Strindberg's Star (16 page)

“Everything went as planned on the first and second nights, and when the group camped under the open sky, Hedin sketched the geometry of the terrain with his charcoal pencil so that he wouldn’t lose his way. But on the third night, the sandstorm came. According to what Hedin wrote later, it raged for all of seventy-seven hours. When the black dust finally settled, the whole landscape around their camp had been transformed. The storm hadn’t just moved the three-hundred-foot-tall sand dunes—they were obliterated by the wind, and where there had been sand before, there were now petrified trees stretching their branches toward the sky. When he had been wandering among the trunks for a while, Hedin discovered some white bars
sticking out of the sand, and when he came closer, he saw that he was standing at the remains of a fence with widely spaced posts. Along with his servants, he followed the fence as it stretched to the west, and after only a few miles, they reached a group of empty houses, the remains of a city that the strong winds had swept clean of hundreds, or who knows, perhaps thousands of years’ worth of layers of sand. Hedin later wrote that his servants demanded to leave the place, which they called the Ivory Houses, but for his part, he danced around with joy and was convinced that he’d found another Pompeii.

“In some of his first notes, Hedin wrote that the houses appeared to be built of wood, more specifically poplar. Poplar, in the middle of a sea of sand! But although the white facades felt hard at first, they fell apart like cracked glass when he tapped them with his riding whip. Hedin also painted some pictures showing that some of the walls were covered in frescos: naked praying women, with something that Hedin interpreted as an Indian caste mark painted on their foreheads. Men with peculiar weapons, and at their sides, Buddha figures with the lotus flower in their hands. Hedin came to the conclusion that he found himself in something that had once been a temple. Today we know it as Dandan Oilik, the buried city. But what is less well-known,” Eberlein continued, “is what Hedin found
under
the buried city on that first day. In a letter, which we have access to, Hedin describes quite dramatically how by mere chance he stepped through the floor in one of the grandest buildings and crashed headlong down onto a stone mosaic in what seemed to him to be a much older burial chamber. He never succeeded in dating it. Around the greenish black heart of the mosaic lay twelve wrapped-up bodies, mummies that had been preserved and dried out by the desert air long ago. Then, when he walked closer, he found an ivory-colored cross in the shape of the hieroglyph called the ankh on the chest of one mummy. On top of the ankh, on its crosspiece, someone had long ago placed yet another object: a star made of five staffs protruding from a hub. The shape that the Egyptians called
seba
, which they regarded as a symbol for
the god Osiris, ruler of the extreme periphery, the god who holds the keys to the very underworld.”

Eberlein stopped speaking and observed Don for a long time as though searching for answers.

“Ver volt dos geglaibt?”
Don said at last.

Eberlein didn’t release him from his gaze.

“I mean, a star and an ankh in a sunken burial chamber under a sunken city …”

Don’s eyes were burning, twenty-four hours without real sleep.

“
Ver volt dos geglaibt?
Who would have believed that?”

Eberlein gave a weak smile. “But you see … Sven Hedin never
tried
to convince anyone of the import of his discovery in the burial chamber under Dandan Oilik. The fact is that he considered the whole story embarrassing until his dying day. Because you can’t very well tell people about sensational, historical objects that you found and later happened to … lose.”

He coughed, took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and wiped his lips. “Dreadfully dry air in here, isn’t it? Perhaps you would like something to drink?”

Eva Strand’s expression didn’t change, but Don nodded. The German turned to the Toad, who got up from the darkness in the corner, mumbling. When he waddled out into the corridor, he left one of the library doors ajar, and Don could glimpse the red rays of the sunset in the villa windows beyond the corridor and the spiral staircase. Then he heard Eberlein’s voice again.

“We know that Hedin brought the ankh and the star back with him to the oasis at Kashgar, because they’re noted on his inventory list from the excavations. What happened later was presumably largely due to Hedin’s personality. He was nearly obsessed with correctly describing, by himself, each object that he discovered, before he packed them in shipping boxes to be sent back to the scientific academies in Stockholm. But with the ankh and star, that proved to be impossible. Despite a few primitive tries, Hedin didn’t even succeed
in determining what material the objects were made of. To hide this failure from his colleagues, he then sought the advice of an acquaintance who was living in France at the time. He placed the ankh and star in a sealed brass case, along with a letter in which he described the discovery and asked for a technical assessment. The parcel is noted in Hedin’s papers, and it arrived, as far as we have managed to ascertain, from Kashgar to the Hospital St. Louis in Paris on February 2, 1895. The hands that loosened the rivets of the box were wrapped up in strips of linen to relieve certain chapped rashes that had been brought forth by long nights of experiments with alchemy. They were hands that, for a month’s time, could hardly hold a pen.”

Eberlein’s face seemed to have become younger somehow in the soft incandescent light from the glass lamps; the grayness was on its way to disappearing, and now it was just as though he were waiting for Don to say the name:

“Strindberg?”

A nod. Don tried to keep his mouth closed, but he couldn’t help laughing with a hoarse hack, which disappeared into the wall-to-wall carpet and the leather-bound books. But the German’s eyes didn’t yield; he just continued:

“It might seem like an amazing coincidence, but you must understand that the Swedish upper class at this time was a very limited circle. Besides this, Strindberg was a person whom Hedin knew had access to the analytical laboratory at the Sorbonne, which at the time was one of Europe’s most technologically advanced facilities.”

Don glanced at Eva, but she only rolled her eyes. Then he turned back to Eberlein and said, “But just the thought that Sven Hedin, of all people, would send something to August Strindberg …”

“Yes?” Eberlein asked.

“You know that they were mortal enemies, don’t you?”

“Oh, but that animosity came later! And it’s possible,” continued
Eberlein, “that it’s connected with the way Strindberg handled Hedin’s two objects. No, up until 1895 they had a good relationship.”

Eberlein smiled again.

T
he sun must have already gone down, because the light in the vault of the library hardly changed as the doors swung open and the Toad came back. He placed the tray on the table with a bang. A silvery tea kettle, three gold-rimmed cups on gold dishes, and alongside them a discreet pile of white cotton, which Don realized after an instant must be several pairs of thin gloves.

Eberlein got up and walked around the table, and there was a clinking sound as he arranged the porcelain with a few dainty movements. The steam from the cups spread a soporific scent of poppy and cinnamon, and Don sneaked a few fingers into his bag to hunt for two capsules of energizing amphetamine derivatives. The German meditatively raised the porcelain cup to his red lips.

“In any case,” Eberlein said when he’d taken a sip, “Strindberg’s experiments with the ankh and the star went very poorly. He was, of course, something of a charlatan when it comes down to it, a poet-chemist, as he himself wanted to be called. When it came to determining the origin and properties of a material, his knowledge was entirely too superficial. In addition, Strindberg was somewhat moody during this period, and after a month of failed experiments, he grew tired of ‘Hedin’s desert things,’ as he called them. Because he didn’t want to admit that his experiments had gone badly, he just sent a short explanation in which he lied and said the ankh and star had quite simply disappeared, misplaced at Café du Cardinal in the second arrondissement. Sven Hedin became enraged, of course, but from his position in the deserts of Central Asia, he could hardly do anything about it.”

Eberlein walked up to the table and let his nails glide over the metal box, down onto the back of it, where some sort of lock gave a click.

“No,
August
Strindberg never got anywhere with the ankh and star.”

Then he unfastened two more hinges on the sides, and the lid swung open.

“He who wishes to get the story straight loves a collector, isn’t that right, Titelman?”

Eberlein stood with his hand on the back of his chair and looked down at the contents of the box.

“Yes, we love a person like August Strindberg, someone so convinced of his own importance that he dates laundry bills, shopping lists, and the tiniest inferior sketch to be kept for posterity. More than ten thousand letters are said to have been preserved, to Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, Zola … and then there are the letters that Strindberg sent to his cousin Johan Oscar, or Occa, as his family called him, in the late 1800s. The friendship between them was actually so close that August later became godfather to Occa’s son Nils. Now, it just so happened that by this time, in the early spring of 1895, this Nils Strindberg had grown up to become one of the most promising physicists and chemists in the country. We know that Occa mentioned his son’s findings about electrical resonance in a letter dated February 2, 1895, and that only a week or so later, Strindberg sent a series of physical questions directly to Nils’s address at the university college in Stockholm. Nils wrote a detailed answer, which is also preserved, along with another dozen letters. During that entire spring, he became something of a confidant, even almost forsworn, to August Strindberg in his alchemic research. After a while, the tone becomes more personal, and in one of the last letters, from June 1895, one can read Nils’s complaints about how Stockholm is so dreary in the summer, when all scholarly work has been put aside. In answer he received a parcel from his godfather in Paris that contained two objects: a cross that ended in an eye, and a five-pointed star in Egyptian style.”

There was a clatter as Eberlein put down his porcelain cup. Then he sat down once again at the table, across from Eva and Don, pulled
the metal box a bit closer, and slowly started to pull on a pair of cotton gloves.

“What I intend to show you now is something that we brought primarily as a basis of comparison for Erik Hall’s discovery in the mine. But I expect it might be able to serve another purpose.”

Eberlein twined his hands together to pull the white fabric tight between his fingers.

“In the note that Strindberg sent with the package, he didn’t mention a word about Sven Hedin or the Taklimakan Desert. All he wrote were a few short lines requesting a careful analysis of the ankh and star and a quick answer. The first thing the photographically inclined Nils did when he inspected the objects …”

From the metal box Eberlein took a thin, rectangular carton that appeared to be made of cardboard. He placed it on the table and loosened its string so that he could open the lid. On the very top was a layer of grayish padding, which Eberlein loosened and spread out before them. Then he stuck his hand down into the carton again and brought forth a number of fragile plates of glass, which he carefully began to lay out on the soft padding.

Don leaned forward so he could see.

At first it was difficult, with all the light that was reflected in the dark glass, but when Eberlein provided a shadow with his hand there was no longer any room for doubt.

On the oxidized silver of the glass plates shone an ivory-colored cross with an eye, and beside the cross lay a brightly glittering star, with five arms sticking out from its center.

Beside the objects someone had placed a ruler. Looking at it, Don could tell that the cross was 16¾ inches long, including its eye, with a crosspiece of 8
inches. In another of the pictures there was a handwritten note that the
seba
star had been measured at 4
inches in diameter.