Invisible Things

by Jenny Davidson

  “What am I supposed to say?” Sophie asked incredulously. “Do you think it is all right for me to stand here and talk to you, as if I might ever forgive you for what you’ve done?”

  “I look on this story as cautionary,” Elsa Blix said, ignoring Sophie’s question. “I should have made sure you would die. I did not know it then, but I had a very good reason to want you off the face of the planet.”

  “Why did it matter to you whether I lived or died?”

  “I did not know then that your father was Nobel’s son,” said Elsa Blix. “If I had, my animosity would have run even deeper than it did—for I, too, am the child of Alfred Nobel. . . .”

  “You are not!” Sophie said, though the words were more expressive of shock and surprise than of actual disbelief. She remembered Nobel’s having mentioned his acquaintance with Elsa Blix’s socialite mother. It was at least feasible, she supposed, to imagine a liaison leading to the production of a child.

  “The only thing I want, Sophie, is for you to go back to Nobel—thus far he has refused to admit me to his presence—and tell him this. Tell him he had another child, and that he needs to write a place for me into his will. You and I are the two heirs of Alfred Nobel, Sophie; I will not harm you, but you must go and plead my case. I will come with you, and you will persuade him to see me—a father cannot deny his child, can he?”

  It was the most extraordinary thing Sophie had ever heard, and yet in a strange way she could see the justice of it.

  “Why didn’t you tell him before now?” she asked.

  “I did not know it when I met him all those years ago,” said Elsa Blix. “My mother told me only on her deathbed, though the man I have always known as my father was very cold to me in a way that made me suspect something was amiss, and of course my mother committed many later infidelities. But, Sophie, I think you cannot imagine the depth of the rage I have felt for Alfred Nobel, ever since he turned on me those many years ago. He hired me, he made me think of him as a sort of mentor, and then when push came to shove he took Alan’s side against mine.”

  “But it was a question about the weapon, wasn’t it?” Sophie said. “Not a personal question at all, but a philosophical one?”

  “Is there any difference between the two things?” Elsa Blix asked.

  Suddenly Sophie saw Elsa Blix as another version of Tabitha Hunter, someone impossibly distorted by a set of abstract commitments that in certain respects might have been admirable ones but that led to a kind of separation from the rest of humanity—a separation that negated the real, ordinary connections between human beings in which the ethical life must surely reside. There was some of Tabitha in Sophie, too, and Sophie could even feel that she had some shred of similarity to Elsa Blix, who was her aunt—her half aunt?—after all. Some, but not much—one could choose what kind of a person one would become.

  “Even if I tell him this and he believes it,” Sophie said slowly, “and even if he says he will see you, Nobel might not want to write you into his will.”

  “It is enough if he sees me,” said Elsa Blix. “I am guessing that in his heart of hearts he knows I am his natural successor. He is a merchant of death—I am just showing him the true face of the work he has been doing all these years. I do not in all honesty care about the money. I will continue to build my own company, if he does not choose to bestow a share of his wealth on me. I want the public recognition that I am his child; only then will I destroy the plans, and if he will not acknowledge me in public, then I will sell them to the European Federation.”

  “The plans are for a bomb so powerful it could destroy an entire city, just like that,” Sophie said slowly. “A bomb so small I could probably carry it in one of the panniers of my bicycle! You do not really mean to hand such a thing over to the federation, do you?”

  “Nobody knows what I will do,” said Elsa Blix, “not even myself. But once such a bomb has been conceived, sooner or later it will be built, for better and for worse—that is the nature of the human animal.”

  Sophie thought she spoke truly.

  “Is that really all?” she asked. “I promise to say all this to Nobel, say it in a serious way, and just like that you will let me and Mikael go?”

  “That is all,” said Elsa Blix. “So long as you agree to the condition, I will fly you south this very evening. There is one other thing, I think, that I must ask before we go to find your friend. Those plans—do you know how they came into my possession?”

  “How?” asked Sophie.

  “That was not a rhetorical question,” said Elsa Blix, looking rather puzzled. “I genuinely want to know—I thought you must have had something to do with it, Sophie, at least once I learned of your existence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Around the same time those images appeared on that absurd old-fashioned hunk of machinery in Edinburgh—I was able to obtain them by having one of my agents photograph the document from Nobel’s files—I, too, received a sort of visitation.”

  “What was it?” Sophie asked.

  “I thought you might have some notion yourself. I had a dream, a dream in which I very clearly saw your mother. Rose—ah, she was the only agent I could use for the destruction of the factory; nobody else would have let me hypnotize him or her so willingly, but I was sorry she had to die!”

  Sophie stared at Elsa Blix. The woman was an utter psychopath—did she think Sophie could just ignore this sort of statement?

  “In this dream,” Blix continued, “your mother gave me a strangely precise set of instructions. I felt like a madwoman for following them, and the story of my adventures along the way is another tale altogether, but when I woke up I found myself under an almost irresistible compulsion to do just as she had told me. I went to the Fabergé workshop in Saint Petersburg and found a little old craftsman who had been consulted as to the metalworking technology needed for the explosive chamber of your father’s device. After some persuasion—don’t worry, Sophie, there was no violence involved, and it was only a slight stretch of the truth to represent myself as an emissary of your mother—he gave me a safe-deposit key that Rose Hunter had left with him more than fifteen years ago. I went to a bank on the Nevsky Prospekt; I was led to an underground vault, and there in a small metal box were the plans. . . .”

  “Had my mother put them there?”

  “Yes. Alan thought it too dangerous to have a second set circulating, and fought to keep everything within the factory, but your mother worried that sabotage might destroy all of his work and wanted to have some way of reconstructing it in the event of its being lost.”

  “But why should my mother have appeared to you in a dream?” Sophie cried out. “I would think she’d have done anything to keep those plans away from you—she died at your hands!”

  Elsa Blix looked at Sophie in a way that could almost have been described as sympathetic.

  “What if she knew that the plans were needed?” Blix said. “What if she had gathered that war was coming, and that Frisch and Meitner were just coming toward the point where Alan’s work would have been peculiarly useful to them? What if she hadn’t agreed with her husband that the bomb shouldn’t be used?”

  “She wouldn’t have wanted the Hanseatic League to fall to the European Federation!” Sophie protested.

  “That is certainly true,” said Elsa Blix, “but then, neither do I.”

  Sophie stared at her. “But you sold them the weapons they used for the invasion of Denmark!” she said.

  Elsa Blix shrugged.

  “I am a weapons dealer,” she said. “I sell to either side. I sell to anyone who has the money, within reason. That is the way of the world, Sophie, but no more than you would I like to see the world completely overwhelmed by Europe. It is sheer utopianism, though, to believe that one can prevent the most powerful weapon in the world from being built—your father was a utopian of that sort, but I was not, and neither was your mother. Indeed, even your precious Niels Bohr, Sophie, knows the weapon mu
st be built—I have talked to him about it already. . . .”

  “Are you really saying that you believe you were directed to the plans by my mother’s ghost?” Sophie asked.

  “That is indeed what I believe,” said Elsa Blix.

  Could it be that Sophie’s mother had communicated with Sophie, too, without her even knowing it, but that the only message she had bothered to send had been a page of old blueprints? Sophie felt as though her brain had been twisted into knots. In a storybook, she would be plotting to kill Elsa Blix in revenge for her parents’ death. In the real world, how would one even undertake such a thing? And what good could it possibly do?

  “Come,” said Elsa Blix. “We will have more time to discuss these matters later. You and I and Mikael will travel south in my aeroplane to see Nobel again so that we can hammer out the details of an agreement. It is time now for you to call Mikael back from his captivity.”

  “Are the changes in him permanent?” Sophie asked. If Mikael’s former self were beyond reclamation . . .

  “Time is the chief antidote,” said Elsa Blix, which did not seem to answer the question. “Would you like to see Mikael now? And perhaps you will first use the washroom.”

  Sophie flushed. Her face was quite dirty, she knew it, and her hands were filthy, and she would welcome the chance to use the washroom—but why should this woman, herself surely almost beneath contempt morally, so readily induce in Sophie shame for what was, after all, merely physical dirtiness?

  They seemed to be the only warm, living physical beings in the entire palace. The gatekeeper had not reappeared since Sophie had emerged from the tunnel, and Elsa Blix herself showed Sophie to a small washroom. The facility was a perfectly ordinary-looking porcelain one, to Sophie’s relief. She did not want to have to set her bottom on a rim of ice!

  “Now you may see Mikael,” the Snow Queen told her, and they made their way through chambers and passageways built on a more than human scale to the strange cell where Mikael was being kept.

  He was awake this time. He sat listlessly at the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. As they watched, he looked up, then got up and began pacing around his cell. Something caught his attention in the corner, and he knelt down and began fiddling with what seemed to be a kind of jigsaw puzzle, only made of flat, irregularly shaped pieces of ice.

  “Go and help him with the puzzle,” Elsa Blix said, standing with her arms folded by the bead curtain.

  “Mikael,” Sophie said softly, reluctant to cross the threshold. She felt strangely self-conscious—was it because he was a captive and she was free, or because she had been watching him already without his knowing it?

  He lifted his head up and turned it toward her, then went back to what he was doing, trying and failing to press another piece of ice into the edges of the one already set into the floor.

  “He sees you,” Elsa Blix whispered, “but he does not believe that you are really here. He thinks you must be merely another illusion. Go to him, Sophie!”

  The thought that Blix might want to trap her with Mikael in the cell had already crossed Sophie’s mind, but she had come so far, and had already so thoroughly given herself into Blix’s power, there was no point hanging back now.

  “Mikael, it’s me,” she said more loudly, stepping across the lintel and walking toward him. “I am really here. . . .”

  “Sophie?” he said, looking up from the strange shards of ice before him and frowning. “But how can you be Sophie? How did you get here?”

  As she looked at him, tears began to form at the edges of her eyes. She impatiently ran a finger along her lower eyelid and forced herself to think of non-sad things: earwax, pork sausages, the taste of anise.

  Mikael was pallid, chilly, otherworldly.

  He looked in her direction again, frowning a little.

  Sophie was almost sure it was just wishful thinking—how could one tell such a thing just by looking at someone?—but had he not lost some of the hardness about the face that had been so striking during their days in Stockholm?

  Trismegistus had followed Sophie over the threshold into the cell and was inspecting Mikael’s ice puzzle with interest. He gave a little chirp and sniffed one of the pieces, then lapped at it a few times with his pink tongue.

  “I don’t understand how you came to be here, Sophie,” Mikael said, his voice stronger now.

  “It took me many days of travel,” she said softly, and then, irrepressibly: “I was traveling by reindeer!”

  “Reindeer?” Mikael said, his voice sounding a little more animated.

  “Reindeer!” Sophie said. “And Trismegistus came with me—I must say that he has been very good—but, Mikael, I had to leave the bicycle in Stockholm. . . .”

  “Sophie?”

  “What?”

  “Are we going to be able to leave this place?”

  Sophie looked over at Elsa Blix, who was standing just to one side of the doorway, her hands crossed over her chest, the language of her body taut and defensive.

  “I think so,” Sophie said. “But, Mikael, it is good to see you!”

  Tris was poking one of the puzzle pieces with his paw. He meowed to attract Sophie’s attention, and she turned her gaze to what he was looking at.

  She saw at once how the remaining pieces should fit together, and she bent down to rearrange them. As she fit the last piece into place, she heard a kind of click, and the whole puzzle began to rotate on its base.

  Tris jumped back from it, the dainty haste of his steps almost comical, but Sophie could now see that the image chiseled in sharp lines on the surface of the puzzle was the chemical structure of nitroglycerin, traced over with a pattern she didn’t recognize of interlocked elliptical orbits.

  “Sophie!” Mikael said, turning to her and placing his hand on her sleeve. “I was so awful to you those last days in Sweden—how will you ever forgive me?”

  Sophie found herself in his arms, her face muffled against the rough cloth of his jacket.

  She wrapped her own arms around him.

  “Sophie!” he said, his lips brushing her hair, his arms closing more tightly around her.

  “The thing is,” she said, though she spoke the words into his shoulder and she was almost certain he couldn’t hear them, “it is perverse to have these tales of rescue and self-sacrifice and redemption of the other. In real life, when someone has been utterly horrible, there is every reason to think that they will continue to be so. It would be more productive and less self-defeating to write that person off and turn over to a fresh page. . . .”

  She felt his hand brush her hair again, and buried her face in the hollow near his collarbone.

  She saw suddenly that the war had changed everything and it had changed nothing. Perhaps Sophie would return to Scotland for university; perhaps she would instead get caught up in the war effort somewhere and become a cryptographer or an air-traffic controller or an ambulance driver. The legacy of her parents, their complex entanglement with the life and fortunes of Alfred Nobel, did not have to continue to define her. She was not obliged to be Sophie the student, Sophie the orphan, Sophie the worrier. She was just Sophie Hunter, with all sorts of adventures still to come.

  “What are we going to do now?” Mikael said into her ear.

  “We are going home,” Sophie answered, knowing that it did not matter whether they ended up in Stockholm or Edinburgh or anywhere else, so long as Mikael was always with her.

  Author’s Note

  As I wrote in the note printed at the end of The Explosionist, which tells the earlier part of Sophie’s story, I have always been in love with the idea of north. My father is Scottish, and I spent quite a bit of time in Edinburgh and its environs as a child. Over the summers between 2000 and 2004, I was lucky enough to visit St. Petersburg in Russia, Tallinn in Estonia, Stockholm in Sweden, and Copenhagen in Denmark. (København is the Danish spelling, which I have retained here for the slight sense of alienation and estrangement it gives to English
-language readers.)

  Like Edinburgh, these are cities of striking natural and artificial beauty, and I began to dream about what it would be like to live in an alternate universe in which these northern cities, so strongly united by culture and geography, were also politically connected. What if a new Hanseatic League (the Hanse was the name for the medieval trade alliance that spanned the Baltic and North seas) had come about in the wake of an event that did not happen in our world, but did take place in Sophie’s—Napoleon’s defeat of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815?

  There is a by now well-established genre of fiction called alternate history. Many alternate histories take a single event (often a famous battle) and change its outcome, considering what might have happened had history continued along another prong of the fork in the road. Novels of this sort might be set in worlds where the South won the American Civil War or Germany won World War II, to take two of the most popular examples.

  Sophie is coming of age in a 1930s that looks in many respects much like the decade we knew (more about this in a moment), but that is in other respects quite different. As in our world, the 1910s in Sophie’s world saw a Great War; in Sophie’s world, though, that war lingered well into the 1920s and ended with England falling to Europe. The countries in the Hanseatic League (chiefly Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Estonia) are able to hold out against the Europeans only because they are also the world’s premier suppliers of top-quality munitions, which Europe needs. Thus the secular patron saint of the modern Hanseatic states is Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and industrialist whose invention of dynamite in 1867 changed the landscape of Sophie’s Europe even more decisively than our own.

  The world I imagined comes out of real places and real history but also out of fairy tales and counterfactual paths not taken. Of course, if we really think about how history works, a world that split off more than a hundred years prior to the events of Invisible Things would have much less in common with our own world. In Sophie’s world, it is Ludwig Wittgenstein (in real history, a philosopher rather than a physicist), not Werner Heisenberg, who collaborates with Niels Bohr and comes upon the notion of the uncertainty principle; in our world, Denmark was occupied by the Germans in April 1940, whereas the world of Invisible Things sees a German-dominated European Federation invading Denmark in October 1938. But Sophie’s world remains quite recognizably entwined or entangled with our own world and its history; not just Niels Bohr but Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Robert Frisch, Lise Meitner, and others were real historical characters with the same names and birth dates and personal histories that they possess in Invisible Things. Logically speaking, it is monumentally unlikely that if history had taken such a different turn there would even be such a person as Niels Bohr: he would have to have been the product of a particular meeting of sperm and egg contributed by parents who might never even have existed in the world of Invisible Things, let alone been born and met and married and conceived exactly the same child at the same exact moment and given him the same name as they did in ours. This is a very great liberty, given the rules of alternate history, and I have taken it ruthlessly and without remorse.