Strindberg's Star (14 page)

Then the SS guards climbed up on the roof of the car, like a flock of ravens in their black coats. Once there they unbuttoned their pants and pissed down into the holes in the rusty metal roof. And Bubbe had been so thirsty—
a shand!
what shame!—that she clawed her way up over the children’s backs to fill her mouth with the Germans’ warm urine.

T
he car gave a sudden lurch, and through his sticky eyelashes Don managed to make out a sign that said
ENKÖPING
25
.

Then his stomach acid must finally have dissolved the triazolam
in the white Halcion tablets, because the next time he closed his eyes, it was as though someone had pulled a plug.

W
hen he once again had the sensation of being awake, Don noticed that his body was falling slowly. He was sinking, floating like a feather down through an abyss, past the rounded walls of a tunnel. And when he finally got his sticky eyelashes open, he saw that a blue-violet light was glittering from the inside of the walls.

He floated like a shadow past the trickling light, but then a great void opened up under him. He was sucked down into it faster and faster, until he finally landed in a deep layer of dust.

He had sunk all the way up to his calves into the powdery blanket, and when he moved his boot, the dust was swept along with it; it spread through the violet light like a fan of ash.

Don took another step and it felt as though he could sail and could put his foot back down however he liked, as though he no longer weighed anything.

His feet paddled forward in slow motion, across the surface of the dust, and at the very end of the void he could see the edge of a pool. A stone rose out of the water in the pool, and there, on the top of the stone, was something that looked like a bundle. No, not a bundle … there was someone sitting there, someone whose face was hidden in lank black hair.

Then Don heard a voice he thought he recognized come from the stone. It was piercingly unpleasant, but at this distance it was impossible to make out her words.

He must … go in the cold water; he waded out to the stone and was soaked up to his waist. At the same time, ice-cold fingers slid up through his throat and tightened along his trachea.

When he finally got close, he stretched his hand out to the long hair that hung in front of the woman’s face. But then he stopped himself, because he thought of Bubbe for some reason, and how he had
never seen his grandmother’s black hair loose, only tied up in a knot. And he was aware that he knew the meaning of every word that he heard muttered, but still he couldn’t understand:

“Di nacht kumt. Red tsu der vand, di nacht kumt.”
Night falls and I speak to a wall.

“Bubbe? Grandmother?”

Don was almost sure that he really had spoken the question, and yet he hadn’t been able to hear his own voice.

At that second, a white light began to expand from the lank hair, and when he looked up above the crown of the woman’s head, he saw that a rectangle of lights several meters high had towered up behind her back.

“Loz mich tsu ru, Don. Loz mich tsu ru.”
Leave me alone.

He wanted very much to say that he would never leave her, but the ice in his throat wouldn’t release its grip.

“S’iz nisht dain gesheft,”
said the piercing voice. None of your business.

Bubbles of new words collected under the knot in his trachea, but he couldn’t get an answer to force its way through the ice. It lay like a lid in his throat.

“S’iz nisht dain gesheft, Don!”

At the same instant that Bubbe’s scream died away in the void, it was as though someone had blown a powerful breath through the white rectangle behind her, and a cloud of shining dust loosened from its surface.

The cloud of dust swept through the air, past Bubbe on the stone, and just as it washed over Don, it was as though someone seized him. He could feel himself being dragged upward and backward by his arms and now he soared back up toward the tunnel again.

When he turned his head to see what it was that was holding him, he saw that the dust had been molded into a figure with a face of light. The face had two holes for eyes, and there was something black on its forehead that spun very quickly.

Far below him he could hear the piercing voice once again:

“Don, du kenst mir nisht pishn oyfn rukn meynendik as dos iz bloyz regen!”

Closer and closer to the tunnel now; soon he would be out.

“Don, du kenst mir nisht pishen oyfen rukn meinendik as dos iz bloyz regen!”

Then he felt an intense pain just above his eyes. And when he looked back up toward the bright face of dust, the black thing on its forehead had begun to rotate more and more slowly, feebly, sluggishly, and even before it had stopped moving, he recognized the shape of a swastika.

“Y
ou really must have taken a wrong turn, now.”

The attorney’s voice through the darkness.

“I don’t think so,” the thin-haired man answered.

Don got his eyes to open and turned his aching neck. Eva had moved up to the edge of the seat; she sat with her hand on the back of the driver’s seat.

“But you should have continued up toward Bergsgatan to get to the police station. Now we’ve driven way too far.”

“Du kenst mir nisht pishen oyfen rukn meinendik as dos iz bloyz regen,”
said Don.

The attorney gave a start and turned to him.

“A Yiddish expression.
Du kenst mir nisht pishen oyfen rukn meinendik as dos iz bloyz regen.
”

The thin-haired man’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“You can’t piss on my back and make me think it’s only rain.”

The attorney faced the front again: “I demand to know where we’re going now.”

But no answer, only the dull sound of the car’s tires against the asphalt streets of Stockholm.

Don could vaguely make out the voice blaring from the speakers at some demonstration when they rolled past the light sculpture at
Sergels Torg. Then he saw the entrance of the department store NK through the tinted glass of the window, shadows of all those people with shopping bags on their way home. The wide stairs of Dramaten, the theater, and after that, out toward Strandvägen and the boats.

After they had crossed the Djurgården Bridge and continued toward Skansen, the thin-haired man suddenly turned left up a winding avenue.

After they had passed the majestic oaks along the driveway, the car stopped in a turnaround in front of a turn-of-the-century villa that was covered in dark brown wooden shakes. The roof was irregular, with narrow slopes of glazed green brick. The granite foundation flowed into the surrounding terrace with no transition, which gave the sense that the house had somehow naturally grown out of the original Swedish rock. Through the rear window, Don could see two men come out of the front door of the villa. One was wearing a dark suit and looked as though he was in his sixties. The other was short and had a wide head that seemed to rest directly on his shoulders, which caused him to resemble a toad.

Then the locks popped up, and the man in the dark suit took a few final steps forward and opened the back door on Don’s side. He said that his name was Reinhard Eberlein, and even in this first short phrase, Don could make out a slight German accent.

A
wide hall of stairs with low-hanging chandeliers opened up inside the front door of the villa. The glow from the candles’ shafts of imitation candle wax made Don think of a cave of stalactites, but instead of bulging granite, the walls here were covered in oil paintings.

A scent of dust and national romanticism: Zorn’s Dalarna girls looking at their reflections in the water, Liljefors’s flight of birds, and of course the main attraction—a door-shaped painting by Carl Larsson, centrally placed above the wide, ostentatious staircase. A girl with a parasol, two towheads dressed in frocks. At the very bottom, the title of the painting:
My Loved Ones.
On a tray under a gilded mirror lay several letters, stamped with the German eagle.

The man who called himself Eberlein had hooked Don’s arm and led him forward across the creaking parquet. It was presumably the pale gray tone of his face that made Don place him in his sixties, but now he had begun to wonder, because the German was moving as lithely as a cat alongside him. His body thin and sinewy under the elegant suit, a slender slope to his shoulders, and on his pointed nose sat a pair of nonreflective eyeglasses. Below the round, rimless glasses,
his mouth was a shade too red, and his lips seemed to have become stuck in an inward smile.

Ahead of them, the other man, who still resembled a toad more than anything else, had already made it halfway up the stairs with Eva Strand. Don’s eyes followed the way the attorney’s hand slid along the white-glazed railing on her last few steps up toward the balustrade of the upper floor.

The two policemen from Säpo didn’t seem to have any intention of following them farther into the house, and the last thing Don noticed, once Eberlein had guided him so far up that he could look back down at the hallway, was that the thin-haired one was slowly lighting a cigarette.

O
n the upper floor, the Toad led them through a suite of bright parlors that could have been models for a Svenskt Tenn brochure. A birch spiral staircase twined up to a darkened corridor, and at the end of it there was a pair of closed double doors. Eberlein took out two miniature keys, which he had apparently managed to take over from the thin-haired Säpo man. Then he unlocked Don’s handcuffs and gently rubbed his wrists. A heavy scent of cologne rose from the German’s body.

“I hope you realize that you have nothing to be afraid of.” Don heard the accented intonation in his ear. “This will only be a matter of a few questions, asked with utmost friendliness. An exchange of information, if you will.”

The German touched him lightly on the arm.

“This way.”

T
he double doors opened into a vaulted library. The shelves along the high walls of the room stretched from floor to ceiling. Endless rows of the black spines of books, which ended in a wall-to-wall carpet so thick that it would swallow all sound. It was like finding oneself in a cocoon. Centrally placed under the glass lamps was a
dark-stained table, and Eberlein indicated that he wanted them to sit at it.

Green leather seats, brass rivets. Don sank onto the chair, and, hunching down, pulled his leather bag closer to him on his lap. Then he heard someone behind him, probably the Toad, lock the two doors. With a breath that sounded somewhat strained, Eva Strand also took a seat at the table and started to search through her papers.

“As I said, this will just be a purely informal conversation,” Eberlein began, and he brushed Don’s bent back lightly as he walked by.

The cocoon of the library crept a bit closer, and Don could feel Eva trying to get him to wake up with a little nudge. But when he remained silent, she answered in his place: “We don’t understand what this conversation is meant to be about.”

Eberlein pulled out the chair on the other side of the table, adjusted his dark pants, and sat down. Then he twined his fingers together in front of him, and a pair of yellow-green, very deeply set eyes was directed at Don from behind his nonreflective glasses.

“First I would like to welcome you to Villa Lindarne, which is part of the German embassy nowadays.”

“So you have orders from the embassy?” said Eva Strand.

A sudden smile swept over Eberlein’s face.

“The ambassador is what you could call a good friend, but I personally came here to Stockholm only this afternoon. And I would be grateful, as I said …”

He gestured toward her pen.

“Grateful if we could keep this conversation as informal as possible.”

The attorney hesitated for an instant, but then she shrugged her shoulders and put down her pen.

“I’m here to ask a few questions on behalf of a foundation,” said Eberlein. “There is great interest in Germany in a thorough investigation of this matter, for, shall we say, historic reasons.”

“A German foundation that receives help from the Swedish Security Service?” asked Eva Strand.

“Yes, for a short meeting of utmost friendliness.”

Eberlein smiled again, but this time the corners of his mouth didn’t quite follow in his pale gray face.

“In this case, everyone will profit from cooperation.”

“I have a difficult time imagining that the prosecutor in Falun knew about the purpose of this journey.”

“I can assure you that everything has been done properly.”

“If this is about the death of Erik Hall …”

“This matter does not only concern that,” said Eberlein. “I am more interested in investigating exactly
what
Erik Hall actually brought with him out of that mine.”

There was a gravity in the German’s eyes, behind his glasses, that made it hard for Don to look away.

“Did Erik Hall make any suggestion to you that he found any type of document or object down in the mine, besides the missing ankh?”

“He has …” the attorney began, but she was interrupted by a cracking voice.

Don swallowed in irritation, trying to get his voice to work: “Why do you want to know?”

“That, Don Titelman, is a very long story.”

A cough made Eberlein glance over toward the Toad, who had sat down on a stool with his back leaning against one of the bookcases.

“Far too long,” Eberlein repeated.

It looked as though he was waiting, but when Don didn’t say anything further, the German tried again.

“The fact is that the ankh Erik Hall happened to find completely by chance is an object that we have good reason to believe actually belongs to us. You could say that
everything
that was in that mine is a clue to a historic mystery that the foundation has spent many years trying to solve. But now Hall happens to have left us, and you seem to be the only one who can guide the matter farther.”

“I really have trouble understanding why you think I could help you with it,” said Don.