Immanuel knew nothing about the island. But he was sure the light that morning was more golden than anything he had ever experienced and the pale woman on the jetty the most ethereal creature he had ever set eyes upon. He could barely make out her shape. She was almost diaphanous, her hair translucent, the breeze giving it life. The sound of the engine grew louder, and he could see the boat approaching, although the reflections on the water made it hard to focus. This morning was nothing but sun.
Now she was already standing in the bow of the motorboat that had come to fetch them. In her white dress her body could only be described as a shimmering light. Helios was the god of the sun, but of the seas too, he thought, as he stepped aboard, firm-footed but happy nonetheless to hold on to the strong arm of the boatman. Helios gave us something priceless, the gift of sight. He dwelt in a light-filled palace on the great river at the eastern ends of the earth.
Thoughts flitted across Immanuel’s mind as if he were not really up and awake, but still lying in relative comfort on the sofa in Mittag-Leffler’s mathematical library. A slim volume with the puzzling title On the Motion of a Rigid Body about a Fixed Point was the last thing his eyes had rested on for a few seconds before the shifting images of sleep displaced it. He had slept badly and woken repeatedly with a gnawing sense of unease, as if misgivings concerning the immediate future were already confirmed.
He was still in this state of mind, and the monotonous drone of the engine heightened the sensation of riding through a dream, but not a dream that belonged in the night. From his slumped position on a white leather bench right at the stern he could make out the boatman’s muscular back ahead of him, but the impression this gave was of traveling under the glistening water and not on top of it.
Impatient shouting from the bow interrupted his thoughts. The athletic boatman appeared to be doing the splits, with one foot on the deck and the other on the lowest of a flight of stone steps that was surprisingly grandiose for a little island of otherwise frugal wooden structures. Immanuel’s gaze followed the steps up. A series of small terraces could soon be seen, lined by statues and enormous rhododendron bushes. The young woman, who had been friendly enough but of few words when she met him on the jetty and had then stood bolt upright in the bow throughout the short journey, seemed to have disappeared into thin air. For a second he thought he saw her figure flash past behind a railing quite a long way up the steps.
Or maybe it was reflected light, tricking him into seeing things that weren’t there. He found it hard to clear his vision, his eyes still slightly dazzled after the boat ride. But suddenly he caught sight of something unexpected. High up, amid the huge treetops, stood a gray stone building of almost ridiculous dimensions. It was partly concealed by leaves, which had already turned to flaming red. It was autumn, but still as warm as high summer. In front of the castle, for a castle it was, were Norway maples and laburnums.
“You’ll have to wait here until Miss is back from the house,” the boatman said, with no great warmth. “Madame doesn’t want the guests to go up by themselves, under any circumstances.” He turned away with a gesture that clearly implied he had said what he was going to say and now was going to mind his own business. Silence fell, an oppressive silence.
“Thank you for the ride. It was quick. Smart boat, by the way,” Immanuel said, in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere. That his Swedish was less than perfect was not going to stop him making casual conversation. It was something he had resolved to do from the moment he arrived in his adopted country.
The boatman seemed little interested in chat. They were both now standing firmly on the quay, with the terraces at their backs and the pale-green water in front of them. On the other side of the bay the leafy gardens of Djursholm were visible, and behind the rich autumn reds was the hint of one grand villa more stately than the rest. Somewhere it must be possible to make out parts of the Mittag-Leffler Institute, where Immanuel had spent the night so he could walk down through the wooded neighborhood at dawn and be on the jetty at the allotted time. Unusual for a breakfast meeting to require a motorboat journey, he thought, turning to look back in the other direction, up toward the villa that seemed now, in the wavering morning light, to be floating among the treetops. He followed the elegant lines of the Louis XVI–style building, and for a second he forgot his uneasy feeling; a feeling that in fact he was to have every reason for, given the deception the trip would demand of him.
The house stood on massive foundations. They must have transported huge quantities of stones here on barges, he was thinking, when a sudden metallic noise roused him from his musings. The boatman, his blond hair swept back, had dropped something heavy and compact onto the quay, making them both jump. In a split second the man had bent down and picked up the object, before hastily slipping it inside his blue sports jacket. It was a pistol, small and hard, black as tar. A piece of coal, hard, absorbing all the sunlight, it was so black.
The whole thing happened so quickly, it was difficult afterward to be totally sure it hadn’t been a figment of Immanuel’s imagination. It hadn’t occurred to him that the man piloting the boat that had picked him up from a wooden jetty in the tranquil setting of residential Djursholm would be armed. There was silence, apart from a dull thud every so often when the boat moored several meters below them hit the quay. The engine was turned off now, and with some curiosity Immanuel gazed down at the elegant craft. He was familiar with these neat, speedy wooden boats from his visits to friends at Lake Garda, but he hadn’t seen a single one since arriving in these latitudes.
“Has it been imported from Italy, maybe?” he asked aloud, to break the silence.
The boatman turned to look at Immanuel, blinking nervously into the sun, but still said nothing, as if he hadn’t heard the remark, or deemed it irrelevant. Perhaps he had found the incident with the pistol embarrassing. Or perhaps he was unaware that the guest had seen the handgun that had dropped to the ground momentarily, only to be just as swiftly slipped into the holster in all likelihood concealed under his jacket.
Seagulls landed close to the bow of the boat, unperturbed by the presence of the two men. They fought over a small, shiny fish jumping around on the stone surface.
“Everyone knows it’s a copy that Kassman had built of the old boat, the one that went up in flames,” the boatman said suddenly, almost reproachfully.
“Kassman? Who’s Kassman?”
“No problem for the likes of Gunnar Kassman to find a new engineer and a new gardener,” the boatman went on, as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Who wouldn’t want to work for a boss like him? Especially if you’re not that fussy about the true source of the money. No, Director Kassman entertained women with champagne and caviar, and men as well. The motorboats were moored here at the quay until midnight, before heading back to town. Who cared if one of the boats went up in flames at daybreak, and a young engineer and a groundsman vanished into the deep? Who cared about it, except for Karin, who was to have married Axel a few days later? She was only nineteen, too young to marry maybe, but that’s how it was. Her life was over then.”
He stared blankly across the water, now an even deeper green, until the sound of light footsteps could be heard approaching.
There she was again, in front of him. Delicate, gossamer, as if the rays of the autumn sun could shine through her. It came as a surprise when, with a gesture up toward the castle, she began speaking, her voice soft yet firm.
“Miss Lorentzon knows you’re here. She’s working with Madame in the salon but wants you to wait on the grand terrace.”
“The grand terrace.” Immanuel repeated the words hesitantly, unsure why he felt the need to do so.
She set off up the steps without checking whether he was prepared to follow. But follow he did, of course. He could barely keep pace with her as they climbed up the steep stone ledges, and he was already regretting his decision to take with him the weighty tomes from Mittag-Leffler’s library. He could perfectly well have collected them on his way back into the city, but now the massive leather briefcase his wife had purchased on one of their final days in Warsaw was as heavy as if loaded with the same flat slabs that were under their feet. They hurried up the gravel paths that zigzagged between the flights of steps leading them toward the increasingly imposing mansion.
The young woman—he guessed she was the same Karin about whom the man with the gun had been speaking, and into whose destiny he had been given an unwarranted flash of insight—almost flew along the balustrade ahead of him. Panting, he managed to catch up with her, and for a few seconds they walked side by side. He turned to her and, with a boldness, an impertinence even, that surprised him, breathlessly asked a question he hoped would instigate a conversation.
“So you were working here in Mr. Kassman’s time?”
Whatever had got into him? This woman’s sad fate was none of his business. Not in the slightest. She had nothing to do with the task ahead, which was already quite complicated enough, nor with the subtle game that formed the purpose of the entire visit and should undoubtedly be his focus.
As it turned out, his impertinent question had no effect. The luminous figure had increased her lead and now disappeared through a glass door standing open on the object of their climb, the grand terrace. He mounted the last step and, gasping for breath, put his heavy bag down on the ornate flagstones, set in a lavish mosaic the likes of which he had never seen, even in villas he had visited in northern Italy.
He dropped into one of the chairs on the terrace and was aware at once that behind the white curtains moving gently in the breeze something was happening. He heard the dulcet tones of a woman’s voice, apparently reading from a script, and another slightly deeper voice interrupting in Russian and then making comments on the reading in what seemed to him to be very broken Swedish. Sometimes the more pleasing voice delivered long pages without intervention. It sounded flat and slightly forced, as if they were in a hurry to work through a large body of text.
“But who is this new independent woman? She is a child of the large-scale capitalist system. She is not a rare apparition, but as an everyday phenomenon she was born simultaneously with the infernal din of machines and of factory sirens summoning the workers. The independent woman, of whom our grandmothers and even our mothers had no idea at all—she exists, she is a real, living person.”
She was interrupted by a testy comment in Russian. There was a clatter of china and the sound of other voices chiming in with questions about entirely different matters, followed by silence. The mellower voice resumed but was obliged to repeat the phrase “real, living person” several times. After a short pause, the reading continued.
“Independent women are a million gray-clad figures, pouring out of working-class quarters in an endless stream, and at daybreak, when the dawn sky still battles with the dark of night, they set off for the mills and factories and railway stations.”
At this point the reading was cut short by prolonged throat clearing.
“Right, right. That’s enough. Thank you, Emy. Thank you. We’ll continue this afternoon.” Silence fell, and it sounded as though the women had left the terrace room without noticing Immanuel’s presence.
From this position he could gaze out over the fountains in the garden and the lush vegetation of rhododendrons and exotic trees, and he thought how out of place they looked in this Nordic archipelago. He leaned forward to inspect the sunflowers growing nearest to the villa. Their extraordinarily long stalks reached up to the terrace. They seemed to be staring him in the face, like huge black pupils.
“They turn during the course of the day and follow the sun, as if they have no choice but to look straight into the ball of fire,” a woman’s voice behind him declared suddenly. “Madame loves them. They’re one of the reasons she rents the villa. She’d really like to buy it, but who knows what the future will bring? We tie the sunflowers back with string so they don’t collapse under their own weight. But they’ll wither soon anyway, now it’s autumn. Do forgive me, my name is Emy Lorentzon, Madame Kollontai’s secretary. You’re extremely punctual. Did you have a comfortable trip across?”
Immanuel nodded to the young woman who had appeared beside him, but there was no time for even a pleasantry in response before she carried on with her account of the flowers’ daily rotation around their own axis.
“Heliotropism, a tendency Madame has taken an interest in, as something with potentially profound significance for social movements. It’s hardly surprising if that intense mass of light creates the right conditions for a completely different type of politics, is it? Pavel Dybenko, who spent many white June nights on the Baltic Sea, introduced her to these ideas. You know the story about the Lapland sunflowers that grow so far north they never have the chance to turn their heavy heads back at dusk?”
Miss Lorentzon gave him a searching look, like a teacher with high expectations of her student, and continued without waiting for a response.
“Because there’s no dusk, ever, nor is there the essential respite dusk brings. For the twelve longest days of the year the flower twists in a spiral until it finally strangles itself. And in exactly the same way the stalk of north European socialism is threatened by the optimism of its own blooms, or ought we say, extremism?”
She smiled serenely at him, as if her words were the most natural thing in the world, so self-evident they hardly needed voicing. He looked closely at the young woman, utterly convincing in her gray suit, thoroughly proper and exemplary. A secretary, a typical secretary at an embassy in a north European capital. Behind her he glimpsed the indistinct shapes of the dark-centered heads in a sunflower sea, motionless in the morning calm.
Nebulous thoughts flashed across his mind without really taking shape. Dybenko, the naval officer, the Ukrainian giant in the Baltic Fleet. The love affair that nearly had the woman he was about to meet expelled from the party. He recalled the words the irreproachable Albert Oeri earnestly and repeatedly pronounced: She is an authority, perhaps our greatest authority, on the field of carnal love.
He was roused from his musings by a booming voice.
“And you’ve been sent here by Albert Oeri, editor of Basler Nachrichten, a man my Swiss friends hold in such high regard they overlook his political stance, by and large.”
Her appearance was so sudden, he didn’t quite grasp what had happened, but there she stood in all her splendor, wearing a long morning gown of dazzling silk.
“I presume you see yourself as a liberal voice in the continental darkness. You’re a journalist, I understand. And you wish to ask about the woman question. Or, as you wrote in your letter, ‘so-called feminism’—is that so?”
Madame Alexandra Kollontai gave him a piercing look. Under the arched brows her gray eyes appeared lit from within, their luster truly uncommon. And now this warm iridescence was directed at him in a way that made abundantly clear it would be difficult to hide anything from this woman. Had he been far too rash in taking on this project? Had he overestimated his own ability?
In any event it was too late to change his mind. Now he was standing in front of this formidable person, with no possibility of beating a retreat or holding anything back. Or more accurately: she was standing in front of him with such a clear advantage that the notion of him staging any kind of subtle maneuver was ridiculous. Of course he had heard about her charisma and her unfading beauty. But he could never have foreseen the authority she commanded physically, the aura of absolute power surrounding her. He pulled himself together and took the plunge.
“Your Excellency, that is correct, I arrived here in the city some time ago after many years in Warsaw, and I continue to work as a correspondent for Basler Nachrichten. I am first and foremost German, and my mother tongue is German. I am delighted to hear that in your circles too the esteemed journalist Dr. Oeri enjoys the respect he deserves in these dark times.”
“So you’re the one with the pen name Dr. B. I was only reading you yesterday. You wrote about our problems in Finland.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Immanuel answered, unsure whether her remark held any criticism.
“Basler Nachrichten has another correspondent here in Stockholm,” she said.
How could she know that? Gabriel Ascher, for years the Vatican City correspondent, had been in Stockholm for a while now, an awkward situation in several respects. Immanuel had never liked Ascher, and there would obviously be stiff competition for space.
But he had no time to expand upon that. Kollontai continued, in a more conversational tone, “You spent the night at Mittag-Leffler’s villa on the other side of the water, my secretary tells me. Isn’t that what you said, Emy?” She turned to seek the younger woman’s confirmation, but Miss Lorentzon had quietly withdrawn.
With a gesture into the light-filled room, Kollontai invited Immanuel to take a seat in one of the two gray armchairs, relatively modern for a palace. “Another splendid house I’ve considered renting as a summer residence in the past. I suppose the famous library is still there, but I heard that plans for the mathematical institute itself were put on ice after the bankruptcy. Anyway, I prefer spending weekends out here on the island, and I hope we’ll be able to move in properly next summer. I’m contemplating bringing some of the legation over—at the moment I’m getting help from Kassman’s old staff. You’ve met Karin, poor girl. She’s working for me now, and her brother pilots the boat.”
So the man with the gun was the gossamer woman’s brother. That explained his vehemence, and his despair. But aloud Immanuel said, “Yes, the library is still there. Thousands of mathematical treatises on mahogany shelves stretching up to the ceiling. Excuse me, but who is this person Kassman who builds a palace on an island in the Stockholm archipelago?”
“Of course, I’m sorry. You don’t know Director Gunnar Kassman, do you? I’d forgotten you’re new to the city. A great friend to Russian culture, a financier with connections on both sides of the Baltic Sea. He hit problems around the same time as Mittag-Leffler was declared bankrupt. And now both villas stand empty. Speaking of which, you will of course be aware that Sonja Kovalevsky, our first female mathematician, was awarded her professorship thanks entirely to Mittag-Leffler. A forward-looking scholar, an exemplar. Higher education wasn’t open to women in Russia, and under Professor Weierstrass in Göttingen, who naturally saw her talent, only private study was possible. You’ve heard of Kovalevsky?”
She must have realized that wasn’t so, because without waiting for a response, she carried on with her account, as if everyone needed to be informed of the Russian mathematician’s fortunes. She spoke as if delivering a lecture, or possibly a welcome speech to a full delegation.
“She devised important calculations concerning Saturn’s rings and subsequently wrote On the Motion of a Rigid Body about a Fixed Point, which at a stroke made her famous in scientific circles across Europe. But the Royal Academy of Sciences here in Sweden drew the line at accepting a woman member. On the other hand, apparently the academy did preserve her brain in alcohol as an example of something that violated the laws of nature, something that really ought not exist, genius in female form. We’re touching on our topic now, aren’t we?”
“I beg your pardon? I’m not sure I follow your train of thought.”
Her expression when she looked at him was hard to determine. But when she continued, her tone was markedly less friendly. “Kovalevsky did not publish only mathematical research into cosmic rings. I suppose her autobiographical novel might be of interest, if it really is so-called feminism that concerns you. But perhaps it’s now time for you to explain to me what we’re going to talk about. I see you’ve made notes and picked out some quotations, which I presume are from my writings. But first a question for you: What does the year 1905 say to you, if I give you the clue ‘Halle’?”
He had not imagined the conversation unfolding like this. It began to smack of an examination, and that even before it was properly underway. To extricate himself from this uncomfortable situation he answered in a tone he hoped would convey a certain levity.
“That isn’t the story I wished to speak about with Your Excellency, but instead, more specifically, your view on woman’s position today, as expressed in the novella about Vasilisa Malygina, the knitter. Vasilisa is pregnant, she forgives her husband and his mistress, and she makes a life for herself, devoted to the party. How should this be read in the light of your critique of marriage today?”
His hope was that a reference to the only book by Alexandra Kollontai he had actually read from cover to cover, Love of Worker Bees, would provoke a lively discussion and obviate the need for him to confess that he had no idea what might have happened in the small university town of Halle in 1905. He gazed at her with an expression that probably betrayed a certain hopelessness.
At once she seemed to take pity on him, answering in a kinder voice, “As I’m sure you know, I usually do argue that marriage, the modern-day compulsory union of two individuals, is still, for all its shortcomings, the mainstay of woman’s affluence in the middle bourgeoisie and obliges her to cling to this institution. Are you married, sir?”
He nodded cautiously, welcoming the invitation to move on to something personal, but before he had a chance to mention his wife’s name, they were interrupted by a sliding door opening almost soundlessly, and a trolley with tea was wheeled up to them. Two steaming cups.
She broke off her exposition with a short, “Thank you, Emy,” without so much as a glance at her secretary. Just as soundlessly the latter vanished from the large room, the wide glass doors still open to the sunflower terrace. They were already bathed in warm morning sunshine.
They remained silent as both attempted to drink the piping hot tea. What then followed was nothing short of a lecture on the economic plight of the single woman in the Soviet Union. As though to demonstrate his intense interest, Immanuel made assiduous notes in one of the pads he had brought, interrupting occasionally with a brief question or to request further clarification. The literary examples came thick and fast but were far from familiar to him, and the language became steadily more high-flown.
Finally, after a prolonged pause, she arrived at what he took to be a kind of summary. “The transformation of the female psyche, adapted to the new conditions of its economic existence, is not achieved without dramatic self-delusion. You understand that, of course. And this conflict playing out inside the female soul gradually draws the attention of writers. By degrees woman is transformed from an object of the tragedy of the male soul to the subject of an independent tragedy.”
To indicate his awareness that at this point an official person of her rank would probably judge she had spent enough time with her guest, and other duties beckoned, he cleared his throat and rose to his feet. Was this the right moment to thank her humbly for a fruitful discussion and then, without in any way revealing how important this was to him, progress to other questions and observations about the diplomatic world? He had been mulling over this move for days, but now it seemed out of the question. Suddenly openings to the kind of conversation he needed looked highly unlikely. How could he ever have thought otherwise? However, when he nervously cleared his throat again to offer a few pleasantries, she remained seated and continued gravely:
“If it’s the situation in the new Germany that interests you, there’s clearly much more to be said. You will obviously understand what National Socialism means for these issues. But let me remind you of a bit of history here. German feminists worded their bourgeois concerns very precisely at the women’s congress in Halle. On the one hand they demanded that society should recognize one single morality for men and women and that the state should be prevented from interfering in personal sexual morals, while on the other hand they insisted on measures for the protection of social morality from that same state. Do you follow me?”
He really didn’t know what he should say to this. There was no point pretending he knew what had been discussed at a women’s congress several decades before. Instead, with forced enthusiasm, as if she had never posed the question, he said, “I’m convinced this will be a fascinating portrait, and your views will attract much attention. As you know, initially it will be published in Basler Nachrichten, a free voice in the German-speaking world, but naturally the hope is that we can place the article in a number of newspapers, in all probability De Telegraaf, and why not in a paper in a Nordic country too? Has Uusi Suomi or any daily paper in this country talked to Your Excellency about these subjects?”
There was no reply. She gazed out through the fluttering curtains at the sea of sunflowers swaying gently in the breeze that had now sprung up, as if she hadn’t heard the question. A shadow play came to life on the wall behind her, gray veils moving back and forth.
When she finally resumed her monologue, it was obvious she was reading from one of the sheets of paper lying in front of her on a low table. “ ‘When the woman of old left love behind, she buried herself in darkness and gloom to lead the life of a helpless wretch, whereas the new woman has liberated herself from the thralldom of love and stands proud.’ ”
She turned to the shadow play on the wall. For a moment it seemed she had forgotten Immanuel’s presence in the room. Whenever he looked back later on the lengthy silence that ensued, it always struck him that it had cast them both, him as well as her, out into another sphere, as if they had embarked on a voyage to quite different places, which in some strange way manifested themselves as the salon in the gray palace on the leafy Swedish island. Did they visit the bright halls in the country house of her childhood on the Karelian Isthmus, or was it the exhilarating tumult of the revolution? The Young Workers’ Party’s bustling headquarters, or the colorless maze of power in later years? Their journey couldn’t have lasted more than a minute or two, but it was more real than anything else that had happened to him that day, despite being impossible to explain satisfactorily. He would never forget it.
Then they were back in the salon, the white curtains dancing ever more merrily in the sunlight flooding the terrace. She turned slowly, but only halfway, so that her famed profile could be seen to full advantage, and explained in the most casual of tones, “These are the ideas with which Miss Lorentzon and I engage in the mornings. When you arrived we were working on a translation of some of my lectures. But tell me now: Why have you actually come to see me?”
He felt as though his entire body had turned into something alien, something that didn’t quite belong to him. His legs couldn’t decide whether to remain straight or bend at the knee, and as a result his stance was only semi-upright, leaning against the back of a gray armchair.
“What does Your Excellency mean?”
“I’m simply wondering what your business is here. You can’t persuade me that the conversation we’ve had was the real purpose of your visit.”
He heard himself reply in a voice that didn’t sound like his own. It came from his lips, but who was technically speaking, he didn’t know. “Your Excellency, what makes you think that?”
Now she turned to him so that he could see her face. The beautiful gray eyes, not in the least threatening but absolutely steady, inspected him from top to toe, while she spelled it out, point by point. “I’m not generally mistaken. You introduce yourself as ‘first and foremost German,’ but let me say this: I think I can recognize Jewish intelligentsia when I meet it. The fact that you’re trying to establish yourself at the present time as a journalist for a daily newspaper openly critical of Hitler doesn’t exactly preclude my hypothesis. But be that as it may, it’s plain you haven’t mastered the subject you claim you want to discuss.”
In a whisper she added: “You want something else from me.”
Without noticing how, he found himself back in the gray armchair, in a crumpled heap opposite Madame Kollontai. It was all up now, his failure complete.
With the feeling of resignation came something else: amazement at his own plan, the fundamentally incomprehensible and totally unrealistic idea that he, a journalist in exile, could hoodwink one of the diplomatic world’s most experienced negotiators, a renowned tactician, in the way he had supposed. Would the woman who had miraculously escaped all physical reprisals from the party leadership, despite being regarded as a counterrevolutionary, be so easily deceived? What insane arrogance! Would the woman who negotiated with ministries and embassies and under whose firm direction the Soviet legation operated be duped by him, a man for whom the present situation was so complicated that a cool head was out of the question?
It all obviously came down to the absurdity of the whole plan. Though it had to be said, when he looked back later, that in principle it could have worked. If only it had involved someone other than Alexandra Kollontai, former People’s Commissar for Education, now a minister and the Soviet Union’s first female envoy to Europe. Had it not been for her, it would have been feasible. But she was the one sitting in front of him now, waiting for an explanation. Why had he really come to see her?
It occurred to him that the situation was an outright disaster, and a series of realities sprang to mind like a flurry of icy gusts to the soul. First of all: he was on an island and had no control whatsoever over his departure. He recalled the tight-lipped boatman’s less than cooperative body language, his powerful physique, and above all the sports jacket that evidently concealed the fact that he was armed. In fact the villa was probably guarded by other representatives from the Soviet legation. He was effectively a prisoner on this island.
Once again he had the feeling someone else was speaking through him, in a strong, clear voice: “It concerned a visa question.”
A faint murmuring was heard from other parts of the villa, but here in the sunlit room everything seemed to stand still. He filled the void with an account to strengthen her suspicion that the conversation hitherto was basically a pretext for broaching other subjects entirely. “As I said, a visa question. More precisely, a transit visa needing to be extended. I’m sure you’ll know the publisher Gottfried Bermann Fischer, who relocated here to Sweden with the assistance of Tor Bonnier of Albert Bonniers Förlag. Bermann Fischer spent the last weeks of the summer with his wife and children in a large wooden house belonging to the Bonnier family south of the city, more precisely on Dalarö. The other week they were visited by Katia and Thomas Mann, who should have been the keynote speaker at the PEN Congress, which was naturally canceled because of the outbreak of war, but Bermann Fischer’s press wants to publish the speech now and distribute it in Germany. You’ll be familiar with his publishing house, now fifty-one percent owned by the Bonnier family and forty-nine percent owned by Bermann Fischer himself. He has found a number of very capable coworkers in the city, and miraculously he has resumed publishing at a level many thought was impossible these days, with the press’s authors spread all over the world. But Zweig, Werfel, and Hofmannsthal are back in print despite the German censor. And Mann as well of course, and Ève Curie, whose successful book about her mother actually provided the financial footing for the company’s recovery.”
He tried to meet her eye to gain some sense of how his explanation was being received. She was still sitting in profile, which made it impossible.
“German literature is at stake, and now Bermann Fischer is convinced that the next step requires him and his family to get to America, where Mann has already settled and will provide assistance. The journey will be difficult, of course. I saw the family’s passports yesterday, all five stamped full of transit visas, every one of which has to be renewed on a regular basis to enable international travel. I don’t need to tell Your Excellency what this journey involves. Naturally you’re aware that one has to fly from Bromma to Riga, then on to Velikiye Luki and from there to Moscow. From Moscow one takes the Siberian railway to Vladivostok and then a boat to Yokohama. Finally across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco in one of the famed passenger ships and onward over the new continent. Not something accomplished in a hurry. But forgive me, are you acquainted with Bermann Fischer, the illustrious publisher of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann?”
The reply came immediately, scornful and not exactly oozing goodwill. “Gottfried Bermann Fischer, publisher of Leon Trotsky’s mendacious book My Life—yes sir, I am well acquainted with him. Did he really send you here? Is this the reason for your visit, the travel plans of the Jewish publisher and his family?”
He was going to point out that Trotsky’s autobiography had nothing to do with Bermann Fischer, that it was his father-in-law, Samuel Fischer, who had published it, but he stopped himself, recalling that Bermann Fischer had predicted this reaction. Publishing Trotsky would not go unpunished, of that he had always been convinced. Yet he had knowingly backed the proposal. Some had suggested it boiled down to Jewish solidarity being stronger than any ideological differences. It was widely known that Trotsky described Comrade Kollontai’s obsession with sexuality, especially her own sex life, as offensive. In Trotsky’s opinion, probing into matters of sexuality, despite the uninhibited and wild impression it gave, in the end indicated a fundamentally bourgeois disposition. Those were the very words he used: she probes into her own sexuality. Then again, their mutual antipathy was also widely known, and Kollontai had later prevented Trotsky’s entry to Sweden by simply refusing his visa application, which in turn had earned her one of the Soviet Union’s greatest political distinctions, the coveted Order of Lenin. Perhaps her triumphant report on how she stopped Trotsky’s admittance was what saved her from Moscow reprisals. Whatever the case, clearly Bermann Fischer’s publishing house, no matter how crucial to German literature it was held to be, was for Alexandra Kollontai essentially part of Trotsky’s infernal network, possibly even a central part. That the Jewish publisher and his family would receive aid in their plight from her of all people was unlikely.
She repeated the question, her voice now betraying a degree of impatience, not to say antagonism: “So this was the real reason? Your implied interest in the issues explored in my writings was nothing more than a false pretext, and your famous editor Oeri, our great liberal journalist in Basel, nothing more than a smoke screen. Thus your visit is exposed as an attempt to fool me, lull me into a feeling of intellectual consensus in order eventually, almost en passant, to broach the matter of a visa, as if merely a bagatelle. I believe we have said all we have to say to one another, sir.”
She rose to her feet and left the room. Immanuel’s heart was pounding in his chest, thoughts racing through his head. The awkward thing was that her version wasn’t far from the truth, even if it had been expressed with a brutality he couldn’t have articulated even to himself. But it was true, he had hoped to raise the subject of the Bermann Fischer family’s predicament at the end of their meeting, after the interview had been concluded. Anything to impress the publisher who had given him relatively well-paid commissions and had actually hinted at the possibility of a permanent position. Nothing could be more pivotal to his current situation, and the whole idea of sorting out the visa problem for the publisher was one of the reasons he had pressed ahead with this visit. Now she had found him out before they had even finished their conversation about the woman question.
He heard firm footsteps, and Madame Kollontai appeared at the wide sliding door leading to the villa’s inner recesses. He saw his last chance of putting things right.
“Your Excellency, you exaggerate, or rather, you misjudge the entire situation. Firstly, of course I’m here to discuss your view of society and the issues to which you have devoted a large part of your life. Believe me, Dr. Oeri will be delighted to publish this portrait should you give the newspaper permission. Naturally Your Excellency will be able to read the article in its entirety and have every opportunity to correct any errors or potential misunderstandings.”
Suddenly she no longer seemed annoyed or even slightly upset. “From my perspective the conservatives mark a pause in history. For all his urbanity in Swiss salons and his self-professed liberalism, Dr. Oeri himself represents just such a pause. A conservative is, as we like to say, a person who admires radicals centuries after their death. A conservative is a person who believes quite simply that nothing really big should ever be undertaken. Nothing new should ever be done. I have no time for such men, and history will prove me right. Thank you for coming. Miss Lorentzon will take you down to the boat.”
Without further ado she turned and disappeared from view. In her place appeared the smiling young secretary in the immaculate gray linen dress. She showed him out to the terrace, and together they began the climb down to the water.
The sun was in the southwest of the clear blue sky as they quickly descended one level after another, passing the sunflowers and the huge rhododendron bushes lining the terraces and railings. He broke the silence by asking a few questions about the villa and its irrefutably dramatic past. To his surprise the prim secretary’s account picked up precisely where the boatman’s had ended that same morning. Once again he heard the story of the boat that had caught fire and sunk in the bay, claiming the lives of a groundsman and a young engineer who was about to be wed. This was in Director Kassman’s time, when the house was known for the most sumptuous of society parties. The bride, the translucent woman who had met him that morning, and her brother, the young man in the sports jacket, still worked on the island, carrying out all manner of services for the Soviet delegation.
“Yes, all manner of services,” she repeated, as if there were some inner meaning to the words. “And not just for the Soviet legation, but for the German one as well. And doubtless for others too,” she added.
They were close to the water now and could see the boat approaching at full speed. They could already hear the muffled engine noise, which seemed to emanate from somewhere beneath the shining surface.
“I have informed Madame of my concerns,” she went on, “but she can see nothing strange in it. Everyone needs work these days, she says. But I’m wary of that man and want as little as possible to do with him. We all feel a fondness for the poor girl, but her brother’s hiding something.”
Why Miss Lorentzon of the Soviet diplomatic mission felt the need to share these suspicions with a journalist who was a complete stranger was a mystery to Immanuel, and at that moment it didn’t preoccupy him, for now the boat was alongside and the boatman was once again straddling the boat and the jetty. As if to avoid having to greet the young man, Miss Lorentzon said goodbye, but just as she set off back up to the house, she turned to Immanuel with one last message.
“Madame would like you to know that the publisher Bermann Fischer may collect a transit visa for all members of his family at the end of the week. If he hands in the passports to our consular department on Thursday morning, she will make sure they are stamped the same afternoon. The embassy is at 17 Villagatan, as you know.”