by Mattias Berg
Even the correspondence with her nearest and dearest turned out to be ambiguous and hard to fathom. At the same time as members of her Swedish circle were giving accounts of magnificent parties at her home, she herself was sending out stifled cries for help in German or English to her friends overseas.
So hardly a week went by without my trying to abandon my project. And hardly a week went by without Ingrid Bergman, equally frenziedly, dragging me along, pushing, urging, enticing. At times it almost seemed as if she were ghost-writing my dissertation. During our supervision sessions, which I recall like dreams, she must have persuaded me to keep going more or less against my will. The while calling me “my treasure”, as if we were in a relationship.
When I had completed all the theoretical courses for my doctorate, Ingrid Bergman gave me a present, a portrait to put on my desk in the office which I was then assured. It was a photograph of Lise Meitner in the laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. She is looking straight into the camera, wearing strangely formal clothing for somebody who is carrying out experiments.
But the striking thing about it was her face. Meitner’s mouth appeared a little crooked, as if she had had a stroke, which was hardly likely. She could not have been more than forty in the picture—and she was twice that age before her first stroke occurred. Yet there was something additional, a hidden membrane, which disturbed the picture. The answer to the riddle came if you covered up one side or the other. The right half was sad, undecided, almost sickly. The left one determined and open, with an audacious little smile.
That photograph provided both the title—“The Two Faces of Lise Meitner”—and the direction of my dissertation. That it should deal with the idea of having more than one side to oneself. And be-neath the surface it would be as much about myself, my double life.
But Ingrid Bergman refused to accept the idea. What she wanted—and it was impossible to resist her: after our sessions I felt drained—was for the title instead to be “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.
I could at no time bring myself to tell her that I never really understood what Meitner’s secret was, or whether there was one. Yet in the end I managed to describe it in a general enough way, to satisfy Ingrid Bergman. So the development of nuclear physics and mankind’s inability to withstand its own scientific and military potential, how the whole impossibility became the only thing that was possible, the sweeping theoretical basis for my dissertation.
Against all the odds—and even though the style was closer to that of a literary essay than it was soberly scientific, since I was always finding myself carried away by the momentum of the thing—the dissertation survived its examination by an introspective and humorless exiled Bulgarian.
Immediately after that came the attacks of September 11, 2001. And then the summons to join the newly created team which was to save the world.
They also arranged my new double life in a very elegant way. At the same time as I took my place in Edelweiss’ team, they stowed the other me away in a research post with minimal teaching responsibilities at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. A gloomy early-nineteenth-century castle with pinnacles and towers, no more than a couple of thousand students and some surprisingly interesting manuscripts in a dark archive called Sister Helen’s Library.
Those who thought they knew me well—a few fellow researchers from university, the odd friend I dared have and had managed to hang on to—were told that I was more or less burned out after my work on the dissertation and needed to get away on a long journey, alone. I was given a new name, a new identity and a new appearance. Two operations in little more than a month, followed by a long and painful convalescence, in the gap between my dissertation and the new job.
During the year that followed, before I met my future wife at a party and the same evening went back to her place with her, I had also tried on a few occasions to contact Ingrid Bergman. Anonymously, obviously, from telephone boxes outside abandoned training grounds or somewhere in the desert. I had not caught so much as a glimpse of her since I had defended my dissertation. Nor re-read my thesis, hardly given it a thought. But I could not forget her, however hard I tried. The faculty and the university switchboard had both given the same answer. “Ingrid” had handed in her notice and moved on. No, unfortunately, no forwarding details.
To the official visit to Stockholm and the escape, I had nevertheless brought my—or perhaps I should say our—dissertation. I was after all going to Lise Meitner’s involuntary home. The place of her long, puzzling exile.
And now we were meeting again. After twelve long years it was Ingrid Bergman—“Ingrid”—who walked into the fallout shelter. Pulled the protective doors shut, one after the other.
I tried in vain to make sense of what I was in fact seeing: my former lecturer and supervisor, in full combat gear. Ingrid Bergman seemed to be carrying exactly the same equipment as I was. A uniform with understated insignia, backpack, headlamp, her weapon drawn. In all respects her equipment was the same as my own, apart from the briefcase.
Her hair was short and jet-black, a higher forehead than when I last saw her, her nose bigger. Colored lenses and heavy camouflage completed the job for which the cosmetic surgery had prepared the way. She was changed yet not erased. Someone who knew her would still sense an Ingrid Bergman underneath it all. That quick little smile, the look.
There was so much that I would have liked to ask her. Where she had disappeared to, what had happened, why.
“What are you doing here?” I managed to say.
“I could ask you the same, Erasmus. If I didn’t already know.”
She went to the Nurse, crouched down and muttered “Jesús María . . . Jesús María . . .” over and over again, like a prayer. Fingered the glass splinters in the Nurse’s forehead with a troubled look.
And suddenly the Nurse did give a tiny start. There were some weak reflexes in the cheek muscles and the eyelids, a small movement in the left leg. Like a cat moving while dreaming.
“She’ll surface soon,” Ingrid Bergman said.
“I can carry her with me now. We’ve got to get away from here,” I said.
She stared at me.
“Erasmus, my treasure, for the moment we’re lost to the world. Yes, we have to regroup, but not right now. Nobody’s going to find us here. Hardly anyone knows that the system’s intact, that it even exists.”
“But you do?”
“Sure. Too well, probably.”
I looked at her, searching for words. My mind seemed sluggish and helpless in the face of her verbal pirouettes.
“So is it you who is our Alpha?”
“Well, was. Until this morning, when I set off the alarm.”
“Where were you during my escape, in that case, before you got here?”
“Oh, here and there, the usual thing.”
I waited out her artificial pause, hanging on for her confirmation—until it finally came:
“And now it’s we two against the world, Erasmus.”
With her hair cut short she no longer had to fight it, no brushing the fringe out of her eyes as she used to. I could not take my eyes off her.
“You still look like Ingrid Bergman,” I said.
“You think? I’m not sure that was the idea. But here’s the person you’ll soon be able to ask.”
Then she huddled up to the Nurse and immediately fell fast asleep, just like a child.
1.08
I was fumbling far back into my childhood for memories. Scratching away in my notebook while the two women lay there, very close, sharing the same languor. Little by little the picture cleared: like a half-remembered scene out of an old movie.
It was my thirteenth birthday. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother. Cryptography already captivated me. I was trying to teach her the basis of book ciphers, even though she was a humanist through and through. To share with her my obsession.
The key to the disclosure of the top secret principles of th
e atomic bomb, which the Russian spy Theodore Hall had smuggled out of the Manhattan Project, was contained in one of our most famous collections of poetry, which I thought might interest her. Operating at a distance from each other, Hall and his courier Sax had used the same edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for their cipher. The numerical codes indicated which pages, rows and letters of the book should be used to decipher a message.
It was a simple method, which both appealed to and could be understood by someone just into his teenage years—and also, so I supposed, by my mother. Yet it was a significant help in allowing the Soviet Union to detonate their own nuclear test charges much earlier than we had thought possible. Only four years after the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So I picked out an old paid—or maybe it was unpaid—bill from one of Mom’s chaotic piles of paper, turned it over and started to work away in my neat handwriting, explaining as I went along. First we choose a key sentence, I said, for example: “I love you”. Then we give a number to the first letter in each of the three words in the sentence. So 1 stands for I as in “I”, 2 for L as in “Love” and 3 for Y from “You”, right?
But the drawback in using such a short sentence as key, the lost and prematurely middle-aged youth in me continued, is that it gives you so very few numbers and therefore so few possibilities. Because if I write 123 in a cipher which has I love you as its key sentence, that only leaves us with “ILY” in clear. And you can’t encrypt any proper words with such a short key sentence. The code 213 gives you “LIY”, 132 “IYL”, 231 “LYI”, 312 “YIL” and 321 “YLI”.
And it does not have to be some sentence from a book, I said. So long as both sender and recipient—and ideally nobody else in the whole world—know which key sentence they are using.
My mother was staring at the paper, seemed absorbed by it.
“But let’s say that I keep writing,” I said with enthusiasm, “adding to that sentence a little bit at random while we’re sitting here at the kitchen table anyway, for example like this: I love you . . . just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen. Then the number of possibilities becomes so much greater. Besides, there’s only you and me who know that this sentence even exists: it can become our own little secret which we’ll never reveal to anybody, can’t it?”
Her faint smile encouraged me to keep going.
“Let’s use that key sentence to decrypt the cipher 122129, for instance. Do you want to have a go, Mom?”
She nodded and put her spectacles on while I gave numbers to all the words in the new sentence, as neatly as before on the back of the bill.
“So let’s begin”, I said, “by taking the easiest interpretation. Let’s read it as 1-2-2-1-2-9. That gives us the first letter in the first word of the key sentence: which is I. Then we have the first letter of the second word, which is L from ‘love’. Then another L, another I, another L and finally the first letter in the ninth word: P from ‘pretty’. But that doesn’t make up a real word—only ‘ILLILP’.”
“But if you read some of the numbers as two-digit numbers, like this: 12-21-2-9, we get something different. The first letter in the twelfth word in the key sentence is H from ‘hellish’. Then you take the first letter from the twenty-first word, which is E from ‘eternity’, the first of the second word which is ‘L’ from ‘love’ and then the first letter of the ninth word: ‘P’. Do you want to read it out for me, Mom?”
She shook her head. So I read out loud, in my clear little voice: “The book cipher 122129 with this key sentence gives you the clear text HELP.”
I looked proudly at my mother—until I saw her twisted grimace. Then she shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears. Scrunched up the paper. Started to rock back and forth.
That was the moment when I realized that she was sliding into her own world, far beyond my reach or that of others. That key sentence, concocted at random, also became my own dark mantra. I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen.
For nights on end I rattled off the words as I tried not to fall asleep, since the dreams were worse than reality. Used the sentence as a key in my own restless search for hidden signs. I applied it to everything, from car license plates and telephone numbers to stock market figures and sports results: even though the clear text hardly ever produced a single comprehensible word.
My mother had been in an institution ever since, so I was convinced that I alone could possibly know our key sentence. Until the day when the packages started to arrive.
The first brown envelope was lying in the mailbox outside my office on December 22, 2001, just before the Christmas break. It was a month after I had joined the Team, a few weeks after our return from Afghanistan: what I had pretended both at home and to my colleagues to be a guest lecture tour in the Mid West followed by a fictional week’s backcountry skiing to explain away my cuts and bruises.
At the very top it said “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” in green ink. Then my name and workplace, in the same anonymous capital letters.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR ERASMUS LEVINE
SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY
THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA
WASHINGTON D.C.
The envelope bore neither stamps nor a zip code, somebody must have delivered it by hand. Which might have meant that it came from one of my colleagues, though envelopes like that could be left at the ground-floor reception. Security at the university, even after 9/11, was not impressive.
I followed the routines with care before opening the envelope. Felt it with my fingertips for irregularities, smelled it for any trace of chemicals.
Inside were a dozen articles cut out of newspapers and magazines. They all dealt with the fact that the nuclear disarmament talks between ourselves and Russia were on the point of collapse, an historic moment at which the media was more taken up by global terrorism, the Muslim threat, in fact. I had read all these articles and columns. Their common theme was that we in the U.S. were on the point of unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been one of the cornerstones in the balance of terror since 1972. This was a development that would lead to a dramatic worsening in the climate for nuclear weapons negotiations.
The clippings had underscores in green ink, in some cases of long passages, sometimes the odd sentence in which a few words had also been circled. At first sight they conveyed no clear meaning. Presumably there was more to them than met the eye.
Having without success tried the most obvious methods—from assembling the underscored words into functioning sentences, to combining the first letters of the words in different ways, or the last ones, those with an even number, those with an odd number, following the Fibonacci sequence, every imaginable series of numbers, forward and backward—I finally had a go at different variations of dates. A classic yet long-forgotten means of teasing out a hidden message.
I started with the day’s date: December 22, 2001. Shuffled the twelfth, twenty-second and first circled words in every possible way—but without the smallest sense coming from it. Then I took the next most obvious date. My birthday was February 14, 1963. So I put together the second, fourteenth and sixty-third circled words in different combinations.
Suddenly the sequence of words “against the world” appeared. And if instead I wrote out the year of my birth, 1963, in full, taking it as indicating the first, ninth, sixth and third circled words—There it was: “WE TWO AGAINST THE WORLD”. Against, not on the side of.
That preposition could have been the difference between a lunatic and a pacifist. Yet all I did was pile the articles up in my broad marble window bay, on top of one of the piles which was spilling out in all directions. In that way, whoever had left me the articles would be able to see through the window and know that I had read them. A small signal that I had engaged with them. That I was willing to join in, test the boundaries, until things star
ted to go too far or get out of hand.
The cleaners seemed not much interested in the papers, perhaps because they did not stand out from the rest of the piles. My office was one entire analog mess.
What had started out as a number of unsorted heaps had over time come to resemble a rolling tide of paper with no beginning and no end, no visible boundary between insignificant and meaningful, dog-eared newspapers and books filled with underscores in red ink or neon-green highlights, classic volumes of scientific history treated any which way, reports from inspections of nuclear weapons bases, dissertations in the field of natural sciences of which I did not at first understand one iota, D.V.D.s and old broken V.H.S. cartridges, drafts of some earlier ideas of mine—some significant, some less so—incomplete lines of reasoning, papers which had got stuck in the printer and just been laid in the mess by a colleague, cutaway diagrams of submarine designs, designations of different missiles, cassette tapes of interviews with researchers which I had never got around to listening to, table after table listing the efficacy of thermonuclear weapons, unsorted minutes of disarmament talks going back more than sixty years, ever since the invention of nuclear weapons, strident pamphlets, counter-arguments.
The entire shapeless research project which I called “The long chain reaction” staggered on, under and across my own desk.
Which is why the envelopes could keep coming, once a month or more often, with none of those around me seeming to notice or care. Jammed together with everything else in the mailbox—with my persistent ordering of new research material I took advantage of my curiously unlimited budget—the evidence could then lie in the window bay for all the world to see.
