Snow had been falling all night. The streets were quiet, and it was difficult for cars to get through. Clearing hadn’t even begun on Villagatan. It was Madame Kollontai’s decision that the German journalist, the one who wrote as Dr. B., should present himself so early. It was the only chance of fitting in one more meeting that day. Now she regretted it. Morning hours were the most productive, her time to write up the sometimes almost indecipherable notes she had made during the night. Events of the last few days had been exhausting. Constant meetings with foreign minister Väinö Tanner’s emissaries, sometimes at the embassy, more often at the Grand Hotel. Now there was talk of the Finnish minister himself coming. The person who had worked behind the scenes to bring about the meeting, probably within the week, was Hella Wuolijoki. The press officer at the Finnish embassy had spoken of her as an unusually creative Communist. All she could do was agree. Apparently Wuolijoki was a friend of the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, who had been living in the city for some time.
She couldn’t help feeling slightly irritated that this mediator had played such a decisive role without any involvement on the part of the embassy. Quite how it had come about, she couldn’t fathom, but she was all the more eager to regain the initiative.
They had indeed been busy days, filled with very difficult decisions and a great deal of apprehension about the future. It was not uncommon for her to be in touch with Moscow in the middle of the night, and the Swedish foreign minister kept late hours too. It was fortunate that her need for sleep had diminished in recent years. She used the quiet hours of the early morning to work on her journal.
She sat at her desk upstairs, looking out of the window at the street. There was not much light penetrating the gray clouds. The snow was still falling, snowflakes swirling in small eddies before settling on the windowsill. She leafed through the pile of papers and read out the morning’s corrected draft. Her voice was so muted that had someone entered the study, where she was always alone, this rare visitor would have heard only a faint murmur. Occasionally she paused and crossed a word out or added a short phrase.
The cipher messages often arrive late at night, and in these charged times, as we move into peace negotiations with Finland, I am ready to set off at a moment’s notice for Arvfurstens Palats, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is located now. There is no longer anyone living there, but in my imagination the halls and corridors of the palace are peopled by shadows of the past. The founder of the Swedish royal line lived here, one of Napoleon’s officers who was adopted by the Swedish king.
The last few weeks had been turbulent, among the most unsettling in her life, which certainly hadn’t been lacking in drama hitherto. If it wasn’t communications from Moscow, it was telephone calls from the press office, which was all the way out on Katarinavägen. Or it was questions from TASS or Intourist that for some reason had to be answered immediately, regardless of the time. The official Soviet presence in Stockholm was large, perhaps too large, and sooner or later all questions ended up on her desk. It was time-consuming.
No one thought twice about troubling her with the most basic of visa matters, and in recent weeks it had become clear that the strain on the Siberian railway had been mounting. For some refugees the long journey across the Soviet Union was their last chance to leave Europe. It was becoming increasingly apparent that they were Jewish families who had discovered this final eye of the needle. Rumors abounded. According to one, Shanghai was a place where you could settle without a visa. But more often than not it was the lure of a sea passage from Yokohama to San Francisco that drew them. Be that as it may, consular questions had become much more taxing.
The new Swedish foreign minister, Mr. Günther, was evidently something of a loner. He had nothing against receiving visitors after midnight when all his colleagues, even those who worked into the evening, had long since left the department. She had recorded these nighttime excursions in her writing.
At night I am admitted to the old palace building, not through the parade entrance, but by a discreet side door. The night watchman escorts me through the maze of corridors and halls still furnished in the style of the Napoleonic era, to the reception room, where I wait to be called in to see Minister Günther. I am not bored as I wait for his summons. I settle into a familiar mood, pushing aside all thought of my current task and indulging in fantasies about old times.
Passages such as these made her happy that she kept a diary, not simply a diplomat’s notebook but an account that one day would be read as literature. At this moment she was certain of that, and she felt a sense of satisfaction that made her forget the politics of the day.
I walk past a succession of sumptuous but now dimly lit halls and salons in the old palace and up to the reception area, where I wait to be called into Günther’s office. The night watchman is tired. I am alone in these extraordinary surroundings, a palace from the eighteenth century. And I ask myself: What would the Swedish king’s adoptive son, Jean Bernadotte, with his southern temperament and his naive view of the world, have said if he had come across an aging but still handsome woman wandering around in the old castle at night? Would he have taken her to be the lover of someone in his French retinue, or would he have decided she must be a conspirator, sent to spy on him—heir to the Swedish throne?
She arranged the papers in a neat sheaf. While she was happy to dictate letters, articles, and lectures, she had always chosen to write up her diaries herself. Her Excellency’s personal records, which stretched back decades, required a very different role of Emy Lorentzon. Every other month she made sure the manuscripts were transferred to Triewaldsgränd, the little side street linking the squares Munkbron and Järntorget in Gamla Stan, where a friend, a woman doctor, locked them in a secret filing cabinet that they both regarded as safe.
But at the moment Miss Lorentzon had other things on her mind, for the first guest of the day, the young German journalist who had visited Madame in the villa out on the island on one of the last warm days of autumn, had already taken a seat in the salon next to the grand piano. They had recognized one another at once—Immanuel recalled her friendly welcome on the terrace and their rather odd conversation about black sunflower discs turning toward the sun. He also remembered their walk down to the water and his surprise at being taken into the secretary’s confidence regarding the fair-haired young woman’s plight and her rather undesirable brother, the armed boatman.
After the first excruciating meeting with Madame Kollontai, Immanuel had discounted any possibility of a second chance for a private exchange of ideas. But this time the initiative was Kollontai’s, and the invitation had been brought about by mutual acquaintances in the diplomatic corps. The envoy Lagerberg, his benefactor from the embassy in Warsaw, had indicated that the Soviet emissary wished to meet him. In fact all three should have been involved, but Lagerberg had been unable to attend and now Immanuel sat on his own, waiting for her to receive him.
She handled the diplomatic game with discretion and the utmost finesse, but now, Lagerberg had said, her thoughts were directed to the increasingly German-friendly leaning of the Swedish press. He had added that Swedish allegiance to the German cause, which often went hand in hand with a knee-jerk skepticism toward everything Soviet, troubled her.
Immanuel had been surprised when a formal invitation arrived in the letterbox on Frejgatan. Now he was sitting in an upstairs salon, browsing through magazines containing articles about embassy events. The salon was decorated in a style befitting a banker or bourgeois politician with a taste for the applied arts. The rugs and wallpaper were remarkably colorful, indeed quite ornate. On the grand piano stood an array of lavish bouquets of flowers that looked bizarre, given the season.
He started reading a richly illustrated piece about Red Army Day the previous year. The embassy could celebrate in the most grandiose fashion, it seemed: it wasn’t just about diplomats and attachés dressing up, there were singers, actors, and the famous revue artist Karl Gerhard, with his merry entourage. It had obviously become a tradition, and on February 23, Stockholm society had grown accustomed to being invited to Villagatan for caviar and vodka. There had been plenty of politicians at the previous year’s party, but the foreign minister had stayed away. Mr. Sandler was seldom seen at functions of this sort nowadays, the author of the article noted. But his deputy, cabinet secretary Erik Boheman, usually attended. Why had he passed up this popular event? the writer wondered. Could it possibly have something to do with increasing political tensions?
How different the atmosphere must have been in the embassy then and in the diplomatic corps as a whole, indeed in the entire city, Immanuel thought. The idea that the country’s foreign minister should find time for events with revue artists was almost unthinkable. Now Sandler had been replaced by a minister even less festively inclined, and the country was under threat from all quarters. The magazine’s pages were teeming with photographs of bigwigs from the armed forces, perhaps present to pick up news at first hand and gain a sense of the Soviet mood. Immanuel didn’t know many of them, but here and there he spotted a familiar face. Funnily enough, he could glimpse Lagerberg in one picture, wearing tails and talking to a Russian official. In the background he could make out Lagerberg’s diplomat friend Sven Grafström and Grafström’s wife. The writer went on to report that the German envoy, Prince Victor of Wied, was absent, perhaps on account of the Nobel Prize crisis. But on the other hand, General von Uthmann had been more visible than ever in the salon. The military attaché could be seen in several photographs, wearing a uniform adorned with a large number of medals. With him was the mustachioed Hans von Euler-Chelpin, Nobel laureate in chemistry, and the latter’s handsome wife.
Immanuel had moved to a chair by the window overlooking Villagatan when, with scarcely a sound, Miss Lorentzon reappeared behind him.
“I’m so sorry, Madame is slightly delayed. Would you like a cup of tea while you wait, sir? She won’t be long.”
“A cup of tea would be nice, thank you.” With a slight nod toward the magazine, Immanuel added, “What parties you throw in this place! Illustrious guests from all over Europe!”
“Not only Europe,” Miss Lorentzon said. “Look at the bottom. No, hold on, the next page. There’s Sugihara, the new vice-consul in Kaunas. And farther down we have other long-distance guests. Ambassador Wang and his friends.”
She turned the page and pointed to a group of Asians being presented to a man wearing an extraordinary quantity of medals and decorations, identified as Baron Stiernstedt. Under the photograph was a quotation from the Swedish baron: “What a cultured man Mr. Wang is, so well educated! The crown prince holds Chinese culture in the highest regard and is fascinated by its art treasures. The court is planning a trip to China next year.”
“Yes,” said Miss Lorentzon, “there was so much more conviviality here before the outbreak of war. Now the atmosphere surrounding our embassy is distrustful, as if Madame weren’t doing all within her power to secure good relations between our nations and find ways out of the crisis in Finland.”
“I’m sorry, but ‘crisis’ might no longer be the right word,” Immanuel said, intending to add something about the progress of war. But this wasn’t the appropriate place or time for discussing politics. He changed the topic. “The minister just uses the villa on the island during the summer, I suppose? A fantastic place, but maybe not very practical in the cold and snow.”
“Funny that you should ask about the Kassman villa today,” the secretary said. “It was confirmed yesterday that we’ll take over the whole estate as our summer residence from the beginning of May. Last summer we had the villa on trial until early autumn, and Madame was extremely pleased. But despite Mr. Kassman’s financial worries, he only wanted to make the villa available one season at a time. Now it’s been settled, though, and we have access to the villa for at least three years, which, as Madame says, is an eternity in these troubles times.”
Miss Lorentzon took the opportunity to tidy the pile of magazines while Immanuel continued to browse through the report on Red Army Day. There were some old faces from the cultural world too, the article declared: an anti-fascist and painter by the name of Grünewald, and the opera singer Pålson-Wettergren. Another picture of Euler-Chelpin with his enormous mustache and elegant wife. And one photograph after another of Karl Gerhard, the city’s redoubtable King of Revue, known for his sarcasm and his vitriolic songs about current affairs.
Immanuel wanted to be certain not to forget Gerhard’s name, and was taking out his pen and notebook when Miss Lorentzon, who was obviously still thinking about the summer residence, interrupted. “Madame and I had given up hope of the villa, and we tried out a small boardinghouse on Lidingö one weekend,” she said, leaning slightly over the tea table right behind him. “Modest, nice enough. Otherwise, we’ve often moved out to Saltsjöbaden for the summer.”
Immanuel had heard about the Grand Hotel in Saltsjöbaden, owned by the wealthy Wallenberg family, but he had never been there. It hadn’t been an appropriate season for that kind of trip. He understood it to be a splendid spa hotel in the European style, with countless negotiations conducted in its salons or in rooms hired by representatives of various embassies in the capital, not least the Finnish and Soviet.
Immanuel’s family was not truly settled in the city. That morning his wife had remarked that there was a markedly deserted feel about it, and that compared with Warsaw, Stockholm was a cold place. That applied to the inhabitants, and also to the city itself. The people hadn’t really managed to make the buildings their own or occupy the streets, Lucia thought. It was certainly beautifully situated, and the way in which the water weaved through the city everywhere was striking, yet many of its buildings were plain and rather dreary, especially in the part of the city where they lived; utilitarian, with no regard for aesthetic qualities.
It was different in the city center, where they had admired the many buildings in the art nouveau style—the Royal Theatre, naturally, but also a post office so imposing it was a match for any banking emporium or great theater. That morning, in the snow on Villagatan, Immanuel had been particularly struck by a row of entrances decorated with intricate trailing patterns from the animal and plant world that spread across the stuccoed facades, twirled around the windows, and reappeared in the ornamented oriels and the curves of the balcony railings. Even if the art nouveau style was in general more restrained here than in more southerly parts of Europe, these features gave the city a melodic lightness. On their strolls together through the city, Immanuel and Lucia had marveled at the arched gables and windows on Drottninggatan. They regularly passed a bathhouse too, whose ornamented facade and huge windows reminded them of the serpentine moldings around the pool at the bathhouse in Breslau, a place they had often visited when they were newly engaged.
Outside, the snow was falling more heavily. Miss Lorentzon disappeared elsewhere, and Immanuel immersed himself in another of the magazines, this one containing an article about his hostess. This was no photo reportage of embassy parties but a serious discussion about emancipation of the modern woman. Two quotations were highlighted in bold type. He spelled out the first to himself and was pleased he understood the Swedish: “The pregnant woman must remember that she no longer belongs to herself, she serves the collective, she produces from her own flesh and blood a new unit of labor, a new member of the labor republic.” Madame Kollontai was photographed in the embassy, indeed by the very same window at which he was now sitting. She looked rather majestic in her fur coat. The second quotation was in even bolder typeface, giving it the appearance of a heading: “Marriage is a business deal of secondary importance for women in the new society. Everything must be rationalized, even our creches.”
Immanuel had finished his tea, and was starting to feel a little impatient. After standing up to stretch his legs, he took a few steps toward the small room adjacent to the salon. The wide sliding doors were open, inviting him to walk in. On a round table, under an oval gilt frame containing an oil portrait of an aristocratic lady in evening dress with deep décolletage, stood a framed photograph beside a vase of white lilies. Immanuel leaned over the picture and saw to his surprise that it was a signed photograph of the British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who was hardly known as a devotee of the Bolsheviks. In recent days his name had appeared in all the newspapers. It was declared no longer to be a secret that the instant Chamberlain was judged definitively to have lost his mandate, Churchill would take over. Immanuel had commented on the rumor himself in a short item published in Basler Nachrichten. What this shift in power would mean for the Nordic countries was a question Albert Oeri had put to him in a telephone call only a week earlier. It was a question to which he needed to find the answer.
Through a half-open door he caught sight of a painting of Lenin reading a newspaper. He had just seen the same painting in one of the magazines. Its position was unusually high on the wall, in one of the few spaces not occupied by bookshelves. No great painting on purely artistic grounds, Immanuel was thinking when he heard a familiar voice behind him. Once heard, never forgotten. He turned to meet the gray eyes he remembered so well from their meeting on the island. It had been only a few months before, but it felt like a memory from a previous life. Madame Kollontai held out her hand, but began speaking before Immanuel could take it in his own.
“Your editor Oeri is criticizing in increasingly pointed terms our analysis of Nazism as a capitalist society in its last convulsions. It is alleged that we see current German politics as a transitory end stage preceding the socialist revolution. I am quoting the words: ‘transitory end stage.’ Where on earth did he get that from?”
In the look she gave him it was clear these words of reproval were seriously meant. But was she expecting an answer? After an uncomfortable pause she added, “Will you please inform Mr. Oeri that this has all been plucked from the air? He has fabricated these quotations. For they are intended to be read as quotations, are they not? A fatal misjudgment of the Nazi threat, he writes; but who has worded this, if not Mr. Oeri himself?”
Immanuel cleared his throat, embarrassed, but couldn’t find an appropriate answer. As they sat down by the photograph of Churchill, Madame Kollontai must have noticed her guest’s quizzical expression as he glanced in the direction of the First Lord of the Admiralty, for she picked up the portrait and looked at it for a few moments. Then she put it back next to the vase of lilies.
“A stylist,” she said in a gentler voice. “A genuinely great stylist. I particularly admire his biography of Marlborough. I devoured each volume and couldn’t wait for the next. I recently expressed my admiration in the presence of the head of the British mission, and in no time at all the signed photograph arrived with the kindest handwritten greeting. A civil tone is indeed possible even when political differences seem unbridgeable.”
Miss Lorentzon had entered discreetly through the sliding doors. She moved silently across the room and lit a number of candles, spreading a warm and rather soothing light.
“The real reason for our meeting is, as you know, a different one,” Kollontai continued as Miss Lorentzon returned, wheeling a trolley with a samovar and teacups, which she proceeded to place on the table. She then sat down in an armchair a few meters away.
“It concerns reports in the Swedish press about incidents in Lapland being presented in an unfavorable and ultimately unacceptable way,” Kollontai went on. “It’s obvious that Aftonbladet can spread whatever untruths it likes, as long as they are packaged in German-friendly jargon. This adventurer they referred to last week . . . I’ve forgotten his name—”
“Pantenburg,” Miss Lorentzon said from her armchair. “Vitalis Pantenburg.”
“Exactly. Not a name to retain. In fact not an individual to take note of in any regard. His book is bizarre and of no consequence whatsoever. But now it’s been translated into Swedish, and one has to wonder at the entirely uncritical reviews printed in the Swedish press. Listen to this nonsense, these lies dressed up as pioneering prose that Aftonbladet’s writers deem reasonable to disseminate to their readership here in the capital. Please read out what I’ve underlined, Emy.” She passed a torn-out page to the secretary, who stood beside the trolley and read out a long piece, apparently a quotation from the new book. Kollontai’s face was expressionless as she gazed across the room and let the secretary read without interruption.
“ ‘Lying in the remotest part of the north by the distant Arctic Ocean, far from the incendiary flames stoking world politics, is a lesser known but by no means less dangerous political storm center. Like an underground fire it flares up, now here, now there. We read of spy planes and border incidents, of secret underwater craft and vessels of unknown nationality. But let us not for a second be duped by this shroud of mystery. There can be no doubt that all this activity has been instigated by the Third International, whose leadership rests in Moscow. Propagandists and activists are regularly caught in the northernmost provinces, Muscovite emissaries, sometimes officers of the Red Army in disguise.’ ”
She fell silent, and Immanuel wondered if he was meant to comment on this remarkable passage, written by the German polar explorer who had been staying at the Hotell Reisen at the same time as his own family. For some reason his travelogues had become popular in the whole of northern Europe, including Sweden.
Clearly Immanuel’s friend Lagerberg had suggested him as a reasonable person with whom to have this conversation, as if he could give advice to a diplomatic authority of Kollontai’s stature. Perhaps Lagerberg had seen it as an opportunity to contrive an unofficial audience for himself. But then little Madeleine, his adopted two-year-old daughter, had suffered another ear infection and been awake all night. It was the third time this winter, he had explained on the telephone. He wasn’t worried, he had added, but he must take her back to the doctor, and maybe they would need another bottle of the drops he must try to force into her.
Anyway, strange though it was, Immanuel was now sitting with Madame Kollontai, discussing Swedish journalism and the impending Nazification of the Swedish press. The conversation soon strayed to the German press too.
“Is the process complete?” she asked, adding in a rather reproachful tone: “I can see no indication that the Frankfurter Zeitung is an exception, as is sometimes claimed. How do you see the press landscape, discounting for now Mr. Oeri’s liberal view?”
He gave a brief account of his own situation, mentioning De Telegraaf, of course, as well as Uusi Suomi and Dagens Nyheter. He stressed that Pantenburg was in no way an authoritative voice in the German press—a popular travel writer perhaps, but completely without political influence. He couldn’t explain why Pantenburg had been singled out by Aftonbladet and given so much Swedish publicity. He also agreed that the Swedish newspapers, with a few exceptions, liked to report on minor attacks, probably pure accidents, as if they were evidence of Soviet presence in Lapland.
For a few moments it seemed that there was a consensus in the room.
“An oversensitivity has developed, and it has to be traced back to German propaganda,” Kollontai said. “As soon as any sign of alarm can be recorded in the country’s northern regions, the press assumes we are behind it. As if it couldn’t just as easily be a question of English or German interference. Or the Swedes who created the problem themselves, which is most likely.”
It wasn’t clear to Immanuel where this discussion was leading. He added something he had gleaned a few weeks earlier concerning Dagens Nyheter, which could scarcely be accused of excessive enthusiasm for German politics. “Do you know what they’re saying about Tor Bonnier, the proprietor? I’ve only just heard this. The Oriental with the Old Norse name, that’s what his Swedish employees call Mr. Bonnier nowadays.”
They were interrupted by heavy footsteps and loud Russian voices from the next room. Two gentlemen appeared in the doorway so abruptly, they must have been close at hand. One was taller than the other by a head and had a vigorous and slightly untidy beard; the smaller one was bald, and wore spectacles with uncommonly thick frames. Immanuel jumped when their headlong entrance into the room intruded into the conversation, but his hostess didn’t appear in the least surprised. She turned in her armchair to receive a document from the man in spectacles. He bowed reverently, his arm stretched to its limit. It took only a couple of seconds for her to register that the matter was urgent. She stood up and hurried out of the room.
Immanuel remained seated. He had seen the spectacles somewhere before. He could hear Kollontai speaking in the adjacent salon to the men, who he assumed must be members of the embassy staff, or possibly from the news agency TASS. He couldn’t decide if she was annoyed or just upset by the matter, but the tone of the conversation suggested that feelings were running high.
It suddenly dawned on Immanuel where he was, and with whom. He had been drawn into the discussion and very nearly disclosed everything about his own situation. Of course it was true that the Frankfurter Zeitung was fully Nazified; almost all his colleagues had been replaced. He hadn’t set foot on German soil for six years. He had left Warsaw, certainly, but for the most part to visit the Baltic countries in which a number of his friends from Breslau’s Social Democratic circles had settled. They were in fact the people who had made it possible for him to leave Poland. Some of them were also Swedes, but basically it was von Scheliha at the German embassy who had been at the center of it all. He was living dangerously these days. The question was whether he should carry on with his covert activity. The risks were enormous.
Immanuel had been one of the first to concur with von Scheliha’s proposals. Together with his brother, Gerhard, he had assisted in the creation of a network that, with considerable vigilance, managed to maintain its reporting unfettered by the propaganda of the national press. The articles were placed in provincial newspapers only, but nevertheless provided a space to breathe freely.
But it was obvious that because of his intimacy with Moscow-friendly elements, von Scheliha was teetering on the brink of the abyss. Perhaps he had already toppled. Perhaps he had taken Immanuel’s brother with him. The press agency in Berlin appeared to have survived, but what did Kutzner, the editor who still seemed to be in business, want?
It was fortunate they had been interrupted, or he might have been tempted to reveal too much. What had Lagerberg said about him? Perhaps Kollontai already knew about Ilse Stübe, the young revolutionary, and the circle of Moscow loyalists around von Scheliha?
It was quiet again in the salon facing the street, and Immanuel moved across to the windows. He looked down to see three women in dark-colored coats hurrying along. The sight seemed familiar and he had the idea he had seen a painting somewhere depicting those very women. The snow was falling so slowly that some snowflakes seemed to possess the magical power to rise up toward the white sky, instead of circling downward to the blanket of snow covering the cobblestones in the street. These small white particles, seemingly weightless, flurried around the women’s shoulders and heads. They landed on their navy-blue coats and on their comical headgear. Each was wearing a flat cotton cap held in place by a black velvet ribbon that ran along the edge and separated the smooth cloth above from a pointed end, which in all three cases was resting on a chignon. It gave them an air of gravity and discipline. Perhaps the severe hairstyle was part of the nurses’ uniform; in any case the three women were practically identical.
Presumably Sophiahemmet was their destination in the swirling snow. Under their navy-blue coats they would undoubtedly be wearing blue skirts with aprons and white-collared blouses, as he had witnessed on his visit to the hospital. The matron had highlighted the symbolism of the headwear and the fact that the nurses had to sew those flat caps themselves as part of their diploma. Then she had examined Lucia with a thoroughness that had exhausted her.
With a heavy heart he recalled the conversation at Sophiahemmet. It had been Lagerberg, whose father-in-law was some kind of director of the entire hospital, who managed to arrange the examination without Lucia being officially registered as a patient. It would have been too complicated and expensive, his friend had said, without going into further detail about what it all would in fact have cost them. It had begun with the severe matron asking questions, while a young nurse made notes in a large white notebook very much resembling an artist’s sketchbook. There had been talk of cardiovascular problems, of inadequate circulation, of every possible vascular disorder with a Latin name. A young doctor with thick glasses had been called. He had spoken fast in a Swedish Immanuel couldn’t follow, repeated the word homeostasis several times, but directed all his questions to the matron rather than the patient herself. Unfortunately he had also said something about excess weight, which was repeated and translated into German.
Memories flooded his mind. In Żoliborz his wife had managed a household with a cook and nursemaid. Here in Stockholm she was on her own with all the shopping and cooking. No wonder she was worn out. He stood by the window, staring out at the snow, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Lucia had suffered a series of dizzy spells since they arrived in Stockholm, and in the last few weeks it had grown worse. She was barely able to get up in the morning without fearing for her balance. It was true, she had grown a little heavier, but the word overweight had been an unpleasant surprise. He could recollect her very first attack on the quay. It had genuinely given him a fright.
Startled by a movement behind him, he was woken from his trance by Miss Lorentzon. Guiltily she explained that, with regret, Madame was obliged to end the meeting. Unforeseen events had required her to leave the embassy at once.
Immanuel nodded and looked around for his things.
“Madame would also like to exchange a few words about Bermann Fischer’s family, who still don’t seem to have managed to get away,” Miss Lorentzon said.
Immanuel was reluctant to revisit this issue, but naturally he listened politely to what she had to say while he put on his hat and coat.
“You understand, it’s becoming urgent. The border to Japan will be closed very soon. Madame was distressed when she read the articles about the German boat forced to return from Cuba. Barriers are being erected everywhere. Did you read about that terrible misfortune? It must have been a nightmare to be aboard that fateful ship.”
What was she getting at? Immanuel didn’t know how he should react to her display of thoughtfulness. Was this really Madame Kollontai’s thinking, or was it Miss Lorentzon’s?
“Of course the question is whether you have entertained hopes for your own part. If you had similar plans for yourself and your family, you’ll have to hurry. The only person who is still issuing Japanese transit visas is the vice-consul in Lithuania. Do you know our Japanese colleague in Kaunas?”
Immanuel shook his head. No, he didn’t know him.
“As I said, you need to hurry.” Miss Lorentzon gave him an impenetrable look as she held the door open for him.