Then it got really unpleasant. I would not be able to get many minutes of sleep in “Solid Flow/Time Warps”, “It’s Alive” or “Before the Big Bang”. But the worst of all, Suite 325 in the western gable, was called “The Martyrdom of Christ”. Just a double bed—made completely of ice, like everything else—and a gigantic shining crucifix, on which a man-sized Christ figure was writhing in agony.
I kept close to Ingrid, even more so after the incident on the Luossa slope, watching everywhere for signs of Zafirah and the surviving Kurt-or-John. But there was just one other person in this terrible place: Jesús María stood stock-still and admired the work.
“I’d like to live here,” she said.
We left her in front of her namesake and went out to the Ice Bar, which was packed full of people even though only three minutes had passed since its opening at 4.00 p.m. Ingrid somehow found a place at the bar and immediately ordered a vodka cranberry. I took a Virgin Mary and as we drank slowly, I sensed a feverish energy rising in her as we waited. The wall clock of snice struck 5.00 p.m. and she stared at it, then at her cell phone.
The noise level in the bar became more oppressive with each passing minute, a strangely lustful bellowing, Sodom and Gomorrah 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle. People crowded in on all sides around our bulky packs. Played and lost crazy sums at the roulette table, cut directly from the ice of the Torne river: every time the ice ball came to a stop, there was an ear-shattering cacophony of rejoicing and dismay.
Eventually Ingrid’s cell phone did ring. Or at least it must have done—I heard nothing at all through the din. Just saw that she started, as if shot.
“Suite 325,” she then shouted in my ear with the cell phone still in her hand. Her breath was heavy with vodka cranberry.
“He’s waiting for us there. Glory be to God on high.”
When we got to the suite, there was no sign of Jesús María. On the door Sixten had put his own handwritten piece of paper over the suite’s name. It now read “ERASMUS’ MARTYRDOM”.
All these games. Sixten’s cool temperament, even in a situation like this.
I could not help but smile, recalling our first late-night dinner at Ursvik. How he, as part of his conversational performance piece, had discussed Poussin’s interpretation of the myth surrounding the saint who bore my name. How Sixten himself had apparently once hovered around “The Martyrdom of St Erasmus” at the Vatican Museum. Finally he walked away, but not being able to forget it, went back that same day. Then repeated this ritual several times during his week’s holiday. The savagery of it had made a deep impression on him. How Saint Erasmus just lay there on a bare bench while his intestines, according to the myth, were wound out of his stomach by a windlass.
Sixten was now sitting in Suite 325, in splendid solitude, facing away from us on the double bed of ice, in the darkest part of the room. He continued to play his games. Pretended to be reading a book, not even to notice our arrival.
“Ah, so there’s my knight in shining armor!” Ingrid exclaimed.
I hurried forward to take the book from his hand and gain his attention, without first studying the situation. Only close up could I make out the title: The Soft Spots. The textbook to which our instructor in extreme close combat always referred.
Then everything went haywire. People were pulling and tearing at me from different directions. Blurred contours, imprecise movements, insufficiently synchronized pressure against the spots on my temples. Confusion, some form of combat perhaps. Zafirah’s face inches above my own, the black of her eyes, without life, reflected nothing. I froze. A sharp stab to my neck as the needle pierced the vein. Slowly I started to lose consciousness, felt how the hybrid was lifted off me and my back was pressed directly onto the bare ice of the bed. I heard shouts, agitated voices, ultra-violence. Right there and yet somehow far off. As if I were under the surface, sensing everything through a tiny hole in the ice.
It took some moments before the initial numb feeling from the cold began to fade and my brain registered the pain. Just before I experienced the sensation of skin against ice, heat rather than cold, I gave Sixten another appreciative little smile. At how precisely he had managed to recreate Poussin’s painting—as a living tableau.
My own terrible martyrdom.
4
Second Down
December 2013
Peer, Belgium
4.01
That night was one long stream of visions, hallucinations, images. Lucid dreams. Beyond reality.
I was waterboarded five times in succession in the water of the wishing well, a fraction above freezing. Then I was skewered by the unicorn’s three-foot-long horn of ice—before my innards were slowly rolled up on it.
The experience of having died, if only temporarily, made the dreams worse than ever.
Not even Edelweiss had allowed us to take our practice sessions all the way. We could after all not be totally sure that the resuscitation exercises would be as effective as the killing methods. “And once you’re dead you’ll never be the same again,” he had proclaimed without a trace of a smile.
As I regained consciousness, I dreamed that I was our most lauded president and was making a speech at a top-level meeting about nuclear weapons during the early years of the Cold War.
“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable,” I began.
“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. The mere existence of modern weapons—ten million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on earth—is a source of horror, and discord and distrust.
“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. If only one thermonuclear bomb were to be dropped on any American, Russian, or any other city, whether it was launched by accident or design, by a madman or by an enemy, by a large nation or by a small one, from any corner of the world, that one bomb could release more destructive power on the inhabitants of that one helpless city than all the bombs dropped in the Second World War.
“A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than sixty minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than three hundred million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, ‘the survivors would envy the dead’. For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors.
“In an age when both sides have come to possess enough nuclear power to destroy the human race several times over, the world of communism and the world of free choice have been caught up in a vicious circle of conflicting ideologies and interests. World order will be secured only when the whole world has laid down these weapons which seem to offer us present security but threaten the future survival of the human race.
“So let us turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world’s slide toward annihilation.”