Strindberg's Star (18 page)

And even if she was ashamed of it, Elena had always felt that she had asked exactly the right question after that long period. Because what right did that woman have to believe that a six-year-old, after all that had happened, would still want to recognize her own mother, or, for that matter, that she would be willing to leave?

During this first year in Wewelsburg Elena had been transformed into another person. The strangers had treated her as a princess, giving her all she had ever dreamed of. Vater had prized her psychic abilities and tenderly helped her to explore the immensity of their scope.

Over and over during that year she had been told that her mother had been richly compensated. And, in the dim light of the banking hall, the denial had seemed a fitting retribution against someone who had so carelessly given her child away.

A
fter that morning, the woman had never come back. And it wasn’t until she was a teenager, as her abilities slowly died away, that Elena happened to find out what had occurred.

That her parents had been in a hurry on that summer day, that her sisters hadn’t been buckled in, and that the serpentine road across the mountains down to the coast had been muddy from prolonged rains. That a pickup had come into a curve at an excessive speed, and that the brake pads of the Citroën had been badly worn.

It was just an unfortunate coincidence, they had told her. The deadly plunge down to the sea had just been one of those things that was no one’s fault. And any possibility that she would find answers had disappeared along with it. But why would a child who was given away seek answers?

E
lena pushed the pillow up behind her and looked toward the attic apartment’s only window, but the image of the heartbroken woman still wouldn’t disappear.

Inwardly, she tried to get the six-year-old on the stairs of the bank to look up at Vater instead. See the happiness in his eyes; it had always been there during the first years. Think of their work with the sparkling dust under the glass windows of the lead boxes and the geometric patterns that had once sparkled up at her so clearly.

Not until later, when she was so much older and her senses had been mute for a long time, did Elena understand what she’d helped Vater and the foundation see.

But they hadn’t been able to get much further, not even with her help. The material they’d had to work with in the lead-encased glass
cylinders had been no more than a few flakes from the source that had been closed for so long.

T
hen Elena felt how the six-year-old slowly began to move her gaze down the stairs toward her mother’s face. She did all she could to stop the chain of memories. She wanted to remain in the long silence before the question came:

“Wer ist sie, Vater?”

In that drawn-out instant, Elena could count the windows in the large banking hall, see the winter light that fell pale against the smooth gray stone tiles. The seams at the shoulders of her mother’s coat, her open, inviting arms, and her tense smile. Then the images rolled on again.

Yet something was so different this time, because there was a sudden crackle, and the soundtrack of the memory changed. The child’s question disappeared in a distant murmur of voices, the same voices she’d heard during the long motorcycle trip from Falun to Wewelsburg.

E
lena threw off the blanket and ran across the floor to the kitchen alcove. Because she knew only one way to get the persistent dream to come to an end, to get all these grim things to be quiet and die away.

She pulled out the top drawer and turned on the gas stove. Then she placed the tip of the knife into the burning flame and heated the metal until it glowed red.

She rolled the bandage off of her chalk-white arm, exposing the row of red burn marks. There was a sizzling sound as she pressed the blade of the knife against her bare skin.

Inside the pain, it was as though someone had turned up the volume of the murmuring voices, and Elena felt heavy vibrations coming from a point just behind her forehead. Then, with what sounded like a tape being played backward, she heard syllables, a soft voice that she knew so well.

“Devi darmi la, Elena.
You must give it to me.
La croce.
The cross.
Elena, dammela.”

The tip of the knife in the gas flame again, trembling this time, letting it burn away her skin until everything inside her went black. She sank to the floor and pressed her hands to her head, but she could no longer find silence.

T
he last page of Nils Strindberg’s laboratory notes had been pieced together from several different sheets of paper, and when Eberlein had unfolded it in front of Eva and Don, it covered the better part of the surface of the table under the glass lamps.

As in the earlier drawings, a lofty celestial sphere arched above the ankh, with the constellation of the Little Dipper at its center. This time, the geography of the northern hemisphere had been drawn under the sky with meticulous precision.

From the first hasty sketches, in which the contours of the coastlines had hardly been discernible, Strindberg had advanced to the detailed projection of a map in which the prime meridian ran in a straight line from Greenwich in London up to the Arctic and the North Pole.

A bow-shaped grid spread east from this line toward Svalbard and Spitsbergen, and just north of the islands there was a shaded circle with the note:

“There are some things,” said Eberlein, “that indicate that Nils Strindberg had contacted the engineer by the middle of July 1895. But the first time this map is mentioned is in the memorandum from their meeting in Gränna in the beginning of August. As you can see, the young physicist was quite sure by this time that the ray moved only within a radius of about 120 kilometers. No matter what the North Star pointed out, the goal was just north of Svalbard, and it would theoretically be possible to reach it via a short journey by air, over the ice.”

Don rested his head in his hands where he sat, bent forward and looking down at the glued-together sheets of paper. At the topmost point of the coast of Svalbard were a few half-faded lines, written in more pedantic handwriting than Strindberg’s, that began with a question:

Strong northeasterly winds?

“We don’t know what Engineer Andrée thought of this first meeting with the twenty-two-year-old physicist from Stockholm, with his map and his Bunsen burner, but Nils Strindberg describes it as a disappointment.”

Eberlein carefully smoothed out a wrinkle that had formed in the paper along the contours of the English Channel, and then he continued:

“Strindberg believed, of course, that Andrée had been serious when he spoke of a hot air balloon journey to the North Pole, and at first it seemed that he was. Over a simple lunch at his home on this beautiful August day, Andrée told him about the perfect flying conditions in the Arctic. About the midnight sun, whose light would make navigation
easier, and that the journey in the gondola would be warm and pleasant. He described the system of drag-ropes and sails that would make it possible to steer the balloon, and the mild summer weather they could expect. Nils was, of course, familiar with the engineer’s plans; the papers wrote of nothing else at that time, and indeed, that was also the reason he had come to Gränna. But in his notes after the meeting, he writes that Andrée’s enthusiasm seemed to fade the longer lunch went on, and that the conversation petered out after a while. When Strindberg finally got ready to demonstrate the reaction with the Bunsen burner, Andrée remarked that he wasn’t particularly interested in antiques and works of art, and at first he explained away the spheres as a cheap trick. Then he began to place the blame on a lack of money. Before the Royal Academy of Sciences, Andrée had claimed that the entire expedition would cost only 130,000 kronor, although that amount was very much on the low side. Now he admitted that he might have idealized the project a bit to get Oscar II and Alfred Nobel each to contribute a donation. By the time the coffee arrived, with cognac and cigars, it was already clear to Nils Strindberg that Andrée’s North Pole plans were a charade, a way to attract free publicity. It also came as something of a shock to him that the engineer had flown a balloon a total of only nine times, and that most of the flights had ended in wrecks. Andrée claimed that he still suffered from back pain after a landing on Gotland, where he had been carried by the wind from Gothenburg earlier that spring.”

I
n order to have space to unfold the glued map, Eberlein had moved the metal box to the edge of the table. Now he lifted it back and placed the box in front of him, alongside the lines for Normandy and Brittany. Don looked at Eva as the German once again undid the catches on the lid. She twisted her arm toward him and pointed at her watch. Then he noticed that she was shaking her head slightly.

“That the expedition happened at all,” Eberlein continued, “was due only to Nils Strindberg. In a letter dated the seventeenth of
August, he asked his father, Occa, how one might go about getting a large sum of money to make Andrée’s project a reality. Occa, who was a wholesaler specializing in trade between Hamburg and Berlin, strongly advised against it at first, but in the end he arranged contact with a group of German businessmen. On the third of September 1895, Nils Strindberg and Andrée stepped off the train at the newly built Bahnhof Berlin Zoologischer Garten, and after a demonstration of the Bunsen burner and the spheres, they were able to convince the Germans to put up the finances, a sum of 2 million kronor. This was a time when the interest in Egypt had reached feverish levels, and the Germans were surely inspired by the unparalleled discoveries the Englishmen had just made in the Valley of the Kings. The financiers quite simply hoped that Strindberg’s navigational instrument would turn out to be a treasure map.” An inward smile passed over Eberlein’s face, and then he continued.

“But there were a few conditions. For one, the businessmen demanded that the
main purpose
of the balloon trip would be to explore the area that the North Star pointed out above Svalbard; whether they also happened to reach the North Pole was of less interest. The second condition was that the Swedish donors must not know of their investment, because they didn’t want to risk their defense-industry contacts with the Nobel firm. They assumed, not entirely without reason, that Alfred Nobel would protest if he found out that German interests were trying to influence Andrée’s North Pole expedition. The third and final condition was that all information about the Bunsen burner, the ankh and star, and any discoveries in the designated area would be kept secret and would
for all time
be preserved by a foundation with its headquarters in North Rhine–Westphalia. Engineer Andrée refused to sign at first, but was eventually convinced by Nils.”

D
on watched as Eberlein opened the lid of the box and took out a small green-checked book. The cover of the book was of a smooth material, similar to oilcloth. Inside the cover, the pages seemed crinkled
and bent, as though they had been exposed to a great deal of moisture.

“On the thirtieth of May 1897, after two years of preparation, the expedition’s ship headed in toward Svalbard and the cliffs of Danskøya through rotten, broken-up ice. I don’t know if you’ve seen the pictures, but they seem quite unprepared, Andrée and Strindberg, standing there side by side on the deck of the gunboat
Svensksund.
Two slender men with gold watches and suits, their hands inside the lapels of their jackets. The only person on the expedition who had much experience with physical labor was Knut Frænkel, whom Andrée had demanded they bring along for the sake of his physical strength. The intent was probably that Frænkel would be able to pull the four-hundred-pound sled if, contrary to expectations, they were to touch down some distance away from their target. For five weeks, they waited for the right winds. Nils Strindberg passed the time by playing the violin and writing letters to his fiancée, Anna Charlier, while the sailors from the
Svensksund
varnished the balloon’s fabric and made it watertight. They hadn’t had time to take the balloon, which Andrée and Strindberg had ordered from the manufacturer Henri Lachambre in Paris, on a test flight. On the eleventh of July, the weather finally changed: the wind was blowing to the northeast.”

Eberlein opened the green-checked oilcloth book. Don recognized Nils Strindberg’s handwriting, but here it was in plain text, no shorthand.

“This is his travel journal, begun at lunchtime just before their departure.”

T
he first page was damaged, a thin flap that Eberlein carefully turned aside. In the upper corner of the next page was the note:

A sketch showed that Nils Strindberg must have lit the Bunsen burner one last time and fused the ankh and star together to determine the position of the ray. Underneath there was a smudged note in ink:

Next to the note of distance were a jerky “attested” and a big A.

It looked as though the page had been hit by a few drops of water just as Strindberg was writing, because the ink in the words that covered the rest of the page had almost bled out. In what Don managed to decipher there was only speculation about the lifting capacity of the balloon and its noticeable frailty.

Eberlein’s voice from the other side of the table: “The front of the balloon house had been torn down, Andrée and Frænkel had already taken their places in the gondola, and the carrier pigeons were tied on in their cages—and still, these last expressions of doubt. When it comes to the departure, we must rely upon the eyewitness accounts: how Strindberg nodded at Andrée to give the order to cut all the ropes, and then came three sharp snaps as the ropes that anchored them were hacked off. The balloon stood still for a second, but then Frænkel began to raise the three sails. The ground sank away beneath them, and they hung weightless. When they had almost made it up out of the balloon house, the wind took hold and the craft rolled one last time back toward the wall. But then it climbed to a height of a hundred fifty feet and drifted out over Danskøya and Virgohamna. They had waited until their departure to christen it. The businessmen had insisted on a German-sounding name, the
Eagle,
instead of Nobel’s suggestion,
Le Pôle Nord.
”