Invisible Things

by Jenny Davidson

  As if his appearance had been scripted, the black cat materialized in the doorway, wedging the door a little wider open and weaving his way around the edge of the room toward Sophie. He rubbed his muzzle along the hand she offered him, then sprang up onto the arm of the chair and settled down in the pose preferred by the Egyptian sphinxes.

  “He is amazingly intelligent, isn’t he?” Sophie said, giving the cat a series of strong, firm strokes over his brow ridges and ears, a form of patting that made the cat purr like a dynamo.

  “Hevesy?”

  “No!”

  “Oh, you’re talking about Blackie. . . .”

  Sophie gave Mikael a reproachful look, and he started to laugh.

  “I suppose you wish I’d call him Trismegistus! But it’s a ridiculous name for a cat, Sophie; it makes the wretched beast sound like the prop of some charlatan of an occult practitioner. Just because he once belonged to a spiritualist medium doesn’t mean he’s not a perfectly ordinary, common-or-garden-variety black cat! Bet you he prefers to be called Blackie—look! Here, Blackie, do you want the last bit of cocoa?”

  He picked up the mug and held it about a foot from the ground, tipping it forward in the cat’s direction and jiggling it to slosh the scant remaining liquid around at the bottom. The cat remained impervious to the cocoa’s charms, perhaps because of the affront to his dignity, but more likely because Fru Petersen had already given him herring for supper; Sophie could still slightly smell the residue on his face and whiskers, though he was an irreproachably clean cat who groomed himself at every opportunity and sported an exceptionally thick and glossy coat.

  “I agree it’s a bit silly,” Sophie said regretfully, “but really I think he must be called Trismegistus. It suits him, in a slightly sinister way. Perhaps he wouldn’t object to being called Tris for short. What do you think, Tris?”

  When she reached under his chin and began rubbing along the bottom of his jaw, his purring swelled to such a degree that Mikael could hear it all the way on the other side of the room.

  “Tris it is, then,” he said, with a sigh of resignation so dramatic that Sophie couldn’t help but laugh.

  In the absence of anything better to do—his mother would be very annoyed if she saw the mess!—Mikael was plucking the white blossoms off a flowering branch that Fru Petersen had arranged in a sleek white modern vase. The petals mounted in a heap, Mikael registering what he had been doing only when every twig had been stripped bare of blossom; he looked surprised, then picked up the pile of petals in both hands and heaved himself out of his chair to cast them in Sophie’s direction.

  The petals descended over Sophie and the cat like snow.

  With the last petals still fluttering to the ground, Mikael’s mother leaned her head around the door.

  “Still up?” she said. “You two had a long day—I’d say it’s bedtime around now. What a mess you’ve made!”

  Sophie cleaned her teeth in the bathroom. Mikael had taken to leaving his toothbrush and the little tin of cleaning powder by the kitchen sink and brushing his teeth there to avoid either enduring or instigating a bathroom wait; Sophie would have been glad to let him go first in the bathroom, but Mikael’s notion of the obligations of the guest-host relationship entwined the pair of them in a merciless web of mutual courtesies.

  She left her door open a crack, and a few minutes after she had turned out the bedside light, Trismegistus padded into the room and jumped up onto the bed with the funny little revving-up noise that Sophie found so endearing.

  She turned onto her side, and the cat tucked himself into the space between her arms and stomach like a hot, fat, furry sausage. The cat’s companionship was one of Sophie’s greatest consolations in her new Danish life. It wasn’t a bad life, on its own terms, but it had made all of the futures her past self had spent so much time pondering go quite blank.

  All she seemed able to do now was wait. When would the dynamiteur Alfred Nobel send word that he was ready to see Sophie? Just before she’d left Scotland, she’d spoken to Nobel on the telephone, and he had promised all sorts of revelations about Sophie’s long-dead parents, but she had never expected such a long time to pass before his next communication. When Nobel did finally reach out to her, would the message be brought by her old chemistry teacher, Mikael’s older brother, Arne?

  Would Mikael—but Sophie could hardly stand to think about it, the idea so thoroughly and confusingly excited and shamed her—ever want to kiss her?

  Just then the cat reached out his left paw and laid it on Sophie’s forearm, kneading her flesh for a moment and giving her a short, sharp dig with his claws.

  “Stop that!” Sophie said, outraged and rolling away from him.

  No sooner had she turned her back than the cat raised himself up and picked his way around the blanketed outline of her body to set himself back down along Sophie’s front.

  “I do not see why you have to lie on my front side,” she said with fond exasperation, but the cat only purred and settled himself closer by.

  For Saturday-morning breakfast, Mikael’s mother always made them crepes filled with apricot jam and sprinkled with powdered sugar, which seemed almost criminally delicious for a meal that in Sophie’s Scottish life had usually been more penitential than mouthwatering—oh, but she must stop making these comparisons! Even when the advantage fell to København, as often seemed the case, there was something reproach-worthy about looking constantly backward. It was better not to let the words In Scotland . . . or At home . . . ever cross her lips; it was the lesson of Orpheus and Eurydice, or of Lot’s wife looking back and being turned into a pillar of salt.

  After helping with the washing-up (and goodness, it was nice having hot running water and electric wiring— but there she went with another “In Edinburgh”!), Sophie spent an hour on her history essay. Mikael went to the boys’ school where Niels Bohr had sent his sons, but Sophie had been enrolled as a pupil at a very good English-language coeducational school founded and directed by Bohr’s aunt Hanna Adler. Sophie liked the Fællesskole quite a bit. It was a progressive school, which seemed mostly to mean that children so inclined were allowed to behave very badly, but that lessons were considerably more interesting than at an ordinary school. All but the most daunting teachers were called by their first names, a custom Sophie judged strange but pleasant: the verdict she had reached on almost every aspect of her new life.

  At the other side of the dining table, Mikael was covering sheets of paper with intricate penciled calculations, and the example of his easy concentration helped Sophie become fully absorbed in her own essay, which was on the relationship between aboveboard diplomacy and secret operations like espionage or even assassination.

  In a way it was like animal vivisection or scientific experimentation. Sophie would much prefer not to euthanize and dissect an animal with her own two hands. Just so might she recoil at the notion of ordering an assassination, let alone assassinating someone herself. But there was a kind of hypocrisy, wasn’t there, in congratulating oneself on not having to descend to such things while simultaneously benefiting from living in a world where espionage and even assassination might be the only way for one’s country to maintain its independence?

  She finished a paragraph and started doodling in the margin of the page. Drawing a blank as to what to say next, she decided to consult the encyclopedia, whose gilded black-and-red volumes took up almost a whole shelf in the library downstairs. On a weekday, a noisy game of Ping-Pong might have been under way at the table by the library windows, which were always kept open to clear the haze of tobacco smoke that otherwise hung in the air; the cold air had led someone to put a joke sign above the door (but it would make more sense when winter came!) saying nordpol, with North Pole written underneath for English speakers, and one of the eccentric Russian George Gamow’s trademark drawings of Bohr as Mickey Mouse. Bohr/Mickey was dressed up as Father Christmas and brandished a Ping-Pong racquet at his team of reindeer; it was one of the great myster
ies of life how the crude inked figure could so clearly represent all three things at once—Bohr, Mickey, Father Christmas.

  Today being Saturday, the library was empty. Leafing her way through to Intelligence Services, Sophie got distracted by Ichneumon, Ichthyology, and Iodine, and she was immersed in Ice (glacial) when someone tapped her on the shoulder.

  It was Niels Bohr himself. After checking that Sophie did not mind the interruption, he pulled up a chair, tipped back in it, and rested his feet on the table in front of them.

  Bohr was kind to everybody, in his own absentminded fashion, but the great surprise of Sophie’s first days in København a month earlier had come when Mikael’s mother informed her that Bohr wished to see Sophie in his office.

  Sophie had flinched—it sounded distinctly disciplinary!— whereupon Fru Petersen twisted her mouth in a comical fashion and said, “The only person who is not periodically summoned to the great man’s office is the janitor, and that is because Bohr knows the fellow will only importune him for more funds if they meet face-to-face!”

  “What does Professor Bohr want to talk to me about?” Sophie asked, but Fru Petersen couldn’t give her an answer.

  So Sophie had duly appeared in the outer sanctuary, the secretary asking her to sit quietly until Bohr was ready to see her. Her heart had been in her mouth as she waited, and she felt almost breathless with nerves. Would he cross-examine her about her visa status, or, worse, about her fairly sketchy knowledge of nuclear physics?

  But when she was finally ushered into Bohr’s office, Sophie had seen not an ogre but a kind-faced man whose boyish manner belied the fact of his being in late middle age. The first thing he did was jump out of his seat and rush over to Sophie and clasp her hands in his own, leaning over to look closely into her face.

  “A definite resemblance,” he muttered. “It would be an exaggeration to say I’d have known you anywhere—it is difficult to pick out a likeness in the face of a complete stranger on the street—but I see quite a strong look of your father. . . .”

  Seeing the puzzled expression on Sophie’s face, he led her to a phalanx of framed photographs on the wall beside the window. There was a row of almost indistinguishable group portraits of the institute’s staff—the earliest ones had only twelve or fourteen people in them, while the more recent ones were populated by several dozen figures—and there in the back right-hand corner of the group photograph for the year 1917 was Sophie’s very own father, who had died (so had her mother) when she was too young to remember him.

  “Alan came to the institute as a postdoctoral fellow in 1912,” Bohr had told Sophie. Then he put his finger to the smudge of a half-visible face of a young woman standing at the other edge of the group. She had turned away, as if responding to a comment from someone outside the frame of the picture, and there was something elusive—almost ghostly—about her equivocal presence. “Your mother had already been working here for a year when he came, but it took him many months to persuade her to let him take her out for coffee and cake!”

  Sophie had been struck almost dumb with surprise.

  “My mother and father met here?” she had asked, after recovering her voice. “At the Institute for Theoretical Physics?”

  “Did you not know?” Bohr had said in response, frowning a little and opening a drawer from which he extracted a tin of biscuits. Taking the lid off, he had offered it to Sophie, who chose a rectangular shortbread, and then he himself carefully picked out two chocolate-covered round ones dusted with coconut. He had gone on to tell Sophie the tale of Alan Hunter’s courtship of a shy, charming fellow Scot called Rose Childs, a story hitherto entirely unknown to Sophie, before further endearing himself to her by offering her some fudge from the secret supply in his office cupboard. He had concluded by telling her that Sophie had been a favorite name of his ever since his time as a very junior research fellow in Manchester, when he had taught himself English by reading David Copperfield and looking up the words he didn’t recognize. “Dickens’s Sophie,” he had added, “lived in Devonshire and was one of ten, as I am sure you know!”

  Seeing Bohr again now in the library, the pages of her history essay slightly fluttering (she had pinned them down with a malachite paperweight) in the breeze from the windows, Sophie had to fight the urge to pepper him with more questions about her parents. But though she desperately wanted to learn everything she could, she did not want Bohr to think of Sophie as a person of exclusively genealogical interests. It was hard to shake the sense instilled by her stern guardian, Great-aunt Tabitha, an elderly lady of supreme rectitude who had seen fit to keep Sophie almost entirely in the dark about her antecedents, that questions about one’s deceased parents represented idle curiosity of the most frivolous sort.

  The encyclopedia volume still open before her, she asked Bohr the question that had been troubling her as she wrote her essay.

  “Say that someone’s leading a double life,” she began, remembering not just Great-aunt Tabitha and her twin role as enlightener and secret keeper for the sinister organization called IRYLNS, but also Sophie’s former history teacher, Miss Chatterjee, and Arne Petersen himself, and the ways their secrets deformed and distorted their other human relationships. When Mikael’s older brother had posed as Sophie’s chemistry teacher in Edinburgh, he had really been working as a secret agent for the reclusive dynamiteur Alfred Nobel. It had taken Sophie quite a long time to apprehend the extent of Arne’s double-dealing, and to add insult to injury, after revealing to Sophie that Nobel had actually connived at a plan to bring Sophie to see him in his . . . Sophie mentally supplied the word lair, Arne had simply gone off without doing anything about making arrangements for a visit that Sophie perhaps dreaded and looked forward to in equal measure.

  “Would you say that it is possible for each strand of that life to be full of integrity,” she asked Bohr, “even if it is lived under conditions of concealment? Or does the ongoing deception tarnish the person’s character regardless, even if each strand of the life seems respectable on its own?”

  “Do I detect a question motivated by something other than abstract curiosity?” Bohr asked, his voice kind. He snapped the book shut and took his pipe from his breast pocket, then began the near-interminable process of fiddling that might or might not culminate half an hour later in its finally being lit. “Are you thinking of Arne Petersen?”

  Sophie flushed and nodded.

  “Do you think I’ll hear from him soon about the visit to Mr. Nobel?” she asked Bohr, hating how pitiful she sounded but unable to stop the words from tumbling out of her mouth.

  “I hope so,” Bohr said apologetically, “but it is honestly impossible to say. You know that the institute gets a good deal of its funding from Nobel’s various trusts and foundations; at times I will receive from the man as many as three or four telegrams in a single morning, whereas at other times months may pass without a hint of response even to my most pressing inquiries. It can be highly frustrating, but then that is the price we pay when we deal with these great men. . . .”

  He did not seem to use the phrase ironically, and it caused Sophie to bristle slightly on Bohr’s own behalf. Surely Bohr himself was by any rational standard of measurement as great a man as Alfred Nobel!

  Just then Mikael peered around the door of the library.

  “There you are, Sophie!” he called out. “Professor Bohr, I must claim Sophie for a bicycle ride. . . .”

  “We just as well could ride later on, though, couldn’t we?” Sophie said hopefully.

  Mikael started laughing, and so did Bohr—alas, bicycle riding was one of the minor banes of Sophie’s Danish existence, and it was well-known throughout the institute that Sophie would have been very glad had the bicycle never been invented.

  As they clattered downstairs through the deserted building, Sophie had an appealing sense of the institute’s being their own personal playground. The main building, in addition to the residential flats and guest rooms on the top floor, held laborator
y and office space for about fifteen physicists. The ground floor had a big office and reception area for Bohr and his secretary, and an auditorium that could seat almost a hundred people. The basement, served by a goods elevator, housed a chemical laboratory and four big workrooms for experimental research. It was packed full of all sorts of things whose inner workings Sophie did not always fully understand but whose names rolled off the tongue in a most lovely way: a high-tension generator, a grating spectrograph, a precision lathe, drills and saws and sanders, and the delightfully named universal cutting machine. Of course, the universal cutting machine could not really cut everything; it was just a name, but Sophie liked the notion that it might be used to cut out a neat strip of sky or a perfect cube of water.

  And in a detail like something out of a fairy tale, a seven-meter well had been dug deep below the floor of the basement, with a narrow staircase leading down into it. It had been built for the spectrograph, which had been floated at the bottom of the well in a container of oil meant to minimize vibrations from the trolley cars that ran along Blegdamsvej in front of the institute, but when the vibrations continued to affect the instrument, it had to be moved elsewhere. Now the underground cave was used to produce and store the radioactive isotopes for Hevesy’s tracer experiments, the Hungarian scientist’s slight resemblance to a turtle only compounding Sophie’s sense of its being a magical grotto where frogs might turn into princes if the right person kissed them.

  The bicycle shed stood on the east side of the building. By the time Sophie had knocked over several other machines and barked her shins painfully on the lawn mower, Mikael was already riding around outside in circles.

  It was not so much that Sophie minded actually riding a bicycle. It was quite enjoyable, really, once one was rolling along, so long as one did not allow oneself to become flustered when a dog took chase or a small child rushed directly out into one’s path. But bicycles themselves were so troublesome and awkward! One banged one’s shins on them and knocked into things as one tried to wheel them out of congested areas, and it still seemed to Sophie impossible to imagine walking and wheeling the wretched contraption at anything like a normal pace.