Strindberg's Star (31 page)

The flood had reached so high that its surface lapped above the lowest row of plaques. He hoped that the cement seams at the openings of the compartments still fit tightly.

“You don’t need to come down!” Don called up to Eva.

There was only enough light for one, after all, and hardly even that.

T
aking shallow breaths, he made his way down to the last dry step. He let the lighter go out so it could cool off again. The muffled sound of the rainstorm was far above him.

Then he struck the lighter again and leaned out from the wall to the left, so that he could examine the closest row of plaques.

“Nineteen oh seven … 1908, 1909.”

The lighter burned Don’s fingers, and he swore and shook his hand in front of him.

In the dark he tried to form an image of how the niches might be placed. The numbers went from left to right, and 1909 was the last one he had managed to reach. He needed to stretch another four numbers away to reach plaque 1913.

It would be very close to the limits of what he could do without having to wade out into the sludgy water.

H
e grasped the edge of the opening, which he could just reach above his head, with his hand, then leaned forward, hanging by one arm, as far as his stiff back would allow. He extended his other hand toward the wall of plaques and struck the lighter again:

–1912–
BELLEMÈRE GEORGES
MORT POUR LA FRANCE LE 23–4–1915
BLESSURES DE GUERRE

Don let the lighter go out and heaved himself back. Just a little rest. He closed his eyes and listened in the dark. Then he opened his eyes, one last try, just a little bit more.

He stretched out as far as he could with his arm. A harsh sound as the flame crackled to life. It flickered before him:

–1913–
CAMILLE MALRAUX
MORT POUR LA FRANCE LE 22–4–1915
TUÉ À L’ENNEMI

E
lena knew very well that she wasn’t the only person the foundation had fostered. After finding her, Vater had built up a network of parapsychological research centers all over northern Europe. The children who had been identified there as psychic-gifted had also been lured to Wewelsburg with promises of stipends and scholarships, but her powers had remained of superior quality, impossible to match.

The other children had had to work in small groups of twelve—for some reason, the most favorable combination. The foundation’s men had then tried every method to develop their receptive abilities. Still the children’s minds had proved to be hopelessly dull, and throughout the years she had remained Vater’s first and most prized discovery.

H
e had given her his loving attention as one chosen and adopted. Even before Elena had been able to understand what they were, Vater had shown her the oldest sketches from deep within the source.

The visions had sneaked into the edges of the purely technical descriptions of the cavity that had been made by the scientists early on. Isolated, hasty drawings in the margins that seemed to have been written by a different hand.

But only a few of the original researchers had had any psychic aptitude for taking in the astral fields that were hidden in the underworld. And those whose notes had been affected had dismissed it as a phenomenon that lacked any rational weight.

Everything had changed when they had discovered that one of the involuntary sketches had the form of a self-recursive molecule that no one had ever seen before. It could have been a coincidence, but soon the incident had been repeated, in sketches of building blocks for materials of more and more bizarre quality.

The visions had seemed to appear without any internal order, and interpreting them soon became the foundation’s most important project. The notes that remained after contact with the source ceased had been enough to fill many decades with meticulous scientific work.

O
nly afterward, when the meaning of each vision had been exhausted, had the men of the foundation tried to conjure up new discoveries. There had still been samples of the sparkling powder left, preserved in lead-enclosed capsules of glass.

This peculiar dust carried with it a trace of the spiritual energy that ruled in the underworld. A lingering shimmer, only perceptible to someone who had a sufficiently sensitive mind and soul.

T
his had essentially been Elena’s gift, and she had helped them come further than anyone had dared to hope. Oblivious to her own history, she had, like an obedient child, been rewarded with unrestricted affection from her stepfather for all the detailed pictures she had been able to sketch during the first years.

T
hen, when her body had just begun to change into that of a woman, the powder in the containers hadn’t spoken to her anymore. It had just lain there under the glass like gray flakes of ash, lifeless and mute.

When Vater pointed out that she was failing more and more often these days, Elena had defended herself by saying that she couldn’t help
it if the material in the glass capsules had exhausted its power. But when the other children produced new discoveries, she had been exposed and had to admit that her mind had become insensible and blunt.

It had been described as a remarkable favor that Vater had kept her with him anyway. For him, she had already served her purpose, and searching for a new role had been her way of trying to remain close to him, her only family, and to justify her existence. The bonds of love and fear that connected her to Vater had grown so strong that she couldn’t envision another path.

E
lena had learned to use her body as a weapon from the men in Sicherheit. She had proved to have remarkable talent for that too. They had taught her to control machines whose strength she could never have dreamed of. They had drilled her in close combat and laughed at her until she had learned to control the revealing play of her facial movements.

S
o in an unexpected manifestation of sentimentality, her stepfather had given her the task of bringing Erik Hall’s discoveries home. Vater could have sent someone else, which in hindsight would probably have been a much better idea.

She had succeeded—and failed. That was the message that had been repeated these past few days. Now it would be her job to fix everything that had gone so inconceivably wrong.

And with the ankh in the vault of the banking house, the perceptions of whispers she thought she had heard went quiet again. They had disappeared along with her memory of another life. What remained was the lingering sense of entrapment, a feeling of having been trapped.

W
hen Don had managed to get back up the stairs from the lower level of the mausoleum, he was forced to lean forward, support himself against his knees, and take deep breaths to get the sickly stench of sewage out of his lungs. And as he stood there panting in the bluish white light on the dirty tile floor, his thoughts wandered to what he had actually hoped to find.

A carved image of Strindberg’s ankh and star? A clue? What had he hoped for? A sketch of the Bunsen burner’s spheres, stuck between the plaque on the niche and the cement wall?

“S’iz nor vi redn tsu der vant,”
Don groaned to himself and shoved the hatch back to reduce the nauseating smell. “It’s like trying to talk to a wall.”

Then he shuffled over to the wall of the mausoleum, where he sank down with his arms around his thin legs. And there he sat until a shoulder bag suddenly was dangled in front of his face.

“You might need this,” said Eva.

Don took the bag from her hand and searched greedily inside it until he found a Bulgarian antianxiety medication, which he didn’t even remember having taken with him from his office in Lund.

When the colorful pills landed on his tongue, his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of chloral hydrate. Then he swallowed and took a quick breath from the trichloroethylene inhaler. All to hasten the chemical calm.

His inhalations must have caused his eyes to roll back for a few seconds, because Eva seemed nervous when she shook his arm.

“So what’s down there?” she asked when he had once again managed to focus his eyes on her.

“Nothing,” said Don.

“Isn’t Malraux buried here?”

Don cracked his neck and looked up at the glass globes on the ceiling.

“I thought it couldn’t be a man,” Eva mumbled. “So we’ll just have to …”

“Yes, Camille Malraux is down there,” Don interrupted. “
Gants geshtorben,
completely dead, as long as his niche isn’t empty.”

Eva crouched down in front of him. After a minute of silence she said, “And there was nothing else?”

“Go down and see for yourself, if you’re so interested.”

“The dates were right? The spelling of his name?”

“It just said,
‘Tué à l’ennemi.’
Killed by the enemy.”

He looked at her and smiled faintly.

“A dead end, you could say.”

E
va sat still for a bit without saying anything. Then she got up and went over to the dark opening toward the cemetery, where the rain just kept on pouring down. She rested one hand against a mold-speckled pillar, and with the other she smoothed a strand of her upswept hair. Don closed his eyes and listened to the patter of the rain.

“Camille Malraux,” he heard Eva say. “Camille Malraux,
tué à l’ennemi.
Killed by the enemy. A postcard sent to a beloved man who died in the war.”

He heard the scrape of her boots, and when he looked up, the attorney had turned toward him.

“What does it mean?”

A drab green trench coat, her thin arms crossed. Her handbag hanging over her shoulder, her sullen face.

“That we have a taxi waiting,” said Don.

He placed the strap of his bag over his shoulder and began to gather the strength to stand up. Eva remained standing like a shadow in front of the falling rain.

“Eberlein was so eager to know what you had found at Erik Hall’s house.”

Don sighed and leaned back against the wall again.

“He probably thought it was about something else. Maybe the diver knew more than what he told me. It was only by chance that I happened to find that postcard; it doesn’t really have to mean anything, does it? Erik Hall could actually have written it all himself. Maybe he had a burning interest in World War One.”

“Still, there is a Camille Malraux,” said Eva, “who is lying in niche number 1913 in the Saint Charles de Potyze cemetery outside of Ypres. And the date is correct; he died on April twenty-second in a gas attack at Gravenstafel.”

She left the opening of the mausoleum, walked back to him, and extended her hand.

“Let me look at it again.”

Don took the postcard from the inner pocket of his jacket. It had almost been destroyed by the rain; the edges of the paper had softened and begun to disintegrate. He turned it over and saw that at least the ink hadn’t begun to run. Then he gave it to her, and she mumbled her way through the lines one more time:

la bouche de mon amour Camille Malraux

le 22 avril

l’homme vindicatif

l’immensité de son désir

les suprêmes adieux

1913

The tip of her nose had taken on a reddish tone from the cold. Thin lips, lines in her forehead, the transparent eyes moving from left to right.

Eva turned the card over and looked once more at the picture of the church.

“Could it be some sort of wordplay?” she said. “A code?”

“It could be a nonsensical old postcard that the man in the mine had planned to save until he was old, until he happened to kill himself with the help of an awl instead,” Don said. She didn’t smile.

“La bouche de mon amour Camille Malraux,”
Eva said. “This is my beloved Camille Malraux’s mouth.”

She fixed her eyes on Don, and it looked as though she was expecting a little help. Finally he took a deep breath and made an effort: “Maybe they’re sitting together at a café on Grote Markt. World War One is raging, but there is still hope. The man in the mine has an old postcard of the cathedral as it looked before the battles began. It means something special to them. Maybe they promise each other something. The man asks Camille Malraux to press his painted lips to the postcard, and then he puts it in his pocket, to save it. Much later he writes these phrases as a reminder of their love. Something like that?”

“Yes. Who knows?” said Eva.

But at least she seemed satisfied that he had made an effort, because she sat down on the tile floor at his side.

“And what then?” she said.

“The date he chooses is the day Camille Malraux dies, April 22, 1915—the gas attack at Gravenstafel. He adds 1913, the number Malraux
lies buried behind. And then he writes the phrase
les suprêmes adieux,
because now he has said good-bye for the last time to someone he loved.”

“But we don’t really know that they loved each other in a purely physical way,” Eva said. “They could have been just good friends, right?”

Don looked at her with surprise.

“But what does that matter?”

“It doesn’t, I just wanted … keep going.”

“In any case, there are only two lines left.
L’homme vindicatif
and
l’immensité de son désir
. The vindictive man and his tremendous desire.”

“Yes?”

“That part about tremendous desire does seem to indicate that there was some sort of attraction,” Don said. “And vindictive … maybe vindictive toward the Germans. Although I think it’s really just
meshuges,
meaningless. A few lines of verse that preserve the memory of a poem they both liked.”

“Baudelaire?”

Don nodded.

“Yes, it’s from Baudelaire, just as she said, that girl in the city archive. I looked up the poem in the war museum before I found the note about Malraux’s grave.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. All three phrases were in the same poem in
Les fleurs du mal,
The Flowers of Evil.
Baudelaire was prosecuted and sentenced because of it, and parts of the collection were banned in France until the fifties, because it was considered to be so incredibly perverted.”