Strindberg's Star (26 page)

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” said Eva, and looked around the sleeping cabin. “Amazing, actually. And she is actually able to operate this thing from her computer?”

“Do you have any reason to doubt her?”

The situation was getting too bizarre, and Eva couldn’t help but laugh. A gloomy gaze from Don cut her short, and instead she asked, “How often do you see each other, you and your sister?”

“We keep in contact, let’s put it like that.”

“And what about your family, do they …”

“Well, you know, it’s complicated,” Don interrupted curtly.

I
n the long silence that followed, he thought of everything he could have told her about Chana Sarah Titelman.

If it hadn’t been so late, if he hadn’t been so deathly tired, it would lead him on to that night of despair in 1994 when she had become older than he, had taken him into her home and cared for him, her older brother, as though he had been a child. What did he care what she called herself, or what she had decided to do with her life? She was the one who had carried him when he hadn’t had the strength to stand.

“T
here are hot water bottles,” said Eva.

She had pulled a drawer out from under the bunk and held up a rubber bed warmer.

At that moment, the car was shaken by a hard bump, and the movement spread through the compartment and made the frosted glass in the train door start to vibrate.

Don looked at the clock.

“The locomotive,” he said.

From outside they could hear the rattle of chains, voices, and steps of people moving around the car. Someone called out, a sharp whistle, and there was another powerful jerk. Then everything was quiet.

Don’s legs wavered as he tried to rise from his seated position by the wall.

“You have to get some sleep,” said Eva.

She moved backward into the bunk, and he hardly had the strength to take the last few steps and lie down beside her with his face turned out toward the room.

The compartment window rattled again as the car was pushed a few yards backward on the track. They lay awake there for a few minutes before the locomotive finally started to pull. Eva could hear the noise from the joints of the rails, a rhythmic thudding through the bunk bed. She had almost fallen asleep when she formed one last whisper:

“But she still said something Jewish before she left. Hex, I mean. And whoever switched the subway wrong in Kymlinge I think she called a schmuck.”

“There is hope,” Don mumbled.

Eva thought she ought to be quiet, but she had to ask anyway. “Why did she call the car the Silver Arrow?”

Don turned toward her and switched off the orange lamp. Then he fumbled in the drawer where she’d found the bed warmer and brought up a blanket, which he spread over her and himself. He laid his head down and stared into the dark and tried to find a rhythm in the vibration of the car as it moved over the rails in the dawn.

“Don?”

The freight car stopped on a side track, another train pulled past, and the roar lingered at the wall as the train rushed away.

“Don?” Eva said again.

“That old rumor,” he said thickly.

“What old rumor,” she said.

With a sigh he turned around and tried to make out her face.

Then, in a whisper, he began to tell her about the ghost train that roves around deep down in the Stockholm subway. The dead gaze out at the living through its windows as its silvery cars open their doors at the platform. And if someone dares to step on …

The words came out of his mouth with drawn-out pauses.

The Silver Arrow, the Flying Dutchman of the underworld, only lets passengers off at Kymlinge, the station of the dead.

W
hen he stopped talking, he could tell from Eva’s breathing that she had fallen asleep. And at a quarter past six, as the freight car was towed out of Västberga heading south, Don, for the first time in forty-eight hours, also dared to relax.

The buzz of the slowly waking city, which they were leaving behind them. Inside the compartment, safe darkness, heavy wheels rhythmically striking the joints of the rails.

Don felt Eva grope for his arm and pull it around herself. He moved close to her body and then slowly began to fall asleep.

T
he plans to leave the city as it was, obliterated, as a monument to the power of the new era’s weapons, had come quite far. But in a practical sense it was impossible, because the people who had lived in Ypres before the war soon demanded to be able to return home. And though they had been told that there was nothing to return to, they refused to change their minds.

In the fall of 1918 the authorities gave up, and temporary camps began to be erected in the trenches of scrap metal that had once been a city. At that point, all that was left of the central square, Grote Markt, were two ruins, burned black: the remains of a colonnade that showed where the cathedral had risen, and the broken bell tower of the medieval cloth hall. It was as though someone with a giant road grader had once and for all scoured Ypres from the flat Belgian landscape.

T
he cause of the city’s misfortunes had always been its strategic position—placed like bait in the middle of the fertile fields of West Flanders, a short distance from the coast toward England, with Germany to the east and France to the southwest. A suitable area for
deployment, with no natural obstacles, that through the centuries had been crossed by nearly every European army.

In October 1914, the Greater German offensive streamed in across West Flanders, heading for the coastal towns and northern France.

Before they got stuck, the Germans managed to surround Ypres on three sides, and from the surrounding low hills, they could bombard the city at will. One month later, in November 1914, over a quarter of a million people were dead or wounded, and the Allies still held the city. This first strike on Ypres was later called
der Kindermord,
the Massacre of the Innocents, because an entire generation of teenagers had been obliterated on the muddy fields of West Flanders. Barely six months later, in April 1915, the slaughter began again. After a few weeks of artillery fire, there was practically nothing left of the medieval Ypres.

The third blow became the iconic picture of the madness of World War I and has gone down in history under the name Passchendaele. Four months of pelting rain and bottomless mire, in which wave after wave of youths were thrown at barbed wire and machine-gun fire. The Allies’ attempt to break a hole in the German front continued until November 1917, and its only result was that hundreds of thousands more people died. After this came a time of resignation and exhaustion, and both sides awaited the end of the war in the same positions they had occupied on the day the battles had begun.

W
ith the help of reparations for war damages, which would be one of the reasons for the next big clash, Ypres began to be built up again during the fall of 1918.

For those who didn’t want to forget, there was a marked path that led out to the trenches of World War I. It began at the monumental facade of the Cloth Hall and ran with yellow arrows along Meensestraat, where wave upon wave of young men had marched on their way to the fields of slaughter to the northeast.

A triumphal arch was built in memory of the British soldiers whose
bodies had never been recovered, and it was named the Menin Gate. Fifty-five thousand names were carved into its stone panels. The other approximately half million fallen were buried in the hundreds of cemeteries outside the city walls. There they rest under white crosses, in straight rows that are miles long.

Saint Martin’s Cathedral was rebuilt from the photographs that remained after the war, but the spire was redesigned in Gothic style. Soon it once again towered high over the merchant halls of Grote Markt, its defiant tip aimed at the sky from which the incendiary bombs had once fallen.

F
rom the spire of Saint Martin’s, one could make out a white light that was slowly approaching the southern city limits of Ypres. The freight terminal waited there like a yellow rectangle. Down on lively Rijselsestraat, the last bar had closed, and in the quiet night, you could hear the whistle of the train clearly, although it was still many miles away.

I
t rattled and shook inside the lounge of the freight car as Don unfolded the Belgian railroad company’s blueprints on the surface of the table between the easy chairs. He had found it in the briefcase Hex had sent along, and it had an overview of the freight depot’s rail yard. His sister had circled track number seven and written a note in ink about their estimated time of arrival.

Don had tried along with Eva to estimate how much distance there was between track number seven and the depot’s exit, and they had ended up with a distance of about five hundred feet. The attorney had assured him that she would be able to run the short distance without help, but it was only after he’d examined her calf that Don understood that she hadn’t just wanted to appear brave. Because where there had once been an ugly gash, there was now only a bit of scar tissue. Eva had already removed the bits of surgical tape. Don thought that he might have overestimated the depth of the cut and that his medical
knowledge was out of date. Still, it seemed strange somehow, how quickly she had healed.

T
hey had been traveling in the car for more than twenty hours now. Don had been awake since they passed Hässleholm. It had already been lunchtime then, and the sun had been very strong; it made the compartment stale and stuffy.

When they arrived in Helsingborg, he had risked opening the sliding door of the freight car to let in a little fresh air. From the sound of the sea, he had realized that they had been towed to a waiting area down by the harbor, and when he looked out, the gray-black water had been calm beyond the railroad tracks, at the end of the quay. He wondered whether he should go out and try to move around for a bit, but then he had heard Eva calling from inside the dark car. So he had let the sliding door roll shut once again in front of the opening of the Masonite corridor.

They had eaten a simple lunch. Vegetable soup from Hex’s canned goods, a glass of white wine each, crispbread, and crackers. For dessert Eva had found a jar of preserved fruit, and afterward they had started up the laptop.

On the Internet, they had been able to follow the Swedish police’s hunt for new leads, and Eva had sent off messages to the law firm in Borlänge to see if they might be able to get help there. But there had been no results yet.

A
nd now, as they sat there before the layout plans in the lounge, the heavy freight car finally began to slow down.

They remained in the easy chairs, waiting, for over an hour after the train had stopped, for the last voices outside the car to grow quiet and disappear. By quarter to three, they could hear only distant cries from some blaring loudspeaker, in a language that sounded like a mix of English and German.

Don nodded at Eva to follow him out through the narrow Masonite
passage. At the secret wall, he carefully lifted away the outer locks. Then he stood and listened again for a short time before he finally dared to turn the key in the lock of the sliding door and start to pull it aside with small movements.

W
hen Don stuck his head out into the night air, he saw that the rail yard was lit only here and there, and that the path was open to the exit of the terminal, only a few hundred yards away. That was blocked by two simple wooden bars, and next to those was a dark sentry box. Two night-shift workers in yellow vests were squatting at the foot of a crane. They seemed to be busy with some sort of welding work, because there were occasional sparks from a white-blue flame.

Don helped Eva climb down from the freight car, and she landed with her high heels in the gravel. Then he dug around in the bag and found the cylinder-shaped inhaler that contained trichloroethylene. Took two slurping breaths and felt the liberating calm appear. He rolled the sliding door shut and breathed in the scent of rubber and diesel. Each step crunched as they began to move toward the yellow and black bars at the exit. Somewhere far behind them they thought they heard someone shout.

Don quickened his steps, and thirty seconds later they had managed to pass the sentry box and were on their way out into something that looked like an industrial area.

There they temporarily took shelter behind a Dumpster and waited for a while to see whether someone inside the freight yard had seen them.

But when no one appeared, Don took the map that Hex had sent along out of his shoulder bag, so that they could find their way to the central neighborhoods of Ypres. Eva pointed to an open place that appeared to be called Grote Markt, whose edges were marked by several red circles with the letter H on them.

H
otel Langemark was squeezed into a brick building from the 1600s that was so narrow that it had space for only a few rooms, despite being sixty feet high. It sported white-lattice arched windows; and like every building that surrounded Ypres’ medieval square, Grote Markt, the building had been rebuilt from the ground up after the war, brick by brick.