Strindberg's Star (8 page)

D
on took his eyes from the
Dalakuriren
article and slowly put down his cup. The ankh had caused his memory to start up, and it couldn’t be stopped: the ankh, a cross with a handle,
crux ansata,
the original cross, the symbol for the planet Venus. A hieroglyph that could mean vital force, water and air, immortality and the universe. Although those were only theories, of course; not even the Egyptologists knew what the ankh stood for.

One theory was that the ankh symbolized a womb; another was that it had originally been created as a picture of Egypt, where the vertical shaft was the Nile while the eye represented the delta of the
Nile valley. Someone who was more practical had suggested that the ankh quite simply depicted a sandal.

On the other hand, if the Rosicrucian Order was to be believed, the symbol of the enlightened, the ankh, could be used as a key to open the gates to the inside of the earth. But who believed the Rosicrucians?

Unfortunately, the answer was a surprising number of the students who came to Don’s seminars in comparative mythology. And for them, it wasn’t just the mysteries of the Rosicrucians that were tempting. Why not Atlantis or flying saucers in Roswell? Why not out-of-context theories about the ten Sephiroth that formed the tree of life in Kabbalah, or a day-long seminar on the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Agartha while you were at it?

W
hen he left Karlskrona after his breakdown at the neo-Nazi demonstration up at the apartment buildings in Galgamarken, Don had stayed with his sister at first.

She had always been a loner, just like him, but by this time, she had become more or less a complete recluse. Once a brilliant student of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology, she had drifted into a shady programmer subculture that had gotten her a lot of money and some major legal problems, under the label of cybercrime. She had never been convicted, though, much due to the fact that she’d been able to vanish to a place where nobody could bother her anymore.

In her home, his sister had taken care of him during that phase when he had totally lost his grip. It was she who had forced him to find a way to challenge those inner demons, and now afterward, he realized that he had truly been saved by exchanging his medical career for the prolonged studies at the dusty history department in Lund.

B
ubbe had filled her cabinet with Nazi symbols like a child who couldn’t stop picking at a scab. For Don, his studies became a way to
tear the wound open in order to find a way out of the darkness of that 1950s house. In his research, he had wanted to dig his way past the symbols that, for him, had been charged with such fear. By confronting them, he had hoped to be delivered from his past and to find some retribution for his grandmother’s fate.

He had devoted the first part of his dissertation to Heinrich Luitpold Himmler’s organization Ahnenerbe, the research department that the chief ideologue of the Holocaust had set up in order to rediscover, or rather reawaken, the mythological legacy of the Germans. Don had followed every tentacle, every sick thread of an idea, to its miserable end: from the use of made-up runes to the idiotic ideas about the spear of fate; from the theories about a lost Aryan homeland at the end of the world, Ultima Thule, to the swastika itself. The symbol for the sun and the cult of Mithras that German romantics falsely linked to the Aryan people and thus equally falsely to the Germanic people.

After the shattering of each myth, it all seemed more and more absurd. It turned out that not even Hitler had believed in Ahnenerbe’s theories. Like everything else, Don could still recall the quote word for word:

In his continued research, Don had dissected the myths surrounding the S rune, the
Wolfsangel
, the sun cross, the SS honor ring, the
Thule Society, Karl Maria Wiligut, and so on, and then finally:
die schwarze Sonne
, the black sun, a crystal plate in a cupboard a long time ago.

In the end, he had been able to prove to himself rationally that every Nazi symbol had either been made up or used completely incorrectly: a set design for the masses that supplied made-up bloodlines in order to justify wiping out those who were different.

But the one who held the emotional core of his fear, the eight-year-old boy he had inside of him, didn’t seem to notice his discoveries and could never be reached by the power of argument. Finally Don had given up, because he couldn’t get any further, and he was left with agony and a rage that he still didn’t know how to shake.

A
fter his dissertation, Don had widened his scope from Nazism to a critical study of symbols and myths in general. But his research had been misunderstood in an unfortunate way.

At first there had been only a few people who noticed that the Department of History had started to offer speculative courses on ancient legends. But once the rumor had started, the country’s most stubborn New Age students streamed to Don’s lectures. For them, this was a place where you could get financial aid to become absorbed in the occultism of the past. And what these incense-scented people could concoct about an ankh in a mine shaft, as a symbol for the keys to the underworld, was something that Don preferred not to think about.

H
e blinked suddenly and shook his head. Then he got up from his chair and kept his eyes on the view.

Sheynkeit,
beauty.

There was beauty in what was simple. So what was the simple solution to the ankh in the mine? Presumably something much more ordinary than what that diver would like to believe.

Don pushed open the glass door of the motel restaurant and walked
down the wheelchair ramp toward the parking lot. He stopped next to the old Renault 5 and took a few last breaths of fresh air. How much farther could it be up to Falun? Five hours?

Don opened the car door and lifted his black shoulder bag from the seat. After a minute’s search, he found the right box and pulled out the blister pack. Pushed out five light brown capsules, times forty: two hundred milligrams of Ritalin. Crushed them with his teeth to make them take effect more quickly.

It would come about the time he got to Gränna, he thought, that tickling feeling of alertness. Then maybe another helping at Mjölby, before he turned off toward Motala and Örebro.

Then continue on Route 50 until he began to approach Falun. According to the directions, he should look for a sign that said Svartbäck. A right on a gravel road, and left six hundred yards after the fallen barn.

Then, the diver had said, he just had to keep an eye out for a fenced-in yard and a sunporch.

A
gust of wind rattled the bedroom window. A few drops of rain hit the pane, and then came the dull rumble.

Erik Hall was sitting in his bed and had drawn the blanket up over his knees. On the nightstand next to him was a bottle of gin and a half-empty glass. The tired springs made the mattress sag into a hammock under his heavy body, and as the thunderheads darkened the sky out there, all the light slowly disappeared.

T
hat cunt of a photographer really had given it away; everything he’d told her had been there, distorted and crooked, in
Dalakuriren
’s article.

The ankh, the words about the key to the underworld, and then above that: the picture of his face, which no one would ever be able to take seriously again. Coming back one week later and suddenly telling about an Egyptian cross that he’d discovered down in the mine … She had made him look like a fucking clown.

Erik let the bitter liquor roll around in his mouth.

A fucking clown … was that what the girls in Dyke Divers had thought when he’d sent them his pictures of the ankh?

A fluttering flash of light, short pause, and then thunder and the black masses of water.

He had only to close his eyes to be back down in the vault, to hear the cracking sound as the ankh was cut away from the fingers of that hand, and to stagger backward again, crashing down into the cold water of the pool.

There was a sudden hiss as Erik drew in air between his closed teeth, in order to be able to find his way back out of the depths of the shaft.

He opened the bedroom door into the dining room and tried to avoid looking over at the corner with the diving bag, where the ankh lay rolled up in its wine-colored towel. But he couldn’t help it.

The bundle was so light as he lifted it up out of the bag, and he let the tips of his fingers grope through the terrycloth until they brushed the shaft of the ankh.

Way down below the slope of pines, beyond the haze of rain, was the lake. If he were just to go out in the storm, down the dark path, and then throw in the ankh, deep, deep … then wouldn’t that cunt, the Dyke Divers, and all the readers of that fucking paper be satisfied? Yes, he might as well throw himself in too, while he was at it. One thing was certain: No one would look for him.

But then the towel loosened, exposing the perfect white metal, which no one would voluntarily throw into a lake. Erik let his fingers stroke along the eye to the sound of the hammering rain. A chill crept from the ankh, as though it had lain in a freezer; it shot through his fingertips, through his wrist, up to his arm, and he felt a longing for light.

E
ven though it was only late afternoon, it could easily have been midnight, and the glow from the low-hanging porcelain lamp was only strong enough to light up a small part of the kitchen table.

He sat down on the sofa with his back to the window and carefully laid the ankh down in the middle of the pale circle of light.

It was perhaps a foot long, and as far as he could tell, it was cast in a single piece. But the metal was not entirely smooth: Some sort of decoration twined over its cold surface. Striations a millimeter high, too finely made to be able to read with the bare eye against all that white.

He had tried a magnifying glass and a strong flashlight, without result. When he gave up, he let the ghostly ankh lie hidden, so he didn’t have to look at it, until Titelman came. If that bastard was ever going to come.

He looked over at the notebook by the telephone where he’d written down the researcher’s number in smeary pencil. Maybe he should call again … maybe he should … but wait …
a pencil
?

Erik pulled himself along the bench, toward the telephone, and got hold of the notebook and pencil. He began to wind the next torn-off page around the shaft of the ankh.

When the thin paper was pulled tight enough, he took the pencil and let its blunt tip begin to stroke back and forth across the designs.

A flash just behind his neck made the pencil jerk in his hand, and he reflexively turned toward the window. He could barely make out the fence through the haze, and he started to count: a hundred one, a hundred two, and the crack came at a hundred three, two humongous pot lids struck together. The thunderstorm would come right over the house if it continued like this.

When Erik’s gaze returned to the notebook paper wrapped around the shaft of the ankh, he saw that the pencil must have continued to sketch entirely of its own accord. In the light layer of pencil lead, a row of meandering symbols stood out:

A dry feeling spread through his mouth, and now he watched as the pencil began to move faster and faster, as though it were guided by someone else’s hand.

When the first page was full, his hand—even though he truly didn’t want to see more—automatically ripped another sheet from the notebook and twirled it into place around another part of the shaft, and the tip of the pencil began to work again. It wasn’t possible to stop it.