Strindberg's Star (19 page)

E
berlein flipped forward a few pages in Strindberg’s oilcloth book.

At the top of the page, Don saw some notes on the weather. They were followed by words about beer and sandwiches, a sketch of birds flying next to the gondola, and a note that Andrée had just stood up on the ballast ring to piss. A short memo that his last greeting to his fiancée, Anna, had been sealed and thrown down as they passed over the island of Vogelsang. And after that, underlined twice:

Frænkel knows!

Don looked up at Eberlein.

“The part about Frænkel was a surprise to Strindberg. All the measurements had been carried out in Andrée’s berth on the
Svensksund,
and the Bunsen burner had been smuggled aboard in a closed canvas sack, along with the ankh and star, just before their departure. The idea was that the secret would be kept from Knut Frænkel, as with all other Swedes, but he must have learned about the existence of the instruments somehow. Strindberg seems to have suspected Andrée; there’s a bit about that further on.”

Eberlein moved a cotton-clad finger across a few words that had run together a bit lower on the page.

“It’s remarkable, actually,” Eberlein continued, “that Nils Strindberg had time to devote energy to this question. The flight was already a catastrophe. When they got out over the harbor, a gust caught the sail and forced the balloon down toward the waves. They had flown so low that the gondola hit the surface of the water with a thud, and once Andrée and Strindberg had finally emptied nine of the sandbags they did float up, but by that time the balloon had rotated half a turn
around its own axis so that it began to go backward. This spinning movement caused several of the important drag-ropes to come unscrewed from their anchors, and they no longer had a way to steer. But instead of cutting the expedition short, Andrée and Strindberg seem to have been gripped by panic at the prospect of losing the ankh and the star in the sea, so they continued to dump out sand. The
Eagle
climbed uncontrolled to a height of nearly two thousand feet. But when they felt the wind, their courage returned, because it was blowing stronger and stronger to the northeast.”

Eberlein pointed to some figures:

“The glaciers and cliffs of Spitsbergen were behind them now; there was black sea below, and Nils Strindberg wrote that he noticed a steamer trying to follow them. They all helped splice the remaining drag-ropes with more rope, but the
Eagle
was now flying too high for this to allow them to steer. They soared into increasingly dense fog; it started to become very cold; and the balloon’s thin silk fabric cooled down. The low air pressure caused them to lose hydrogen much faster than expected, yet Strindberg still took it for granted that they would reach the ray’s position before evening.”

E
berlein picked up a few final objects from the bottom of the metal box: a handful of black-and-white film negatives encased in glass, which he lined up on the table with his cotton fingers. Then he pushed one of the glass plates over to Don, so that the photograph ended up next to the crinkled page of the diary.

“The first picture Strindberg took from the gondola,” Eberlein said.

The negative inside the glass was almost empty of subject matter, except for a thin black line.

“You must remember that the colors are inverted,” said Eberlein. “They’re approaching the white edge of the pack ice.”

Then he pushed over another negative—two bright spheres and a black ray. Below the lower sphere they could see the fused ankh and star above the dark flame of the burner.

“Strindberg took this photograph an hour or so later, down in the sleeping cabin in the gondola. The balloon was now traveling at an altitude of 2,300 feet. Everything was dripping with moisture from the clouds, and that was probably why he dared to light the Bunsen burner and check the position of the ray. The tiniest stray spark would have been a catastrophe, and the
Eagle
would have turned into a fireball.”

“What is that?” Don asked, pointing to some white marks in the lower corner of the negative.

“Points of the compass and the time,” said Eberlein. “Strindberg’s camera was equipped with a mechanism that marked each picture. This was taken just after midnight, dawn on the twelfth of July, and the position of the ray hadn’t changed yet.”

He turned ahead another few pages in the journal, and Strindberg’s handwriting became messier with each page.

“It was the cold from the clouds and the loss of gas that caused the balloon to begin falling. On the morning of July twelfth, ice had started to form on the load-bearing net and the drag-lines, weighing the
Eagle
down by more than a ton. The gondola hit the ice every fifty feet, and as you see, he had difficulty writing. Their course had become more easterly, and they argued about how they could get the balloon to struggle on, up toward the mark made by the Bunsen burner. Around eleven o’clock, Frænkel and Strindberg went to bed, but they didn’t get any sleep.”

Eberlein pointed at several lines:

The next page:

pole buoy sacrificed

“The day after that, the thirteenth of July, they had thrown everything they could do without overboard. The North Pole buoy with the Swedish flag, which they had brought along for looks, wasn’t difficult to sacrifice, but they also started to get rid of quite a lot of provisions. That night one of the drag-lines got caught in the blocks of ice, and they had to stay there for several hours. When they finally managed to get it loose, the sun had come out, and the warmth allowed the balloon to lift. Once again they tried to climb to reach the higher winds and continue to the northeast. But once they got the sails in order, all the warmth had disappeared, and the balloon sank again. There are no notes from that day—Strindberg writes further on that he was far too seasick from thudding against the ice. Their luck didn’t change until July fourteenth.”

Eberlein lifted yet another glass-encased negative from the table. In this picture they could see the spheres again, but something was different here: a hazy ring of light encircled the Bunsen burner, the ankh, and the star.

“It was taken at two in the morning,” Eberlein said, pointing at the numbers on the lower edge of the negative. “They had anchored on a floe of ice, to rest awhile, and the midnight sun was so weak that Strindberg must have had to use his magnesium flash to be able to take a picture at all. The burner seems to have been five or ten meters from the balloon; as you can see, it’s possible to make out the contours of the gondola through the spheres.”

Don angled the negative toward himself but didn’t see anything
other than the thin ray from the star, which fell onto a lower dome that arched over the silhouette of the ankh.

“When Nils Strindberg came back to the balloon, Andrée had taken their position with his sextant and was ready to give up. But when Strindberg showed him …”

Eberlein flipped a few pages ahead in the journal, then stopped, wrinkled his forehead, leafed a few pages back again, and found the spot:

“As you see,” said Eberlein, “the ray had moved. Actually, it shouldn’t have been a surprise for Strindberg. He had, after all, estimated during his calculations at Stockholm University College that the shift happened about every third day. The balloon had left Danskøya on July eleventh, and now it was the fourteenth, and the new position that the North Star pointed out was at a distance of less than thirty miles. They made one last attempt to get the
Eagle
to lift off and threw everything but dry rations, rifles, snowshoes, and the sleds out of the gondola. The lighter weight allowed them to float slowly just over another eighteen miles to the north. At nineteen minutes past seven, they decided that they had come close enough. After he had landed the gondola, Andrée began to empty the balloon of gas. Nils Strindberg lifted out the camera, brushed the snow off of the leather-covered beech frames, and took eleven pictures of the giant silk cover as it sank down onto the ice. The next morning, they assembled the sleds and thus began their hike, the last few miles to the goal of their journey.”

D
on bent forward over the journal and carefully began to turn its pages.

On the pages after the last indication of their position was something that looked like an inventory of what they had brought along. Several of the articles had either been scaled down in weight or crossed out entirely. It ended in a circled note:

6 bottles champagne, gift from the King

When he was about to keep browsing, Don noticed that the page with the list was strangely loose against the bound spine of the book, as though it were poorly attached. Then it came completely loose, and he thought it seemed like the last pages had been ripped out. All that was left now was a single sheet, folded up on top of the back cover. He looked at Eberlein, who seemed to have been waiting for his discovery:

“Isn’t it odd?” said Eberlein. “Of a hundred twenty bound pages, the last thirteen were missing when the journal was recovered at the end of 1899.”

The German pushed a glassed-in negative across the table. It seemed to be the last thing he had to show them.

“The foundation managed to develop a single exposure from the last roll. It was found next to Nils Strindberg’s body, stored in a copper cylinder in the pocket of his felt jacket.”

Within the glass plate that Eberlein had placed before them, Don and Eva could see a negative with black cracks through it. An inverted picture of something that looked like black flakes of sleet. Behind the snow, a white hole shone in the dark ice.

“Did they come to a hole in the ice?” asked Don.

“Not a hole,” said Eberlein. “Look at the edges.”

Don lifted the negative again. The edges of the hole in the picture formed a perfect circle. When he compared it to the figure with binoculars
that was standing next to a small flag at the opening, he realized that the hole in the ice was very large, surely 150 feet in diameter.

“Strindberg must have been the one to take the picture,” said Eberlein, “he was the only one who could use the camera. But we haven’t been able to determine whether it’s Frænkel or Andrée who’s standing there looking down.”

Don tried to invert the colors of the negative, to see it as it must have looked on a July day in 1897. Far away, a circle-shaped, black abyss in the white ice, and right at the edge, the silhouette of the binocular figure. It was as though someone had carved a tunnel straight down into the earth’s interior with a welding torch.

Eberlein gestured toward the markings at the lower edge of the picture.

“Eighty-two degrees and fifty-nine minutes north, the morning of July fourteenth, 1897. They are at the exact location the ray indicated. It must have taken them twenty-four hours to get there after leaving the balloon.”

Don put down the negative and loosened the final, folded sheet from the oilcloth book. He looked up at Eberlein, who nodded. So he unfolded the sheet in front of him and smoothed it flat. A row of columns with numbers ran across the page: date stamps, amounts of precipitation, air pressure, and wind speed.

“This is taken from Frænkel’s meteorological calendar,” Eberlein said.

Then the German turned the sheet over. On the other side, smudged across the tables, ran bled-out, blotted ink with isolated discernible words, out of context, sprawling:

W
hen Don, too, had lifted his eyes from the sparse lines, Eberlein pulled the paper away and returned it to the very back of the checked oilcloth book, with the printed weather notes facing up, and closed the cover.

“And especially in consideration of Anna Charlier, one can say that the end of the story was needlessly tragic. If I may … ?”