Invisible Things

by Jenny Davidson

  Fru Petersen was downstairs, in the thick of the logistical nightmare of trying to keep the essential scientific functions of the institute going under quarantine conditions while also supplying everyone with food and amusement. When she came back upstairs and saw the broken plate, she said nothing, only gathered up the pieces and said calmly that she would take it downstairs and see whether someone in one of the workshops might rivet it back together.

  “I don’t know why you’d bother with that,” Mikael said dismissively.

  Sophie’s eyes filled with tears, though his contempt had not been directed specifically at her.

  Fru Petersen did not look hurt. Her lips pursed in a way that Sophie suddenly realized meant that she was so angry she could hardly speak.

  The only thing she did, though, was to say after a moment that there was a very good cake downstairs in the reception area of Bohr’s office—his secretary had ordered it from a bakery to try to cheer him up—and they could each have a piece if they got there while there was some left. Bohr, too, was quarantined, of course, but he had been allowed a special vehicle for moving back and forth between the Mansion of Honor and the institute. It was marked with a rather frightening hazard sign on both doors, the traditional poison symbol of skull and crossbones in black and a bright, bilious yellow so lurid one felt it might even glow in the dark.

  Sophie and Mikael went back downstairs with Fru Petersen for cake. Bohr was closeted in his office for an important telephone call, and the atmosphere outside seemed tense, but it was certainly a very nice-looking cake, a rectangular one with two chocolate layers bursting with whipped cream and cherry jam and an utterly lavish top bit that had lots of very rich chocolate icing of a kind that Sophie believed might be called ganache and a gorgeous pattern of white piped latticework and little pink and red roses tucked in around the edges. Sophie rather had her eye on a particularly good pink one.

  When Mikael danced ahead of Sophie and cut himself a huge piece of cake, she thought nothing of it, but what he did next astounded her. She would not, of course, have minded had he taken the next bit of rose for himself. Sophie always felt slightly ashamed of her greediness with respect to cake: really, any piece of cake should be just as good as another, though it was strongly written into her nature to covet a corner piece with an icing flower.

  But rather than either taking the rose with his own slice or leaving it for Sophie, Mikael first cut carefully around it, then took a fork from the supply of cutlery the secretary had placed beside the cake and, giving Sophie an impudent look, used the fork to smash the icing rose and grind it down into the cardboard bakery tray.

  He laughed at the expression on Sophie’s face, and then forked off the last cluster of roses remaining on top of the cake and popped it into his mouth, smacking his lips with ostentatious pleasure.

  “Mikael!” Sophie said, stricken, but he went on laughing heartlessly at her evident distress.

  She tried to control her emotions as she cut her own piece of cake, but she felt quite dazed as she climbed the stairs after Mikael. She found that she could not force down more than a few bites, and put the plate and fork back on the table.

  Mikael had already finished his own slice, but he now helped himself to Sophie’s without asking, finishing the rest of it in a few mouthfuls.

  She did not realize, until the tears were actually rolling down her cheeks, how very upset she was. She sniffed unattractively and tried to stop, but instead found herself crying harder.

  “Why are you crying, Sophie?” Mikael asked. “It makes you look quite awful. Your eyes are all red!”

  “What’s happened to you, Mikael?” Sophie sobbed, trying to snuffle up some of the awful crying-related snot that was about to pour out of her nose. Oh, if only she were the kind of person who really reliably carried a handkerchief!

  “There’s nothing the matter with me,” said Mikael. “It’s bunk, what they’re saying in the papers about the attack—if anything, I feel better than I ever have before in my life. Stop crying, you idiot!”

  They were interrupted a second time by Fru Petersen.

  “You had better turn on the radio,” she said to Mikael.

  Sophie was afraid that he would refuse to do so, but after a moment he got up and turned on the apparatus in the corner of the sitting room, then went over to the casement window and began swinging it in and out on its hinge, the cold air coming into the room and blowing away a sheaf of papers that had been stacked in a neat pile on the desk.

  Trismegistus had stalked into the room behind Fru Petersen, and Sophie, though she always felt it to be a slight affront to his dignity, picked him up and settled him down on her knee, pressing her hands into his thick fur for comfort. She could feel the steady vibration of his purr, a deep, reassuring rumble that seemed to resonate with her own sympathetic nervous system and helped her settle down into some semblance of calm.

  The radio was tuned to the English-language news station. The journalist Sophie liked best, an English refugee named Eric Blair, whose thoughts on politics and language seemed more interesting to Sophie than almost anything she had ever heard, was reporting from a spot near København harbor.

  The noise in the background was unbelievable—aeroplanes buzzing around overhead, the sounds of sirens and of blaring radios and people milling in the streets. It provided a strangely disorienting accompaniment to Blair’s calm reporting. He painted a picture of unmarked European troop ships moving in during the early morning darkness and under cover of fog and passing by the harbor forts, the security forces there having been paid off not to alert the Danish army to what was going on: paid off or, more likely, Blair said grimly, manipulated by way of their sympathies for the notion of a European-backed government committed to the strong enforcement of a rule of law.

  Small groups of elite forces had then dispersed with great rapidity throughout the city—to the army headquarters, to the palace where parliament was in session—a parliament that had scrambled to come up with a plan and that, before an hour had passed, had voted in favor of a policy of nonresistance.

  Now it was lunchtime, and the European occupation of Denmark was official.

  Aeroplanes marked with the distinctive Napoleonic insignia could be heard flying overhead, Blair continued, and were dropping leaflets intended to indoctrinate those who read them. These manifestos stated that the federation’s troops did not set foot on Danish soil as enemies; that European military operations were aimed exclusively at protecting a vulnerable Denmark from the onslaught of a possible Russian invasion; that Europe had no intention of infringing on the territorial integrity and political independence of her Danish neighbor, or indeed on the independence of any other Hanseatic state; in short, that the people of Denmark would be wise not to offer any resistance.

  “So the attack at the party really does seem to have been the precursor to a full-scale invasion,” Sophie said, more to herself than to the others.

  “It seems that way,” Fru Petersen agreed.

  “Will Blair be able to keep broadcasting if the Europeans really have occupied Denmark?” Sophie asked her.

  “I doubt it,” said Fru Petersen. “This may well be the last we hear of him, at least from Danish soil. If he can get out of the country in time, he may be able to resume broadcasting from Sweden or Finland.”

  “And—”

  Sophie was about to ask another question, but Fru Petersen put her finger to her lips.

  “Sophie, listen,” she said urgently. “You, too, Mikael: this is of the utmost importance. I’ve been in consultation all this week with Niels Bohr, and we are in agreement as to what must happen next. We still haven’t heard from Arne vis-à-vis Nobel’s plans for Sophie, but we feel that there may be only a very small window of time in which Sophie, as a foreign national, will safely be able to get out of the country. It might be alarmist, but her visa situation is unusual, and there has been talk of the Europeans—it certainly has happened in Poland and Lithuania—putting fo
reigners and other undesirables into internment camps. The quarantine has been lifted, though we expect a curfew to be imposed shortly. Lise Meitner and her nephew are traveling to Stockholm tonight—Bohr and I believe that the two of you must go with them.”

  “On our bicycles, I suppose,” Mikael said sarcastically.

  “Indeed, on your bicycles, at least for part of the way,” his mother agreed, ignoring the tone of his voice. “They will be put onto a rack on the roof of the car that will take you to Elsinore for the ferry. Meitner and Frisch will be met off the boat by a relative of theirs who will drive them to Stockholm, but the other seats in that car have already been promised to several old ladies who are not able to travel on their own, so you will have to cover the final leg of the trip by bicycle.”

  “But where will we go?” Sophie asked. She hoped Trismegistus would be amenable to being packed into the basket on her bike—it was certainly out of the question to leave him behind.

  “To Arne, in Stockholm, of course,” Fru Petersen said briskly. “He has a perfectly good set of rooms, and he has already obtained his landlady’s permission to have you there as long as is needed.”

  “I know it is a difficult question for you to answer, but how long might that be?” Sophie asked anxiously.

  Fru Petersen shook her head.

  “It’s impossible to say, Sophie,” she said.

  It did not take long to pack. Fru Petersen said to leave behind almost everything except for the bare urgent necessities, and that she would arrange for Sophie’s and Mikael’s clothes and books to be shipped directly to Arne’s, assuming such shipping was still legal under the new regime. She sewed banknotes into the hem of Sophie’s coat and the inner lining of Mikael’s jacket, and finally told them to go and leave her alone to finish sorting everything out, as they were giving her fits by being so much underfoot while she tried to work!

  They would leave at eight that evening. Under ordinary conditions, one might reach Elsinore in less than an hour by car, but it would certainly take much longer than that tonight. The ferry left every hour, though, and ran all through the night, so they would take whatever one they could.

  In the meantime, Sophie and Mikael clattered downstairs to see what was going on. The library was off-limits—it was serving as a dormitory for patients no longer ill enough to need the infirmary but not well enough to return to their own lodgings. Bohr was much too busy to be interrupted, and the ground-floor auditorium had been given over to a fierce and argumentative blackboard-style debate among chalk-wielding physicists—Frisch and Meitner were both there, but too immersed in the cloud of symbols on the board to notice Sophie and Mikael at the door.

  In the basement they found Hevesy and Hilde Levi at work. On the face of it, things here were so exactly as they always were that Sophie was able to forget for a moment how upside down everything had been turned by the invasion. Miss Levi was tabulating a set of data, and Hevesy himself was engaged in some sort of chemical procedure.

  Then Sophie saw that before Hevesy on the countertop was an actual heap of gold medals.

  “The Nobel Prize medals!” Mikael cried out.

  He moved to them, almost involuntarily, and picked them up, cupping them in his hands and then turning his gaze on the Hungarian scientist.

  “What are you doing with them?” he asked accusingly.

  “Bohr has been worrying about what will happen if an occupying army finds them here,” Hevesy said, carefully measuring out five hundred milliliters of acid and pouring the beaker of liquid into a jar with a seal. “These medals belong to various members of the institute, all of them Europeans who directly contravened the federation law that prohibits gold from being taken out of the empire. Their names are engraved into their respective medals, of course, and Bohr is worried that the discovery of the medals might have very serious consequences for the individuals concerned.”

  “Are you going to hide them?” Mikael asked.

  “At first I suggested that we should bury them in the back garden,” Hevesy confessed, “but Bohr was concerned that they might be too easily unearthed. So instead I am dissolving them in acid—I will hide them, as it were, in plain view.”

  As they watched, he detached the first medal from its ceremonial ribbon and plopped it into the acid, where it began rapidly to dissolve.

  “I will put the bottle on a shelf,” he added, “and even the most suspicious intruder will have no idea what it is.”

  Miss Levi had paused in her work to give Hevesy a long glance of affection and amusement.

  “You needn’t sound so gleeful,” she said, “even if it is a chemist’s dream come true! Sophie, are you going to go to Sweden with the others?”

  “Yes, Mikael and I both are,” Sophie said regretfully. She felt the tears spring into her eyes and shook her head to make them go away. At almost any other time in the past few years, a trip with Mikael would have been absolute heaven, but now she feared she would be traveling with a virtual stranger.

  “Safe travels, then,” Miss Levi said, standing and coming to give Sophie a parting embrace. “Mikael, you will look out for Sophie, won’t you?”

  Mikael was poking at the macaw with a stick and didn’t respond, but Sophie hugged Miss Levi tightly and promised that she and Mikael would look out for each other.

  “When the war is over,” said Hevesy thoughtfully, “we will mint the medals again.”

  “But they won’t be the same medals!” Sophie cried out.

  “It depends upon how you define the word same,” said Hevesy. “If I call a place ‘home,’ does that simply mean the place where I live? What if I call more than one place home— and what if the first and foremost place I think of when I hear the word home no longer exists in the world, but only in my memory?”

  They stood and looked at the jar of acid. The medals had vanished. One would never have known the gold continued to exist in any way, shape, or form.

  The name Elsinore was romantic to Sophie because of Hamlet, the character and the play, but whatever turrety erections might grace the Danish coastline, the trip that night was so chaotic, and the evening so dark and overcast, that Sophie was left with only the vaguest impression of crenellations and looming battlements. The drive had taken longer than one would have thought possible, giving credence to Mikael’s gripe—repeated so many times that Otto Robert Frisch finally told him to hold his tongue—that they would have been faster on their bicycles, which were strapped to the car’s roof. In the backseat, Sophie clutched the basket holding Trismegistus to her chest.

  The roads were packed, not just with cars but with carriages and horse-drawn carts and bicycles attached to homemade trailers and people walking on foot and pushing things in perambulators or shopping carts, all determined to escape the country before the anticipated crackdown on border crossing. When they arrived at Elsinore, they learned that the ferries for hours to come were already sold out. They finally got places on the five-o’clock boat, and spent the brief early-morning journey drinking very nasty hot chocolate topped by an unappealing form of whipped cream that Mikael said—Sophie had never heard the term before— was ersatz. Mikael seemed withdrawn and quiet, but Sophie found this less worrying than the bursts of manic energy that had characterized his behavior in the time since his recovery.

  The doctors still hadn’t worked out the exact nature of the chemicals in the attack, or whether the vicious little metal pellets had been intended to do anything more than collateral damage, but changes similar to the ones Sophie could see in Mikael continued to be observed in many others who had been present at the party. Nobody knew whether the effects would wear off in time or whether they would be permanent, and Sophie had already come to think of Mikael as containing something like Jekyll and Hyde’s two selves—a stomach-churning prospect.

  When they disembarked onto Swedish soil at Helsing-borg, the lines for getting papers checked were very long, and Sophie was dismayed to find, once they had finally cleared customs and immi
gration, that they were due to part ways with their traveling companions immediately.

  She had not really slept the night before, other than a frigid, stiff hour or so in the car en route to Elsinore, and she was not at all sure that she had the mental fortitude for the long bicycle ride—it was about thirty miles to Stockholm—but Mikael told her to buck up, and Trismegistus supplemented the brusque instruction with a plangent, imperative meow that made Sophie laugh and think that perhaps she could do it after all. The cat was as heavy again as Sophie’s modest luggage, but once everything was properly balanced, Sophie felt fully capable of managing it, especially as Tris seemed to understand that it made things easier when he did not yowl as they went round a corner.

  Mikael consulted his pocket atlas regularly. They stopped, too, for him to repair a puncture in his front tire. While she waited, Sophie drank some of the glass thermal bulb of tea that Fru Petersen had instructed them to refill on the boat. Once Mikael had finished patching his tube—and drunk his own share of tea and eaten the other half of the rather sickly bar of Swiss chocolate Sophie had bought at the refectory in the ferry terminal—they got back on their bikes and continued along their way.

  It was nearly dark by the time they arrived at Mr. Petersen’s lodgings. The building was in a bleak outskirt of Stockholm, with grand but slightly dingy buildings and boulevards with the air of having rather come down in the world. Arne had left word with his landlady to let them in but was not himself home from work yet, which hit Sophie with a pang. It was unpleasant to think of feeling almost afraid at the prospect of being alone with Mikael.