Dr. B. Page 5

  Finally the answer came. The voice had grown stronger, and the words were articulated with a new emphasis.

  “Immanuel, if you think the angry waves of regional and racial strife don’t sweep over the walls that surround the church, you are wrong. The Jewish Enlightenment that underpins all your thinking appeals to me. In all respects it is convincing. But Reverend Ohly has raised the swastika flag on every national holiday for the last two years. A colleague on the church council has resigned in protest and has announced he is leaving a church to which he no longer feels he belongs. You need to know that. You need to know what this church is today.”

  On their first walk along Skeppsbron, the family had seen the swastika flying over the German embassy on Blasieholmen, to which they would soon be obliged to go in order to have their residency permits validated. He hadn’t realized that it was also raised outside the church. Someone had said the priest refused, but evidently he must have changed his mind.

  “Naturally you all have admission to your church. The fact is, you and your family have already been registered. You sent us all the required details, with one exception: we have no postal address.”

  Had he heard correctly? Everything was actually in order, and they had been admitted to the church. Could he breathe out? He chose to withhold the fact that they were living at the Hotell Reisen, just a few streets away. Fortunately they had been promised rooms with the Weil family on Frejgatan, and obviously that sounded more convincing, more stable. So his answer was quite matter-of-fact. “I am grateful to you for this fruitful discussion and ask that I might reply to you in writing so that all the particulars are accurate. I will send the information to the parish office tomorrow. It is evening already, and I must hasten home to my family.”

  He gave a brief bow. Since he still couldn’t see the priest, whom he presumed to be somewhere in the darkness, it was an odd gesture. He looked around and discovered that there was in fact a faint light coming from the far corner of the church. He cautiously took a step in that direction and felt his way toward the shaft of light that appeared to be coming from the door. Was the priest, whose name he hadn’t asked, still sitting on the pew behind him, or had he also withdrawn? The only steps he heard were his own.

  As he had thought, it was the gray band of light under the door he had seen, and with a firm hand he pushed the door open, allowing the evening light to filter into the church. He let it close behind him and hurried across the paving stones. He didn’t know where he was—this couldn’t have been the same door through which he had entered the church—but he managed to come out onto a street running along one side. He felt slightly uneasy, full of questions that he couldn’t properly formulate. He looked up at the street sign next to a lamp illuminating a small three-cornered square with a solitary chestnut tree, and he spelled out the letters. Svartmangatan. It meant nothing to him. He turned left by the little square and hoped it was the way back toward the water where the hotel was.

  This area of the city was like a labyrinth, and he remembered the warren of narrow streets his gaze had wandered over when he stepped out onto the tiny ledge high up in the church tower. The streets were empty, but he glimpsed an unsteady figure a stone’s throw ahead of him, keeping close to the buildings and then disappearing around a corner. He turned the corner too and thought he could see the short figure again, casting a long shadow on the wall opposite. The light must have come from a low window, but to his surprise all was in darkness when he reached that part of the street. He wasn’t sure he was going in the right direction, and again he was filled with a sense of disquiet. The feeling intensified at the thought that he had recognized the outline of the figure that was walking in front of him a moment ago and was now no longer to be seen. It must surely be none other than the small boy from the tower, the bell ringer. Or was he chasing his own shadow?

  Getting lost in a forest isn’t difficult, but losing your way in a city is an art that has to be cultivated. He recalled this maxim, formulated by a friend on the Frankfurter Zeitung in the days when they were both contributors, and he laughed to dispel the consternation he felt at finding himself back at the three-cornered square. The friend from his youth had displayed a philosophical mind quite different from his own, an entirely distinct gift for speculation that did not go unnoticed, in particular by their shared teachers. But politically he had always been clueless, a point on which Immanuel never wavered. Their only dispute had been over Immanuel’s patriotism, which his friend dismissed as ill-judged and fundamentally incomprehensible in a Jew. But that was all a long time ago. It was about a different war, and a different Germany. Since then the friend had made a name for himself with quirky radio programs and pithy commentaries on urban walks, with streets and alleyways like arcane manuscripts for people to wander through. Where Walter Benjamin was now, if he were still alive, Immanuel had not the faintest idea. In that narrowest of streets he had thought of his introverted old friend for the first time in several years.

  Without any effort to acquire the art, he had now managed to get lost in this maze. He was back under the same chestnut tree, illuminated by the same streetlamp. Or was it a different square with a different tree and a different lamppost? He hurried on and turned left. He hoped that at the end of this backstreet he would see one of the boats that was moored by the quay, and behind it would be the hotel containing his waiting family, who by now had good reason to be wondering where he had gone. But there was a bend in the street, and it looked as though he was back at the German church, where the whole exercise had begun.

  He decided to follow a straight course this time and not deviate in any direction. The medieval district, which actually formed an island, wasn’t very big. If you didn’t walk in a circle, sooner or later you had to reach the water. Eventually the quay would appear.

  The sensation created by unintended repetition can sometimes resemble the desperation of a dream state. To banish his thoughts and not fuel the seed of panic growing inside him, he tried to recollect what he had recently read about the psychological effect of repetition. It must have been in one of the many texts his editor at Basler Nachrichten had recommended. Maybe an article by a Swiss psychiatrist, he was thinking when, incredibly, he saw the square and the solitary tree in front of him once more. He stopped and leaned against the stone wall of a building that seemed to have no openings whatsoever onto the street. What was the force drawing him toward this peaceful square in the middle of the city? Then he saw the silhouette again. This time he was quite sure; it was the boy from the tower, disappearing into a door facing the square. It opened quickly and instantly closed behind him.

  The odds against what happened next must have been high, but on the other hand he had suffered far stranger experiences that day. He actually knew very few people in this city. But coming toward him in the narrow street was the librarian Josephson, the thoroughly obliging mathematician from the Mittag-Leffler Institute who had allowed him to stay overnight in the villa to facilitate his meeting on the island early the following morning. And this despite the fact they had only just become acquainted. The librarian’s oval spectacle frames reflected the light from the streetlamp on the little square to shine in the dark like two crescent moons.

  “Good evening. What a pleasant surprise!” he said, giving Immanuel a slap on the shoulder. “This is where I live, on Själagårdsgatan, next door to the old synagogue. If you have a look in here you can make out what used to be the women’s gallery. Today our temple has been turned into a police station, so in some ways it feels doubly reassuring to live here.”

  He smiled good-naturedly. “An evening walk in the new city, I assume?”

  Immanuel nodded. It was comforting to meet Josephson after all that had taken place. It was through Bermann Fischer, one of the first people he had sought out in Stockholm, that he had been introduced to the likable librarian, who was helping one of the publisher’s authors with information about the subtleties of chess from a mathematical point of view.
And here he was, next to the solitary chestnut tree, whose leaves had still not started to fall despite the arrival of autumn. He pointed up to a number of windows from which a warm glow lit up the leaves outside.

  “My family and I organize quite a few concerts here. We have excellent musicians performing. My son plays too, and he’s not at all bad, though I say so myself. It might be of interest to you and your family. The Katz family usually drop by. I heard about your father’s great contribution to music from Viktor. No one today has the same overview, he says. No one’s demonstrated the historical connections between what’s played for us in church and secular music like he has.”

  Immanuel didn’t have the faintest idea who this Viktor could be, but the favorable words about his father cheered him up, so he just gave a friendly nod. He did know of the Katz family, however, very well. David Katz, the German psychologist, had become a professor in Stockholm, but the appointment had attracted criticism from National Socialist quarters, and his inaugural lecture had been interrupted by young nationalists. Immanuel had heard about all of this in his first few days in the city, and he would have liked to carry on talking to the librarian, but he felt almost dizzy with tiredness, and it was getting late. He had no desire to enter the warren of little streets again only to end up back at the three-cornered square where the synagogue had once been. Enough of this; the day had provided quite enough twists.

  He gave a nod of farewell as affably as he could. “You don’t happen to know the quickest way to the Hotell Reisen?”

  Instead of the simple directions he was expecting, Josephson said with a new gravity in his voice, “You need to be very careful of the Reisen. The Germans eat all their meals in the dining room there. You must have seen the little flags set out on the tables for official meetings. That’s no place to make friends. We call the hotel the Little Embassy.”

  Immanuel had indeed noticed the flags the hotel staff placed on the tables on certain occasions. The small pieces of shiny white fabric were decorated with black swastikas, the same as the ones fluttering in the wind on the other side of the water. The German legation was located opposite the Hotell Reisen, somewhat hemmed in on either side by the National Museum and the city’s one true luxury hotel. Presumably the legation supplied the table decorations.

  One day soon after they had arrived at the hotel a large group had assembled in the dining room to hear a lecture and award some kind of academic distinction. That was the first time he saw the swastikas appear. The noisy gathering was patently composed of Germans, and Immanuel had asked the people in reception what it was about. His two boys, both teenagers, had been curious because it clearly involved a widely known arctic explorer, a Mr. Pantenburg, who was to give a talk about his adventures in the very north of Lapland and on the other side of the Russian border. They had heard applause and enthusiastic shouts from the dining room. The pictures projected onto a plain white cloth hanging on a metal stand didn’t serve to lessen the boys’ interest. They showed icebergs and glaciers, bears and packs of wolves, and sledges pulled by huskies. It had quite simply been too much to resist, and without asking their parents for permission, they had crept into the dining room and sat down at the back. The parents had retired to their room on the third floor and didn’t realize where the boys had gone until the lecture was over and they came racing in, full of the arctic explorer’s stories of polar seas and vast snowfields, and of mysterious spy planes with bases east of the Finno-Russian border.

  Immanuel was discomfited by the memory but had resolved that no great damage had been done. That his teenage boys saw this as something exciting was no surprise. He nodded his agreement with the librarian in the street. “No, that’s quite right, the Reisen is no place to make friends these days. But we have managed to rent three excellent rooms with the Weil family on Frejgatan. We’re moving in next week. This evening I have no choice, though, and my family will be wondering where I am. Which is the quickest way, would you say?”

  Josephson indicated with an oddly crooked arm that Immanuel needed to go around the corner a few meters ahead, walk toward the water, and then left at the quay. He added a few jocular parting shots in Yiddish before he turned away and disappeared into the shadowy doorway that a few minutes earlier had swallowed up the boy from the tower. Just as Josephson stepped over the doorstep and his face was no longer discernible in the dark, he said one last thing. It sounded like a warning.

  “Zay gezunt! He works in mysterious ways. Take care of yourself and your family.”

  Café Ogo

  The windows were misted up and the air thick with tobacco smoke. The coffee shop on Kungsgatan had quickly come to feel like home. Immanuel behaved like one of the regulars, nodding in recognition to the tables by the window as he stepped inside and closed the inner glass door behind him. There were always people here he recognized, many of them sitting alone with a book in front of them or a newspaper spread out on the table. At the far end of the café sat Ascher, writing. Immanuel pretended he hadn’t seen him to avoid being drawn into a conversation about how they should split assignments for Basler Nachrichten. The fact was, Immanuel felt uncomfortable with the whole situation. It was really unfortunate that Ascher had ended up in Stockholm too, after being forced to leave his post in the Vatican. No one found him a likable person. He was always the injured innocent, and often ill-tempered.

  As usual the café was full. Every day small groups of people would meet, speaking languages of which Immanuel had a better command than his adopted land’s. He gleaned fragments of their stories. Two Russian men, one bearded and rather portly, the other bald and wearing high-strength spectacles, were always sitting deep in conversation at the same table. Now and then they would glance around, as if they were actually keeping watch on the place. There were Poles, in exile for months or years, on their way to the next city, with worn-out suitcases and leather briefcases bursting at the seams with the thick sheaves of papers inside: passports so crowded with stamps they were illegible, visas and testimonials grubby with thumbing and anxious fingering. Large numbers of German speakers were here, some of them well-dressed office workers but others stranger characters with furtive eyes, on the run or perhaps with business best kept to themselves. And then groups of Swedish women, young and all dressed up, as if they were on their way to some festive soirée, although it was early afternoon on a very gray weekday in the autumn of 1939.

  He had almost an hour to read the newspapers. Rickman wasn’t due at the café until three o’clock. Bermann Fischer had asked him to get together with the Englishman. Preferably not at the publishing house but somewhere else, on neutral ground. An agreeable fellow, a man with a past in the world of musical entertainment, thoroughly charming, the publisher had assured him. The purpose of the meeting was unstated, but the publisher had implied it had something to do with deliveries to Germany and had added that his secretary Miss Stern would be pleased to assist with the practicalities.

  Bermann Fischer had already given Immanuel a number of minor editorial commissions, and he naturally hoped for more. He wondered how he could broach the subject without appearing either too forward or too desperate. To show his willingness to meet with an unknown Englishman was one way of demonstrating his keenness. Unfortunately it was becoming ever clearer that he needed several sources of income. He was finding it more difficult to have his articles accepted. His work was published very infrequently in De Telegraaf now, and he didn’t understand why. When he applied for a residency permit in Sweden, he had listed the Dutch newspaper as though it were as obvious a revenue stream as Basler Nachrichten. On the other hand he hadn’t mentioned the provincial German-language newspapers where his items regularly appeared; it had been too complicated to explain the press agency’s somewhat special function in Berlin. In the long run that couldn’t be counted on as a given either. It was only a question of time before it ceased entirely. He hadn’t heard from the editor, Kutzner, for months. Nor from Ilse Stübe either, who was supposed to be
the new contact person.

  Immanuel sat down by one of the windows and placed his briefcase on the chair next to him and Basler Nachrichten on the table in front of him. As usual it was a two-day-old newspaper. One of his own articles, an attempt at summarizing the reactions in the Nordic countries to the outbreak of war, was at the top right corner of page 1. That was gratifying. Albert Oeri, the increasingly renowned editor in chief, had recognized the importance of a staff writer in this little metropolis in the far north, a place that until recently had been completely peripheral but now suddenly was the scene of vital decision-making. In fact it was the city in which Europe’s future might be decided this very autumn, maybe even within the next few weeks, if Immanuel had interpreted accurately the precarious situation that had developed concerning the transport of iron. If its transportation were to be disrupted in the slightest, German occupation wouldn’t be far behind. Dr. Oeri had understood this and encouraged him to write regular reports, giving his articles a prime position in the newspaper. He didn’t need to worry about Ascher. Clearly Oeri preferred Immanuel’s pieces to Ascher’s, which more often than not concerned obscure topics from the Catholic world and were generally placed near the back of the newspaper. And yet it was a difficult situation to have a rival who made no bones about his readiness to fight for space.

  Immanuel’s article, the third longest from Sweden, was extremely well placed. Although the remuneration left much to be desired, this was the ultimate incentive, a validation greater than that generally bestowed by money, even if it was the money he needed at the moment more than anything else.

  It had been a time of constant disruption. For a number of weeks now he and Lucia and their sons had been lodging with the Weil family in Vasastan. They had three adjacent rooms, which in reality felt like their own apartment. And furthermore, the Weil family were almost never at home. But if they were going to stay in this city for several years more, another solution would be required. Yes, he would have to talk finance with the editor. It was clear from the positioning of the articles that his cooperation was appreciated. It’s unwise to pay too much, Oeri had said the last time they met and the question of fees was raised. But thankfully he had added that paying too little could cost even more. There was clearly room for negotiation, even if he could also recall another of the Swiss journalist’s less promising axioms: Money won’t help on Judgment Day.