Invisible Things

by Jenny Davidson

  Mikael would share his brother’s bedroom, sleeping on a cot in the corner, and Sophie was relieved to learn that rather than being relegated to the sitting room couch, as she had at first feared, Mr. Petersen had arranged for the landlady to give Sophie a bedroom of her own in another part of the house.

  It was a dank little room, with a strong smell of tobacco and a mysteriously greasy sheen on everything, and one had to go out into the hallway to use the toilet, but there was a sink in the corner, in which Sophie now very thankfully brushed her teeth. She fell into bed with all her clothes still on.

  Sometime later she heard indistinct murmurs outside the bedroom door, but whoever it was must have decided it would be better to let Sophie sleep. Though she woke several times during the night in an utter panic, with no idea where she was and a strong sense of imminent danger, she was able to go back to sleep each time. Finally the combination of full daylight outside, a sharp feeling of hunger, and the pressure on her bladder prompted her to throw back the covers and brave the world outside these four walls.

  She had somehow forgotten where to find the toilet and had to try several different doors, with a sick, nervous feeling of shyness, only overwhelming need forcing her to persist. Once she found the lavatory and had splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth, though, she felt considerably better. She left her sponge bag in her bedroom and went in search of Mikael and sustenance.

  She found Mikael surrounded by the detritus of breakfast and a huge heap of partially disassembled newspapers. He looked up briefly and greeted her, and told her to ring the bell for Arne’s landlady, who appeared immediately and promised to bring Sophie eggs, toast, and tea.

  In the meantime Sophie began to leaf through the bits of the paper that Mikael had finished with, but was disappointed to find that many of them were in Swedish, and that her basic Danish could do little for her.

  Mikael tossed over some pages of the English- and French-language coverage he was currently perusing, from which Sophie was able to glean that Denmark was now officially occupied. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand people had left the country before the borders were closed that morning; the general of the European forces had promised that while a small number of people would be interned, every effort would be made to accommodate the Danish people and their national traditions and preferences.

  “Arne was here for a bit this morning,” Mikael said.

  Sophie had finished eating her breakfast and was drinking a second cup of tea.

  “You should have woken me!” Sophie said.

  “He thought you needed the sleep,” said Mikael. “He’ll be back later this evening, in any case, though he told us not to wait for him to have supper.”

  Sophie looked round at the shabby furnishings and the gray skies outside.

  “Do we have to stay here, or can we go out?” she asked.

  “Once the landlady gives us a key, we can do what we like,” Mikael said. “It’s a lark! Oh, I’m sure that by next week we’ll have been sorted out with some kind of school—Arne’s going to visit the headmaster of the English school and see if they have room for us both in the sixth form.”

  “Won’t we go and see Alfred Nobel first, though?” Sophie asked, feeling unsettled by her lack of familiarity with the setting and the routine here. “He must live quite nearby, mustn’t he?”

  Mikael didn’t know.

  “I’ve been out already,” he added, “to explore the neighborhood. It’s a bit quiet, but I’m sure we’ll find things to do—we’re not that far from the center of town, really. Let’s go!”

  “I must have a bath first,” Sophie said fervently. Breakfast was a very good thing—she felt considerably more human than she had upon first getting up—but the sheer greasy griminess of her skin was making it impossible to greet her current predicament with equanimity.

  “Oh, what a bother, Sophie,” Mikael grumbled. “Must you really? The morning’s half-gone already!”

  But he rang the bell, and the landlady came in and whisked Sophie off with her. Strange to say, she was a very pleasant Scottish lady called Mrs. McGregor. She had some sort of family connection with the Petersens and had been letting rooms in Stockholm for at least three decades, but was still very proud of the Scottish connection, telling Sophie that she was a native of Edinburgh and how good it was to hear another Scottish voice.

  The bathroom was cold and cavernous, and the towels rather threadbare, but the hot water was very hot indeed and came forth in ample quantities. Having put on a clean set of underpants and a vest, Sophie did not find it overly penitential to put back on the trousers and wool jumper she had been wearing before. The clean socks in particular were bliss—socks became somehow almost crusty if one wore them for more than one day. It was unsavory to contemplate.

  It was beginning to get dark by the time Sophie was dressed again, and she resisted Mikael’s entreaties for her to come outside with him. He went without her, and she was left to regret her choice—there was very little of interest to read, and she had too much time to sit and fret about what might be happening back at the institute.

  What if Europe decided to ignore Sweden’s neutrality and invade the country anyway, en route to complete domination of all the formerly independent Hanseatic states? Scotland must be in danger, too—the papers had reported nothing in particular about a European initiative in that direction, but it did not seem at all plausible that the armies of the federation would not soon have a stab at it, though Sophie felt sure that her compatriots, unlike the Danish, would go down fighting rather than allow for a bloodless occupation.

  And what if Mikael—but the thought did not bear contemplating!—never returned to his true self?

  Mrs. McGregor gave them supper—cock-a-leekie soup, ham sandwiches, and a delicious apple pie—and they sat for a time afterward in Mr. Petersen’s sitting room. It was after nine o’clock by the time Arne got home, and he seemed very tired and not at all inclined to provide nonlaconic answers to the barrage of questions that Sophie and Mikael leveled at him.

  “Does your mother know we’ve arrived safely?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I borrow your ice skates?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wrong size.”

  “Snowshoes, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has a time been set, now that I’m here, for me to go and speak with Alfred Nobel?”

  “No.”

  “If I am snowshoeing, where is the best place for me to get a run at a nice clean stretch of snow?”

  Finally Mrs. McGregor made them leave Arne alone while he ate his supper.

  Sophie couldn’t get to sleep that night. She had slept too long the night before, she supposed, and she felt fretful and out of sorts, so physically and mentally tired—with sore bicycling muscles to boot!—that at moments, as she tossed and turned and tried to find a comfortable position, she wondered if she would ever be able to fall asleep again. It was not so much how awful one felt the day after a sleepless night that was the problem as the sheer horror of having to greet a new day without a decent period of unconsciousness to separate it from the previous one.

  Tris didn’t help. Sophie had set up a tray of litter for him in the corner of her bedroom for when he couldn’t go outside, and bowls of food and water under the washbasin, but his sporadic investigative padding around was broken up by intervals in which he kneaded her stomach with his paws and batted at her feet. The chiming of the hours by the grand father clock in the hallway downstairs only deepened Sophie’s despair.

  She finally fell into a restless doze sometime after four, which meant she woke late again, well after nine o’clock. By the time she had bathed and dressed and breakfasted and given her underclothes to Mrs. McGregor for the laundry, Mikael was pacing back and forth like a caged panther; he had dug out all of his brother’s winter gear and found it in such a condition of disuse and disrepair that most of it was actually now literally u
nusable, including the snowshoes.

  “Let us go sledding,” he said finally, having thrown aside a heap of gear in disgust.

  Sophie could not feel any fire in her belly at the prospect of sledding, but she went obediently with Mikael to beg a pair of metal trays from Mrs. McGregor, who found them a couple whose advanced state of battering meant they could come to no further harm. They bundled up with scarves and gloves and boots and went outside to find a good hill.

  The day was gray and overcast, with the feeling of snow in the air, but even the damp grayness was refreshing after the slightly claustrophobic warmth of Mr. Petersen’s sitting room. The park nearby had a very decent bank on which some younger children were already sledding, and Mikael and Sophie had a few runs down it, which Sophie genuinely enjoyed, especially the bit where they shot off the bottom and came gradually to a standstill, spinning to a stop only at the very edge of the park.

  Some older boys soon joined the pack of sledders, though, and Sophie watched regretfully as they tired of sledding and instead initiated a complex and virtually paramilitary game of snowballing whose unarticulated rules seemed byzantine and whose physical requirements were well beyond Sophie’s capacities. After a little while, finding herself on the periphery and with the feeling of being about to burst into tears at any moment—the last snowball had hit her directly in the face, a hard-packed icy projectile flung by a tall boy who had laughed at her expression and then run off to pelt someone else—she looked around for Mikael. She did not want to spoil his pleasure—he could be happy here for hours more— but she felt in need of home.

  “Don’t let’s leave, Sophie,” Mikael said, adding thoughtfully, “I know you’re not much of a thrower, but you could perfectly well make me a good magazine of snowballs. I am finding it difficult to keep my arsenal stocked.”

  Sophie regretfully declined.

  “Well, I’m staying,” he said, “even if you’re not.”

  It was a frigid and gloomy walk back to the lodging house. At one point, she became afraid that she had lost her way, and though she felt an awful baby, she could not stop a few tears from rolling over the bottoms of her eyelids. The taste of salt comforted her, though, and it was an amazing relief to realize that she was on the right street after all, indeed only a few houses from home.

  She had her own key, and she let herself in and crept up to her room, where she took off her wet things and hung them over the back of a chair and slid back into bed in her underthings, to be joined under the duvet by Trismegistus.

  Mikael seemed inexhaustibly and impossibly boisterous when he finally got home. Oblivious to Sophie’s anxieties (she had dragged herself out of bed and back into her clothes), he was instead full of news of a shop where they would mend the bindings on Arne’s cross-country skis.

  “And they have used boots, too, marked down to very reasonable prices, including a pair just my size,” he concluded triumphantly.

  “Do you think I would like cross-country skiing?” Sophie asked timidly.

  “You? Sophie, don’t make me laugh! You hate all that sort of thing—and besides, it will slow me down awfully if you come with me—much better if you give it a miss.”

  Even in light of how cruel he’d been since awakening from the artificial sleep following the attack at Bohr’s party, Mikael’s discouraging words were unexpected enough that Sophie’s breath caught in her throat. Mikael had been such a stalwart supporter even of Sophie’s slightly hopeless endeavors to become a competent cyclist. Had he hated every ride they’d ever taken together because of Sophie’s slowness?

  Tris had been sitting grooming himself in the corner, but as Mikael spoke to Sophie, the cat had pricked up his ears and then lifted himself up and trotted over to Mikael and sniffed him. Then the cat bristled and began hissing, back arched, the fur all over his body puffed up, his tail an enormous bottlebrush.

  Mikael seemed unsettled by the cat’s fury. He scooped the cat up in the damp towel he had been using to dry his hair and tossed him out into the corridor, then slammed the door after him. The cat was left to meow plaintively and fruitlessly in the hall for readmission.

  Arne was late coming home again, and the conversation played out almost exactly as it had the night before, with Sophie—she was trying not to sound grumbly, but feared the attempt was not a success—asking whether there was any arrangement for her to see Nobel and Arne looking weary and slightly annoyed and telling Sophie that the latest developments in the war meant that Nobel had almost more on his plate than he could manage, and that Sophie must be patient.

  “Look!” Mikael shouted.

  Sophie and Arne were still finishing their puddings, but Mikael had not been able to stay at the table.

  “I can walk on my hands!”

  “Not inside, please!” said his brother, but Mikael had already thrown himself heels over head and begun to walk around the room on his hands.

  Trismegistus yowled and shot out of the room like a rocket. Mikael came to grief a moment later, overbalancing directly onto a little table with a china box on it. Everything crashed to the ground; one leg of the table splintered, and the box smashed into tiny pieces.

  Mikael was not at all penitent. It was Arne who apologized to Mrs. McGregor and who spent the rest of the evening sitting at the dining table, newspaper laid out before him to protect the surface of the table, mixing little patches of adhesive and applying the fixative with a matchstick to the china, then devising a cunning sort of brace to hold the pieces together while they dried.

  Just as he finished, the telephone in the hallway began to ring. A moment later, Mrs. McGregor came to find him.

  “There’s a call for you, Mr. Petersen,” she said. “I think it’s work—the gentleman sounds quite urgent.”

  Arne went to answer the call. Sophie couldn’t hear what he was saying, just the low, infrequent murmur of his voice in response to the caller’s longer stints of talking; she would have said the tone was resistance shading into resignation.

  When he came back, he looked very sorry.

  “Sophie, I must travel to the countryside tomorrow,” he said, “to assess a situation that has transpired at one of Nobel’s factories: a sabotage attempt has led to a great deal of trouble, and I must get there as soon as I can.”

  “Will we come with you?” Sophie asked, hoping very much that this would be the case.

  “No,” Arne said gently, “you’ll be better off here, where I know Mrs. McGregor will keep an eye on you and feed you and so forth. And you’ve got my brother. . . .”

  “Yes,” said Sophie, feeling disconsolate. Loyalty should prevent her from saying it, but she could not help herself from adding the words under her breath: “Only he has been so awful recently! He has not been the same since the birthday party. . . .”

  Arne gave her an inquisitive look.

  “The papers have not used the word,” she said impulsively, “but it is hard not to think of some kind of brainwashing— clearly his thought processes have been affected by the chemicals he inhaled, or even by those little metal pellets. The way he’s acting—it’s not his true self!”

  “It should be that he’ll calm down a bit once he’s been here for a few days,” Arne said, though Sophie could tell he was very worried. “I’ll see if I can find a suitable doctor to check him out. There’s no doubt that the attack was meant to make the population receptive for the next stage of the invasion, and though I know mind control is often considered a matter of science fiction rather than science fact, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that those affected may be more vulnerable than before to certain kinds of suggestion, hypnotic or otherwise.”

  “How long will you be gone?” Sophie asked.

  “Oh, a week or so—not longer than that, anyway.”

  “A full week?” Sophie asked, her voice small and hopeless. “Surely you’ll be back before next weekend?”

  “I don’t think so,” Arne said. “Look, Sophie, if anything really strange happens, or e
ven if you’re just worried, you can easily put a call through to my mother. She’ll tell you what she thinks—she knows Mikael better than anyone else, and she’s also there on the spot to see how the other victims are recovering. I’ll leave you plenty of money. There’s a cinema around the corner if you get bored—I know it’s not always easy waiting endless hours for something to happen—and Mrs. McGregor will give you all your meals. I can be reached by telephone, too, at least with a message, though it may take me some hours to return your call—I’m likely to be all over the place rather than working out of an office or a hotel room with really reliable telephone contact.”

  Arne was gone before Sophie even woke up the next morning. She had meant to get up in time to say good-bye to him, and she ate her breakfast in glum and self-reproachful silence.

  Mikael was planning a frenetic day of exploration. He had mapped out the route they would take down to the water and across the bridge to the old town.

  Sophie was not really in the mood, but on the premise that she would almost certainly be sorry if she stayed behind, she put on her warmest clothes and boots and followed him out into the street.

  It was a long, cold walk down to the harbor, but the beauty of the city along the water made the trip well worth it. There were some obvious similarities to København: Stockholm had the strongly northern feel that characterized all of the major Hanseatic cities, including Edinburgh, with their situation on the water and their stern, slightly otherworldly northern beauty. But Stockholm also had a magnificent imperial aura quite unlike the style of København or Edinburgh. One got a strong sense here of Sweden’s past as the dominant force in the Baltic, the city’s grandeur surpassing even København’s parade of forts and palaces.

  They stood for a while watching the traffic on the water. Sweden’s vaunted neutrality in the conflict between Europe and the other members of the Hanseatic League did not mean that the country was not arming herself as a precaution, and the whole area teemed with uniformed personnel and troop ships.