by Mattias Berg
As Amba began to get closer to glancing at my face, circling steadily, as if she were trying to recall something long forgotten, I looked straight at Unity for the first time. She was sitting closest to Amba. Still seemed cheeky, but afraid. Never before had I seen such an expression in her eyes: the very opposite of a spark, something which had gone out forever.
She was unexpectedly pretty, in a red dress that must have been bought after my flight. And even though she was sitting hunched up, resigned but ready to hit back, she looked to have grown at least two inches since I saw the kids for what I thought would be the last time. When on the night of September 4, 2013 I had peered into each of their rooms, held their doors ajar, and whispered a simple “Bye!” at them. Seen Unity lying there covered in sweat, entangled in her sheets, with that strange inner warmth which would not have lessened now with the onset of puberty. I clearly distinguished the drops standing out on her forehead, with the temperature being turned up here in the Interview Room: we had called her the “Steam Engine” when she was really small and the center of attention. During the two years that she was our only child.
Then, suddenly, it all became crystal clear. Why my entire former family was so smartly dressed. And how quickly one can forget the most central of things.
I checked my wrist-watch. The time was 01.14 the night following December 21—the winter solstice as well as Unity’s twelfth birthday. They had been celebrating that evening, in their finery, with the house full of people and only Daddy permanently absent. This is what they had so abruptly been pulled away from. Probably at the exact time when the cake was carried in, given Edelweiss’ unfailing sense of the dramatic.
Once again the memories came welling back, even though they were the last thing I wanted now. The first birthday had been at least as trying as the delivery. Unity had just been given her name, having simply been called “Miracle” during her first year. A group of reasonably intimate friends came to celebrate. Close enough to be invited to our home for the first time, distant enough not to ask any questions which were too difficult. Neighbors, some few chosen colleagues of Amba’s from the auction house, none from my murky existence as a researcher at the university. No family at all, whether mine or Amba’s.
I felt the eyes in the back of my neck, from several of Amba’s female colleagues. I must have puzzled them with my contradictory appearance: the hard-as-steel body and the post in moral philosophy, the lure of my faintly melancholy air. Things which seemed impossible to combine in one and the same person.
When the guests arrived, it felt like the introductory psychological tests I had undergone at West Point’s sealed wing. A glass fell onto the floor, the crash must have been audible all the way out in the dining room, a cloud of small shards, fine splinters. But when I went to clear up there was no longer any trace of the accident. Amba called from the living room, wondered where I had disappeared to, when the drinks would be coming.
Then I saw the glasses. They were on the tray, lined up perfectly as if in an interior design magazine, full to the brim with crushed ice and decorated with garish plastic umbrellas. I put them out on the table and the guests applauded enthusiastically. “What a man,” one of the women said, “might I be allowed to borrow him from time to time?”
The child herself, little Unity as the main character in her party best, the odd little dress which Amba had had made. Neither then nor later did we ever manage to arrange a party for any of our children which actually pleased them. When they were a bit older I tried with treasure hunts. Did my best to pitch them to the lowest possible level, but the games were still far above their heads: with the exception of Duality, the children immediately became whiny and impatient, started to bicker, gripe for ice cream. Then I had to give up organizing them because our friends and neighbors began to talk, the children’s questions spreading to their parents. A father who was a moral philosopher—yet put together such advanced ciphers that not even the grown-ups could work out where the treasure lay buried . . .
Maybe it had all changed now, even the parties. Since I was no longer there.
Duality was wearing a nice blue suit and seemed as introspective as ever, with that sparkling talent which never quite found its way out. He who was able to solve the simpler cryptic crosswords long before he started school. Was unfailingly the first to find the hiding place during my increasingly complex treasure hunts, before I was forced to stop. Here, today, he was giving nothing away.
Trinity, our youngest, was the antithesis of Duality and was sitting closest to John in her new purple dress. Seemed totally unafraid, as ever, although of course tired and nonplussed about the situation. She had always been a little rash for her age; not many seven-year-olds were prepared to take the risks she did. I was struck by the fact that she kept her left hand stuffed into a pocket in her dress. I couldn’t help wondering if she had hurt it in some way, and began to worry the way a parent does.
Amba had still allowed our youngest to sit closest to the enormous John, like some sort of shield. And surely nobody who saw all that innocence and naïvety, Trinity’s childish belief that she would soon conquer the world, that everything lay open before her despite her father’s disappearance, could touch a hair on her head. Or maybe one person after all.
That man was almost touching the seven-year-old’s fair head with his swelling muscles, crammed into his tight white T-shirt, already transparent with sweat. John put me in mind more of a torturer than a bodyguard. Which of course was the intention.
Time passed, as oppressive as everything else. I tried to stop myself from looking at my watch, could not allow the repetition to drive me out of my mind. Edelweiss knew better than anyone how to exploit the fact that waiting can cause severe psychological damage in itself. That awareness that something is going to be done—but not what, not how, not by whom to whom, nor why.
At short intervals my family began to look up, one after the other, to fix their eyes on us on the opposite bench. Seemed to be gaining some sort of courage, or perhaps it was the reverse: a collective sense that it was already all too late. That resignation which, according to our psychologists, could travel from person to person in roughly the way yawning does. Between individuals, members of a social group, even in a room full of strangers, proof of how empathic human beings are. So we were trained not to yawn when others started. To be able to resist our empathic instinct.
In the mirror along the opposite wall I saw Jesús María, sitting to my right, staring straight ahead. At the group on the other side of the room—or rather at John, from the very first moment. With a dull hatred that could almost be heard vibrating in the room. Ingrid too looked right across the room, let her eyes travel back and forth across the group.
So in the end I had to do the same. So as not to stand out, reveal my identity in a way which could prove fatal: not only to myself, but more importantly to my former family. Because naturally I had no idea what John and Edelweiss now meant to do with them. Who was prey and who hostage—and who would be sacrificed on the altar.
Which was the next phase in Edelweiss’ devilish piece of theater. The very fact that he had made the arrangements so overwhelmingly complex—that none of us knew who in the room was a prisoner and who some sort of witness. Whether we, or they, came here freely, or were on the run, or in custody. What was going to happen, even in the next few moments. Who knew what about whose arrangements.
That there was no possibility for me, or actually any of us here on this bench, to make our positions clear to the others with the necessary speed.
Because even if I suddenly decided to change course, to try to get myself and my family out of this escape-proof space, how could I make them trust me? Reveal both myself and my intentions swiftly, to make them want to follow me? Explain the intricacy of the situation, with my unknown face beneath its heavy disguise—before John or maybe Ingrid took down both me and my family, either together or one by one?
The only way to loosen the knot was throu
gh violence. I would even have to neutralize my family, temporarily, first Amba and then the kids, before I could get them out of here. And that would be way too complicated even for me.
This was nothing less than a live exam in Edelweiss’ favorite game: “Everybody against everybody”. The exact thing we had trained for in narrow tunnel systems deep below our nuclear bases or in desert landscapes, the sky black with smoke from fires and explosions, with no clear view in any direction.
It invariably ended in furious violence, since mankind had never yet been able to find any other solution to insoluble problems. That was why we did not need more than a single guard in here, although in this case it was John. Because mutinying prisoners seldom act together but usually kill each other first, like scorpions in a small glass jar. And because there was in any case no chance of getting out of “Fort Knox” alive.
Soon we found ourselves in the next phase, following the usual pattern, when the reality of the situation started to sink in for my ex-family as well. One after the other they came to realize that in all likelihood none of us would be able to get them away from here: that we who were sitting on the benches opposite were just as much prisoners as they themselves, maybe more so. So each of them gradually deflated, in roughly the same way. Finally even Amba, and little Trinity, until recently so rock hard.
It was still quiet in the room. I glanced at my watch again, despite myself, and with increasing frequency, not least to get some momentary relief from the unbearable sight of my former family breaking apart opposite us. One moment it might be 01.53 and the next—after what seemed like an eternity—only 01.58. Then barely three minutes passed before I found myself looking at my watch again. It was a classic psycho-physiological effect. Time passed increasingly slowly in the locked room. In the end it more or less stood still.
Having no alternative, I kept doing what Edelweiss had always recommended for situations one did not comprehend: waited for the next move. In the worsening heat—that too presumably part of the game—my intake of breath began to burn at the back of my throat. At 02.26 my wrist-watch told me the temperature in the room had risen to 102.7 degrees. My family’s movements became ever slower. Unity and Duality were whimpering softly, Trinity kept on nodding off, in the almost drugged way of someone in an overheated bedroom.
Only Amba remained braced. Ready for the fight, still watchful. Sometimes she would stare right into my face. Again that look, as if searching for a name that was on the tip of her tongue, some celebrity she had no personal connection with. As if she had vaguely recognized me from a newspaper photograph, under the heading “Wanted”.
When my watch showed 02.43 and 107.8 degrees, I felt the blessing of fatigue for the first time. The sounds of dozing throughout the silent, hot room—all three children had now fallen asleep—were hypnotic. Even Amba’s eyelids were drooping. It was impossible not to follow, and in the mirror I thought I could see how Ingrid too was struggling to keep awake. Only Jesús María still stared straight ahead, unbending. At John, who was in the same position as earlier: stock still, eyes turned down, fingertips together. The only sound which could be heard, softly but with increasing frequency, was that of John’s heavy drops of sweat landing on the tiled floor, like Chinese water torture.
My next glance at the watch showed 02.57. I became more and more convinced that there would be no initiative at all from Edelweiss. That he wanted to let us melt into one single piece, like a grotesquely deformed tin soldier, here in the hellish heat.
And just at that moment, of course, came his next move. Just on the stroke of 3.00 a.m.
That was also when I first realized why he had arranged for us to be placed just like this. Amba and the children on the bench with the word INTERVIEWER burned into the wood, we on the opposite bench with the word INTERVIEWEE. Because John slowly got to his feet. Turned his head toward my family, tapped the children on the shoulder until they had woken out of their deep sleep, broke the now nearly three-hour-long silence.
“Listen up, ladies and gentlemen, or rather: lady, girls and boy. You now have the chance to put your questions. To the only ones who, based on our research, know anything about Erasmus Levine’s disappearance. So I think you should take this opportunity, kids. You too of course, Mrs Levine.”
They looked so terribly confused, all of them, Amba included. Probably just like all of us on the bench opposite. Me above all.
When Amba then looked straight at me in a different way, deep into my eyes: as she used to once upon a time, I fell over backward even though from the outside I remained sitting upright. Because her eyes beamed like X-rays at the disguise and my new face. Through successive layers, hidden strata, as sharp as few others in her increasingly frequent hunts for forgeries. That strangely penetrating gaze I had fallen for that very first evening.
She must have recognized me—but if she did, she gave nothing away. Seemed to be allowing me the chance to run free for a while longer, as much as she was in a position to do so. Then she turned to John with tired resolution.
“No, I don’t think we have any questions, Mr . . .?”
“Smith. Peter Smith,” John said.
I breathed out for a second or two. Even though this probably wouldn’t advance my cause by more than a fraction. Then another thunderbolt, as Amba continued. They say lightning doesn’t strike twice—which is mere superstition, of course.
“And to be honest, Peter, I don’t care. The explanation which that police inspector with the funny name—Edelweiss, I think—gave me seemed good enough . . . that Erasmus had just run off with his old academic supervisor. That she’d bewitched him. And you could tell it was going to happen from the way Erasmus used to go on about that woman: I always regarded her as our ghost from the past.”
I sat very still, shut my eyes. Paralyzed by the power in the room. The charge from the thunderbolt. But what Amba said next may have come as a surprise even to Edelweiss, who would surely be following all this minutely via the monitor in his office.
“And anyhow we’d stopped relying on him a long time ago. All of us.”
When I was able to open my eyes again I saw the children nod. Well-mannered but perhaps with a little melancholy.
Then I saw something glint by Trinity’s pocket as she turned and the spotlights in the room fell on it. I realized immediately what she had been clutching throughout this whole unbearable session. The last part of the trinitite, the glassy residue left by the first nuclear weapons test—when the desert sand in New Mexico encountered the blast, destruction and creation—which became a kind of rarity among collectors. I had given her a small piece on each of her birthdays, fragments from what Edelweiss had once given me. When I fled, in that last goodbye, I left all that remained of it in a gift box under her bed.
I tried not to look into Trinity’s eyes as my family got to their feet from the bench opposite, Amba and then the children, from youngest to oldest. Closed my eyes as I listened to the last I would ever hear of Amba’s voice.
“So if you’ll excuse us, Peter, we want to go now. Get on with our lives. We have a twelfth birthday party to finish. A cake to polish off, bowls of candies just for us, piles of potato chips left—isn’t that right, kids?”
5.07
As they were led out of the room by two escorts, one in front and one behind, there was a change of scene. A number of other guards came in and stood just in front of us, by our bench. Six of them in that small room, “Fort Knox”: two for each of us. A man and a woman in each pair. Staring us right in the eye, trained even to blink as little as was physically possible, not one movement in their faces.
I tried so hard not to wonder where they were taking Amba and the children. Whether back into some sort of custody, maybe worse—or really back out to the suburbs, home, free, in a normal civilian car, where they might resume Unity’s party with as much enthusiasm as they could muster the next day.
Had Amba played her role perfectly? Or rather broken every imaginable rule, and impro
vised, thought for herself, usually a prisoner’s worst offense. Or had she articulated their genuine feelings about me? Real, deep hatred following my sudden escape.
One by one, I managed to shut down my thoughts of Amba and the children. Put into practice all the things I had so long trained for, never dreaming that this ultimate challenge would be where I would make use of them most. Not in my worst nightmares.
I looked past the guards toward John, who had assumed the same position as before on the bench opposite us: eyes on the floor and fingertips together, as if meditating. I had never before seen him like this. While Kurt was alive they had been indistinguishable, rarely speaking with anybody except each other, as only they were sufficiently receptive to each other’s brutal humor. As far from being meditative as it was possible to be.
But perhaps this was John’s way of mourning his life-long partner. Or brooding, stock-still, over the next phase in his revenge.
As I leaned further to my right to be able to see the whole of him, my two guards—cheap Secret Service types, pawns on Edelweiss’ board—followed the movement and reached for their weapons. Then they swayed back into position, since this was not turning into any incident. I stayed in the same crooked and uncomfortable position, watching for John’s next move.
His T-shirt was now so wet and rank from the heat in here that every ripple of his mighty chest and stomach muscles had become visible. After a few more minutes he started to carry out a certain movement with mechanical precision. Seemed preoccupied with the small pool of sweat which was forming in the crook of his elbow, just below his sculpted biceps, and he dried it at regular intervals with a tiny ball of cotton wool. On the other hand he appeared not to care at all about the floods of sweat which simply ran down his bald scalp, continuing like tears over his face, and then onto the floor with a soft plop.