The Historians Read online

  “He asked for notes from the recent calls between us and the Danish foreign minister and the Norwegian foreign minister in exile, to put them in the records.”

  “He’s mistaken.” Günther looked down at his calendar.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There have been no recent phone calls between me and them.”

  “Daniel said—”

  Günther raised his voice. “I don’t care what he said. He’s wrong.”

  Daniel was methodical. He’d found the calls in the register of the Security Services. And hadn’t Daniel said he’d checked with his counterparts?

  He found the minister studying him.

  “How long have you been working for me now, Jens?”

  “Six months.”

  Günther nodded. “I’d like you to speak with Daniel and ask him to stop requesting my records—I assume this is what he has done. This time, he got it wrong. Errors can start all kinds of rumors.”

  “He is normally diligent,” Jens said. “And I don’t see how I can ask him to stop requesting information.” It was the archivist’s job. To document. To know what was going on.

  Günther silenced him with one acidic look. “Tell him to stop,” he repeated, in a low voice. “Do you know why I chose you to become my secretary?”

  “No.”

  “I took you on because you were not one of those career civil servants entangled in their routines and petty concerns. You are here for me alone. You can be gone just as easily.”

  Jens found himself fidgeting with his pen and forced himself to stay still.

  “Are we clear?” Günther asked.

  “Perfectly.”

  BACK AT HIS office, Jens sat down in his chair, not certain what had just happened. When a colleague infuriated Günther, he normally displayed a nonchalant attitude and simply ignored the person in question. Jens had never seen him threaten; for that’s what he had done: threatened. Daniel had struck Jens as good at his job, conscientious, meticulous. But this time, what Daniel had told him was perhaps incorrect and had gotten him into trouble. Though to ask that the archivist stop requesting the minister’s records seemed an excessive response to a mistake. Documenting was the archivists’ job. By law, Jens was certain. Or at least in the charter for how a ministry should be run.

  He rose and walked down the corridor to Daniel’s office. He found the archivist hunched over a bunch of papers on his desk, several empty coffee cups beside him.

  “Oh, Jens,” the archivist said, pushing up his glasses on his nose with a finger. “Did you manage to find anything out about those phone calls?”

  Jens hesitated, closing the door behind him. “I spoke with the minister this morning.”

  “Yes?”

  “He says he hasn’t spoken to the Danish or Norwegian ministers for a long time.”

  The archivist’s mouth hung open. “But he did,” he said finally.

  Jens raised his eyebrows.

  Daniel rose, walked to another table, searched among the papers. “Hold on.” He turned to the bookshelf. “I had it right here,” he mumbled.

  “You got me into trouble with Günther.”

  “Wait. Jens, I swear it was here.”

  Jens waited.

  After a while, Daniel stopped. He faced Jens, his hands outstretched. “I get copies of the records from a contact at the Security Services. I ask for them, as I know the minister occasionally forgets to tell us what’s going on.”

  He was being tactful. Günther didn’t forget anything.

  “It was on the last one. I can’t find it now, but I’ll find it. I’ll show you. And, before coming to you, I spoke to my counterpart, who verified what I said. I wouldn’t have talked to you if I wasn’t absolutely certain.”

  Jens didn’t respond. He nodded and opened the door.

  “You’ll see,” the archivist said to his back.

  Jens didn’t know what would be worse: the archivist being right, or him being wrong.

  9.

  Blackåsen Mountain

  Georg was dead. Frida still couldn’t believe it. What on earth would become of them now?

  Frida picked among the clothes she had washed. Her hands worked automatically, folding, flattening, pressing, but her heart wasn’t in it. Hadn’t she always known that something like this would happen if they moved to this place?

  The little one was screaming. She’d sent the bigger children outside.

  “To do what, Mummy?” her daughter had asked.

  “Clean,” she’d mumbled.

  “Clean what?”

  She lost her patience. “Anything! Find something useful to do!”

  The children quickly scurried outside, and she sank down into the chair and buried her face in her hands.

  It was only for a minute. Then she’d fetched the laundry basket. There was always so much to do. If you stopped, you wouldn’t manage. Now, she could hear her eldest, Abraham, chopping wood, the rhythm of the ax not as regular or as strong as Georg’s, but not far off.

  The little one was still screaming. “Hush, hush,” she mumbled, but she didn’t pick him up.

  Oh my God, she thought. What were they going to do?

  Director Sandler had come to tell her himself. The foreman had brought him. The director had perched on the edge of the chair she had just been sitting on, pinching at his trousers as he crossed his legs. He was a handsome man, she’d always thought. A different breed, of course. He had no idea what it was like in their shoes.

  She’d expected his visit. Georg had been gone since Friday. Georg would never go away without telling her. He was a man who liked plans and routines. No, deep inside, she’d known something had happened.

  “It wasn’t a work accident,” the director had said.

  “Then . . . what was it?” she asked.

  “A fall.”

  Frida had looked to the foreman, who stood just behind the director, hat in his hands.

  “He was found in the open pit area,” Hallberg said. “We think he was on the mountain on Friday night. Would you have any idea why?”

  “No . . . He was at work. And then with the others,” she said and glanced at the foreman again—drinking, she thought, but she didn’t say that. “He never came home. On Saturday morning, the others said he had left earlier.”

  The mine. She couldn’t wrap her head around it. In the middle of the night. What had he been thinking?

  “I am so sorry,” Sandler said. He looked around the worn cottage and at the children and sighed.

  “I suppose you’ll need us to leave,” she said, and it was difficult pronouncing the words.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Unless . . .” the foreman began. The director turned to him. “How old is your oldest?”

  Abraham’s eyes turned black. Don’t say anything, Frida pleaded with him in her mind.

  “Thirteen,” Abraham answered, his voice breaking in the middle, shooting up. He cleared his throat and frowned. He hated it when that happened, as it was a sign he was not yet a man.

  “Unless you want to take your father’s place.” Hallberg finished his sentence.

  “We’ll think about it,” Frida said rapidly, without looking at her son. When they’d told him about his father, he had screamed that he hated the mine and that he would never set foot inside it. But there was money. There was this house . . .

  The director stood up. The foreman put his hat back on.

  “Don’t worry, Mummy,” Abraham said, when they had left. “We’ll find a way.”

  She had looked at him; she hadn’t raised him to be naive.

  The little one was screeching now, long, piercing shrieks.

  “Be quiet!” she yelled and covered her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she cried. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, rose and picked the baby up, rocked him in her arms. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. The baby turned, looked for her breast and she gave it to him even though she wasn’t certain she’d have anything to give. />
  Another thing to worry about.

  What had Georg been doing on the mountain in the middle of the night? Why was he there? She couldn’t understand it. Had he forgotten something? She couldn’t see what could be so important that he’d gone back on his own.

  She walked to the window to see it: the blunt black shape that was visible from everywhere in town, the massive ditch in front of it where the ore had been mined in the open before they began the tunnels. The central point, the one reason they were all here. She’d told Georg that they shouldn’t come here; told him that if they did, they’d never be able to leave. The hatred she suddenly felt for her late husband surprised her.

  Her grandmother had told her the stories about Blackåsen Mountain and about the influence it had on people. “It’s the iron,” she’d said, chewing bread. She broke off another piece and put it in her mouth, her jaws working. “Magnetic. It pulls you in and keeps you close. Some things are just neutral,” she’d said, “neither good, nor bad. But Blackåsen is not like that. Blackåsen has powers and, as far as I know, it has only ever used them to do evil.”

  10.

  Laura

  Laura got Andreas’s address from the Department of Theology after stating it was a family emergency. She felt bad about lying, but the administrator gave her no choice. Andreas had a room in the student home managed by the Friends of Sobriety, a ten-minute walk from Britta’s dormitory. His doorbell was marked by a handwritten A. Lundius. Nobody answered when she rang it. She had been surprised to see he lived at a student home. But she wasn’t certain what she had expected. She didn’t know how much of a distinction the university was making between Sami and Swedish students.

  The front door opened and a young man came out, wet hair combed, book bag under his arm.

  “Excuse me,” Laura said.

  He paused, angry. A first-year student, she thought, straitlaced, stressed.

  “I’m looking for Andreas Lundius.”

  “He’s not here,” the boy said, brusquely.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t exactly socialize. I saw him leave last week. He was in a hurry.”

  Last week?

  “Where did he go?”

  The boy shrugged. “Traveling, I guess. He was carrying a big bag.”

  Andreas couldn’t leave. Did the police know?

  “Where to?”

  “I have no idea. Why does everyone want to talk to him?”

  “What do you mean, ‘everyone’? Who else has asked for him?”

  “A man. Early this morning.”

  “Did he say who he was?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know. Dark hair.”

  “How old?”

  “Forties?”

  “Did he have an accent?” she asked. A German accent, she thought.

  “Not at all.”

  “Could it have been a professor?”

  “Maybe. He was wearing a suit. He didn’t resemble a teacher, more a lawyer, or a banker.”

  “Or a policeman?”

  “Yes.” The boy lit up. “I’ll bet you it was a policeman.”

  IN THE AFTERNOON, on the way to meet Professor Lindahl, she stood for a while in the square beneath the cathedral. Britta was dead, killed, but not where she was found. She tried to visualize it, a person carrying her past this cathedral across the cobblestone square. Or the other way, down the hill of the main university building. Or coming up along the small streets from the river? Britta was tall. She would not have been light to carry. Perhaps he had wrapped her in a rug? Perhaps there had been several perpetrators? Or perhaps he drove the body there. But in that case, would someone have noticed a car?

  Three women came up the hill wearing the brown jackets and skirts of the military volunteers. The badge on their caps told what organization they belonged to, but Laura didn’t know enough about it to tell. Many women had joined, but Laura had never contemplated it. She’d felt she was doing her part for Sweden in her role.

  “I’d do it.”

  A fragmented discussion from another time. Britta. Hitler had just been given Sudetenland by Prime Minister Chamberlain. A war seemed inevitable.

  “I’d be a soldier. I’d kill for our country.” Britta rose, face grim, made a salute, hand to forehead.

  “You couldn’t kill a fly,” Erik had said, softly. “You’d find a reason to feel sorry for anyone—regardless of what they’d done.”

  “I could if I had to,” Britta insisted.

  “Imagine actually extinguishing a life,” Matti said.

  “If it comes to their life or yours . . .” Britta said. “You’ve been a soldier.” She turned to Erik.

  “In peacetime,” he said. “God.” He rolled his eyes.

  “Question is where you draw that line in the sand,” Karl-Henrik said. “I think most of us would find that the line is actually further away than we had originally thought.”

  Britta plopped down in the armchair behind her. “Actually,” she said, “the one among us who could kill is probably Laura.” She raised her glass to toast Laura. “You have that steely resolve . . . You’d do it if you had to.”

  “Me? You’ve got to be joking.”

  Britta tipped her head to one side to look at her.

  “Never,” Laura had said.

  Erik had been laughing. “Well,” he’d said, “at least we’re your friends. Likely better to be killed by someone you know.”

  Britta would have been more likely to enlist than her, Laura thought now. Britta had a strong moral compass. But as far as Laura knew, she never had.

  PROFESSOR LINDAHL WAS late, so she sat down on the chair outside the classroom where they’d agreed to meet.

  He might have been disappointed when only Britta continued their studies. Laura hadn’t talked to him in person about leaving after Jacob Wallenberg asked her to join the trading committee with Germany. She had written him a letter, to which she received no response. She regretted that now. She’d been in a rush, flattered that Wallenberg wanted her—keen to get into real life and contribute to the war effort.

  She should have gone to see him. He had taken them under his wing. It was at the nachspiele that she had met the others, including Britta. In that way, the professor had chosen her friends for her.

  She pictured him in her mind. Impossible to tell his age; he could be thirty, he could be fifty. Short and slim, dressed in a black turtleneck and black trousers; a white face with the soft skin of a child and feminine features with a broad, sensitive mouth; his blond hair parted on the left, bushy, coarse, flattened to shape rather than combed and long enough to cover his ears. His eyes, too, were unusual: one green, one brown.

  He’d always been ahead of them. Sometimes his comments were so far out there, it had been hard to follow his train of thought. But if you tried to trace it, you’d discover that his brain seemed to leap two or three steps at the time—simply skipping the middle. She’d never forget hearing him speak that first time.

  “You have come to study history,” he said in a quiet voice. “Welcome.” He’d crossed his arms over his chest. On the stage, he’d looked like a tiny black figurine. Or a dancer.

  “We live in the most interesting period, and you have chosen to loiter in the past. I wonder why?

  “I get the impression from people I meet that history is not important. It doesn’t produce anything that we buy to put in our apartments or our houses. It doesn’t stand in front and lead the world. Apart from knowing the answer to the question of who invaded who in what year when playing games, the study of history has nothing to offer.

  “I think to myself how they could not be more wrong.

  “History is about the past, certainly, but it is far more than just that. History is knowledge. Knowledge in the most beautiful, deepest sense of the word. History brings comprehension of what came before us, as well as insight into the future, for in our past lie
the seeds of what will come. As the future happens, you will be able to go back and see the roots of each conflict, the reasons, and it will be clear to you why change occurred, or, perhaps more importantly, why it didn’t. It can even give us the road to follow next. And this, my dear fellows, is wisdom. Of course, it is precisely in these times that we must study our history.”

  SHE HEARD SOFT tapping sounds coming from the stairs and rose. Her breathing quickened and she wiped her hands on her skirt.

  In the gloom of the stairway, the professor’s pale hair seemed to be glowing. He was dressed in his usual black attire.

  “Laura,” he said, in his soft voice. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  She hesitated. He must know about Britta’s death and understand that this was why she was here.

  He took her hand and she looked into those strange eyes, one green, one brown.

  He let go of her and opened the door to the classroom. He was carrying nothing: no notebook, no papers or pens. Everything was kept in his head, she thought, and felt the usual surge of admiration for him.

  He pointed to a chair and she sat down. He pulled out another chair and sat down opposite her. He leaned forward in his seat, crossing his arms. She’d forgotten how small he was.

  “I’ve come to see you because of Britta,” she said.

  “Oh yes, Britta.” He pursed his lips. His face was impassive, but then he rarely showed emotion. He often looked at them as if studying a peculiar animal or plant he had not come across before; head tilted, eyes narrowed, pale lips pursed.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she admitted.

  “It was a shocking event.”

  “She was still a student of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still at the nachspiele?”

  “Yes . . . Why are you asking about this?”

  She couldn’t tell him it was Wallenberg who had sent her. “She was my best friend,” she said. “I guess I’m trying to come to terms with her death.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t understand it. Why should this have happened to her? And why leave her body at the Historical Society?”

  “Death is always sudden for those who remain,” Professor Lindahl said. “You know this, Laura. We cannot prepare for it. It always leaves us with questions . . . as it should. It is an interruption of life as we know it.”