by Mattias Berg
I understood right away, of course, what the Nurse had been after: whom she had wanted to bring out. But I said nothing.
Then it was my turn—while Ingrid lay there and stared straight into the mirror, saying not a word, trying to piece together herself and her new face. I laid the briefcase on the bunk. Braced myself against both sides with my knees, prepared for all eventualities. When the Nurse removed the bandages, loop by loop, it felt as if she were pulling pieces of barbed wire out of my skin.
You can never be prepared for the unguessable. However much you train to do just that.
So I had to put one foot on the floor, and try to fend off the feeling that I was falling not just forward but inward, even though I was propped against the bedhead of the metal bunk. Took a succession of deep breaths when I saw myself, or whatever I was supposed to call it, in the mirror. Transformed beyond recognition.
My nose was the most striking thing. A large meaty lump in the middle of my face, still swollen, blue-red. Even my mouth had become thicker, coarser, because my lips had been made much fuller. But the totality of the change was most noticeable. Not just in certain parts of my face—but in everything that had been me to this point. It was the work of a master.
The Nurse, the master herself, stood between my bunk and Ingrid’s. Put her hands on my shoulders and looked, with me, in the mirror.
“Lionel Barrymore. Don’t you think?” she said with a meaningful smile.
I made no reply, did not even know if it was a question or an answer. Some sort of code.
“You know, Erasmo: ‘Malaya’, ‘You Can’t Take It With You’, ‘Mata Hari’, ‘Grand Hotel’, ‘Sadie Thompson’.”
The list of movie titles sounded like a badly encrypted message. I combined them in my mind to make a conceivable yet incomprehensible message. Mata Hari in the Grand Hotel in Malaysia tells Sadie Thompson: ‘You can’t take it with you’.
“‘Mata Hari’ is probably the only one I’ve seen . . . But that one I’ve seen a great many times.”
She said nothing, just wheeled me and Ingrid away from the mirror, the drip stands along with us. When we had got back to our places in the larger rock chamber, the Nurse changed our drips and tucked us in—so tight that we would, in our current state, not be able to get out.
“O.K., sweet dreams. And fucking keep still for the next few days. Anything beyond breathing and blinking is at your own risk.”
2.04
After precisely thirty minutes, Ingrid wobbled ahead of me toward the door opposite the one leading into the operating theater, where I imagined the Nurse was. Long enough for her to have fallen asleep.
My whole body felt like jelly, pain was burning all over my face. I heaved my weight after her through the darkness, up to the concealed entrance. Just as Ingrid opened the door—it sounded like the exact code that she had used to get us both out of the shelter and into the Test Rooms: eight beeps, in the same rhythm—all of a sudden my legs folded under me. I keeled over to the side. Fell straight onto the razor-sharp edge of the last fume cupboard along the rock wall.
Ingrid helped me into the tunnel system, now coal-black. Carrying her headlamp, she switched it on and directed the beam at my hip. A large patch on the uniform jacket, about four inches by six, was red-brown with blood. I stopped myself from checking in on my body: knew that adrenaline can suppress the pain of even the worst injuries.
“It’s O.K., I can hardly feel anything. We can stitch it later. Just take us where we’re meant to be going,” I said.
“Absolutely, my treasure. We’ll soon be in a safe haven.”
She switched off her headlamp again and went down the spiral staircase at astonishing speed. That woman—whoever she might be—must have phenomenal basic fitness. I clung to the handrail, concentrated on keeping up through the pitch-black, not losing the feeling of her proximity.
“Besides, you don’t even have a scratch.”
I heard her voice from somewhere down the stairs, stopped and waited. Knew that the follow-up was on its way, after the artificial pause; just held on for that melodic voice. Her seductive little tales.
“What you’ve got on your jacket isn’t blood, Erasmus, but a compound of gunpowder and rust—which has covered most of the metals in there for decades. Gunpowder accelerates corrosion, as you probably remember: not even stainless steel remains rust-free when enough test charges have been detonated, small prototypes for bigger things. So there were a number of reasons why we called that place the Test Rooms.”
Proceeding down the spiral staircase, I tried to recall Edelweiss’ lectures on this very topic, check whether any of it might be true. Still I said nothing. As soon as my feet touched level ground, the L.E.D.s in the tunnel floor came on. Ingrid was standing a few feet ahead in the middle of the passageway; as far as I could see, without having contact with any controls along the wall.
“How did you do that?” I managed to say before running out of breath.
Without replying, she set off again at an even faster pace—all but breaking into a run—along the shining red line which extended as far as the eye could see. And even though I could not remember the last bit to the Test Rooms at all well, with the anesthetic still humming through my body, I was almost certain that the diodes were showing us a different route to the one before.
I breathed in as deeply as I could, trying to oxygenate myself down here in the close and humid tunnel system, and set off after her. For some reason Ingrid seemed to have recovered better than I had, even though I had devoted the whole of my adult life to preparing myself physically for just this sort of challenge. Maybe it was the paradoxical effect of her age: the twenty years which separated us had given her much more time to train.
Whatever the reason, there was nothing to suggest that the woman who was half running ahead of me was close to seventy years old. No evidence, other than scant biographical details which as students we had found in the university’s registers—after taking bets as to her real age.
Her backpack—a combat pack which seemed a replica of my own—was my navigational beacon: the only thing I had to steer by, that I needed to keep in my sight. Underneath it one could also see something smaller, flatter. It looked like a normal case for a normal laptop. But it couldn’t be.
After half a mile or so heading straight, the L.E.D.s along the tunnel walls began to show the path leading up a steep gradient. Here again we placed our feet on either side of the steep passage, crosswise to the fall line, braced ourselves against the walls, allowing us to keep going, albeit at a slow pace. I kept an ever tighter hold on the briefcase as we climbed. Wound the security strap around my wrist, until my fingers began to grow numb and my knuckles bled from scraping against the rock walls.
Ingrid was now panting. As she turned regularly to check where I was, the blue of her bruised face appeared even stranger in the red glow of the diodes.
My wrist-watch showed how fast the tunnel passage was rising to surface level. At 22.54 the depth was 247 feet; at 23.08, 167.7 feet; at 23.21, 107.9 feet—and at 23.46, 26.9 feet. Then, on a small ledge at the foot of yet another winding spiral staircase, Ingrid drew up. Looked at her watch and turned around.
“Fourteen minutes left. That’s more than enough.”
She reached toward my combat pack, and took something out of an outside pocket before I had time to react. Then, leaving her own backpack on the tunnel floor, she disappeared into one of the system’s passages.
I had nothing else to do but remain standing there in the light from the diodes, peering into the tunnel where I had last seen her. Had no other place to go: abandoned in this strange underground landscape. I wasted no energy trying to guess where she had gone, why, or for how long. A few moments or an eternity. I just counted the seconds and then the minutes for myself.
At 23.51—after the five longest minutes of my life—she came back into the red glow with a quiet little smile.
“I sank them, Erasmus. We’re not going to have any mo
re use for our field cell phones, neither yours nor mine. Quite the opposite. The telephones are their only live link to us, spreading fairy dust throughout the universe, even though we’ve taken the batteries out. So they had to vanish into the chasm of hell. Take this one instead.”
Ingrid put something plastic in my right hand, folded my fingers round it, as if it were a surprise. But of course I knew in an instant what it was. Had so often weighed it in my hand. I had felt how heavy yet light it was, the seeming impossibility of our possible flight—until the old-fashioned cell phone had one day disappeared from the bushes by the hut. After the last encrypted message from Alpha, which read “CREATE MORE TIME. PLAY SICK!”
“I bought them in a small store off the beaten track many years ago, while this type was still available. They’re not connected to the net and there’s no built-in tracking system. I got them when people could still rely on technology and each other. Three for the price of two, the exact number we need.”
Ingrid looked at her watch—and I did the same. It was 23.55. She put her combat pack down and took out four crunch crackers and a bottle of water. With a certain formality she gave me two of the crackers even though I still had rations of my own and, after taking a few big mouthfuls herself, handed me the bottle.
“From now on everything that’s mine is yours, Erasmus. Food and water. The flight and the plan. We share the divine solitude of the savior.”
2.05
At exactly midnight we were helped through the hatch, Ingrid first, by a man’s powerful hand. From my worm’s-eye view, lying on the white clinker floor looking up into the glare of the ceiling spotlight, I could barely distinguish his outline. He looked to be six and a half feet tall. Almost eight inches more than Ingrid, and as upright, slim, showing the signs of hard training. Military through and through.
Their relationship was evident at once. I observed the ease of brothers-in-arms, and from the intensity of their first embrace, it was clear that they shared more.
Although I could not pick up enough of what they were saying—it was now more than ten years since Ingrid had taught me the basics of Swedish—the scene was almost too clear: the reunion left neither of them unmoved. In spite of all their years of practice, they could not hide the weight of the moment. Nor their efforts to conceal it.
Perhaps it was because I was lying there, silently observing them. Or maybe, more likely, because one other person was standing a few feet away in the tiled room. A woman who, to judge from their gentle choreography, was likely his wife. How tenderly he brought her forward—so she too could give Ingrid a long, loving hug.
As my eyes adjusted to the blinding white light of the room, the details became clearer. At first I assumed this was yet another sort of laboratory from the old days, but then I saw that it was a laundry room. The tall man pushed the dryer back over the opening through which we had come, without obvious effort and using only one hand, while picking up Ingrid’s backpack in the other.
I tried to memorize the face. His eyes were at least as ice blue as Ingrid’s, hair cut to less than an inch, and he was going gray at the temples. A fine-looking if anonymous Scandinavian that could have played the hero in a B-movie. The woman was shorter, well below average height. She looked almost small beside her husband and Ingrid. Her hair had a tinge of gray and had been put up in a tight chignon.
The woman stumbled over me in the shadows, but caught herself. Only then did they seem to realize I was there on the floor. Ingrid made a sweeping gesture in my direction and the tall man reached down to me. It was a degrading position to be put in, as if to disarm me.
“So this is Erasmus,” he said in perfect English, giving my hand a hard and determined shake. “Sixten Lundberg. Good to meet you at last. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Erasmus Levine, sir,” I said, as distinctly as I could given my flabby new lips.
“And this is my wonderful wife,” he said, executing an elegant side-step in the narrow laundry room—like a dancer—to allow her to shake my hand.
“Aina Lundberg. It’s a miracle that you’ve managed to make it here!”
Her thick accent made me think again of Ingrid Bergman, the actress. Images from the past telescoped forward to the present. When Sixten had pulled me to my feet, again with one hand, treating my loose-limbed body like a child’s, his look flicked from my swollen face to the briefcase lying on the floor next to me.
“So, the man with the briefcase . . . Imagine, that such a thing still exists.”
As he led us out of the laundry room, Aina behind us, his words rang in my ears, “that such a thing still exists.”
As we went up the white-glazed pine half-flight of stairs into the hallway, I tried to get some sort of grip on the situation—although my strength was ebbing after the surgery and then the journey here to Sixten and Aina, when I should have had a few days at least to recover. I looked around for surveillance equipment, places where people could break in or attack from the outside, possible escape routes.
I saw no trace of concealed microphones, cameras, hidden alarms. In fact no distinguishing features at all: the whole of the newly built house seemed to have been standardized to the point of extinguishing all character.
Only someone with something to hide lives as impersonally as this.
The one break in all of the white was a pale-blue rag mat, and a natural-pine key-cupboard with a small red heart painted on the front. When we got to the kitchen—where the cupboard doors and shelves were also white—Sixten swung around and said we should go ahead. He would bring drinks right away.
The living room was colorful, almost strident, in comparison. Ingrid took a seat on the mustard-yellow sofa. I more or less fell into the matching armchair opposite and looked around to get a sense of who these people might be. Ingrid met my eyes with a soft smile.
But the room betrayed nothing special. The curtains and the deep-pile rug were in exactly the same shade of yellow as the sofa and armchair. Three marine watercolors hung on the walls in white plastic frames: sea and sun in a mildly naïve style. An illuminated display case contained rows of the best glasses, apart from those which had been set out on the glass sofa table—large ones for beer, small for spirits. I swallowed heavily. The smell of honey from the scented candles on the serving trolley made it hard to breathe.
I looked at my watch. It was perhaps significant that the curtains had been drawn, shutting out life outside on a Monday around midnight. And that they were lined with heavy black cloth on the inside. I got to my feet, legs unsteady, and went to touch the fabric.
“Like our blackout curtains, Erasmus?”
I could not hide my surprise, or rather consternation, at how close Sixten had come to me without my noticing. He was barely two feet behind me, carrying three Bloody Marys on a tin tray. He must have had the same training as Ingrid. They had no doubt made a fantastic couple—for those who were on their side.
“This weight probably vanished from our military stock decades ago: it was designed for use during war and in times of peace. I picked up a few bolts when I had the chance, thought that they might come in handy. And when Ingrid contacted me after all these years, they found a natural home here. From a distance, if by chance anyone should have the idea of spying on us, it looks as if we’ve already turned out the lights and gone to bed. Gives the full illusion, I’d say.”
“Nice.”
Since I knew absolutely nothing about either the man or his wife—even whether they were indeed called Sixten and Aina—I had to keep him at a distance. But it was not easy. With each passing minute he put me more at my ease, with his natural manner, his old-fashioned, almost boyish charm. Before he placed the glasses down on the table in front of us, he twirled the tray on his fingertips, as if it were a basketball, spilling not a drop.
“Aina will be ready in just a moment. But try her patented Bloody Mary in the meantime, it’s got a kick in it, I can tell you. My wife doesn’t drink a drop herself—she has her princ
iples, that woman—but she doses up both the tabasco and the alcohol like there’s no tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll find a better painkiller this side of the medicine chest.”
Ingrid nodded, closed her eyes and raised her glass. Muttered a “skål”. I followed her lead. In my fragile state, the alcohol went straight to my head and I lost focus rather than regained it. Yet a sense of gentle well-being settled across what had been, only moments ago, my very sore face. Almost from a distance I heard Sixten’s voice as he raised his own glass—“There’s only me left then, so, skål to you all!”—and he too knocked it back.
When Sixten led us out to the kitchen, to the table which Aina had laid for us, she said “only Swedish specialties” to me in her endearing accent. With the first course, toast with fresh shrimp, she filled our glasses with aquavit and beer. Meatballs and mashed potato came next. The meal closed with “Ambrosia cake”, its white icing bright against the brandy and coffee she served with it.
I managed to stay sober, thanks to Sixten on my right. He showed himself to be an excellent conversationalist. Managed to keep my feet on the ground, always finding new things to engage me with—even in this situation, after our escape, with the briefcase settled between my legs under the kitchen table. Nothing which could in any way put our position at risk. Just enough easy and entertaining differences between Swedish and American culture, food here and there, the particularly difficult “sje-“ and “tje-“ sounds in the Swedish language. In other words: everything except what we should have been talking about.
The alcohol was a diversion, an evasion, flight as maneuver. Something which made things easier and harder in one and the same mouthful.
Because what I was witnessing was a high-drama reunion, celebrated with liquor and conversation. Not that Sixteen and Ingrid were impolite or had eyes only for each other. Strictly speaking it was Aina and Ingrid who were more absorbed in one another. They sat there holding hands, exchanged long, wandering sentences in Swedish which I had no possibility of deciphering because Sixten was keeping me fully occupied.
