The Historians

by Cecilia Ekbäck

“Were there any signs?”

  “Never. He had this saying: ‘And we go on.’ He never gave up. Ever. And a gunshot is crude.” She shrugged. “He liked neat. And he didn’t leave a note. I would have expected him to try to make sure I knew he was right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s like my identity is gone. His daughter . . . that’s all I’ve ever been my whole life.”

  “You are much more than just his daughter,” Jens said. “Perhaps,” he spoke carefully now, for he didn’t want to make things worse, “his death will open things up for you. In ways you never thought possible.”

  She didn’t respond. But he could feel her sitting up straighter. Getting ready, he thought, to face the day.

  66.

  Blackåsen Mountain

  The local hotel, the Winter Palace, lay dark. The front door was locked. Hallberg gave a sign to one of his men and he kicked the door in.

  Dust whirled as they pushed open the door. The hallway was empty. There was nobody at the reception desk. A ghost house, the foreman thought, though he didn’t believe in ghosts.

  “Notholm?” He called. The man must already know they were there.

  All was silent.

  “Perhaps he left?” one of his men said.

  But Hallberg thought not.

  “The director!” he suddenly realized. “That’s where he’s gone.”

  The three men sprinted through the village. They turned into the director’s garden, gravel scraping under their feet.

  They found their friends lying on the ground. It looked like they were sleeping, but Harald was bleeding from his head and Ivar’s body was lying in a strange position. Notholm had arrived first.

  Hallberg raised a finger to his mouth. “I’ll go,” he whispered.

  Once inside, carefully, he walked up the steps toward the director’s bedroom.

  He pushed open the door to the bedroom with one finger, gun aimed, and found himself facing another gun.

  “Drop your gun,” Notholm said, “or the director dies.”

  Hallberg obliged. Notholm turned his weapon back on Sandler. “Wake up,” he said and poked him with his gun. “Wake up!”

  “He’s sick,” the foreman said.

  In the corner of his eye, he saw the door behind Notholm open. Dr. Ingemarsson.

  “Shut up!” Notholm cried and turned his gun back on the foreman. “I want him to know what’s happening. I want him to know he lost.”

  He turned back to the director.

  The doctor was approaching Notholm, something in his hand. A walking stick? The doctor stuck it in Notholm’s back. “Drop your gun,” he said.

  Notholm’s eyes grew large and he dropped his weapon. Hallberg was on him at once, wrestled him down and shouted for his men.

  “A STICK,” HE said to the doctor later.

  The doctor laughed. “I wouldn’t have let him kill a man I’d just saved.”

  “The infection?”

  “He’s lucky. He’s responding to the sulfa. I think he’ll make it.”

  Hallberg nodded. “We’ll take care of Notholm.”

  “Meaning?”

  The foreman hesitated.

  “Actually, I think I’d rather not know,” the doctor said.

  “He won’t be staying in Blackåsen,” Hallberg concluded.

  “Let me go,” Notholm demanded as they took him outside. “You have no idea who you’re up against. They’ll come for you. You’ll see.”

  “Shut him up,” the foreman said.

  They found Dr. Öhrnberg at home, fast asleep.

  “We have Notholm, too,” they told him as he got dressed.

  “You don’t understand,” Öhrnberg said. “It’s for the sake of science. It’s for Sweden.”

  Hallberg understood only too well. Notholm was just a sadistic person turned evil because he was given the opportunity. This man, however, was a true ideologist: a man at service of a cause—all in the name of science.

  THEY BURIED THE dead miners in the graveyard just behind the church.

  “I’ll go and see their widows in the morning,” the foreman said. “I’ll say there was an accident in the mine.”

  His men nodded. They wouldn’t talk. The things they had discovered during the night would haunt them for years. But they wouldn’t talk.

  He longed to tell their families about the cause for which their men had died, but it was a slippery slope. He could tell no one. They had buried the men in unmarked graves and he planned to tell the families there were no remains. This bothered him, too.

  “I’ll discuss it with the director,” he said. “Maybe we can set up a fund for the widows . . . There are a few.”

  Then he looked at Bill. It would be hardest on himself and Bill. It wasn’t over for them, by any means. Bill met his gaze and it didn’t waver.

  “Notholm, Öhrnberg, and the men who came with the train have left,” Hallberg repeated. “Before leaving, they told people they were heading south.”

  The doctor joined them.

  “Accident in the mine,” Hallberg said, clearing his throat and nodding at the new graves.

  “Anybody else hurt?” the doctor asked.

  “No.” Hallberg shook his head.

  “The director wants to see you.”

  “He’s awake?”

  “Yes. Just woke up . . . I didn’t tell him about Notholm.”

  “Good idea,” Hallberg said. “Might set him back.”

  “Right.”

  The doctor raised his hand. “Well, I’ll be heading home now. Let me know if you need me.”

  SANDLER WAS PROPPED up on pillows. His upper body was bare and his chest was heavily bandaged. His face looked ashen, but there was a glint in his eye.

  “I’m told Taneli . . . the young boy who stayed here . . . has left,” he said.

  Hallberg nodded. “Moved home. It was time. He got what he needed. You’ll see him around.”

  “What all happened while I slept?” the director asked.

  “Not much.” The foreman shrugged.

  “Not much?”

  “Notholm left,” he said. “Dr. Öhrnberg, too.”

  “Really?”

  Hallberg nodded. “Said they were going south, that they didn’t want to rent land on the mountain any longer.”

  Ah, so. The Director lifted his chin.

  “Things will be easier now,” the foreman said to his director.

  “You think?”

  “I know so.”

  67.

  Laura

  She had searched the whole house twice before she found the box. It was hidden in her father’s office—behind the books in his bookshelf. It contained letters to her. To baby Laura. Then, later, to Laura the child, Laura the teenager . . . Thick white letters. Just like the one that had arrived on her eighteenth birthday.

  I just want to see you, the letters said. Just a short visit. But he won’t let me. I think he might hurt you or me if I try . . .

  Before we married, he was sensible, charming. I fell for it. I can only hope and pray that he loves you enough not to do the same things to you . . .

  We were his possessions. I tried to take you with me, but you were his and he wouldn’t let me . . .

  Page after page of her mother’s handwriting, the ink blotched with what might have been her tears, and now she was adding her own.

  Her grandfather had read them, too.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know about these. I really didn’t.”

  All these wasted years.

  Her tears came when her grandfather went to bed. She had cried so much she felt drained. Her hands were trembling, and her arms were weak. How could he have done this? She was sitting in the bay window in the living room as dusk fell. The lights were off in the room and the darkness swam in and out of the window from the garden.

  There was an address on the letter. A street in the south of Stockholm. She would find her mother—if it wasn’t already too late.
The last letter was dated over two years ago.

  Something scraped on the upper floor. She stiffened. Her grandfather’s bedroom was on the main floor. None of the servants slept in the house. Perhaps she’d been mistaken? No. She had heard it, she was certain. Coming from one of the bedrooms on the upper floor.

  She held her breath. Her skin broke out in goose bumps along her arms and down her back. Someone was here . . . they had come for her.

  She felt with her hand and found the gun on the settee beside her. Not the gun her father had killed himself with—the police had taken that. The other gun. The one he hid for emergencies. She had loaded it. Now she released the safety catch. She made her way to the door as silently as she could.

  The hallway lay somber and quiet. The stairway to the second floor curved upward at the end, the corners of each step shrouded in darkness. She walked closer.

  She should stop. Call the police. Wake her grandfather. Get out. But there was an intruder in the house, right here, right now, and there was no time.

  She took the first step on the stairs, gun aimed upward, and the next. Every couple of steps she paused and listened. All was still. But there was a presence on the upper floor, as palpable as if she’d seen it.

  Upstairs, she paused again. There were five bedrooms and her father’s office. She carefully opened the door to his office. The moon shone in through the window onto the desk, but the room was empty.

  My bedroom, she thought. He’s in my bedroom.

  She walked down the hallway toward her own room. The door was slightly ajar, and she looked in. By the window—a shape.

  She pulled the trigger. Again, again, again.

  ERIK HAD GOTTEN in through her bedroom window by using the fire escape to get onto the roof, then climbing to the balcony outside her room. But he had brought nothing: no weapon, no rope. Nothing. She didn’t understand. If he’d come to kill her, he’d come unprepared. And he must have heard her approaching. It was as if he wanted to die, she thought. The one among us who could kill is probably Laura. Britta toasting her in her mind. Likely better to be killed by someone you know. Erik. As she saw the blond man lying on her bedroom floor, looking like nothing but a boy, she felt a huge sense of sorrow. For him, for Britta, for herself . . . for all of them who had been touched by the network and its deeds.

  68.

  Jens

  They met in a basement room in a building in central Stockholm. Twenty men and women. The prime minister was there, the minister of social affairs. The leader of the Opposition, too.

  The foreign minister stood at the front.

  “All our information gathering tells us the same thing. Professor Lindahl was part of the team who set up the network in 1914—a young professor with a brilliant mind who was brought in to help. He assisted with creating the State Institute for Racial Biology. When the project was officially stopped, he continued. He had the connections, the information. In active circles, they speak of their leader as “the Teacher.” It is him. We are certain. His closest supporter appears unfortunately to have been Dahlgren at the Central Bank. That is, in roundabout ways, where the money came from.”

  Christian Günther paused, took off his glasses and wiped them with a cloth. “I never thought we’d find ourselves in this situation,” he admitted. He sighed, then put his glasses back on again. “Today, we arrest Lindahl using those sections of the Security Services that are still loyal to us. We start with him, and then we wind in the network quickly, resolutely. We force him to give us other names. We stamp this out for good.”

  There was an excited muttering from the people listening.

  “But for now, we wait.”

  The tension in the room was extreme. The prime minister and the minister of social affairs went to join Günther at the front. Three new kings, Jens thought.

  He thought about the organization they were up against. It astonished him: how entrenched it was in society, its tentacles spreading everywhere. There was no knowing if a person was “trustworthy,” he thought. Not really. Laura’s father and Erik had shown him that.

  After an hour, the phone rang. Günther answered it.

  The room was silent as he listened. Then he said “Thank you” and put the receiver down.

  “Professor Lindahl is no longer with us,” he said.

  The room broke out in clapping and cheering.

  “No longer with us?” Jens asked.

  Nobody heard him. Jens made his way to the front. The foreign minister was standing in a circle of people who were busy congratulating him.

  Jens touched his sleeve. “No longer with us?” he repeated. “What does that mean?”

  Günther was smiling when he turned to Jens. “He was already dead when they got there. He’d committed suicide.”

  “Suicide?” Jens frowned.

  Günther nodded. “It will make it harder to find the others, but as long as he no longer continues with the project . . .” He turned back to the group around him.

  Professor Lindahl hadn’t seemed suicidal, Jens thought. And Laura had been surprised that her father killed himself with a gun and hadn’t left a note.

  Jens could feel his knees weaken.

  He looked at Christian Günther’s stern face, with the round, steel-rimmed glasses, at the prime minister’s blunt features, eyes looking up from underneath bushy eyebrows, at the social affairs minister, with his dark hair combed flat and the deep crease between his eyes. The faces, normally serious, weighed down with the burden of responsibility for their country, now smiling and relaxed.

  There is someone else, he thought. Behind all this, there is someone else. Someone much more powerful. And this someone knew we were coming. Now he’s cleaning up.

  Around him, the conversations were excited, the voices deafening. A champagne cork popped.

  Jens could see it now, the network: a fat cable conveying a current underneath them; black, quiet, sparking slightly, but still there.

  It’s not over, he thought. They’ve changed shape and we might not recognize them next time, but they are all still there.

  Lapland, June 1943

  Javanna came home, her brother by her side.

  The Sami rejoiced for those who had returned. Then they mourned those who had been lost. For this time Stallo had taken many.

  He’s changed shape, Javanna thinks. Taken on the worst one yet. But one thing merits celebration more than any other: the settlers had stood by them. And that will never be forgotten.

  Part of her wants to shout from the rooftops about what happened to her. The memories that still make her scream at night. But Nihkko and the foreman won’t let her. The war is not yet over. It’s only moved away from their town. And so she remains quiet. They all remain quiet. Soon, nobody even whispers about the events.

  Taneli wants to go and say a proper goodbye to the director. The two will meet again, of course, but he says he needs to do this. Javanna says she will accompany him to town. Her strength is returning and she is able to cover the distance on her own. And so there she stands, waiting for her brother, by the empty hotel, the Winter Palace.

  She looks at Blackåsen Mountain. At the black shelf raised above the ground.

  And that is how it will be, she thinks. Together we will master you.

  And the mountain responds: We’ll see about that, it says. We’ll see.

  THE END

  Author’s Note and Historical Background

  I knew I wanted to write about Scandinavia during World War II. It fascinated me how countries that had been in unions with each other ended up taking such different stances. The more I read, however, the more horrified I became. Race thinking was prevalent throughout the world at the time as an accepted science. In 1922, Sweden was the first country in the world to set up a racial institute to study eugenics and human genetics, but it was by no means alone. Some things really surprised me (for example, Jews’ passport being stamped with a red J on the insistence of the neutral countries, Sweden and Switzer
land, so that Jewish travelers could more easily be identified and refused entry at the borders; Sweden’s work camps for communists and Finland’s for the Russian prisoners of war). And I wondered, under the “right” (wrong) circumstances, how far would people have been prepared to take their thinking? Where would people draw that line in the sand?

  An amazing installation was made in 2016 by Finnish artist Minna L. Henriksson in collaboration with the archaeologist Fredrik Svanberg for the Swedish Historical Museum in Stockholm. Called “Unfolding Nordic Race Science,” it depicts the organizations and people involved in race science in the Nordic countries from 1850 to 1945. The extent is remarkable. There are pictures online, and I urge you to see it—in person if you can. Seeing it in Stockholm in the spring of 2017 was one of my highlights of researching this book.

  The plot in this book is pure fiction. The two meetings of the three kings happened, but their aim was only to declare the neutrality of their countries. Some of the historic persona existed, but they were not involved in a project like this. No experimentation is known to have happened in Sweden. Here are some of the facts:

  THE SAMI

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Norwegian authorities suppressed the Sami culture, dismissing it as backward. Land was made state property. Sami settlers had to prove they spoke Norwegian before they became eligible to claim land for agriculture.

  In Sweden, the attitude was perhaps less militant, but the Sami were deemed racially “less” than the rest of the population and not capable of managing their own destiny. During this period, Swedish teachers followed Sami reindeer herders to provide education for the children according to the policy “Lapp shall be Lapp”—i.e., children should not be taught enough to become “civilized” and not in Swedish schools. Sami areas were increasingly exploited by the then new mines in Kiruna and Gällivare and the construction of the Luleå-Narvik railway. The Sami who did not have reindeer herds were refused Sami rights. They were not allowed to hunt and fish where their ancestors had always lived.

  In Russia, Sami life was brutally interrupted by the collectivization of the reindeer husbandry and agriculture in general.