Maybe I nodded, before I stole a look at my watch. Nearly midnight. I emptied my glass, waited for the finale. And after a long pause it unfurled.
“I was stopped at customs at Arlanda airport, my treasure. Even though I had hidden the objects as thoroughly as always—in a secret compartment in my suitcase which I had designed myself—the officers went straight for them. Pulled out first the case and then the key.”
She stopped again, waited, appeared physically to be wrestling with her memories. I counted the seconds to myself. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five… before she felt she could continue. Edelweiss’ trick for both keeping a semblance of control and holding out, giving yourself something else to think about in certain situations.
“So I found myself facing a military tribunal. I realized that all was lost. Our lives together, mine and Sixten’s. Our common dreams about the Doomsday weapon, our love child.
“I confessed to everything straight away, every element, with some significant variations. Told them that I had stolen unimaginable volumes of the material—californium, already by then the world’s most valuable—from Professor Meitner. What else could I say? It was there in the case, all the evidence they needed. That I had in addition taken the key to her secret laboratory over there in Oxford, where I claimed the material was produced according to principles of which I had absolutely no idea. To protect Lise I said nothing at all in my own defense, my so-called lawyer hardly needed to begin playing his part.
“In return I was spared military prison—and was instead effectively exiled. They had organized it all smoothly. In the car on the way out to the airport they told me my activities could be considered part of Sweden’s contribution in kind for the ability to shelter under the U.S.’s nuclear umbrella going forward. That I would become some sort of asset to the American program instead. Which was flattering in a way, a kind of recognition of my celestial talents.
“But I’ve always wondered what would have happened if there had been a different judge, someone other than Aina, at the military tribunal that day, October 25, 1968. If they might then simply have erased me without trace: that sort of thing does happen even in civilized countries. So for this I thanked her when I finally had the opportunity to do so. In Ursvik, almost forty-five years after the event, on her seventieth birthday. For sentencing me to exile rather than oblivion.”
When she had to rest for a moment, she just stared at me with her ice-blue eyes. I felt a shiver deep inside.
“But it wasn’t hard for me to shake off my guards, even in those days. They lost me right where we stopped at the airport. I headed straight down into the underworld, the furthest extremities of the Inner Circle, our link to the construction of the new motorway all the way out to Arlanda. Which was in practice being built for use by the fuel tankers for the American bombers which were to be permitted to land there from then on. Another of Sweden’s services in return for having the protection of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons in case of war.
“For weeks, months, after that I lived like an animal inside the peripheral parts of the tunnel system. But I had an incredible stroke of luck. Met a woman, Sireen, a refugee from Jordan after the Six Day War in 1967. She had a job cleaning the construction workers’ huts in the forest and brought me food from there early each morning. Kept me alive, literally, until it was time.”
She shut her eyes, seemed to be seeing everything before her. Her eyelids fluttered, as if she were having a nightmare.
“It was a terrible delivery. Almost everything tore inside me. Sireen had helped out in the field during that lightning war, knew roughly what to do when I was in the most acute phase. After that I had no choice, you see. Was basically unconscious, torn and broken, no way out. So I left my little girl with Sireen. Begged her to do whatever she could to get the baby to someone called Bo Sixten Lundberg at the F.O.A. in Ursvik.
“Ever since my visit to Oxford I had thought that the baby should be called Lise if she was a girl. Then I began to think that it would be too obvious, too likely to arouse suspicions, I probably became a bit paranoid down there in the solitude of the tunnels. So I wrote ‘LISA’ on a label and tied it round her little throat and left her with Sireen.
“Hours later they managed to find my hiding place, far inside the most remote connecting tunnel, to which I had crawled with my remaining strength in order to die, and they took me by ambulance plane across the Atlantic and straight to the base. Jesús María had to sew me together then and there, that fallen angel, my blood sister. Restored me like a work of art. Her first ever assignment in the military.”
I took a last look at my wrist-watch. 00.37 on December 26, 2013, 65.8 degrees in our room. The co-ordinates I needed to hold on to.
“So that was the only condition I imposed, when Sixten asked me if we wanted to use Ursvik as our safe haven, after our flight. That I did not under any circumstances want to meet Lisa. That I should never see her as a grown woman.”
She got to her feet and tidied away our plates. Moved to the sink, half turned away from me, and began to unpack the dessert. The panettone with diced oranges and raisins.
“So one could understand Sixten’s actions, my treasure. Why he did as he did once they had taken Lisa.”
The last sentence also came as she had her back to me, facing straight into the kitchen cupboards, after a pause of about twelve seconds.
“And she’s my kryptonite too, you see.”
6.08
The next day I felt I was wrung dry, had no strength left. As if I had emptied the bottle of wine on my own. Anxiety coursed and tore through my body. Doubt. Hesitation.
When Ingrid went to take a shower, toward evening, pallid from the previous day, the alcohol and the emotional storm, I called Edelweiss. Not wasting a second.
“Did Ingrid have a child with someone called Bo Sixten Lundberg, in the spring of 1969?”
“A child? Ingrid Oskarsson?” he said.
I hung up right away, more uncertain than ever. The apartment was swaying. When Ingrid had finally finished—she must have been practicing her yoga in the bathroom, on the tile floor, for certain the “Destroyer of the Universe” once again—I had to ask. She sat there showered, fragrant, in her long underwear and holding an impossible yoga asana, tapping away on her portable command terminal.
“Don’t you ever have doubts?” I said.
“About what, my treasure?”
I so wanted to be able to give a sincere answer: that I had been full of doubts and still remained so, caught between trust and dread. But I could not say anything.
“Do you?” she asked me back, as I stood there silently.
“Always,” I managed to say. “From the moment I wake up until I eventually fall asleep. Which is when the nightmares start.”
She took my hand, pulled me gently down into a sitting position. I would hardly have been able to resist, even had I wanted to.
“I feel so sorry for you, my treasure.”
As soon as I was beside her, right next to her on the mattress, she changed the image on her portable command terminal. I tried to look at it rather than at her.
“And for me it’s the same,” she said. “Every single second.”
The map of the world came up on the screen, with its yellow triangles joined by solid red lines. Our seven home nuclear bases. Those initials which I knew by heart ran like a reflex through my reptile brain, three-letter sequences from east to west: SJN CWM BLM NDW WMM KW. Seymour-Johnson in North Carolina, Whiteman in Missouri, Barksdale in Louisiana, Minot in North Dakota, Warren in Wyoming, Malmstrom in Montana and Kitsap in Washington.