by Mattias Berg
“I always thought that I would give the bottle to him, when it was the right time, for some reason or another. Kept it hidden away for ages. For almost half a century, I almost forgot it. I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol from March 2, 1970 until this fall. Right up until I met Sixten again, and Aina, up there in Ursvik.”
As she paused, I could make out sounds from the apartment below, for the first time since we had arrived. Some sort of muttered prayer, music, a choir: a repeat T.V. transmission of Midnight Mass from the evening before, I hoped. Unless it was my own demons.
“But there was never really the opportunity to give it to him in Ursvik, either. So I thought that the two of us could crack open the bottle this evening. Together. I’ve always seen you as my divine son, Erasmus. The treasure sent by heaven.”
I looked down at my plate, trying to think of something to say, in response to her tipsy little melodrama. But I could not think of anything.
“We were so young, you see. I wasn’t more than seventeen when I first saw Sixten, in the tunnels which became our secret meeting places, and he only two years older. Each of us as consumed by the vision as the other. From day one we had a plan ready, taking in the whole of our lives—not just for ourselves but for the country, the continent, the world. Until the end of time.”
I glanced at her. She did not look back, but she took a small piece of turkey from the otherwise almost untouched plate. Chewed pensively, concentrating on what she was saying, trying hard to remember it all.
“And you must understand, Erasmus: the post-war period was indescribable, trumpet blasts and Doomsday fanfares everywhere. You’ve read most of what there is to read about it, but you still wouldn’t understand. All these persistent dreams about things man was never meant for. And when Sweden’s nuclear weapons program was assembled at the end of the 1940s, the thought was of course that we in Sweden should also build an atomic bomb—following the development, not leading it. Create the same sort of fission weapon that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union already had.”
She was looking past me. As if telling her story directly to my notebook, for posterity rather than for me. Then followed a monologue lasting many minutes, as spell-binding as ever.
“But we had Meitner. Our most secret weapon. Sixten actually met her once, deep in the bed-rock, while installing those red-light-emitting diodes we’d been given as prototypes. His very first assignment in the Swedish program, nineteen years old and a newly minted senior high school engineer, still wet behind the ears. Lise was then in the process of leaving Sweden and her underground laboratory. So at that important moment in history—at the start of the ’60s—they more or less ran into each other, right there by the red trap-door.
“Sixten has always described it as a short meeting, fifteen minutes at the most, but intense. Just the two of them, alone in the roughest part of the bed-rock. But Lise nevertheless had time to describe everything to him in broad outline. Probably wanted to offload it all before fleeing to Oxford.
“So Lise told him that she had been corresponding intensively with her world-famous colleagues ever since that triumphal tour of the U.S. in the spring of 1946, as the ‘Mother of the Atomic Bomb’. All those letters you and I never found, however hard I looked in the Swedish archives. To and from her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, of course—as well as Hahn, Fermi, Teller, Seaborg, even Oppenheimer himself.
“And no-one had understood what she was working on. Nearly all of those most closely involved thought it really was to do with the atomic bomb project. That that was the secret which needed to be protected from the public, even from certain government ministers. And in fact it all stayed secret for thirty-five long years—until some technology magazine fancied that it had exposed the Swedish nuclear weapons program in the mid ’80s.
“But that was just a red herring, my treasure. Because according to Sixten that was what Lise told the people who arranged it all for her, this top secret, fully resourced laboratory under one of the deepest tunnel links in the bed-rock. That we in Sweden could simply skip the fission weapon, the atomic bomb, and move straight to the second step and fusion technology.
“So when America detonated its first hydrogen bomb in 1952, there was apparently dismay in the Inner Circle. That anyone else had managed to get there first! But even the hydrogen bomb had been a red herring, because Lise was way beyond that. Her hidden research under the red trap-door in Ursvik was not about the hydrogen bomb either, not about fusion techniques—but rather transuranic elements. The third and maybe final step. The field she had started to look into with Otto Hahn in Berlin, already in the mid ’30s, long before the war broke out.”
Then Ingrid went on to talk about things I had known for decades: details, dates, scientific struggles. I recalled from our dissertation sessions that strange sleepwalking feeling. The next time I stole a look at my watch it was 22.49. It took more than an hour of historical circumstances before she was back with her own story.
“. . . but just before I myself came into the Swedish program, in 1960, Lise all of a sudden moved to Oxford. The Inner Circle suspected that it was because she had failed in her research. That this super-brain simply could not handle the shame.”
She paused momentarily, met my look for the first time.
“But in actual fact it was the precise opposite. As Lise confirmed to me when she and I met for the first and only time, many years later. She fled not because the experiments had failed—but because they had succeeded.
“Because it had indeed shown itself to be possible to create the ultimate weapon, with the help of transuranic elements. And because she did not want that fact ever to come to the world’s attention. So Lise’s thought was to take herself and her findings off to her relatives in Oxford and bury them there for all time, without any other living person hearing a peep about it.”
She kept her eyes pinned on me, as if she were talking about me rather than them.
“That was why Sixten and I devoted almost all of our time together in the program to trying to understand what we called ‘Lise Meitner’s secret’. To following in the footsteps of her work, since she never responded to our efforts to get in touch with her. With the help of a small group of researchers, old enough to be likely to die within a few decades, if we did not succeed.
“So we too worked on a sort of Kinder egg: three secrets, one inside the next. Within what Sixten and I called the First Tier development activities—which essentially all of those involved were engaged with, the dream of producing a Swedish atomic bomb—there was a tight little group to whom we had given the impression that we were in fact planning a Swedish hydrogen bomb, what we referred to as Second Tier work. We told them that Lise had been doing just this, and that was the reason we were so desperately trying to follow her tracks.
“But in actual fact Sixten and I, like Lise, were devoting all of our efforts to a Third Tier development project. The ultimate weapon. As we saw it, transuranic elements were going to bring Sweden to a new era as a superpower. The first since the death of Karl XII at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
“That was why the tunnel system became so peculiar and so extensive: because we needed to hide it as it was being built. New emergency exits were forever required. Secret spaces like the fallout shelter where we met up after our flight, my treasure, strange little play areas where Sixten and I let our chosen few scientists test the short- and long-term effects of those elusive transuranic elements. Like the Test Room.”
A moment’s silence, a faint smile. Then she noticed my empty plate.
“Would you like some more?”
I nodded, had my plate filled up again. Began to eat. Alert as she continued.
“One day we just came to a standstill. Our huge appropriations via hidden accounts, which had made all of this development work possible, boxes inside boxes, together with this meandering tunnel system designed to conceal the left hand from the right, all the night-time bus loads of explosives experts and minin
g engineers to and from Kiruna, the massive logistics, slowly but surely started to run dry because our secretive little group never managed to produce concrete results. Not just the coded transfers from the Swedish state, where those arranging the money movements were under the impression that we were still working on the fission weapon: the atomic bomb, the First Tier development project. But also the largest part of our funding—which came directly to Sixten’s bank account. From a mysterious financier with the signature J.E.
“Once I had met that peculiar Edelweiss a few times, after a couple of years in the U.S., he revealed that he had been the name behind the initials. That most of the support for the research Sixten and I were organizing had in other words come from the American nuclear weapons program. Via him, of all people, as a front.
“Eventually Edelweiss explained to me that Sixten’s and my Swedish development project had been a relatively large expense even by their standards. And that the Americans too had been wondering what a super-brain like Meitner might have been up to over there in Sweden during all those years, why she had always turned down their invitations. And since they never got to the bottom of it at the time—despite what was apparently a major espionage effort, Stockholm’s addresses crawling with agents, even at Tekniska Högskolan—they felt they needed to find out what she had actually achieved. Before anybody else did.
“So Meitner’s name was all it took to justify these magnificent allocations from the U.S. to Sixten’s account, a number of heavily encrypted transfers among many others, right across the globe.”
She paused and I looked up from my plate, which was empty again. She must have sensed some sort of doubt.
“You must understand, Erasmus, that nearly a decade had passed since the invention of the hydrogen bomb by the time Sixten and I came into the program at the beginning of the ’60s. So both superpowers were thirsting for yet another Doomsday weapon, to keep up the pace: as few as seven years had passed between the birth of the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb, from 1945 to 1952. So the transuranic elements had to be the next step. Both sides did whatever it took to get to the apocalypse first. Cared nothing about either the financial or the ideological burden, every layer in the process had only to demonstrate to the one above that it was actually doing something.
“And Edelweiss himself was one of those most actively involved in the search for ‘Lise Meitner’s secret’. That man was to become my direct boss for thirty-three long years—before our roles were reversed and I became his superior, as Alpha in our newly created Team. But he never found out that I was the one in that position. Until our magnificent flight from NUCLEUS, my treasure.”
I took a deep breath. I had come into the story, been addressed, given perhaps the biggest supporting role. She looked past me, into the darkness, out through the window. As if back in time.
“Be that as it may . . . at the same time as our funds were drying up came the news that Lise was dying at her home in Oxford. So this was in October 1968, as you know. Sixten therefore asked me to go there before it was too late and try to get the missing piece of the jigsaw, The Holy Grail. The Philosopher’s Stone. Whatever was needed to allow us to create the third generation of nuclear weapons. He was convinced that Lise still had the secret with her, perhaps just in her head, and that I was the only one capable of getting it out of her. That I had the gift. To persuade and manipulate, the sort of thing I’d mastered since my childhood.”
She began to waggle her foot, I heard the soft rustling of her best mufti trousers under the table. Not even Ingrid could keep the mask in place as she approached the seat of her pain.
“In fact I did not want to travel abroad at the time. I was already five months pregnant—filled with dreams and terror, in equal proportions—even though I was hardly showing. You know I have always been good at hiding things. I was almost as slim as normal in the middle of my pregnancy, didn’t say a word about my condition to Sixten. But I’ve never been able to say no to him. So I took myself off to Lise, all the way to her sickbed, introduced myself as one of her students from the guest lectures at K.T.H. A real admirer.
“And it took its time, it really did, a whole day and night of meandering discussions. But in the end I managed to persuade her that I was just as much for the cause as she was, that peace was mankind’s natural state. So finally Lise sat up, reached in under her pillow and gave me two objects. First, the key to her underground laboratory. Secondly, the tiny black case which Seaborg handed over to her, together with the diploma and the Fermi medal, when he visited her home in 1966.
“I recognized the case at once, from the photograph I had seen in the newspapers: the one which we put into your dissertation many decades later. But it was significantly heavier than I had supposed. Just an inch or so wide, at most two inches long—and weighing as much as lead or refined gold.
“Lise gave me both the key and the case on the condition that I should not ask any questions and as soon as possible destroy both objects for all time. The significance of the key escaped me, however. Until Sixten told me when we met again up in Ursvik, for the first time in nearly forty-five years. So I told her about Mount Doom. Promised that I was going to throw them both down there, among the mass of debris from the excavation of the new 1,770-foot level, back home in Kiruna. Right inside what we in the end started to call Pluto.”
I could feel the heat in my face, my temples were pounding—reactions which one could never really control, however much one trained. The theater of the body.
“And it was those objects which sealed my fate. The case and the key, in that order. Brought to an end that phase of my life. The program and Sweden. Sixten. Love and death.”
She gazed at the label on the wine bottle again. Intact after all years.
“I bought this so we could celebrate when I got home. One wasn’t quite so careful in those days, people both drank and smoked all the way up to delivery, just kept going as if nothing had changed. And the woman in the wine store assured me that it was the best there was. Could be stored essentially for as long as one wanted. Although that in itself was less important: Sixten and I were going to crack it open as soon as we had the chance.”
Maybe I nodded, before I stole a look at my watch. Nearly midnight. I emptied my glass, waited for the finale. And after a long pause it unfurled.
“I was stopped at customs at Arlanda airport, my treasure. Even though I had hidden the objects as thoroughly as always—in a secret compartment in my suitcase which I had designed myself—the officers went straight for them. Pulled out first the case and then the key.”
She stopped again, waited, appeared physically to be wrestling with her memories. I counted the seconds to myself. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five . . . before she felt she could continue. Edelweiss’ trick for both keeping a semblance of control and holding out, giving yourself something else to think about in certain situations.
“So I found myself facing a military tribunal. I realized that all was lost. Our lives together, mine and Sixten’s. Our common dreams about the Doomsday weapon, our love child.
“I confessed to everything straight away, every element, with some significant variations. Told them that I had stolen unimaginable volumes of the material—californium, already by then the world’s most valuable—from Professor Meitner. What else could I say? It was there in the case, all the evidence they needed. That I had in addition taken the key to her secret laboratory over there in Oxford, where I claimed the material was produced according to principles of which I had absolutely no idea. To protect Lise I said nothing at all in my own defense, my so-called lawyer hardly needed to begin playing his part.
“In return I was spared military prison—and was instead effectively exiled. They had organized it all smoothly. In the car on the way out to the airport they told me my activities could be considered part of Sweden’s contribution in kind for the ability to shelter under the U.S.’s nuclear umbrella going forward. That I would become some sort of asset to
the American program instead. Which was flattering in a way, a kind of recognition of my celestial talents.
“But I’ve always wondered what would have happened if there had been a different judge, someone other than Aina, at the military tribunal that day, October 25, 1968. If they might then simply have erased me without trace: that sort of thing does happen even in civilized countries. So for this I thanked her when I finally had the opportunity to do so. In Ursvik, almost forty-five years after the event, on her seventieth birthday. For sentencing me to exile rather than oblivion.”
When she had to rest for a moment, she just stared at me with her ice-blue eyes. I felt a shiver deep inside.
“But it wasn’t hard for me to shake off my guards, even in those days. They lost me right where we stopped at the airport. I headed straight down into the underworld, the furthest extremities of the Inner Circle, our link to the construction of the new motorway all the way out to Arlanda. Which was in practice being built for use by the fuel tankers for the American bombers which were to be permitted to land there from then on. Another of Sweden’s services in return for having the protection of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons in case of war.
“For weeks, months, after that I lived like an animal inside the peripheral parts of the tunnel system. But I had an incredible stroke of luck. Met a woman, Sireen, a refugee from Jordan after the Six Day War in 1967. She had a job cleaning the construction workers’ huts in the forest and brought me food from there early each morning. Kept me alive, literally, until it was time.”
She shut her eyes, seemed to be seeing everything before her. Her eyelids fluttered, as if she were having a nightmare.
“It was a terrible delivery. Almost everything tore inside me. Sireen had helped out in the field during that lightning war, knew roughly what to do when I was in the most acute phase. After that I had no choice, you see. Was basically unconscious, torn and broken, no way out. So I left my little girl with Sireen. Begged her to do whatever she could to get the baby to someone called Bo Sixten Lundberg at the F.O.A. in Ursvik.
