The Historians Read online

  He had reached the point where the path turned, leading downward now, headed for the new galley. How dark it was: not a single star. No moon, either. The skin on his back prickled.

  But then, there it was: a hole leading straight into the mountain.

  “Hello?” he said.

  He cleared his throat. “Hello?” he hissed. “You don’t have to be frightened. I won’t let anyone know you’re here.”

  He didn’t see the dark shape approaching. He didn’t see the lifted baton. He only felt himself go down on all fours. I really shouldn’t have drunk so much, he thought, before all went black.

  April 1943

  1.

  Laura

  Clicking typewriter keys, muttering voices, shrilling phones . . . the barrage of noise in the office was constant. Whenever Laura left work, the echo in her ears made her feel for a while that she had gone deaf. Jacob Wallenberg, Laura’s boss, mentor, and Sweden’s chief negotiator with Germany, walked through the room and they watched him, to see whose desk he would stop at, so they could try to guess the latest twist.

  “For you.” Dagmar, at the desk opposite hers, was holding up a receiver.

  Laura was already on another phone waiting for a confirmation of travel plans. She took the second phone from Dagmar.

  “Yes?”

  “Laura Dahlgren?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Andreas Lundius. Andreas Lappo Lundius . . .”

  Who?

  “Britta’s friend.”

  A face now, remembered from university: quiet, Sami. He and Britta were from the same town in Lapland and had known each other since childhood. At university in Uppsala, Laura and the others had told Britta she only needed them. It’d been said jokingly, warmly, but they’d been serious. To be deemed a friend of the Sami would do Britta no favors. But Britta was loyal. Andreas was studying theology with plans to become a priest, she remembered now. But then, weren’t people like him always studying theology? The priests ensuring the few Sami youths they deemed had potential got a university education. Why was he calling her? How had he even got her number?

  “Yes?” she repeated.

  “Well, um . . .”

  She tapped her foot underneath her desk and rolled her eyes at Dagmar. Couldn’t bear slow talkers.

  “Britta has disappeared.”

  Laura hung up the other phone, turned away from the noise in her office to face the window and bent forward to create a shield against the sounds with her back. “What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” She sounded angry, even to her own ears.

  “We were supposed to meet for dinner last night, but she didn’t come.”

  Last night? That wasn’t a disappearance. Laura exhaled, sat up straight.

  “She probably went somewhere else,” she said, meaning “with someone else.”

  “I walked by her dormitory this morning. She didn’t come home.”

  “Britta is not the most reliable person,” Laura said. “You know this. She changed her plans.”

  “That’s what I would have thought . . .” Andreas’s voice sounded far away, and the rest of his sentence was garbled.

  “What?”

  “She made me promise that if something happened to her, I would call you.”

  LAURA TOOK THE train to Uppsala. Her carriage was empty apart from a mother holding her sleeping baby. Outside her window: a blur of fields, dark empty roads and dull trees. The sky was an insipid gray.

  She imagined Britta before her—the laughing eyes, the uneven teeth, the blond hair neatly rolled at the sides and pinned to the crown of her head.

  It wouldn’t have surprised Laura one bit: Britta not coming to a dinner because she had met someone on the walk from her dormitory to the restaurant, and, just like that, decided to spend the night with them. It had happened countless times. Her friends had gotten used to it. But Britta never worried. She thought she was invincible. So why on earth had she told Andreas to contact Laura if something happened to her? She’d even made sure to give him her number.

  And then there was their meeting in Stockholm a few months ago. Laura was certain Britta had contacted her for a reason that, in the end, she had not revealed. Her heart clenched. I let her down, she thought. She came to talk to me and, seeing me, she decided to keep quiet.

  As the train rolled closer, she could see the black twin spires of Uppsala Cathedral. They pierced the sullen sky and made the world twirl around them, as if the spires held the world in its place. Her heart ached. Laura hadn’t been back in Uppsala since she left university three years ago. Too many memories, she thought. Things you shouldn’t be dwelling on.

  There had been five of them, inseparable, until the war brought occupations of Denmark and Norway. They’d always ended up in her apartment in the early morning hours, drunk—the only difference to what degree—Laura, Matti and Karl-Henrik in the red velvet armchairs, Erik and Britta on the settee. They’d crack open one more bottle, lounge and gaze up at the painting on the ceiling, the one Matti swore must be a Julius Kronberg: a light blue sky veined with thin white clouds on which perched small golden-haired cherubs; naked women stretched on the rocks beneath, their hands in the air trying to touch the cupids. Futile Desire, Erik had named the artwork. Books were piled everywhere on the floor, balancing on the window sills, throwing candlelight shadows like a landscape of miniature buildings in the dimmed room.

  She remembered one night in particular, a strange one, for it had been a premonition of what was to come. They’d opened a bottle of champagne, but Laura had already had too much. It only tasted bitter. She’d laid her head on the backrest and looked at the painting, which seemed alive in the muted light, the golden locks of the cupids waving in an indiscernible breeze, the hands of the women grasping at thin air.

  “Now, this is more like it,” Erik said. “For helvede, Britta, that club was lousy. A real dump.”

  “So was the chap,” Matti said.

  Matti felt like the youngest of them, always joking, teasing. But sometimes—not ill meant—he’d go too far. Laura glanced at Erik, but he was lighting a cigarette, his face blank.

  “Oh, what do you know?” Britta said, but she was laughing. She took Erik’s cigarette, inhaled, let the smoke out slowly and handed it back to him. “Yes,” she agreed then. She swirled around, put her head in Erik’s lap and her legs over the armrest.

  “Now this,” she said. “This is nice.”

  Erik seemed to relax. There was the notion of a smile on his thin lips as his black eyes rested on her, in his lap. The stubble on his cheeks glittered in the faint light. Oh, why wouldn’t they get together? Laura had thought as she always did. They were perfect for each other. Anyone could see. But so far, Britta had been unwilling and hadn’t gone with Erik, like she might have with someone else.

  It had begun to rain outside. Raindrops tapping the window panes. Gently at first, then insistent. Against the glass, a fury of smattering waves.

  “This is nice,” Karl-Henrik said.

  Laura opened her eyes. Karl-Henrik was the most distant of them. He disliked people and walked the earth as if he’d arrived here from the moon: each movement exact, a continuous frown on his face, thinly veiled disdain pulling the corners of his mouth down. At night, she left her apartment door unlocked for him. A couple of times a week, she’d hear him enter, go from the hallway to the library and the door slide quietly shut. In the morning, she’d find an empty whiskey glass on a table and a full ashtray. He needed this. To be somewhere he wasn’t completely on his own when the night got too dark. A breathing body next door. Warmth. Life. How she first understood that he would come, she didn’t know.

  “I mean, this doesn’t happen often, does it? These kinds of friendships . . . Or does it?”

  He tapped his foot, looked at the ceiling, tapped again.

  “Did he just say he liked us?” Erik asked.

  Karl-Henrik frowned. “I wouldn’t go that far. We have idiots among us.” He threw a glance
at Matti. They’d been arguing the value of Aristotle all evening.

  Matti snorted. His hair was too long and covered his green eyes. He pushed at his fringe. An impatient gesture. He caught her gaze, winked at her. Despite herself, she blushed.

  “I’m sure the other students have found each other, like us,” Erik said.

  “You think?” Britta asked.

  Laura had never been this close to a group of people before. They had met and fallen in love. They were fiercely protective of one another. Nobody else seemed remotely interesting.

  Erik shrugged. “Then let it all remain like this.” He dragged on his cigarette and tipped his head back to avoid getting the smoke in his eyes. “And they stayed the same and didn’t change. They never fought, they never separated, they never ever grew up and left.”

  Erik’s voice sounded like that of a priest: solemn, chanting. As if he were reading them a spell.

  “You do know things change, right?” Britta said, twisting her head, trying to catch his eye.

  “Nah,” Erik said. “Not us.”

  “Perhaps if we sacrificed to your Odin,” Britta said, smiling now, “he’d allow us to stay the same. Do you think he’d have us? We strive for wisdom, like he did.”

  Erik’s big passion was Old Norse history and Asatru, the Norse faith. They’d all become besotted with it. How many afternoons had they spent in Laura’s apartment listening to Erik tell them the stories of the Norse?

  Erik lifted his chin. “The only sacrifice Odin wants is one of hanging. They used to have these big feasts to the gods’ honor once every nine years. It is written that they sacrificed nine of each male type; hung them in the trees. Men, dogs, even horses, hanging in these sacrificial groves; their blood used to appease the gods.”

  “Well,” Britta said lightly, “that shouldn’t be too hard to arrange.”

  “We could start with your man from tonight,” Erik said.

  It was a joke, but Laura felt cold. The room was no longer cozy, as much as dark. The flickering candles made the shadows from the book piles tremble, as if they were about to topple over.

  And that was it. Their connection had, of course, toppled over. In the end, they had not been able to remain friends. And that was still impossible to think about.

  THE DOOR WAS unlocked, but then Britta never locked it. Her room was as Laura remembered. It was one of the newer student lodgings: a square area with a low bookshelf, a single bed, a one-door wardrobe, a desk with a chair and an armchair, all the furniture in light wood with narrow legs and straight lines. Behind the door there was a sink and a mirror that sat too far up on the wall—fitted for male students, not female. On the floor, a light blue rag mat. Scandinavian neat and tidy. Only Britta was not. The desk was laden with heaps of books and used coffee cups, their bottoms stamped black by the residual grounds. The ashtrays balancing on the piles of books brimmed with butts, the ends red with lipstick. There was a glass vase with a bunch of parched flowers—roses—the area beneath covered with spent petals. Seashells, round stones, sticks turned silver bleached by the sun, bottle caps and corks filled an ice bucket on the window sill. The wall beside the shelf was covered with postcards—Laura recognized a couple she herself had sent—and wide-ranging newspaper clippings, about the war, Lapland, the national team in gymnastics. There was a photo: herself and Britta, champagne glasses in their hands. Britta exploding out of the picture with her wide smile. Laura, slightly behind her, also blond—hair in a straight bob, also smiling, also beautiful, but her large gray eyes serious. It was a good photo, she thought. Captured them both. Matti had taken it. Come. On. Laura. Smile! You do know how to, right? On the floor were stacks of newspapers and more books. The armchair was buried under clothes, several pairs of stockings thrown over its arms. On the floor behind the armchair, there was a mound of high-heeled shoes in all colors, seemingly swept together and pushed out of the way. A stray spectator pump had ended up lodged under the wardrobe door. Necklaces hung from the arm of the bedside lamp: colored glass, pearls and silver. The bed was unmade. The room smelled stale. It needed airing. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Britta’s room felt unused. Laura could not have lived like this. She needed clean lines to have space to think.

  She wondered where the stray kitten had gone. Britta had found it after a night out, small and paltry, more a mouse than a cat. She’d picked it up, laughed at its tiny black paws clawing at her, and dropped it in the pocket of her trench coat.

  Erik: “You are not going to take that home, are you?”

  Laura: “It’s not a good idea.”

  Britta: “But it won’t make it on its own.”

  Britta had used to call them “her strays.”

  The room was warm. Laura pinched at her shirt collar and lifted her top away from her chest. Britta was Britta. She’d be back any minute and laugh at them for making a fuss.

  Andreas stood in the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to another, as if he didn’t feel comfortable being in Britta’s room. Well, it was his doing they were here.

  “How do you know she didn’t sleep here?” she asked him.

  “She’d promised her girlfriend next door a book she needed for a class this morning, and her friend waited for her last evening and kept checking to see if she’d come home yet. She tried again this morning before going to school.”

  Britta would have forgotten. Laura walked to the desk and looked among the books and coffee cups, but she found no scraps of paper, nothing that could give a clue as to Britta’s whereabouts. And yet . . . Something about Britta’s room was off, she thought. She turned to look around again but couldn’t see what it was.

  “Perhaps Britta went straight to school after a night out.”

  “I checked,” Andreas said. “She didn’t.”

  Laura could feel her nose twitch. She would have hated having Andreas ask for her.

  “I went to the library, too. I asked her friends.” His black hair fell over his forehead.

  “What friends?” she asked. Now that we are gone, she meant.

  “A couple of the other history students.”

  There was a sheen on Andreas’s forehead. His face was ashen.

  “What is going on?” she asked sharply.

  “What do you mean?” He picked a book up from the bedside table, bounced it in his hand as if to feel its weight, put it back.

  “Why on earth would Britta tell you to call me if something happened to her?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “She’d hardly confide in me now, would she?”

  He was telling her he knew she had no time for him. Letting her be right. But he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Laura said, once they were back on the pavement outside the student dorm, but now she didn’t like it. “You’ve tried school, the library and her friends . . .” There were bars, she thought. Restaurants. Clubs. But it was early in the day. They would be closed. Before, they would have gathered in Laura’s flat, but that was long gone. “We could try the Historical Society,” she said. “See if they’ve seen her.”

  He nodded, hands thrust in his pockets.

  They crossed the lawn leading up to the main university building. Spring had arrived in Uppsala. The grass was a thick green. Blue hyacinths were growing in the flower beds. The trees were abounding with small, bright green shoots. There was a scent of wet earth and new grass. Some students lay on the lawn despite the gray weather, reading. They had spread out their jackets; the ground would still be a damp cold. Any day now, the restaurants would move their tables outside. They’d be buzzing with people laughing and debating. There would be the beat of drums and brassy notes of jazz trumpets coming from the dance palace they called Little Perdition. You’d want to stay, to dwell. But, for now, there was still a bitter wind. She wrapped her arms around herself and picked up her pace.

  The small square that held the enormous red cathedral also
hosted Holy Trinity Church, the archbishop’s residence, the former main university building, Gustavianum, with its round green ball on top of the copper roof, and the Dekanhouse, where the State Institute for Racial Biology had its offices. All that history weighing in on a quadrangle of cobblestones. The Historical Society having its headquarters here felt right.

  She traced the black twin spires of the cathedral with her gaze. She missed it—the five of them—and her eyes prickled. Oh, to have one more of those student days, go to dinner, drink too much and then amble home arm in arm through the streets singing silly student songs. To hear Britta’s hoarse laughter, Erik swearing. To flirt with Matti. To poke at Karl-Henrik for being serious and hating everybody. For things to be easy, for any division to be unthinkable. She shouldn’t be here with Andreas; she should be here with them. But university was in the past. And, since the war came closer to home, so were her friends.

  The yellow Ekman’s House that lodged the Historical Society lay opposite Holy Trinity Church. It looked smaller than she remembered it. It was the gray weather. The house, too, was folding in on itself for protection. The Society held regular meetings both during the day and at night; lectures, debates. This was also where Professor Lindahl had held his nachspiele, light evening meals with selected students, in the vault of the Historical Society, after the meetings.

  She walked up the stairs, turned the handle, but the doors were locked. There were no notices for upcoming meetings on the silver board. She shrugged and took a step down.

  “There was one thing,” Andreas blurted out.

  She waited.

  “Before the riots . . . Before Easter. Britta met with a man named Lindholm. He’s the leader of the Svensk socialistisk samling, the Swedish Nazi SSS.”