The Historians Read online

  “Aren’t people talking about it? You know . . . speculating?”

  “I must admit, I rarely listen to gossip.” He leaned back in his chair and looked away.

  Upset, she thought. Or bored?

  She bit her lip. Britta was your student, she wanted to say. We all were. We were special. Britta was special. The professor could be cold and aloof in his interactions—mechanical even. She realized now that she could have mistaken the glint he got in his eyes when they said something brilliant for fondness. On the other hand, she herself had written him a letter about leaving her studies, rather than taking the time to see him. Had this upset or annoyed him? Could this be why he was being unsympathetic?

  “What was Britta working on now?” she asked. As she spoke the words, she realized what had been missing in Britta’s room: her notes and research papers, her work.

  “She was doing research for her doctoral thesis.”

  “What was it about?”

  “The Scandinavian countries and their relationships with other nations through the times, I think.” Seeing her gaze, he added, “With Britta, it was difficult to know what she was working on. She was unstructured. She’d come to see me to discuss her work and often, she had started all over again, changed her mind as to what she wanted to focus on. I must admit, I didn’t have much hope of her finalizing it.”

  “Where would her research be?”

  He shrugged. “I guess it would have been with her.”

  Britta used to have a brown leather bag in which she kept her study material and her notebooks. She carried it around with her, slung over one shoulder. But it had not been in her room, nor could she picture it with Britta when they found her.

  “Who comes to the nachspiele now?”

  “Oh, that varies.”

  It never used to vary, she thought. He always invited the same students. She assumed he didn’t want her to know. She was no longer one of his protégés, not part of the inner circle.

  “Perhaps you could give me a name,” she tried. “I would just like to talk to a student who knew Britta during her last few months.”

  He looked at her, eyes unblinking, expressionless. “I don’t think I want them disturbed. This has been difficult for them. They have work to do. As, I am certain, do you. One has to be careful about these things, Laura. They can drag you down with them. I’m sure your father has already taught you that.”

  There was an odd note in his voice. Her father? The comment was so out of place that it struck her as absurd. She wasn’t a child.

  Lindahl rose and put out his hand to shake hers. As she left, she tried to shrug the feeling off, but she felt sad at the loss of their relationship. He had understood more about her than anyone.

  As she walked down the stairs toward the ground floor, a man came up to her, half running up the steps. The gray head, the steel-rimmed glasses, the strict suit. It was Professor Birger Falk—Professor Lindahl’s nemesis. She didn’t want to see him. He’d always been on their case. Prying. Wanting to know what they were working on, what Professor Lindahl had taught them, with the aim of landing the latter in trouble. When they’d worked on their special project—the one that ultimately had driven them apart—he’d been so insistent they’d stopped studying at the library and kept to Laura’s flat. “It’s not psychology that you’re supposed to study,” he’d yelled at her and Britta at one point. “It’s history!”

  She hesitated but couldn’t turn around and walk the other way. And then he noticed her.

  “Miss Dahlgren,” he said. “To what do we owe the honor?”

  He stopped, forcing her to do the same.

  “I was meeting with Professor Lindahl.”

  Professor Falk studied her. “Ah,” he said then, as if he could read how the meeting had gone on her face.

  Laura felt her cheeks heat up. Embarrassment or anger; perhaps both.

  She remembered being cornered by Falk on another occasion. “Lab rats,” he’d said. He’d been standing too close and she had tried to move away. “That’s all you are to him. He throws things out there, sees how you react, has you fight one another for his approval. Then he studies you. It’s detrimental. Even more, it’s dangerous.”

  Now, she swallowed. “You wouldn’t happen to know who comes to his nachspiele now?” she asked.

  “After your group, it seems to have changed somewhat,” Professor Falk said. “Perhaps the students are less suggestible. But I know Henrik Kallur often joins.”

  She nodded thank-you then continued down the stairs. He didn’t move and she felt his gaze following her.

  As she pushed open the door to the outside and felt the wind blow her hair, only then did she exhale.

  HENRIK KALLUR PROVED to be a young man with round cheeks and round glasses. His tie was askew, and he had a yellow stain on his shirtfront.

  “I am a friend of Britta,” she said, by manner of introduction.

  “My God, what happened to her?” He pushed his library chair back with a juddering sound. The students close by turned to give them reproachful glances. Henrik didn’t notice.

  That he was one of Professor Lindahl’s chosen students surprised her. He was nothing like the five of them, she thought. But then, what had they been like?

  Smooth, she thought. Smart, funny . . . She sighed. How easy to romanticize the past.

  The words lab rats still rang in her ears. She shrugged to get rid of the feeling accompanying Falk’s words.

  “Beaten, they say,” the boy continued. She could imagine him doing the rounds at the university, bigmouthed: “Beaten, they say.” Anger rose within her and she wanted to punch his fat face.

  “Did you know her well?” Laura asked.

  “Nah. She and I weren’t close. Not like many others, if you know what I mean.” He winked at her.

  Her stomach turned. She pressed her nails into the palms of her hands.

  “Besides, we were all busy working on our theses,” he added.

  “Do you know what hers was about?”

  “Not really.” He shrugged.

  Hopeless.

  “Who else comes to Professor Lindahl’s nachspiele?”

  He rattled off the names of four other students. She wrote them down and took her hurried leave. Well, it seemed Henrik was not impacted by Britta’s death. In fact, he was the most unlikely friend of Britta she could think of. She would have found him unbearable. Why had Professor Lindahl chosen to have him in his group? But Professor Lindahl supported no fools. She assumed there was more to Henrik Kallur than met the eye.

  On the advertisement board by the exit: a photo of Britta, smiling. Laura exhaled slowly. “Do you know something?” the poster read. There was a number to call—she supposed to the local police. Laura stood looking at the photo until the face of her friend dissolved into small black and white dots.

  LAURA WENT TO speak with the other students attending the nachspiele; the names given to her by Henrik Kallur. What astonished her was how little they knew Britta. Britta seemed to have become a leftover from the past, a student who was their senior by a few years, the one they were intimidated by, and gossiped about, but whom nobody knew. When Laura lived in Uppsala, you couldn’t walk anywhere with Britta without her stopping and talking to people. She would strike up a conversation with the man who sold her cigarettes, with the waitress who brought her coffee, anyone she met. Later, she’d remember their names. Laura also couldn’t see how students could be in the nachspiele together without forming bonds. It was part of the process, she realized, Professor Lindahl’s process; to pit them against one another, and then unite them. “He throws things out there, sees how you react, has you fight each other for his approval,” Professor Falk had said. Kind of. But not for Professor Lindahl’s own pleasure, she thought. No: to display the beauty of their brilliance, individually and jointly. They’d come to rely on each other’s intelligence to push themselves further. This was why they had become inseparable. It had been immensely alluring. Tog
ether, each of them had become a better version of themselves. Smarter. More insightful.

  “But what about the debates?” Laura had asked. “You must have spoken to her then?”

  “Not much,” one student said. “We debated but didn’t speak, if you know what I mean.”

  Her eyes wouldn’t meet Laura’s. Scared, Laura thought. But then a fellow student had just been killed.

  “Aloof,” a boy stated. “Disdainful. She’d sit on the edge, smoke and look at you, judging.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, likely for speaking ill of the dead, “but it’s true.”

  “She worked on her thesis,” another boy said. “She didn’t want to share it with us. As if we would steal her material.”

  And this, this wasn’t Britta at all. Laura wanted to scoff and convince them otherwise, but that was pointless. What mattered was how much Britta must have changed during the last year. So what would it have taken, to put Britta on the sidelines? And where was her thesis?

  “I didn’t know her well,” another of the female students said. Laura had found her in the reading room and they’d gone outside to talk. They were standing in the hallway on the second floor, outside the heavy wooden doors. She had brought the book she was working on, as if worried another student would steal it. She hugged it against her chest. Large, round glasses, bangs, square short hair. Not Britta’s type but sweet.

  “But I do think she was heartbroken,” she said and nodded to herself.

  Heartbroken?

  “There was a time in the autumn when she came out of her shell. She seemed much more relaxed. I thought she was in love; there was that dreaminess about her. I asked her. I said she looked lovely, in love . . .”

  A boy ran past them, rubber soles squealing against the marble. He took the steps two at a time.

  “What did she answer?”

  “She said she was. She seemed happy.”

  “And then?”

  “It didn’t last. I imagined it had ended, her affair. She looked sad. She didn’t pay as much attention to her appearance as before.”

  Laura remembered Britta in the café at NK, pale face, how her nails had been bitten short. She felt a sting of sorrow. Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps this was about an ex-lover.

  “When did you think it had ended?”

  The student pursed her lips. “Before Christmas. I remember thinking what a shame, she wouldn’t have the holidays together with him, whoever he was.”

  “Do you know if Britta had any German friends?”

  “German?” She raised her eyebrows. “No. Well, I wouldn’t know.”

  “Did you see her with any businessmen or . . . ?” Laura prompted.

  “I never saw her outside the nachspiele. She didn’t go out.”

  “She didn’t go out?”

  Laura couldn’t believe her ears. Britta partied all the time. She couldn’t bear being at home.

  “No. She never came to the parties, or the bars.”

  On a sudden hunch, Laura asked, “The students at the nachspiele, do you . . .” Do everything together? Spend every waking minute in each other’s company? “Are you close?”

  The student shrugged. “We do projects together.”

  Then Professor Lindahl had changed, Laura thought. If the professor no longer ensured that they fell in love with one another as much as they were infatuated with him, then he had changed, indeed.

  LAURA HAD DECIDED to spend the night at the Gillet Hotel. The evening air was bitter. The late afternoon sky a crisp dark blue. She took the detour by Ekman’s House and stood for a while outside. The square was empty. She tried again to imagine a person carrying Britta’s dead body across it, fumbling to unlock the door, but she couldn’t see it.

  A young man came down the slope from the main university building. On seeing her, he paused.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Haven’t you heard about the murder? It happened right here, on an evening just like this one. You shouldn’t be walking around on your own.”

  “Who do they say did it?” she asked.

  “The Germans.”

  “The Germans?” Her ears pricked up.

  He shrugged. “Who else would it be?” He took a step closer to her and lowered his voice. “There are German divisions hiding in Sweden, you know, getting ready for the Allies on our soil.” He nodded. “They are preparing to take over the protection of the Swedish mines.”

  Rumors. God, sometimes it felt like this nation was only held together by shreds. She knew it wasn’t true and yet it scared her. The image of German soldiers hiding out in the north of Sweden. “I’ll be fine,” she told him. “You go on. I won’t be long.”

  He nodded and, after hesitating briefly, left. It was as if he had decided that her fate was in her own hands.

  The river outside the hotel was rippling black. Twilight was darkening the shadows, graying the fronts of university buildings and the hotel. Walking up the stairs to her room, she glanced into the bright dining room. The small tables were full of students, chatting, screaming, laughing. They were beautiful, she thought. No sign of wariness or fear here. They looked . . . clean. Untouched. Us, she thought. Us not long ago.

  How sad it was, she thought when she was lying in bed, the way the professor had sent her off. She had disappointed him. But then, he’d always questioned her commitment, so perhaps it hadn’t come as a surprise. He had a way, the professor, of finding their weakest spot and putting his finger right on it, prodding, asking questions, having them turn themselves inside out under his scrutinizing gaze to find answers they didn’t know they had. He did throw out hooks with bait for them to bite. But it was done to help them improve themselves. The questions he asked them individually had them pondering for weeks, questioning themselves, moving boundaries they’d previously thought were set in stone.

  “That’s how you live, isn’t it?” he’d asked her once, when they were out for a walk, which is how he preferred to conduct his teacher-student meetings; walking along the river, or in one of the parks. Him, smoking; the student adapting their pace to his, pointing out obstacles, looking out for him. “Without ever committing to anything.”

  “No,” she’d protested and then hesitated: was it? “I like to keep my options open,” she’d said.

  “I wonder why? You’re passionate about things; you have convictions. Why wouldn’t you act on them?”

  “Committing is foolish.” The vehemence in her voice had surprised her. “It’s ideological. We move. We adapt. We stay opportunistic.”

  “‘We,’” he’d remarked. “Who was it in your life that didn’t commit, Laura?”

  A flickering image before her: a woman, a ghost, looking much like herself.

  Professor Lindahl nodded. “Your mother,” he said.

  She could barely stop herself from gasping. How on earth did he guess? There was no room for family or friends in Professor Lindahl’s company—only him and their fellow students.

  “No,” she’d lied.

  She hadn’t told the others about Professor Lindahl’s line of inquiry. It was too much. Too close.

  11.

  Jens

  Daniel Jonsson was waiting for Jens to arrive. Before Jens had put down his briefcase, Daniel was closing the office door silently behind them.

  “It’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “The copy of the register that showed the calls between Günther and the Danish and Norwegian foreign ministers is gone from my office. I’ve searched everywhere. I called my friend at the registrar. The calls are missing from the Security Services register, too. He refuses to confirm what was on record previously. Says he cannot remember.”

  “Perhaps you were mistaken.”

  The archivist shook his head. “I would never have approached you if I didn’t have the proof in my hand. And there’s more . . .”

  There was a clanking sound by the door. Both fell silent, w
aited, but it remained closed. Jens exhaled, realizing that he’d been holding his breath.

  “I called my counterpart in Denmark again,” Daniel said, in a quieter voice. “He no longer wanted to talk about it. He said he’d been mistaken. There had been no calls.”

  “Mistaken?”

  Daniel nodded. Jens paused.

  “You realize what you’re implying?” Jens asked.

  Daniel looked pained. “I do.”

  Voices in the corridor now. They both stared at the door again, but the voices continued past.

  “How would a person get phone calls removed from the logs of the Security Services?” Jens asked.

  Daniel pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. “He’s the minister, isn’t he?”

  He was, but how did it work? The registers were serious business. Suspected spies, extreme views, communist tendencies. All details were known and kept for the eventuality of war. It seemed unlikely Günther would have that power over them.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this,” Jens said.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “What will you do?”

  Jens shook his head. “I have to think about it. Don’t tell anyone,” he repeated.

  Daniel nodded and slipped out through the door.

  Jens let his breath out. What on earth would make the minister take such action? What was so special about these contacts that they had to remain secret? There were communications between countries all the time. What could they have talked about? The fate of the Jews? No, Günther normally discussed that even with Jens. They drew up plans and communications together. A military operation, then? No. Sweden was neutral; Denmark and Norway, occupied. A military intervention or support would have to pass through the government and Parliament. Jens felt cold. What was he going to do?

  Jens had no friends in the ministry. He picked up the phone and called Sven.

  Jens and Sven had met at university, studying economics in the same year, and had stayed close ever since. The first time he saw Sven in class, with his sensitive face, tweed suit combined with a crisp shirt, soft-spoken, he had written him off. Jens’s normal friends were brasher, louder. But then the two of them ended up working on a project together. Jens had found he enjoyed the other man’s company, and he came to value his opinions. Jens was ambitious. He hadn’t thought Sven had those aspirations. He’d been surprised when Sven ended up working for Möller, the minister of social affairs, in the same capacity as Jens worked for Christian Günther. “I didn’t tell you I was applying,” Sven had said. “I didn’t think I would get it.” Jens had thought the minister of social affairs was the lucky one, to have Sven working for him.