The black flowers were contorting in his dream. He jolted awake and looked anxiously around the room. Needless to say, there lay his wife, her face turned toward him. She had suffered a series of attacks in the last few days, but now she was in a deep sleep, breathing peacefully. He was relieved she was on the mend. Nothing gave him such a sense of calm as the sight of her gentle features in the dark.
Lucia’s collapse had happened on the quay only an hour after they had arrived in Stockholm. The boys had raced up to Gamla Stan to explore the lanes that led to Skeppsbron and, thank goodness, didn’t see it happen. The family’s suitcases were already waiting for them in the foyer of the Hotell Reisen. But a large sack containing some of their bulkier possessions had been transported across the Baltic Sea in a hold two levels below the passenger deck. A crane lifted out one packing crate after another, turning back and forth in a way the boys found funny. They swung in the air for a moment before landing almost soundlessly on the quayside. It had to be the turn of their sack soon.
It was a sunny morning. The gulls noisily circled the ship’s funnels, and Skeppsbron was full of life in the glow of autumn sunshine. The boys were tired of waiting and had disappeared, but Immanuel and Lucia were still standing by the water when their heavy sack eventually appeared. It was lifted high in the sky, swayed to and fro when the crane swiveled to the quay, and was lowered slowly toward the ground. But before it was halfway down, calamity struck. For some reason the sack came off the hook. It fell several meters and landed on the cobblestones with a dull thud. A thick cloud of dust rose as it hit the ground. Before he had time to register that his typewriter and various other vital possessions were now probably in pieces, Immanuel had worse things to think about. At his side his wife lay unconscious on the cobblestones. Gently and without a sound, she had collapsed. He fell to his knees beside her. For a brief second he believed she had stopped breathing.
A few hours later she was lying in bed in the hotel room with a cup of tea on the bedside table and a woolen blanket over her legs. The color had slowly returned to her cheeks.
Since that time much had been sorted out. They lived a quiet life. There continued to be things of concern, of course. But where did these mad dreams come from, night after night, making him feel as though the end of the world was nigh? Darkness shrouded his thoughts for hours after he woke. If truth be told, they never properly lost their hold over him, and as soon as he fell asleep they reappeared with images full of foreboding. Like a portent, the black discs atop the lofty sunflowers, twisting as if in agony next to Madame Kollontai’s terrace, had obtruded into his mind and brought such unease that, barely awake, he sat up in bed. After resting his bare feet on the cold parquet floor, he stood up. As he passed the half-open door he felt a draft from the kitchen. The boys were asleep in their room, the door ajar. It was just before six in the morning, and there was no hint of daylight.
Immanuel went into the study and sat down in the shabby armchair. He leaned toward the bureau, in the top compartment of which he had hidden the fountain pen and the glass bottle of pale greenish-yellow fluid. On the label someone had written the letter T by hand, very clearly. Was it Horst who had inscribed this single letter to remind himself what the bottle contained, or was it Kutzner, the editor in Berlin? The pen, which had provided the boys with a great deal of fun, was right at the back of the drawer where it couldn’t be seen.
But Immanuel’s fingers soon found it in the dark, and now it lay on the table in front of him. He switched on the lamp, whose oval shade created a sharp cone-shaped beam, despite the bulb’s dimness, and examined the pen in the subdued light. The top and the bottom parts were shiny and black, but they were separated by a gold band featuring the trade name Rotring and the specific logo of this modern writing implement, which could be filled with ink of different colors. When the pen was unscrewed, a transparent inner barrel was exposed that held the liquid. Immanuel lifted the transparent part up to the light, and the shadow that fell on the desk revealed that the pen was as good as empty. Gripping it gently, he emptied the reservoir. A thin trickle of water disappeared into the darkness, the last vestige of the boys’ riotous game.
They hadn’t touched the glass bottle with the greenish-yellow substance, for Immanuel had stowed it away as soon as he witnessed the boys’ interest in the fountain pen’s many delights. The fun had ended abruptly when his wife, who instinctively viewed the pen and glass bottle with misgiving, intervened. She tidied it all away with a comment about gladly throwing them out with the rubbish. She would prefer to forget the day they had entered the house, she said. Perhaps by now she had stopped worrying; it was two months since they had been consigned to the depths of the pigeonhole from which Immanuel’s tentative hand had retrieved them this early morning. He unscrewed the lid and recalled Horst’s words. Secret intelligence. An effective method of hiding the real contents of a letter from third parties. For a person in Immanuel’s circumstances, it could have beneficial consequences. This he had stressed with an ingratiating smile. By performing painless services now, Immanuel could avoid unfortunate situations in the future. It certainly could do no harm at all to appear useful, and it would probably open doors that would otherwise be shut.
Immanuel had remained tight-lipped, but he knew well enough what was at stake. If he was deported from Sweden, he and his family had nowhere to go. A return to Germany was equivalent to a death sentence. He hadn’t been granted a visa to England. No one knew what the future held, Horst had repeated several times, as if to fill the uncomfortable silence. It sounded as much a threat as a promise.
Immanuel examined the slender tube through which the pen was filled. He opened the glass bottle and lowered the ingenious device into the colored liquid, which was instantly drawn up. It was a pale, toxic green. The weight of the pen was different now, and it had a more balanced feel in his hand. To make space on the desk, he moved to one side the typewriter his wife used for typing up his articles. He lifted it a couple of centimeters above the surface of the desk and was amazed by its weight. He put it down with a thud. It was a Rheinmetall brand and belonged to the Weil family, who had been helpful enough to lend them two machines for which they no longer had a use. The second was a Mercedes Selecta and was on the top shelf of the bookcase. Lucia preferred the Rheinmetall machine, the same model she had used for many years in Breslau and then in Warsaw. How many articles had she typed up on that German machine? Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Unfortunately, the Weils’ machine had a different keyboard, which led to a number of unforced errors.
He tried the pale ink on one of the white sheets of paper his wife used. Almost immediately the writing was invisible. When it dries, Horst had said, you don’t see a thing. He stood up, still barefoot on the cold wooden floor. He took a few steps and carefully closed the door to the hall, even though his sons and wife were certain to be deeply asleep and unaware of anything happening in the study. He sat down again by the lamp and wrote his first lines with the green liquid. The words evaporated in an instant.
After much effort, I have managed to identify local Secret Service representation. I came into contact with a Mr. Rickman, who has conducted a study of Swedish iron and written a book about it.
He paused for a second to check that there was no sign of dawn outside. The street was dimly lit by a streetlamp standing at the corner of Frejgatan and Norrtullsgatan. The windows opposite were all still pitch-black. He held the sheet of paper up to the table lamp. The liquid had evaporated and the writing had disappeared, as if by magic. He added a few more lines about Rickman, whom he intended to call Uncle Richard in future, and what he knew of his activity. Despite the moment’s gravity, he felt a sense of satisfaction when he placed a full stop after the valediction: “Sincerely yours, Kant.” What other choice of alias could there be for a man named Immanuel, born into the world in the city of Königsberg? Was it too obvious? No, no one who wasn’t already aware of the information in Kutzner’s possession would understand it. No one knew who the letter writer was.
Staring out into the darkness, he allowed the letter to dry for a few more minutes.
He felt a strange apathy. The first signs of life could be seen on the other side of the street. Suddenly there were lights in a number of windows, even though it was Sunday and most people had the chance to sleep in. He took his usual fountain pen out of the desk drawer and wrote a short, innocuous message over the invisible text. Would it have been better to write this official letter first? Let it dry properly and last of all add the invisible lines? Perhaps the normal ink made the invisible writing difficult to read? How was he, of all people, supposed to know? He read through the letter. His hand. His words.
Dear Mr. Kutzner,
I am very happy with the “Tintenkuli” you sent with Horst. I am using it for the first time and hope that you will be pleased with its performance. Relations with my Uncle Richard, of whom you have heard reports, have not been very helpful to me so far, but it looks promising for the future. He is a very mistrustful man, and he has little gain to expect from any connection with me, but I hope to come into closer contact with his family and thereby win his trust. Although he does not yet have a command of the Swedish language, he has made himself quite at home here, and it is always interesting to observe such a man exercising his profession. He works in the commercial sector, as I understand it, and not with the official authorities, only private individuals, but he has had some beginner’s luck. Of course the war is causing serious disruption.
Materially, I am not doing as well as I was at the beginning, and I have to waste a great deal of time on sidelines, only to get anywhere close to the right sources. Of course we suffer to some extent from the poor postal services; as well as disruption occasioned by the war, there are delays caused by the ice, etc. It will be interesting to see if this letter reaches you, for instance. What do you say about my possible transfer plans?
Sincerely yours,
Kant.
Immanuel folded the letter and put it into one of the light-gray envelopes he found in the desk drawer. He addressed it to Mr. E. Kutzner, PO Box 23, Berlin NW 40, Germany. For a second he wondered whether he ought to write “Kant” as sender on the back of the envelope, but decided not to. He had only one stamp left in the drawer, but that was all he needed that morning. The sweet taste of the adhesive stayed on his tongue. The letter was stamped and ready on the desk, and outside it was now light.
He put away the fountain pen and the glass bottle of green liquid. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily,” he said under his breath as he slipped on his jacket. He donned his overcoat and hat and opened the front door. The smell of sour milk hit him as he entered the stairwell with the letter in his inner pocket. Not to dare is to lose oneself. He couldn’t recall where he had read these lines recently, but by now he was on his way down the stairs.
Perhaps it was Kierkegaard? He went out through the main entrance and noted that Norrtullsgatan was already bustling. He turned right and strode briskly in the direction of Odenplan, where the nearest postbox was. That was where he had sent off all his articles over the last few months, to Amsterdam and Basel and one or two to the press agency in Berlin, the ones his wife was so concerned about.
Yes, it was definitely Kierkegaard, and the passage continued, if he remembered correctly, along the lines of reaching a point, sooner or later, where the only solution was to choose—and then one made the right choice. An article by Albert Oeri in Basler Nachrichten had been introduced with the quotation. He remembered it now.
The kiosk on Odenplan was already a hive of activity. A tram stopped and set down a group of passengers. The stream of people seemed never-ending. When he crossed the track himself to reach the other side of the square, it was a struggle for him to avoid colliding with the throng of people on their way to the church, where a morning service was due to start imminently. The bells had started to ring as he entered the square.
He thought he glimpsed a familiar face, but the tram had started moving and obscured his view. He was standing by the postbox when he heard someone shout, and indeed, he had not been mistaken; it was the earnest figure of Professor Katz approaching. He had his son, Theodor, with him, who looked grown-up in his overcoat and dark hat. Immanuel was aware that Professor Katz was being subjected to anti-Semitic attacks by students as well as the press. He had already heard repeated stories about the torchlit procession and the hateful pamphlet that claimed to be about Jews destroying Swedish culture, but which was primarily an attack on Katz himself and his appointment as professor at the university college in Stockholm. Immanuel’s sons had told him about conversations at school, in which some of their classmates had laughed at their name and talked about Jews and all the outlandish things they were allegedly involved with. The words “Jewish bastard” had been used, something a number of the boys must have learned at home. At first Karl and Henrik had pretended they hadn’t heard. Then they tried to laugh the whole thing off.
The Katz boy had attended the same school as Karl and Henrik, but was a few years older and had recently matriculated. It was clear that things weren’t easy for him, with the persecution of his father and the burden of all the slander. Now they were standing in front of him, father and son. What were they doing out in the city so early in the morning? Immanuel didn’t have a chance to ask them, for the professor addressed him immediately, handing him a small brochure he had taken out of his inner pocket. “This was what I referred to,” he said tersely.
Immanuel inspected the slender publication and read the Swedish title: The Scandalous Katz Appointment. It was, according to the subtitle, a contribution to history of Swedish culture’s Judaization.
“I hadn’t read it myself when we last spoke, hadn’t even seen it when all the articles started appearing. It’s been cited favorably in Aftonbladet, and my colleagues sometimes mention it in a tone I don’t know what to make of. Apparently Professor von Euler-Chelpin has read it.” He fell silent, and his body rocked back and forth in a compulsive way. His eyes darted from side to side and then seemed to fix on a faraway point, as if all the time he was trying to read the clock on the other side of the square. “Of course you understand what this means. We can’t stay in this country. That should be beyond doubt by now.”
It was as if Professor Katz had totally forgotten that he had already related all this and had in fact written down his impressions in a chain letter of sorts that he had sent to his friends and acquaintances, including Immanuel and his wife. The attacks had begun two years previously, he wrote, but instead of petering out they had intensified, and young National Socialists could storm in at any time and disrupt his lectures. The worst attack, which was some time ago, he had described repeatedly. But the threat had not lessened.
Now Immanuel was regaled with the entire account in the letter again, more or less word for word. On the ill-fated afternoon it all came to a head, he had thought at first he would lock himself in his office on the third floor, Katz said, but instead he elected to escape from the university building. The angry yelling and jackboot-stamping eventually made it impossible for him to make himself understood, and all he could do was break off the lecture. He closed the book in front of him and hurried out of the lecture hall. Along a corridor on the ground floor he found a back door that opened onto Observatorielunden, the pretty little park lying behind the building, where there was a hill with a view of the city. He stepped out into the cold autumn air. He had left his books and notes on a table next to the lectern, and, dressed only in a jacket, he dashed up the leaf-covered footpath leading to the top. He kept turning to see if anyone was following him, but he had left the building so quickly, no one realized where he had gone. Only a few weeks earlier a bronze sculpture had been placed at the top of the hill, representing a powerful centaur rampant, ready to leap. The mythical creature’s body was so taut, it appeared to be part of the bow arching between its outstretched hands.
Katz had often seen the bronze figure from below on Odengatan, and had marveled at its dramatic strength outlined against the sky. Now he stood on the terrace, its stone walls encircling the statue, and cautiously touched the cold metal.
Immanuel didn’t want to interrupt, even though he knew exactly what was coming. He watched the professor’s agonized face and gray temples, and he looked with some compassion at Theodor, standing patiently by his father’s side, listening.
Katz carried on in an almost manic voice, and clearly, inwardly, he was still up on the hill. From there one had a view of the entire city, he said. He heard the sound of a brass band, and when he looked down over the municipal library, he was amazed to see that a procession had appeared on Odengatan. People were marching with torches and banners, and whenever the band paused, the crowd chanted slogans he couldn’t catch. There were hundreds of young people, maybe up to a thousand, moving along toward Odenplan. There they stopped, brandishing their banners, soon filling the whole square. He didn’t immediately realize that this torchlit procession was a protest against him personally, and against his appointment as a professor. But when it did dawn on him, he knew then that his days at this seat of learning were numbered.
But where could he and his family go?
Theodor kept twisting his head to look around, and gestured toward an approaching tram. It was obvious he couldn’t listen to any more of this and wanted to move on. Perhaps they were on their way to friends, or had simply been out for an early walk and now were on their way back home to Karlaplan. The son pulled at his father’s coat like a small boy.
“Where can we go?” Katz repeated in a serious voice that was neither despairing nor reproachful, but simply asking a sincere question. As if he really did want an answer. As if he wanted to find out if there was an alternative he hadn’t yet thought of.
When he looked at Immanuel, his expression was pragmatic rather than melancholy. Then they had gone, without saying goodbye, swallowed up by a new stream of passengers descending from the tram, whose doors opened exactly at the spot where they had been standing.
Immanuel was left standing beside the postbox. The gray envelope remained inside his inner pocket. Under his coat he was still wearing his pajama jacket. Would he get home before the family stirred? Without posting the letter, he crossed the square.