They had come to a small sitting room, and Arne rang a bell and asked the maid to bring them tea and biscuits. Once these had been set out on the table and the maid dismissed, Arne began laying out the practical arrangements concerning the train to Kiruna and how Sophie would proceed from there.
“Must I really travel alone?” she said. “Couldn’t you come with me?”
“I wish I could, Sophie,” Arne said earnestly. “It doesn’t sit at all right with me to send you off like this! But Elsa Blix is a woman of her word—if she wants you to come on your own, we must see that it happens that way. In a strange sense, she is almost a trustworthy character—violent, malevolent perhaps, but not, in my estimation, actively deceitful. And we will not be sending you without guidance—Nobel has a man in the north who will meet you at the station in Kiruna and help you to the next stage of your journey.”
“How long will it take me altogether?” Sophie asked.
“That, I cannot say, but I would guess it may take you some weeks—certainly the trip is more likely to be measured in weeks than in days.”
“Weeks!” Sophie said, staring at him. She had still imagined that she might be in Spitsbergen within forty-eight hours, but she supposed that traveling overland would be very slow. “But, Arne—how do we know that Mikael will still be all right?”
“We can’t know,” he said. “We can only hope.”
The same car they’d ridden in that morning—it seemed a lifetime ago—took Sophie to the train station. Arne sat in the back with Sophie and Tris; the chauffeur had been so silent and uncommunicative all day that Sophie wondered whether he was not a deaf-mute.
The station was on the main line north of Stockholm. Getting on there meant a slower trip, Arne had said, but it wasn’t worth going all the way back into the city to secure a place on the express.
There were only two platforms, north and south, and a small waiting room with a news kiosk, where Arne bought Sophie some sweets and magazines for the journey. It was strange not seeing any of the familiar kinds of chocolate and boiled sweets and packets of toffee that one would have bought in Scotland—the case could certainly be made that Scandinavian candies were as nice as Scottish ones, but their niceness was partially canceled out by the lack of familiarity.
When the train pulled into the station, Arne helped Sophie up the steps and tipped the conductor to make sure she got safely to the sleeper berth that had been booked for her. It was a bit of a scramble sorting herself out, and the train was pulling out of the station by the time Sophie had found a spot at the window in the corridor and looked out to see if she could wave good-bye.
Part 3
OCTOBER–DECEMBER 1938
THE STOCKHOLM ARCHIPELAGO
AND POINTS NORTH
The railway journey felt longer than Sophie could have possibly imagined, though she experienced a strangely stirring moment when they pulled into a station that really was just a perfectly ordinary little fortified frontier town—the only people visible on the platform were a handful of soldiers—and saw an actual sign on one of the platforms that said polcerkeln, with an arrow pointing north toward the Arctic Circle. It was the idea of north!
She had already come so far that the daylight hours were severely truncated. Well away by now from the highly populated region at the southern end of the Scandinavian peninsula, the train wound its way through the pristine white landscape like a steam serpent, the regular chugging of the engine lulling Sophie into a rhythmic stupor much like sleep.
At Kiruna, after roughly twenty hours of train travel, Sophie would leave her things at the station hotel, booking a room for the night, and then proceed in a taxi to the photographic studio where she would find her guide for the next leg of the trip. Arne had made a string of telephone calls and roped in on Sophie’s behalf a longtime agent of Nobel, whose tentacles seemed to reach even to the most remote parts of the globe.
Kiruna was hellish: not hellish in a trivial sense, but hellish like Pandemonium in Paradise Lost. At the station hotel, Sophie followed instructions, taking a room and dropping off her luggage and setting Tris up with a rigged litter pan and small bowls of food and water. It was a perfectly civilized hotel, but through the window could be seen an industrial landscape of extraordinarily grim ugliness. Sophie learned from the chambermaid that Lapps had mined here for centuries, long before Sweden claimed sovereignty and built the town up into its present state. The smelting furnaces, the electric power stations, the mountain of iron ore two hundred and fifty feet high that stood directly across from the hotel—evidence of the mines was everywhere.
The photographer Johan Turi had been primed by Arne with news of Sophie’s arrival. He had already prepared an inventory of gear and clothing, and another one of provisions, both of which he offered for her perusal.
Looking at the lists made Sophie feel somewhat helpless. She strongly disliked shopping, and had no idea where to start—it was already dark again, and she devoutly hoped to be off the next morning. But Turi explained that his studio served as a kind of expeditionary outfitter as well, and that everything she needed would be found in the storeroom and billed to Nobel’s account.
He opened up a door to reveal an utterly fantastic treasure house of delights. Sophie was especially taken with the notion that they would bring with them tins of Mediterranean sardines and Californian asparagus as well as big blocks of chocolate and nougat and a whole round of cheese in a red wax rind.
The only worry was boots—he did not have any in a small enough size for Sophie, but they agreed that her current ones would do for now, and that she would almost certainly be able to purchase a warmer pair made of reindeer fur from one of the tribes with whom they would later travel.
He brushed off Sophie’s worries about the logistics of transporting Tris.
“It is certainly more common to travel with a dog than a cat,” he said easily, “but I see no reason why it should pose any special difficulties. I will have to count his weight as part of your luggage and charge accordingly, though!”
The things Sophie had bought would be sent over to the hotel, so that she could integrate her other possessions into the load, and they would set out the next morning at six. She felt that perhaps she would not mention to Trismegistus that he was yet again being categorized under the dreaded rubric of luggage.
When she came back out into the street, she was startled to find it almost as bright as real day—brighter!—the electric lights throughout town making for a striking spectacle. Sophie supposed that the prevalence of power plants must make it quite cheap to do this. In every other respect, though, it seemed massively out of keeping with the town’s ugly utilitarian aesthetic.
Back at the hotel, Sophie sent a brief telegram to Arne, but there was little to say beyond the fact that she had arrived safely and found Turi without any difficulty. Far too many days still stood between Sophie and the likelihood of actually seeing Mikael for her to make any promises—Arne would know that the success of her quest would depend on factors almost certainly beyond her control.
Sophie hated to think of there being such a thing as factors beyond her control—but facts must be faced!
She had not had the self-possession to inquire of the photographer as to their mode of travel, he had so briskly taken the reins of the conversation and, in his pleasant way, steered Sophie to what was needed. But she learned the next morning that the first leg of their journey would be accomplished in a horse-drawn sleigh. Once they reached Karesuando, they would rendezvous with the group of Sami who would serve as their escorts for the next leg, from which point onward they would travel exclusively by reindeer!
Trismegistus had been singularly subdued on the train. Perhaps he understood that the limits of official tolerance for animals on the railway had better not be pressed too far. But as soon as they set out in the sleigh, a sustained low yowling began to issue from the basket. The noise was a trial to the nerves, even if one were fond of cats in general and Tris in p
articular. Turi said nothing at first, but he exchanged looks with the driver, a man of few words, and Sophie began to worry that steps would be taken.
After breakfast, Turi observed that as Tris sounded on Sophie’s account to be a most unusual cat, perhaps it would be worth giving him an unusual degree of freedom and seeing if that suited him better than his cage-bound captivity.
“What if he runs away, though?” Sophie asked. Her dreams were always full of terrible moments where she could no longer find the place where she was supposed to be living and the problem would be compounded by Tris somehow being in her arms and on the verge of slipping out of her grasp and getting lost out in the world forever as Sophie helplessly watched him race away from her.
But Turi regarded her with a bracing kind of disappointment and said that sometimes one had to trust the other person to make good use of the freedom granted him, and that the chance the cat might run off was the price one paid for this. So when they got back into the sleigh and were moving again, Sophie released the catch on the carrier and waited to see what Tris would do.
For a few minutes, he stayed crouched in the bed of the basket, but then he cautiously sniffed his way out and tucked himself under the blanket on Sophie’s lap. It was a thick felt rug that she had wrapped around herself from shoulders to feet, and his body felt warm against hers; she could feel his rumbling purr as they proceeded along what could scarcely be called a road.
They stopped regularly for meals and to sleep, usually hiring a few rooms or just a spot on the floor from some modest householder who would give them a meal and a place to lie down for the night. Not enough people traveled this way to support inns, but there was sometimes a hostel or even just a hut near the side of the road equipped with sleeping pallets and blankets and the facilities for heating water and food. In a town called Jukasjärvi they stayed with the minister and his wife, and Sophie marveled at the names written in the visitors’ book in the green and red church. It was an imposing leather-bound volume that was already well over two hundred years old. Sophie signed her name only a few lines below those of the renowned balloonist and aeronaut Frank Hedges Butler and his daughter, and if one turned back to the book’s first pages—it must have taken a great leap of faith, on the part of whoever had first set the ledger up, in the length of futurity for the gradual filling-in of visits few and far between—the names and dates soon spoke from the eighteenth century: the French scientist Maupertuis and his friend Celsius had been here in 1736, and the Swedish naturalist and classifier Linnaeus in 1732.
In summer, this part of the world was said to be extraordinarily beautiful. It was beautiful now, too, but in such a cold, frozen way that even the possibility of summer seemed inconceivable. Though at night, once they had built up the fire, they often found themselves almost inconveniently warm, it was far colder and darker here than the imagination could encompass. It did not become light until the late morning, so that much of their travel took place in full darkness or by the brightness of the moon on nights when there was one. Very soon there would be no daylight whatsoever.
They reached Karesuando, on the frozen river that separated Lapland from Russian Finland, and began the next leg of the trip to Trømso. The days of reindeer travel that followed were like something out of an amazing dream. They slept in reindeer sleeping bags covered by soft coverlets made of hare skin; the pillows were stuffed with reindeer hair instead of feathers. The tent they mostly stayed in at night was made of forked branches stuck in the ground in the shape of a triangle, the larch trunks lashed together with reindeer-hide cords. It had an inner framework like the ribs of an animal—Turi told Sophie a folktale about two children rescued from an evil spirit by a reindeer who turned its body into a living tent, with the ribs as the frame and the hide as the cover.
One night at supper—reindeer meat and berry jam on a sort of flatbread—Sophie was sitting and idly talking with Turi when something caught her eye. It was a small and roughly printed newssheet that must have come with the supplies they had bought several days earlier at a tiny trading outpost. It seemed to have been printed in Denmark, and it contained a column of smudged print reporting on the current—well, no longer, but it had been current a week earlier!—state of affairs at the institute in København!
Niels Bohr had been put under surveillance. His telephone was tapped, and the new government had attempted to trick him into incriminating himself in all sorts of ways. There was extensive sabotage in the bomb factories that had been taken over by the European Federation, with great loss of life, and the fighters in the resistance seemed to be trying to decide whether they should actually blow up the institute.
It was amazing to think that this piece of newspaper even existed, let alone of its having traveled so far. Sophie hoped desperately that Bohr and the others were all right. When would she see them again? Almost certainly not for a very long time—not if Europe and the Hanseatic states toppled over into full-blown war.
When they reached Trømso, Sophie took her leave of the group. It had seemed an eternity of travel; it was an extraordinary thing to reenter the modern world after this spell of a life that did not materially differ—other than in the peripheral existence of things like tinned food—from how one might have lived in the eighteenth century. She had an unpleasant sense of a safe interlude having concluded, and of returning once more to the dangerous space of Elsa Blix’s surveillance.
Remembering the instructions about traveling alone, she took a very cold leave of Turi and followed the next bit of Arne’s directions, which involved Sophie finding the local telegraph office and notifying Elsa Blix of the details of her arrival in Spitsbergen, where she would be met. The ship to Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen’s main port, left only once a week. It was a special icebreaker—an ordinary ship might not have been able to make the crossing safely at this time of year—and the trip was rough. Sophie was sick a few times into a bucket on deck, and regretted the fact of there being no regular ferry service—a larger ship might have been less likely to tip her over the edge into active illness, though some level of queasiness on this sort of a journey seemed a depressing inevitability.
Tris had proved himself so thoroughly capable of dog-type companionship that she had given up any pretense of containing him in a box or basket. The cat tailed Sophie wherever she went, and found himself a nice warm spot on the ship near the tea samovar; Sophie was impressed at his ability to extract milk from the otherwise fairly hard-hearted cook in the tiny galley.
In a way Sophie was grateful for the seasickness. It stopped her from thinking so obsessively about whether she would find Mikael, and in what condition; what Elsa Blix wanted from Nobel; and whether Sophie would be able to persuade Blix to divulge more about Sophie’s parents. There seemed a significant element of personal danger, but that Sophie largely disregarded. If she couldn’t do anything for Mikael, she was not sure she would much care whether she lived or died. Also, being freezingly cold and extremely queasy was conducive to a stoical sort of detachment about one’s personal survival.
The vehicle that had been sent to meet her in the port was a white sleigh drawn by four white horses, unmistakably the style of Elsa Blix. The driver did not ask to see Sophie’s credentials—indeed, they had no common language, and he drove her in a silence that seemed increasingly ominous as they drew away from town. The horses strained to pull up the steep, mountainous road leading out of Longyearbyen, with only a handful of buildings interspersed through the landscape of rock, snow, and ice. Her stomach settled down a little as they drove, at least so long as she didn’t look over the edge of the precipice.
As the palace of ice came into view, Sophie at first thought it must be a natural feature of the island; only gradually did she come to see it for what it was: the work of human hands. The drive seemed to take forever, and then suddenly there they were at the gates and the driver was letting her off and pulling away without asking whether she would prefer him to wait.
The gatehouse wa
s set into a wall, a glistening updating of medieval-style fortification made out of some material that Sophie could not at all identify but that shared some of the properties of ice. Sophie knocked at the door with enormous trepidation.
The gatekeeper who answered it was small and wizened, so thoroughly bundled up in layers of reindeer fur that one could not discern whether she was skinny or round. She ushered Sophie through the little house and out through another door into a passageway that seemed to have been actually carved through the rock. One half expected it to be lit by torches, but in fact the dim greenish light was emitted from glass tubes that Sophie thought must be some variant of the Tesla lamps (filled with neon or argon) that had been a popular subject of experimentation back at the institute.
The woman led Sophie along as though she must understand very well where they were going and what was about to happen, though in fact Sophie felt utterly perplexed and bewildered. The environment seemed frighteningly remote and isolated, but not in any other obvious sense threatening; it was a palace with no populace, a desert island of the mind.
They seemed to be walking upward at a slight incline, and after about ten minutes’ walk—the cost of excavating the tunnel must have been enormous, even in a part of the world where mining was almost as much a natural human activity as talking or sleeping or breathing—the path began to level out.
They came to a door of brushed steel or something similar, with an artificially lit combination lock of a type that Sophie had never seen before. She edged toward it to see if she could get a closer look, but though it was really just pure disinterested curiosity, it made the gatekeeper shove her away and utter a cloud of reproachful words, standing between Sophie and the matrix of the lock so that Sophie couldn’t at all see what she was doing, let alone what numbers she pressed.
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