Invisible Things (4 page)

Amidst the generally companionable scene, solitary walkers were relatively conspicuous, especially because they all seemed to be men in suits, several of them carrying briefcases or at least a rolled newspaper tucked beneath the elbow. Sophie was only idly watching, but she saw one man sit down at the end of a bench, at the other end of which an older gentleman was already sitting reading the paper. After a moment, the older man folded up his paper and left it beside him on the bench, then walked away in the direction of Christiansborg. The other man waited a few minutes, then stood up himself, plucking the paper from the seat without even looking at it, tucking it under his own arm, and walking away in the opposite direction from the first man.

Mikael had been following the direction of Sophie’s gaze.

“Spies,” he announced breezily, enjoying the effect the word had on Sophie.

“Spies?” she breathed. When espionage was the topic for a history essay, it might seem slightly dreary, but the idea of seeing a real actual spy was singularly romantic. “How do you know?”

“Well, obviously the second man was there to pick up some sort of document from the first,” Mikael said. “That’s how they teach them to do it at spy school! It’s called a drop, and the newspaper exchange is one of the most basic ways of handing something over. Not that there’s anything wrong with keeping it simple. . . .”

“But if it’s really secret,” Sophie said, “why do they do it in broad daylight and in such a public place?”

“I suppose the rationale is that some things are best hidden in plain sight,” said Mikael. “It’s impossible to keep secrets in a city this size anyway. Nobody’s supposed to know who the spies are, but really it’s incredibly obvious: they’re all either attached to a legation, with some nominal cover-up title like
cultural attaché
, or else they pretend to be correspondents for Reuters or one of the other wire services. They spend most of their time going to parties at the other consulates, and it’s all fairly civilized, although I suppose that will change if the Hanseatic states really go to war with Europe.”

“Is war quite inevitable, do you think?” Sophie asked.

“If I were judging based on what I read in the newspapers and hear on the radio, no,” Mikael said, “but Professor Bohr seems to think it’s almost certain, and he knows all sorts of things we don’t. Scandinavia’s been simply crawling with European agents for the last few years; that’s nothing new—just yesterday Bohr got a postcard from our old lodger Ludwig Wittgenstein. You know, Sophie, he’s the fellow who built that tiny working model of a sewing machine out of matchsticks, the one that’s on the dresser in your room. Wittgenstein said that a German woman spy had been spotted near his retreat in the remote northern bit of Norway, and what gave her away was the fact that she was wearing trousers, though I don’t really see how that follows—surely a woman who was not a spy might wear trousers also? When he lived here, Wittgenstein was often ranting about his dislike for women in trousers, so perhaps it is a biased account! But these days it seems as though Denmark’s become a sort of espionage hub for the whole world, with all of the English and French and German and Russian agents hanging around here till the show gets going.”

Sophie’s eye wandered a little farther down the pier. Her gaze snagged on the figure of a man sitting on a bench on the far side of the next ice-cream kiosk. He was eating an apple and reading a magazine.

“Mikael?” she asked, feeling slightly breathless.

“What?”

“It might be that I am just shortsighted—but doesn’t that fellow look awfully like your brother?”

“Oh, but it couldn’t be; Arne isn’t anywhere near here— Arne!”

Mikael took off running toward the man eating the apple, leaving Sophie stuck with not just one but
both
bicycles, wretched encumbrances that they were! She had to wait, fuming, for Mikael to reach his brother and pull him to his feet and give him a highly continental kiss on both cheeks; Sophie slightly squirmed at the knowledge of having imbibed one of her great-aunt’s prejudices against the customs of what Great-aunt Tabitha always referred to as
foreigners
.

Soon they were headed back in Sophie’s direction.

“But why didn’t you say you were coming?” she cried out once she and Arne had exchanged greetings.

“I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get away until quite late last night,” Arne said. “I took the train and the ferry and then another train—got in first thing this morning, and had to see a man about a dog before I could look you up.”

He spoke with a certain evasive jauntiness that irritated Sophie. Clearly Mikael felt much the same way, for he wrinkled his nose at his brother and said, “Well, aren’t
you
full of yourself these days! Coming back to the institute?”

Arne agreed that yes, he did mean to spend the night at home. He had no luggage to speak of, only a small khaki-colored rucksack, and after some experimentation, the two brothers found a way to fit themselves both on the bicycle, with Mikael pedaling and Arne crouched on the rack behind him.

Back at the institute, Mikael and Sophie left their bicycles in the shed (Sophie gave hers a guilty farewell pat on the seat, an apology for insufficient fondness—all she could think about was whether Arne had brought any message for her from Alfred Nobel!) and climbed the stairs with Arne in front of them.

On their way down the hall to the flat, they heard voices coming from the lunchroom under the eaves. Mikael and Sophie both sped up—it had been firmly impressed upon Sophie from childhood not to intrude where business was being conducted—but Arne put up his hand to stop them, then pushed the door farther open and beckoned to them to follow.

The lunchroom was one of Sophie’s favorite rooms at the institute. It had been a surprise, on first arriving here, to find that there was no cafeteria; Sophie had imagined that the institute, like a school or hospital, would have a dreary refectory with a line of ladies slopping awful hot food onto trays. But Denmark was a nation of boxed lunches. Almost everyone who worked at the institute brought a packed lunch from home or lodgings, supplemented in the lunchroom by hot coffee and a generous supply of bread and cheese and apples. One of the English refugees even kept a tin well stocked with biscuits, though crunching into a custard cream or a short-bread filled Sophie with such sharp nostalgia that she would almost rather forgo the treat.

As it was Saturday, there wasn’t any bread and cheese laid out, but a fresh pot of coffee had just been brewed, and Bohr was pouring it into sturdy china cups for his two companions, Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch.

“Hello, Arne,” Frisch said cheerfully. “Haven’t seen you for a while; are you here for the weekend?”

Though Arne gave his assent, Bohr hardly seemed to notice anyone had come into the room.

“What if the repulsive force of the high surface charge of the uranium nucleus turns out to cancel the attractive force of the surface tension?” he was saying. “There would be vibrations; instability would ensue!”

Quite a bit of coffee went into the saucers as he gesticulated, and Frisch kindly took the jug from Bohr’s hands to finish pouring. In the meantime, Bohr transferred three or four heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his own cup and absently plucked a chocolate biscuit from the open tin, breaking it into pieces and consuming it in bits as he continued to talk.

One of the things that most amazed Sophie about the institute was the unending stream of conversation, conversation exceptional in its quality as well as its quantity. Bohr seemed to think best in the company of others, a mode of operating that Sophie found intriguing but strange, and he conducted himself during these endless conversations with an utter lack of reserve. The scientists Sophie remembered from her great-aunt’s Edinburgh coffee evenings had often been tight-lipped to the point of paranoia, perhaps due to the Scottish preference for the laconic over the lavishly verbal, but talk here was a matter of almost divine candor and openness.

“Assuming the nucleus splits into two parts,” Lise Meitner said in response to Bohr’s observation, “the split-up would be accompanied by a transformation of rest mass into kinetic energy on the order of two hundred million electron volts.”

Professor Meitner was rather Sophie’s hero. They had scarcely exchanged a dozen words, though the professor always gave Sophie a shy smile in the corridor, but the fact of a woman being among this august company as a full and equal colleague made Sophie’s heart thrill with the spirit of emulation. Hilde Levi, whom Sophie also looked up to but who was junior enough not to produce quite the same effect of overwhelming awe, had told Sophie an amazing story about the working conditions Lise Meitner had experienced in Berlin before the new racial laws—implemented first in Germany, but now being leveled throughout France, Spain, and most of southern Europe also—made it impossible for her to keep her university appointment. The Chemical Institute had been off-limits to women, and Lise Meitner was only grudgingly allowed to use a basement carpenter’s room that had a separate entrance to the street. She couldn’t go upstairs to the institute, not even to her collaborator’s laboratory, and when she needed to use the toilet, she had to walk to a café nearby. She was paid no salary for the work she did there, and lived only by eking out an allowance from her parents in a small furnished room in an unattractive neighborhood at the end of a tram line. The work she had done under these conditions, however, had earned her a Nobel Prize.

“Shouldn’t we go?” Sophie whispered to Mikael.

He shrugged.

“Arne seems interested,” he said to her under his breath, “and I would bet that Professor Bohr hasn’t even noticed we’re here!”

“Lise Meitner is correct,” said Frisch in response to the female scientist’s observation about the transformation of mass into energy. He was Meitner’s nephew, but perhaps to avoid the appearance of family bias always scrupulously referred to her by her full name. “We intend to observe the ionization pulses from the fragments of the . . . oh, what’s a better word for it? We can’t keep using this term
split-up
; it’s too slangy.”

“There is a closely analogous process in biology,” Bohr interjected. “You English speakers”—cocking his head at Sophie and Mikael; so he did know that they were there!— “what would you call the process by which bacteria divide in two?”

“Do you mean fission?” Sophie asked uncertainly. English was the lingua franca of the institute, with bits of Danish and French and German mixed in, with the result that as a native English speaker one never quite knew whether one were stating something too obvious to be worth mentioning or so obscure as to defy comprehension.

“
Nuclear fission
, that will be an extremely suitable name,” said Lise Meitner, making a note in her diary and giving Sophie an approving nod.

Bohr seemed hardly to have been paying attention. He had eaten half a dozen chocolate biscuits—he had an insatiable appetite for sweets, especially chocolate. Now he bounded up out of his seat, taking his tobacco pouch out of his pocket and beginning to fiddle with his pipe.

“If we record the size of the pulse with enough accuracy,” Lise Meitner added, “we will certainly be able to determine the energy groups and the mode of division.”

Bohr stopped in his tracks. The lit match went out.

“Oh, what idiots we have all been!” he cried out. “But this is wonderful; this is just as it must be! You and Otto must write a paper—you will send it to
Nature
; I will read it for you first. . . .”

Nature
was still perhaps the premier scientific journal of the entire world, though its editors had been forced to move their office from London to the Channel Islands in the 1910s, their evacuation only just preceding Europe’s successful invasion of England. It was certainly Sophie’s favorite out of all the journals readily accessible in the library downstairs—it did not have the more recondite charms of
Chemical News
or the
Annals of Physical Chemistry
, but on the other hand one could actually understand most of the articles.

Meanwhile the aunt and nephew were exchanging looks of amusement. Often time lagged between Bohr’s hearing something and his really and truly understanding it, so that if one did not know better, one might have taken him almost for an idiot.

As the conversation veered off into the logistics of who would write what when, its appeal for Arne seemed to weaken; he motioned to Sophie and Mikael, and they traipsed after him down the hall to the family flat, where Fru Petersen first smacked Arne with the wooden spoon she was holding and berated him for not saying that he was coming, then enfolded him in her arms.

“Tonight we will have a feast,” Mikael happily predicted to Sophie. They had been sent off to the shops with a long list of provisions, including large quantities of butter and almonds and confectioner’s sugar, promising items from a cake-related standpoint.

It was curious. Fru Petersen was almost alone among grown-ups of Sophie’s acquaintance in disapproving of Nobel and what he stood for. She was not opposed to the manufacture of weapons as such, but the name of Alfred Nobel had come to be associated (it was highly ironic!) not just with a paradoxical pacifism but with a radical antiwar cartel that did not draw the line even at the assassination of a minister of state if that person seemed to stand in the way of peace. Sophie had given up trying to understand the logic of pacifism’s being yoked to a violent political ideology, but she was very glad that Fru Petersen had reconsidered her hard-line position on the morality of being in touch with a son who worked for the Nobel Consortium.

Supper was pleasant enough but rather tense. Sophie found it mildly salutary to have her own perhaps overly rose-colored views of family life washed into a more plausibly grimy hue by the palette of interactions at the Petersen dining table. After the meal, which had left everyone feeling rather too full and suffering from the closeness of the air under the eaves, Mikael sat straight up in his chair.