The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (52 page)

The building is immense, five stories tall and the length of an entire city block. I check the address several times, but it’s the right number. The half-ruined facade is covered in graffiti; vast craters gape amid the ornate moldings and the sculpted figures high above, their heads and limbs pried off the stone.

The foyer is littered with beer bottles and cigarette stubs. I climb a grimy staircase to the second floor, a maze of hallways with closed doors. A young man walks past dragging a smashed television on a rickety dolly. I ask him for directions to the jeweler’s studio. He answers in an Australian accent.

—Go to the third floor and make a right. Walk straight to the end.

I follow his instructions to a hallway of glazed white brick, everything coated in graffiti. The corridor ends in a sturdy metal door, the arch above painted in huge black capitals:
HIER SIND SIE SICHER
. It looks like the entrance to an abandoned bomb shelter. A business card is taped to the door.

L. KRARUP—SCHMUCKDESIGN

The door is cracked open, but I knock anyway. A woman’s voice beckons me in.

The studio is cavernous. A series of worktables are pushed against one wall; against the other wall, an aging desktop computer and an assortment of wooden library card catalogs. Tools are everywhere. A rack of hammers in ascending sizes; tongs and files and pliers hanging on a pegboard; a table with soldering irons; a forging anvil, an electric polishing wheel.

The jeweler swivels around toward me. She speaks in German and then in English.

—Can I help you?

She has short gray hair and wears a canvas work apron over her dress, gold spectacles hanging from a chain around her neck. She is eating from a plastic take-out container with a pair of chopsticks.

—Excuse me. A late lunch today—

I tell her I’m trying to identify a piece of my grandmother’s jewelry. The jeweler regards me with mild curiosity, wiping her hands on her apron. I hand her the brooch from my bag. She examines it for a moment and looks up at me.

—Your grandmother gave you this? Where are you from?

—California.

The jeweler frowns.

—But your grandmother wasn’t from California—

—No. She was English. Part Swedish, really.

The jeweler sits down at her workbench. She switches on a bright halogen lamp, looking at the brooch under a swiveling magnifying glass. Her English is accented but fluent and clear.

—Generally, you would say it’s in the Urnes style. There are a few late-Viking Urnes brooches that survive. This is a modern copy of one of them. But not so recent—

The jeweler flips over the brooch. She makes a little sucking sound through her teeth.

—An inscription. Do you know these letters?

—My grandmother’s initials. I don’t know what the symbol is.

The jeweler goes to a bookcase, pulling a huge paperback from the shelf and paging through it slowly. She murmurs something and hands the book to me. It is a glossy auction catalog in some Scandinavian language. On the page there is a photograph of a brooch identical to my own. The jeweler smiles triumphantly.

—I knew I’d seen that symbol before.

The jeweler thinks the brooch is the work of Ísleifur Sæmundsson, an Icelandic silversmith who worked in the early twentieth century. The symbol engraved after my grandmother’s initials is his signature. Ísleifur’s work is quite rare, the jeweler says, and she has never seen his pieces outside of a few museums in Scandinavia. She peers over my shoulder as I look at the catalog.

—It’s in Danish. Do you want me to translate?

The jeweler takes back the catalog and puts her reading glasses on. She translates haltingly, considering her words as she goes. I take notes as quickly as I can.

—Urnes-style brooch by Ísleifur Sæmundsson. Made in—or around—1928. Based on original found on abandoned farm of Tröllaskógur, Iceland, thought to be eleventh century. The Tröllaskógur brooch is told to have belonged to one of the heroines in
Njáls Saga
. Ísleifur was a talented silversmith who revived the Urnes style in the 1920s. He made jewelry inspired by medieval originals. Few examples of his work survive. A fine example valued at nine thousand kronor.

The jeweler smiles.

—It’s a beautiful brooch. And rare. It’s probably quite valuable.

—Does the engraving mean it was commissioned in Iceland?

The jeweler sighs. She puts the brooch under the magnifying glass again.

—The initials could be Ísleifur’s work. They’re well done, they match his signature—

She turns and looks at me.

—But you can’t be sure. Any good silversmith could do it.

—Then someone could have bought it from outside Iceland? And had it engraved locally?

The jeweler frowns. —I’m no expert. But I don’t think this Ísleifur was so famous then. And Iceland was very far away. I doubt he sold his work in other countries.

—Then someone must have bought the brooch in Iceland.

The jeweler takes off her glasses and shrugs.

—Probably. But why does it matter? You’re not going to sell the brooch, are you?

—No.

She nods. —You’ll give it to someone one day. But not for money.

I thank the jeweler and ask her if I can give her anything for her help.

—Do you mind if I take a few photos of the brooch? For reference. It helps my work.

The jeweler puts the brooch under her lamp and takes a few photographs with a digital camera. She turns the brooch in her hand for a final moment and looks at me. Then she hands it back. I sling my bag over my shoulder.

—Can I ask you something? What’s the story behind this building? It’s so damaged.

The jeweler smiles. —I didn’t get to Berlin until ’87, but I know some of the story.

She tells me that when the building was erected a hundred years ago, it was one of the largest shopping arcades in Europe, running the whole length of Friedrichstraβe to Oranienburger Straβe. It had an ornate ribbed dome and a system of pneumatic tubes that whisked messages in capsules. Later the building became a department store, then a showroom of modern appliances, home to one of the first television
broadcasts in Germany. Then the Nazis took the building: they bricked in the skylights and kept French prisoners in the attic. The building was shelled in the Battle of Berlin and fell into disrepair after the war. The dome was pulled down in 1980. A decade later, the building was due to be leveled when a group of artists saved it from destruction.

—I thought we should save this old place. And not just because I needed somewhere to work.

I nod. —I thought maybe the damage was from the war. But what are the words above your door?

—
Hier sind sie sicher
? I didn’t paint that. I went to Copenhagen for a few weeks and when I came back it was there—

—But what does it mean?

She shrugs. —Here you are safe.

The jeweler walks to the door and holds it open for me.

—Just remember, she says. Keep the brooch.

I walk out of the building trying to make sense of what I’ve learned. The brooch is from Iceland, a country with no connection to my grandmother that I’ve ever heard. I cross Oranienburger Straβe and sit on a bench, rereading the jeweler’s translation in my notebook. Halfway through the paragraph, I shut the notebook and start jogging back toward the hostel.

By the time I cross Rosenthaler Platz I’m moving at a dead run. I enter the hostel and take the stairs two steps at a time. Imogen’s letters are in my backpack. It takes a moment to find the right page.

17 October 1916

Dearest –

Eleanor & I went to the London Library today. I picked a tall stack of volumes, but sitting down to them, found myself asleep before ten pages were read. I dreamt of wondrous things – the
stave church at Urnes I told you of, but the famous portals were yet uncarved, so you drew out your knife & we shaped them together – you carving one creature & I the other, their bodies linked fast. You lopped off a piece of the portal as a Souvenir for me, and told me to guard it well, for we were now as joined as two souls could be. Then the carillon tolled, for it was time for us to enter the church, but when you put your hand on the door – I awoke.

I take the brooch out, turning it over in my hands. The silver is cold. I run my finger over the hard flat eye of the dragon, no wider than a blade of grass.

If only I’d never seen it
, I think.
If only I’d never sent for it
.

I go downstairs to the computers and log on to a search engine. I hesitate for a moment. Then I type in
Urnes
.

At midnight I lie awake in my hostel bed, listening to the streetcars halting and starting below, the laughter and voices carried up from the sidewalk cafés. The other guests in my room come and go, sipping and clinking beer bottles, rummaging through bags under the half-light of a bedside lamp, changing clothes and setting out into the night.

The brooch is under my pillow. It is only half a secret now. I’ve spent four hours reading about Norse art.

The “Urnes style” of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the last of several Viking-age styles of animal art. It is named for the stave church at Urnes, which lies on a rise above the blue waters of the Lustrafjord, an inner passageway of the longest fjord in Norway. The intricate carvings on the church’s north portal depict a writhing snake in the jaws of a four-legged creature. Here we meet the zenith of a fluid and highly stylized aesthetic, where animals flail in the embrace of desperate combat, their curling limbs suggesting a physical fate that is at once dynamic and irrevocable.

I know I could go back to England or go back to France, or even go
back home. But I know I won’t do any of those things. Since I got off the plane at Heathrow I’ve been in a world I hardly recognize. I sense a new set of natural laws at work, but I don’t understand what governs them.

The later Urnes style survives in objects created throughout the Nordic world: runestones from eastern Sweden, bronze ornaments from Denmark, silver brooches from southern Iceland. Some scholars believe the creatures represent a Christian vision of the struggle between good and evil. Others contend they depict the Norse legend of Ragnarök, a vision of the end of the world marked by natural disasters and a great battle where gods and men perish alike, leaving two human survivors to begin the world anew. Whatever the inspiration behind the Urnes carvings, in them the viewer recognizes a perverse irony: as each creature clashes against its foe, it becomes more like its enemy, until at last they are intertwined in a death embrace, nearly inseparable from each other—marked by their struggle, but bound by their common fate.

What is the force that guides me toward them? What could you call the thing that pushed Ashley and Imogen together and then pulled them apart? Was it the same force that drove the millions of Europe toward cataclysm, to fight for years against an enemy they had no reason to hate? Next to that Ashley and Imogen were just whitecaps on the sea, the debris of a colossal shipwreck.

Among the exponents of the “modern revival” style was Ísleifur Sæmundsson, a silversmith from the remote eastern fjords of Iceland. Working at a great distance from the art centers of Europe, Ísleifur was notable for fusing modernist influences with Viking age motifs. In his brief career (c. 1925–1937) Ísleifur produced work ranging from sleek Art Deco–influenced jewelry to relatively faithful interpretations of Ringerike and Urnes museum pieces.

I had no business dredging up other people’s past. And there was nothing I could do eighty years later about two long-dead lovers who ought to have been long forgotten. Maybe it was kinder just to forget about it, to let everything go to dust. Maybe that was how the world
softened a cruelty like Ypres, because Ypres and Regent’s Park would look the same after eighty years under the Flemish mud.

I throw back the cover from my bed. I take out my notebook.

What I know for sure:

1. In 1916 Imogen wrote to Ashley mentioning the carvings at Urnes—something they’d evidently already discussed.