Invisible Things

by Jenny Davidson

  They were cold, wet, and a bit battered when they got back to the institute: Sophie would have a huge bruise on her hip the next day, and had tweaked some minor muscle in her side that made laughing slightly painful, but their exertions gave relish to the ample meal provided by Fru Petersen.

  After they had both finished their homework, Sophie and Mikael found themselves leaning on the deep windowsill in the sitting room and watching the snow continue to fall outside in the cones of illumination the street lighting cast. København’s first street lamps had been a seventeenthcentury innovation spearheaded by the astronomer Ole Rømer, who wanted to make the city safer by lighting its streets at the public’s expense. Rømer had also made a set of observations that led to his being the first person to propose that light has a finite speed, a phenomenon for which he had coined a phrase almost more magical than anything Sophie had ever heard: the hesitation of light.

  “The hesitation of light!” she said now, enjoying the feel of the words in her mouth and their sound in her ears.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, a little ashamed of the childish pleasure she took in the ring of certain words and phrases regardless of their meaning.

  Arne had gone infuriatingly and elusively silent again. When would Sophie be invited to visit Nobel? She knew that Fru Petersen had several times tried to put a telephone call through to her older son, but he never seemed to be at home or at work at the times one would expect.

  In the positive ledger column, though, Sophie had received a most amazing letter from Nan in which Nan expressed her absolute shock and surprise at learning the truth about IRYLNS and then gave Sophie almost the best news she could possibly have heard: Priscilla and Jean would not enter IRYLNS after all! The program was being disbanded, and no more girls would suffer the kind of damage that Sophie had witnessed on the locked ward: a turn of events that made Tabitha’s death—Sophie had tried to ignore the thought, but honesty compelled her to admit it— seem almost worthwhile.

  And what they will do now to stay useful, I cannot tell you, Nan had concluded of their two other school friends, with a barely suppressed outrage that had made Sophie rather want to laugh. Priscilla has two offers of marriage on the table, and Jean is scheming to get sent overseas to join the secretarial staff at the Scottish embassy in Saint Petersburg!

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Mikael said, drawing Sophie’s attention back to him. It was an expression she had always found odd—what were its origins, she wondered, and had a penny originally been a generous offer or was it as meager as it sounded?

  “We are going to a party tomorrow!” she said instead, feeling a rush of sudden and inexplicable happiness.

  “Yes,” said Mikael, regarding her with slight perplexity. “Are you looking forward to it, then, Sophie?”

  “I have one word only: cake!”

  “It’s true, and I am sure it will be very good cake, too,” Mikael said, moving toward her as if he were going to embrace her, then stopping at the last moment before their bodies touched. “Sophie . . .”

  His voice trailed off. They stood very near each other, close but not touching, still leaning on their elbows on the windowsill and looking out at the falling snow.

  Trismegistus broke the spell by twining around Sophie’s ankles, giving a particularly piercing meow that reminded her she had meant to give him a saucer of milk.

  “Are you two up still?” Fru Petersen said, coming into the room and drawing the curtains. The room felt smaller and more claustrophobic with the windows covered.

  “Bedtime, I think,” she added. “Tomorrow will be a late night.”

  The snow continued to fall heavily as the car dropped them at the foot of the grand staircase in front of Bohr’s mansion. The stairs had been shoveled, but they were already accumulating a new layer of snow that accentuated the flimsy nature of Sophie’s ballet slippers. The great vaulted front hallway offered a spectacle in cream and rose and gold, with enormous vases of flowers everywhere one turned. A servant took their coats, and while Mikael’s mother tendered her felicitations to Bohr, Sophie and Mikael gravitated to the dining room, where a waiter with a silver ladle poured them tiny cut-glass cups of citrus punch from a crystal bowl with slices of oranges and lemons floating alongside bergs of ice.

  As the noise mounted, Sophie and Mikael happily gorged themselves. Surely the main point of a grown-up party, if one were not yet quite grown-up oneself, was being allowed to stay up past one’s bedtime and eat delicious things? The sideboards were almost groaning with hams and roast turkeys and whole sides of smoked salmon and the most delicious thin slices of brown bread and mounds of fresh salted butter and platters of cheese—in short, everything that Sophie, who liked food to be plain rather than mixed together, found utterly delicious.

  The sweets had been set up in the conservatory, a palatial greenhouse separated from the dining room by a massive wall of plate glass through which could be seen a near-tropical profusion of greenery and bright birds and flowers.

  “Shall we go and look at the cake selection?” Sophie said to Mikael, already slightly sick to her stomach from having overeaten and yet with the yen for something divinely sugary dancing on her tongue.

  “Oh, yes, let’s,” Mikael agreed.

  They stopped along the way to look at the lorikeets, whose bright plumage matched the brilliant pinks and reds and yellows of the flowers dotting the conservatory’s lush greenery.

  “Lavish!” Sophie said fervently.

  A bird in the enclosed aviary came right up to the wire screen and looked inquisitively into her face to see whether she might give it something nice to eat, chirping in a questioning fashion when Sophie shook her head.

  The jewel-colored jungle, with its damp, earth-smelling air and tropical warmth, was made extraordinarily more striking by the fact that outdoors the snow continued to fall: indeed, it fell so heavily that even a few feet away from the glass could be seen only a thick blanket of dull whiteness.

  “When I was little,” Mikael mused, “whenever it snowed, my grandmother would look out of the window and say, ‘Those are the white bees swarming.’ And when I asked her if the white bees had a queen and a hive, as ordinary bees do, she drew me a picture of the Snow Queen in her palace. . . .”

  “The Snow Queen!”

  “Yes—and you know, Sophie, it will sound far-fetched, but I could almost swear I saw her once or twice myself, with my own eyes, in real life, during the coldest bits of winter—a beautiful girl, quite tall—”

  Sophie flinched slightly. Her small stature remained a point of sensitivity, and she could not hear someone else described as tall without feeling it obliquely as criticism; in her heart of hearts, despite the evident liking he had often expressed for Sophie, she believed that Mikael would prefer a tall girlfriend who was strikingly good-looking and with a lovely figure.

  “—and draped all in a sort of white gauzy stuff, with a halo of bright white light around her head. She had bare feet, though it was awfully snowy, and they were just as smooth and alabaster-white as her face and hands. It made me shiver to look at her. She seemed almost as though she must be made of ice. . . .”

  Just then the headmistress of Sophie’s new school hove into view, in intent conversation with the geography teacher, who was Niels Bohr’s sister. As Mikael and Sophie didn’t want to have to make polite grown-up conversation, they hastily made their way to the darkest corner of the room and took up residence behind a fifteen-foot-tall rubber plant.

  “How’s your stomach doing, Sophie?” Mikael asked. “Ready for more food?”

  “Surely it couldn’t hurt just to go and look at the sweets,” she said longingly.

  They slipped around dense clusters of partygoers until they were right by the dessert table. Slivers of talk continued to intrude into Sophie’s consciousness—Otto Robert Frisch and Hilde Levi were having a lively argument about the notion of quantum entanglement; Hevesy was rhapsodizing in strongly accented
Danish about the nursery rhymes of his Hungarian childhood; two men who might have been diplomats or spies chattered in a high-speed Russian of which Sophie could understand just enough to be almost certain they were discussing which laundry did the best job starching shirts for the least amount of money.

  Her ears might have strayed, but her eyes were wholly captivated by the glory of the sight before them. There were platters divided into sections with dried apricots and cherries and cashews and candied ginger, and one plate after another of perfect little round chocolate truffles, each in an individual fluted paper cup and with all sorts of different decorations on top. The plainest ones were simply rolled in cocoa, while others were decorated with little caps of white chocolate with a light dusting of cinnamon or star-shaped patterns of silver and gold dragées.

  There were heaping platters of hothouse fruit: green and purple seedless grapes with the blush still on them, apricots and peaches and plums, strawberries with a scent strong and sweet enough to cut through the competing aromas of chocolate and almond and vanilla and cigars and cognac and women’s perfume and the rich, almost rotting smell of tropical flowers and earth.

  The centerpiece, though, was an enormous multitiered silver cake stand piled with the most beautiful little cakes and pastries imaginable. There were miniature éclairs piped full of pastry cream and covered with shiny chocolate icing and perfect decorative white squiggles down the middle. There were pink macaroons sandwiched together with a light green pistachio cream and white ones sprinkled with coconut. There were tiny fairy cakes iced in the most perfect pale blues and pinks and lavenders, like a gorgeous sunset.

  There were Lilliputian fruit tarts, their delicate custard filling topped with a few raspberries or miniature orange segments or strawberries and glistening with sugar glaze. There were heart-shaped linzer tortes and almond crescents and hazelnut tuiles and black-and-white checkerboard sablés and exquisite rosettes of butter cookies decorated with glacé cherries.

  After agonizing over what to have first, Sophie finally chose a tiny cake iced in robin’s-egg blue and covered with green and yellow sugar confetti. She ate it in two bites, relishing the airy taste of the buttercream icing and the almost fantastically light sponge base.

  While she was deciding what to try next, Mikael put his hand on her arm and turned her gently toward the entrance hall. Around them, others were moving into the central hallway, and Mikael whispered to Sophie that the hour had come for the birthday toasts and speeches.

  “Take a few sweets and wrap ’em in a napkin, and we’ll find a good place to watch from!” he said.

  While Mikael filled a napkin with macaroons and truffles, Sophie chose an almond-pear tart and a perfectly cubical pink-iced petit four with a candied rose petal on top. Mikael led her toward a side staircase and up to a landing that gave them a bit of elevation.

  Sophie could hardly understand a word of the first speech, a paean of praise in Danish from the head of the Carlsberg Brewery, on whose grounds the mansion stood and whose funds supported both Bohr and the scientific institute he directed. When she had first arrived in Denmark, Sophie had experienced the disconcerting illusion that everyone in the streets of København was actually speaking English, only an English become mysteriously incomprehensible to her, as though some lesion had taken away not only the language but also her ability to perceive the extent of the cognitive loss. Even now it seemed more plausible to Sophie that she had lost the ability to comprehend spoken English than that the brewery chairman was actually speaking a different language, so thoroughly did the sound and rhythms of Danish mimic the familiar English cadences.

  Mikael shifted restlessly beside Sophie.

  “This fellow’s going to go on forever,” he muttered. “We should have stocked up much more extensively on cakes!”

  “Yes,” Sophie whispered, “but really it will look too awful now if we go back over there during the birthday toasts.”

  At last the brewery chairman stopped speaking, urging everyone to raise their glasses and drink to Bohr’s health. Bohr raised his glass—the light sparkled in the champagne.

  “Sophie,” Mikael began, but before he could say another word, Sophie found herself flat on the floor, the wind knocked out of her. The air was filled with a strange, sinister hissing sound and a popping and pinging like nothing she had ever heard before in her life, and over the babble of frantic voices could be heard the sound of a woman screaming.

  She risked a glance at Mikael, who put his hand up to his face and touched a rivulet of blood running down from his temple to his chin, then looked at his fingers. He went very pale, a sort of whitish green, and began to sway. A moment later, he fell to the ground in a dead faint. She took his hand and began to say his name, not loudly but over and over again until someone came to help her away.

  Part 2

  OCTOBER 1938

  KØBENHAVN AND ELSINORE, DENMARK

  HELSINGBORG AND STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

  The device had been propelled through the conservatory windows by a mobile rocket launcher found abandoned outside; though the police had swarmed the grounds, they had otherwise discovered only a trail of footprints—rapidly snowed over—leading to a lay-by off the main road. The perpetrator of the attack had made a getaway by car, and though the newspapers said that various leads were being pursued, Sophie suspected the police knew very little.

  Mikael’s flesh wounds were only superficial, but he and others from the institute who had breathed in large amounts of gas remained mostly unconscious since the attack. Several hundred guests had been affected in total, including many of Denmark’s most prominent citizens; impromptu infirmaries had been set up all over the city—the institute’s lunchroom had been given over to cots, with two full-time nurses—and a quarantine was imposed on everyone who had been at the party until a team of researchers from the school of public health could work out what had happened.

  Quarantine! The word alone made Sophie think of bubonic plague and smallpox and the other grotesque afflictions pictured in the color plates of the encyclopedia of diseases of the skin that had revolted and mesmerized her as a child roaming the stacks of the University of Edinburgh library.

  The gas seemed to have had a noticeable soporific and tranquilizing effect on many who breathed it in. Mikael had been much calmer immediately following the attack than Sophie (indeed, he was barely conscious), even as the nurse in the emergency tent—erected in a matter of minutes by a team of army medics, and heated with portable kerosene stoves—had used tweezers to remove the little pellets from his shoulder. She had placed each one carefully in a small metal kidney-shaped dish in which they rolled around like ball bearings; most of the metal was fairly near the surface, but several very deep pieces were left where they were, as it would do more damage poking around trying to remove them than leaving the flesh to heal.

  As Mikael and the other victims slept, Sophie became increasingly convinced that her friend might never wake up again. What if Mikael had something like the sleeping sickness spread by the tsetse fly in Africa? What if he slept the whole rest of his life away? She pored over the newspaper each morning—a special section of the front page was now dedicated to the “Bohr Terror Report”—but found nothing conclusive.

  There was only so much time she could spend doing the assignments that Miss Adler had sent over from school, and when Fru Petersen saw how frantic Sophie was getting, she sent her downstairs to Bohr’s office to help with the typing again. Now even the corner shop had to be telephoned and asked to replenish the chocolate supply by leaving boxes on the doorstep—Sophie had not realized how much she took for granted the privilege of wandering out on a minor errand, and the institute felt almost as oppressive as a sarcophagus.

  By Tuesday, the patients seemed significantly more wakeful, and when Mikael sat up in bed and said he was hungry, Sophie—who had been sitting and rereading David Copperfield by his bedside—was so moved and relieved that she could hardly speak. She ran to find Fru
Petersen, who had, of course, been cooking all sorts of delicious convalescent foods that she and Sophie could barely swallow. Sophie had never felt as strong a fellow feeling with Fru Petersen as when they sat across the dining table and gazed at Mikael eating two huge plates of stewed beef and half a loaf of rye bread with thick slatherings of butter. It was the most beautiful sight Sophie had ever seen.

  The day after, Mikael’s convalescence continued to advance, and he and Sophie spent the morning playing various card games, and then checkers and backgammon. Sophie’s initial relief at having Mikael back, though, had turned to something more troubling.

  Mikael was not himself.

  Oh, he could think and talk clearly enough; it was not that his cognitive faculties had been impaired. His physical energy had largely returned, too—if anything, he seemed more energetic and restless than usual, tiring after a while of sedentary games and instead kicking a ball around the attic room until it bumped up against the sideboard so hard that a china plate was knocked off and smashed on the floor.

  The plate had been a particular favorite of Sophie’s. It featured five strangely geometrical roosters strategically interspersed with haystacks and farming implements against a Chinese-style background and with a very beautiful border of different shades of green, everything from tangy bright apple to lush emerald and the bright, sharp color of early spring grass.

  Sophie was aghast, but Mikael only laughed.

  A medical assessment in the Bohr Terror Report had noted that one striking symptom among those recovering from the effects of the gas attack—the precise chemical constituents still had not been identified—was an emotional affect of recklessness and indifference to the feelings of others. The thought of chemistry affecting personality disturbed Sophie, and she found it worrying to think of Mikael as part of an afflicted cohort, all somehow transformed—at least for a little while—into impulsive creatures immune from the normal promptings of regret or remorse. The doctors had no clue why some people should have been so strongly influenced by the chemicals while others remained impervious, but the phenomenon was widespread, with men roughly four times more likely than women to have had their behavior transformed.