading a double life,” she began, remembering not just Great-aunt Tabitha and her twin role as enlightener and secret keeper for the sinister organization called IRYLNS, but also Sophie’s former history teacher, Miss Chatterjee, and Arne Petersen himself, and the ways their secrets deformed and distorted their other human relationships. When Mikael’s older brother had posed as Sophie’s chemistry teacher in Edinburgh, he had really been working as a secret agent for the reclusive dynamiteur Alfred Nobel. It had taken Sophie quite a long time to apprehend the extent of Arne’s double-dealing, and to add insult to injury, after revealing to Sophie that Nobel had actually connived at a plan to bring Sophie to see him in his . . . Sophie mentally supplied the word
lair
, Arne had simply gone off without doing
anything
about making arrangements for a visit that Sophie perhaps dreaded and looked forward to in equal measure.

“Would you say that it is possible for each strand of that life to be full of integrity,” she asked Bohr, “even if it is lived under conditions of concealment? Or does the ongoing deception tarnish the person’s character regardless, even if each strand of the life seems respectable on its own?”

“Do I detect a question motivated by something other than abstract curiosity?” Bohr asked, his voice kind. He snapped the book shut and took his pipe from his breast pocket, then began the near-interminable process of fiddling that might or might not culminate half an hour later in its finally being lit. “Are you thinking of Arne Petersen?”

Sophie flushed and nodded.

“Do you think I’ll hear from him soon about the visit to Mr. Nobel?” she asked Bohr, hating how pitiful she sounded but unable to stop the words from tumbling out of her mouth.

“I hope so,” Bohr said apologetically, “but it is honestly impossible to say. You know that the institute gets a good deal of its funding from Nobel’s various trusts and foundations; at times I will receive from the man as many as three or four telegrams in a single morning, whereas at other times months may pass without a hint of response even to my most pressing inquiries. It can be highly frustrating, but then that is the price we pay when we deal with these great men. . . .”

He did not seem to use the phrase ironically, and it caused Sophie to bristle slightly on Bohr’s own behalf. Surely Bohr himself was by any rational standard of measurement as great a man as Alfred Nobel!

Just then Mikael peered around the door of the library.

“There you are, Sophie!” he called out. “Professor Bohr, I must claim Sophie for a bicycle ride. . . .”

“We just as well could ride later on, though, couldn’t we?” Sophie said hopefully.

Mikael started laughing, and so did Bohr—alas, bicycle riding was one of the minor banes of Sophie’s Danish existence, and it was well-known throughout the institute that Sophie would have been very glad had the bicycle never been invented.

As they clattered downstairs through the deserted building, Sophie had an appealing sense of the institute’s being their own personal playground. The main building, in addition to the residential flats and guest rooms on the top floor, held laboratory and office space for about fifteen physicists. The ground floor had a big office and reception area for Bohr and his secretary, and an auditorium that could seat almost a hundred people. The basement, served by a goods elevator, housed a chemical laboratory and four big workrooms for experimental research. It was packed full of all sorts of things whose inner workings Sophie did not always fully understand but whose names rolled off the tongue in a most lovely way: a high-tension generator, a grating spectrograph, a precision lathe, drills and saws and sanders, and the delightfully named universal cutting machine. Of course, the universal cutting machine could not really cut
everything
; it was just a name, but Sophie liked the notion that it might be used to cut out a neat strip of sky or a perfect cube of water.

And in a detail like something out of a fairy tale, a seven-meter well had been dug deep below the floor of the basement, with a narrow staircase leading down into it. It had been built for the spectrograph, which had been floated at the bottom of the well in a container of oil meant to minimize vibrations from the trolley cars that ran along Blegdamsvej in front of the institute, but when the vibrations continued to affect the instrument, it had to be moved elsewhere. Now the underground cave was used to produce and store the radioactive isotopes for Hevesy’s tracer experiments, the Hungarian scientist’s slight resemblance to a turtle only compounding Sophie’s sense of its being a magical grotto where frogs might turn into princes if the right person kissed them.

The bicycle shed stood on the east side of the building. By the time Sophie had knocked over several other machines and barked her shins painfully on the lawn mower, Mikael was already riding around outside in circles.

It was not so much that Sophie minded actually riding a bicycle. It was quite enjoyable, really, once one was rolling along, so long as one did not allow oneself to become flustered when a dog took chase or a small child rushed directly out into one’s path. But bicycles themselves were so troublesome and awkward! One banged one’s shins on them and knocked into things as one tried to wheel them out of congested areas, and it still seemed to Sophie impossible to imagine walking and wheeling the wretched contraption at anything like a normal pace.

Intent upon her dislike for two-wheeled transportation, Sophie remained almost oblivious to the route Mikael led them along, except to think that it was a pity the weather was fair and København so attractive, because it led to excessive numbers of people being out and about enjoying themselves and altogether neglecting the possibility that their obstruction of the path of a timid cyclist might pose some danger to themselves and others!

She was taken aback when she realized they had already reached the pier.

“It’s not much of a ride,” Mikael observed as they stretched their legs out in front of them on the sun-warmed dock and unpacked their lunch. This was the magnificent imperial bit of København, almost everything built on a monumental scale.

“It is a nice little bicycle; I will give you that much,” Sophie said, feeling more charitable now that the first part of the ride was over. Mikael loved riding his bike, and had insisted that Sophie must have her own, persuading his mother to mention it to Great-aunt Tabitha, who had wired the money to purchase one just for Sophie, Mikael having rightly noted that there were few things so unhelpful to the timid cyclist as trying to ride a bicycle the wrong size, and that though the institute shed might be full of more or less functional hand-me-downs, they had all been ridden by much taller people than Sophie.

It was blue, Sophie’s favorite color. Mikael had fixed a block to the left pedal to neutralize the leg-length discrepancy Sophie had retained from her childhood injury. Perhaps, in time—in a very
long
time—she might even learn to love the bicycle?

Mikael offered Sophie a sandwich, which she took and washed down with a swig of lemonade from the bottle. A number of other people were also enjoying proximity to the water, mostly families with children eating ice creams or couples holding hands. Sophie sneaked a glance at Mikael, but it did not really seem as though he was thinking about reaching out for her hand. Just in case, though, she wiped her right hand surreptitiously on her shorts to reduce stickiness.