Vater was sailing in his electric wheelchair at the very front, his
hairless head bobbing like a single lantern. There was a soft buzz as the wheels plowed ahead.
D
on could see Eberlein and the Toad just behind Vater’s long, narrow back. Sometimes the nonreflective glasses were aimed back, as though it was important for Don in particular to experience what was hiding down here. After a long silence, there was a distant rumble, which came rolling toward them through the passage. The noise grew louder and louder the farther in they came, and soon it crashed against them in booming blows. When Don sneaked a look at Elena he saw that the white smoke from her mouth came in rhythmic exhalations. At the same time, his own breathing felt increasingly panting and weak.
Vater’s wheelchair braked, and farther on one of the soldiers had raised his hand in a signal to stop. There was another boom, and its rumbling echo vibrated through Don’s chest and back.
Once again he sought Elena’s warmth as they stood there in the mists of the underworld. She gripped his fingers, and they looked out over the gigantic hall into which the passage opened.
E
lena didn’t know what she should think about this place, which had been described to her so many times. It had seemed like a palace in a fairy tale, a magical source of wisdom and understanding.
But now, as the mist dissipated, she realized that Vater’s words had not been true. They hadn’t come to a place of light and reason; they were standing before a mausoleum that welcomed only those who were already dead.
The space before them was so large that it wasn’t possible to see where its walls ended, and when Elena leaned her head back, it was like looking up at a starry sky with small pinpricks of light. Slender pillars stretched up toward the ceiling, completely filling the cave, like an endless forest of branchless trees.
Elena was just about to take a step forward when she felt a firm
grip around her wrist. It clamped down and spun her around, where she was met by Vater’s one-eyed gaze.
“This labyrinth is far too large for you, Elena,” said Vater. “You had better follow my tracks.”
Then he pushed the lever forward and his electric wheelchair began to roll once again. With a hum it made tire tracks through the sea of dust, down toward the outer edge of the pillars. The white-clad soldiers followed in a crouch, as though they were expecting some form of resistance. Alongside Eberlein walked the Toad, who disappeared among the columns with carefully waddling steps.
D
on’s head swam as he realized that all contact with reality had been interrupted. He searched for the rush of nitrazepam inside himself, to make it easier to accept that he found himself inside a hallucination.
Elena jerked him along with her tugs on the handcuff, and he came stumbling along behind her. He could not for the life of him understand why the Germans would drag him down into the underworld.
The pillars they waded past were very narrow and stood like glittering blue torches in the darkness. Don wondered how these thin stalks could bear the unimaginable weight of the rock.
The air was stale and murky down here. It bore the scent of stuffy closets and mothballs, and suddenly he was back in the 1950s house with Bubbe. He saw the glass table he’d lain under, when she had talked him into sharing her prison of fear. That was a prison he would never get out of, he thought, no matter where the Germans were leading him now.
What had she wanted from him, anyway, whispering those gruesome stories? He had been only eight years old, and surely she couldn’t have expected him to heal her pain.
Yet he had given her all he had to offer: the boundless worship and love of a child.
He remembered the daydreams he had had during those long summers. He had dreamed about reaching into the mechanics of the
world itself. How he, Don, by some magical fluke, would be able to turn back the tides of time.
As soon as he had discovered how this could be done, he had promised himself to take his grandmother by the hand. Then, together, they would have traveled to some place of existence long before the terror of Ravensbrück.
And in these memories of gloom, Don came to question what he himself had been to his grandmother. Then, all of a sudden, he knew that the dreadful answer was that she probably hadn’t cared about him at all.
E
lena, who was walking there beside him, had also begun to let her thoughts wander. She was guided forward through the cavity by her mother’s comforting voice. It whispered about warm sunlight that fell on a balcony in the southern suburbs of Naples. It promised that she would finally be able to come home.
This was not a peaceful place, Elena thought; she sensed shadows around it. Not even the foundation’s researchers had been able to say what kind of hall this was. She wanted to believe that she found herself in an intersection of time, where the wall between this world and the next was infinitely weak.
But Elena’s thoughts were interrupted as Vater slowed down among the pillars. She saw him start to whisper with the officer who had led the soldiers here.
The officer unslung his automatic weapon from his shoulder and placed it in Vater’s hands. With the weapon, Vater pointed toward a clearing about a hundred yards away. Then he gestured to indicate that the soldiers should start spreading out. There was a buzz as the electric wheelchair resumed its journey.
With a feeling of pure resignation and gloom, Don had finally submitted to his surroundings: the dust with its sparks and the glittering columns that towered toward the distant ceiling of the cave. The mists
of Niflheim that wound around him with all their raw moisture and cold. But as they approached the clearing beyond the pillars, his heart began to beat so quickly that nothing in his bag would be able to get it to calm down.
The thing that was standing there in the mist resembled a stone ship: rough-hewn blocks of stone that formed a circle. But it was the object in the center of the circle that made Don’s body buckle forward with the vomit reflex he’d been trying to control all his life.
Hanging in the center of the stone circle was a giant floating black sun, and from its round disc extended twelve hook-shaped rays. It was
die schwarze Sonne
that rose there above the tiny particles, weightless between the blocks of stone, and it defied gravity.
E
lena recognized the black sun too. It was the portal to something completely different,
etwas ganz anderes,
and the strongest visions occurred next to it. It was the antenna that brought whispers from another world. But now that Elena saw it in front of her in real life for the first time, it wasn’t the black disc with its spokes that caught her attention.
Instead she looked at the long-haired men who were in the process of assembling a device in the shape of a giant metal frame. It consisted of six seats, linked together by thin tubes, and in front of one of the seats stood a man whose facial skin was so thin that she could make out the yellowish bone of his skull.
Don squinted at the South Americans to avoid looking at the floating black sun. Lytton’s men had now begun to pull on rubber hoods, with openings for their noses and mouths. Otherwise, the hoods were full coverage, and they clung to the men’s heads. Then the rubber hoods began to shimmer through the darkness, in time with the electrical energy of the men’s brain waves.
Rivera attached a tube to the socket at his temple. It coiled over to the next seat, and then up to the next South American. After all six
of them had connected themselves to the chairs’ cables, they sat there in their metal frame like a series-connected human machine.
Agusto Lytton signaled to Rivera, as though to let the procedure begin. In the roar of the underworld, the tubes began to pulse with a greenish glow.
Don turned to Elena, but she didn’t seem to understand either.
Vater was screwing a sight onto the top of his automatic weapon, and the German soldiers had begun to take cover behind the stone blocks. Without a sound, they sank down onto their knees in the deep drifts of dust.
Don began to search for Eva, but the only people in the circle between the blocks of stone were Agusto Lytton and his six interconnected men.
The black sun had begun to change in front of their glowing skulls. Its disc had become soft, like clay, a clay that began to move around and around in a sluggish rotation.
As it spun faster and faster, the sun began to resemble a black vortex. Hovering in front of the men in the metal frame, it looked as if it wanted to suck up the last traces of light. In addition, the rays of the sun wheel seemed to be growing longer and longer. One of them almost reached the woman who had once called herself attorney Eva Strand.
She must have been hiding behind the disc of the sun, but now she was wading toward Lytton. In her hand she held the object that had brought Don so far away from Lund.
Strindberg’s ankh was still transparent, and it shone against Eva’s red jacket, but Lytton seemed uninterested in his daughter. His eyes didn’t want to leave the black sun of the underworld.
When Eva had walked past her father, she continued away from the South American men. She came to a halt so she was standing right between the metal frame and the Germans.
The soldiers had their sights on her from behind the stone blocks, but they seemed to be waiting for a signal from Vater. He directed his
one eye toward Eva and observed her as she bent down toward the surface of the dust.
She scooped up a handful and inspected the gray-black powder. Then Don saw Eva’s aged face light up as the sparks came to life. She lifted her eyes straight at him and nodded and smiled slightly at Don. She didn’t seem at all surprised to find him there.
Behind her, he saw the sucking vortex and the South Americans’ shimmering heads. Around her lay the gray sea, the piles of lifeless powder. Eva moved her lips, as though she were trying to say something to him, but her words were drowned out by yet another drawn-out, booming roar.
After the roar had passed into silence, there was a tug on Don’s handcuff. He turned around and saw that Elena was also looking at Eva Strand now.
Behind Elena, Vater was adjusting his automatic weapon, and when the red dot flashed to life, Don realized that he had attached a laser sight. The other Germans were doing the same as they crouched behind the blocks of stone. The threads of the laser sights’ lights were soon visible in the misty air.
Don turned to Eva again, and he couldn’t understand why she still hadn’t moved. She must have figured out what was going on, of course, but she was still standing there without warning the others.
The tubes between the glowing skulls pulsed faster and faster, and the vortex that had formed in the middle of the sun was now bulging inward like a ravenous hole.
It was like a maelstrom, a spiral that sucked everything toward it, and when Don looked at it, he felt his body becoming heavier and heavier. He thought that it was about to pull everything that made up his heart and soul out of him, that what made him
him
was on its way into the whirling depths of the sun.
E
lena had also begun to feel the intense force of gravity, but for her, the worst part wasn’t the increasing heaviness. It was that her mother’s
voice had disappeared, drowned out by the ominous roar of the maelstrom.
Then she discovered that Vater’s laser had begun to move, and that its beam of light was slowly swinging toward Eva Strand. Elena tried to get her mouth to form a warning, but she couldn’t find her voice in all the growing chaos.
The beam stopped in a red dot on the attorney’s pale forehead. It was motionless, like a caste mark, for a final, drawn-out second.
Don never heard the shot. The only thing he saw was that Eva collapsed like a marionette whose strings had suddenly been cut.
Don barely got the scream that rose within him out of his lips. He tore at the chain of the handcuffs and dragged Elena out from the block of stone, away toward the attorney’s horizontal body.
Over by the black sun, Lytton had finally discovered what was happening, and now he threw himself behind the shield of the metal frame. The tubes stopped glowing with a hissing sound. One after another, the South Americans tumbled off their seats and dropped to shelter behind Lytton’s construction.
Don sank to his knees and carefully lifted Eva’s head with one hand. With the fingers of his other hand, he tried to stop the blood that flowed out of the hole in the back of her head where the bullet had forced its way out.
There was a coin-size hole in Eva’s forehead where Vater’s shot had hit her. A third eye, like her brother’s gashed wound. In death they were alike, Don thought, Eva and Olaf. In death, all time between the siblings had been erased.
He heard himself trying to shout at Eva that she should wake up. Then he leaned down, so close that he could feel her shallow breaths.
There was a weak flame flickering deep inside, behind her pupils. Don tried to find something to say, but no matter how hard he tried, he could find no words.
“Don Titelman,” Eva breathed. “That was a really great … train car you had.”
“Eva …”
“But it wasn’t … it wasn’t right. That it should bring you all the way here.”
“Eva,” Don whispered, “try to breathe.”
She just looked at him for a long time, until a puff of air blew out the light in her eyes.
Elena saw how the pale face became wrapped in veils of dust. The fine lines in Eva’s face had softened and were slowly smoothed out. Don was still trying to hold back the blood, and when he looked up at Elena, she could see his jaw moving mutely.
Behind the metal structure, the South Americans had begun to move, while at the same time the vortex was weakening. Without the men’s brain waves, the maelstrom seemed to be gradually slowing down. It spun more and more weakly now, and at last the black sun hung as bright and motionless as it had before Lytton’s strange experiment.
The lasers from the Germans danced through the mist, and more and more red points of light were aimed at the metal frame. Elena looked down at the ankh, which Eva was still holding in her hands. It sparkled in the darkness as she gently lifted it from the dead woman’s fingers, exposing the star in the center of the object. On the other side of the body, Don was sitting with his head bowed, and his shoulders were shaking. Elena grasped the cold metal and lifted the ankh to her breast.