The Sound of Light, page 5
With his lips smashed together, Mortensen rubbed chalk dust off his hands. “Mrs. Iversen can’t use the mimeograph machine. That’s why I told you to do it.”
No, he hadn’t. Else glanced at the other physicists, who all seemed interested in their own hands. “Me? I don’t know how to use it.”
“Then learn. Quickly. I need copies now—twenty-five of them.”
Else stood staring, her cheeks hot.
Jørgen Wolff glanced up at her with a narrow-eyed, intent look.
How humiliating. Mortensen had gone too far, and words scalded their way up her throat.
Mortensen waved to the door. “Now.”
She blinked. How could she make a scene in front of some of the institute’s most esteemed physicists?
The words scalded even more on their way down. “Where—where’s your paper? And where’s the mimeo—”
“For heaven’s sake, Jensen. Use your brain.” He shook his head at the other men. “Useless woman.”
Else whirled out the door, everything burning and churning inside her. But she choked back her anger so she wouldn’t unleash it on sweet Mrs. Iversen.
In the secretary’s office, Mrs. Iversen slid papers into a file drawer. She lifted her gray head and smiled at Else. The smile fell. “Dr. Jensen? What’s the matter?”
Else pressed her hand to her tumbling belly and stilled her face. “Dr. Mortensen asked me to make copies of his paper. Do you have it?”
Her light eyes stretched wide, wrinkling her forehead. “How strange. Miss Bruun makes copies for me, the dear girl. I can’t figure out that contraption. But this morning, Mortensen told me not to take the stencil to her.”
“He told you not to?” Else’s mouth drew tight. Mortensen had set her up. He’d planned the whole spectacle just to humiliate her.
Mrs. Iversen rose from behind her desk. “He asked you to make copies?”
“Ordered me.” Her voice came out clipped.
“That man. Come with me, dear.” Mrs. Iversen snatched up a folder, and she led Else out of the office and down the hall, her well-padded hips swaying. “Five more years, and I can retire. I keep praying Dr. Bohr will transfer me to someone else’s lab.”
Else gave her a wobbly smile. “I say the same prayer.”
Mrs. Iversen entered the office of Dr. Wolff’s secretary. “Miss Bruun? I apologize for the short notice. Mortensen.”
Miss Bruun rolled dark eyes. “What did he do now?”
“This morning he told me not to make copies.” She slapped the folder down on the desk. “Now he’s demanding them from Dr. Jensen. Would you—”
“Oh dear. I promised to type up Dr. Wolff’s letter. It needs to go out in today’s mail.”
Else stepped closer. “He told me to make the copies.”
“That would be wonderful.” Miss Bruun gave her a smile. “Do you know how?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Miss Bruun frowned at the clock. “If you learn quickly, I could show you in about five minutes.”
“Would you?” Mrs. Iversen said. “You’re such a dear.”
Else tried to smile but failed. She followed Miss Bruun’s quick steps down to the basement. The secretary opened a door to a little room smelling of ink and oil.
“This is the mimeograph machine.” On a table sat a small machine with a cylindrical drum in the middle and two trays on either end. In a whirlwind of words and motions, Miss Bruun described its use.
After the secretary left, Else opened the folder. The stencils were made of a waxy, translucent, floppy paper with a cardboard strip at each end. Almost invisible print had been cut into the stencil with Mrs. Iversen’s typewriter.
Else attached the first stencil to the drum by the tabs in the cardboard strip. Then she rolled it around the drum and secured the bottom strip under a metal flap.
She opened a cap in the drum and squeezed a tube of thick black ink inside. With plenty of blank paper in one tray, the machine was ready.
Else turned the crank. The drum rolled, sucking a piece of paper from the tray and shooting it out the other side with words on it. She cranked it again, round and round, twenty-five times.
Now for the second page. Try as she might, she couldn’t remove the old stencil without getting ink on her fingers. Attaching the second stencil was messy too.
After she wiped her hands on a rag, she started cranking, her throat thick and her eyes misty.
Not only had Mortensen humiliated her, but he’d excluded her from the meeting. By the time she’d copied the twenty-page paper, they’d be in the thick of discussion. Else wouldn’t dare contribute for fear of repeating someone else’s comments.
This was no act of an absentminded professor. This was a calculated plot.
How dare he? Else had earned a doctorate and a position at one of the most prestigious institutes in the world.
And she was making copies. The work was beneath her.
She gasped, and her hand slipped off the crank. Beneath her? What a horrible, arrogant thought.
Else studied her ink-blackened hands. Her gesture reminded her of when Hemming told her he was a manual laborer.
Hemming worked with his hands. Else worked with her brain. Mrs. Iversen worked with flying fingers and crack organizational skills.
No one type of work was better than another. No one person was better than another.
“Lord, humble me,” she whispered.
A damp little giggle erupted. He was indeed humbling her, here at the mimeograph machine.
Else cranked out the remaining sheets for that page and stacked them on the table. She switched stencils, wiped her hands, and went back to cranking.
Was this how the illegal papers were printed?
Throughout Denmark, clandestine groups printed the news. In hushed tones, Laila had told about her work on Frit Danmark. Some of the workers gathered the news, some typed it up, some printed it, and others distributed it.
The papers would be busy today. Yesterday, free elections had been held. Almost 90 percent of Danish voters had elected members of the Folketing, the lower house of parliament.
The German Reich Plenipotentiary for Denmark, Werner Best, had allowed the elections to demonstrate German generosity.
After almost three years of treating Denmark far more leniently than any other occupied country, the Germans expected the Danes to embrace the Danish Nazi Party in gratitude.
They hadn’t. Last night, the State Radio announced the Nazis had received three seats—the same three seats they already held.
Else smiled and rolled the next stencil into place. Another example of Den Kolde Skulder.
For three years, ordinary Danes had presented that cold shoulder to the Germans, ignoring them and pretending not to hear them.
Now they had voted a cold shoulder.
It was a safe way of resisting. Else hummed a tune as she cranked out copies.
Her tune faded. Was the cold shoulder enough? The Germans hadn’t exactly left.
Being civil and accommodating kept Denmark safe, but it didn’t change German minds or actions.
Else stacked the completed page, and Mortensen’s name flashed on top.
Her breath snagged.
For months, Else had been civil and accommodating, but Mortensen’s attitude and behavior hadn’t changed. If anything, he grew ruder and crueler.
Perhaps being nice wasn’t enough.
9
THURSDAY, APRIL 8, 1943
Fragrant curls of golden beechwood fell from beneath Henrik’s whittling knife and into the bucket between his feet. Fru Riber didn’t mind if he carved in the living room as long as he cleaned up after himself.
Henrik sat in a chair near the dining room, letting the four male undergraduates have the two sofas flanking the woodstove. The distance allowed him to listen to their conversation without being tempted to participate. Tonight they were discussing a professor they deemed unfair, a topic that didn’t interest Henrik.
Carving provided an excuse to be present, and he’d found he enjoyed it. Usually he crafted little animals, many of them such poor representations he fed them to the stove. But over time, his carving was improving.
This evening, the Havmand was emerging from the beechwood, unbidden. The head and torso he could complete in the living room, but the merman’s fins would be carved in the privacy of his room.
Perhaps it was his subconscious way of commemorating his own thirty-third birthday today and the Havmand’s third birthday on Saturday.
Henrik poked the tip of his knife into the figurine’s beard to add texture.
His birthday had passed unnoticed. When he was a boy, he’d wake to find presents on the bed. Then Mor would serve the kagemand birthday cake shaped like a man and decorated with candies and Danish flags. Henrik’s little sisters would squeal when he chopped off the kagemand’s head according to tradition. After festive singing, Far would list the accomplishments he expected from his son in the coming year. Eager to please in his youth, Henrik had obeyed and achieved. But Far was never satisfied.
A ripple of laughter flowed from the students.
Henrik’s knife had moved down to the figurine’s hips as if determined to carve fins.
Not in public.
Knowing he was carving the Havmand brought an energizing thrill of courting danger, a taste of what he felt rowing the Øresund.
But Svend’s proposal elicited no thrill, only a chill in his gut. This past weekend, Svend had again asked Henrik to contact the SOE agent. The British wanted to gather the various Danish resistance groups under the Allied umbrella—including one lone merman.
The British had begun parachuting weapons and explosives into Denmark, and they planned to send men to train saboteurs.
The chill in his gut crystallized to ice. Lars Koppel wanted explosives to commit sabotage. Henrik could provide the connection.
With his thumb braced on the wood, Henrik eased the knife over the curve of the shoulder.
What would the connection cost? Henrik had sacrificed his lavish lifestyle to become Hemming. He’d sacrificed his voice to become the Havmand. He risked his life with every stroke of his oars, every exchange of envelopes under kneeling benches.
Wood gave way, and his knife slipped into the hollow of the Havmand’s neck.
He couldn’t take further risks. The more contacts he made, the more likely he’d meet someone who recognized him. The more he spoke, the more likely he’d reveal his upper-class background. And if anyone connected the Havmand to the Ahlefeldts, they might connect his courier work to Lyd-af-Lys, endangering the Thorups.
The students left the room without acknowledging Henrik, but he didn’t mind.
Male and female voices mixed in the hallway. Then the door opened, and Else and Laila entered.
“Hej, Hemming,” Else said with her glowing smile.
“Hej.” Laila waved and headed to the stove.
Else strolled closer carrying a notebook. She wore a white sweater with a starry blue Danish pattern. It fit snugly around her little waist, accentuating what his American friends called an hourglass figure. The type of figure he’d enjoyed most before the war.
Henrik lowered his chin to his work. “Hej.”
“What are you carving tonight?” She stood beside his chair. “Oh, a little man. He looks like you.”
“Oh?” Had his carving improved that much?
Else stroked her chin with a twinkle in her eyes.
Ah, the beard. Henrik smiled and patted his beard. “Ja.”
“Is he a Viking? I think you look like a Viking.”
Laila laughed and plopped on the sofa that faced Henrik. “You do, Hemming. You need one of those helmets with horns.”
Else clucked her tongue. “You know real Vikings didn’t have horns on their helmets.”
“True, but how would we recognize a Viking without horns?”
Else gave Henrik an amused look and joined her friend on the sofa. “Laila, did I tell you I had a breakthrough today while mimeographing?”
“Mortensen made you do that again?”
Henrik’s hand stiffened on the knife. From all he’d heard, Mortensen was a cad.
Else arranged her skirt over her knees. “I’m embracing it as growth in humility. And I do excellent thinking at the mimeograph machine. That’s my reward.”
“What was your breakthrough?”
Henrik kept his ears on their conversation and tried to keep his eyes on his carving.
Else circled one hand in a cranking motion. “With each turn of the mimeo, the stencil wears down a bit more. Entropy in action.”
“Entropy.” Laila narrowed one eye. “Second Law of Thermodynamics?”
“Yes. ‘Everything tends to disorder.’ Entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness.”
Henrik had read about that in the physics textbook from Lyd-af-Lys.
Else tapped the notebook on her lap. “I was wondering how entropy applies to light. Max von Laue and Max Planck did some work on it in the early days of quantum theory. I think it goes deeper.”
“Do you have calculations?” Laila eyed the notebook.
“I was hoping you’d ask.” With a sly smile, Else opened her notebook. “It might involve matrices, and those are a weakness of mine.”
“Oh! I love matrix mathematics.”
The two ladies bent their heads over the notebook, both faces bright with intellectual stimulation.
Their conversation exceeded the basic physics in Henrik’s textbook. But he was beginning to understand a concept Else kept talking about, the nature of light, how it was both a wave and a particle.
For hundreds of years, physicists had argued about it. Light could only be a particle. Or a wave. Not both. Then Niels Bohr solved the problem with his complementarity principle, explaining how two concepts could be mutually exclusive—and still both be true.
Henrik carved a valley separating the Havmand’s arm from his chest, and he smiled. The theory illuminated the smallness of the human mind, how little the brain could understand, even the most brilliant of brains.
Else laughed and wrote in her notebook.
Everything about her seemed soft. Her laughter. The way the lamplight gleamed on her light blond hair. How that hair curled under her round face. The glow in her eyes, the curve of her cheeks, the bend to her pink lips. Those looked soft too.
Henrik jerked his gaze down to the figurine. He wanted to fashion the same pose as the Little Mermaid statue, the same wistful longing for what couldn’t be had.
And Henrik could not have a woman in his life. He’d had more than his share of women in his dissolute years, and now he could have none.
He glanced under his eyebrows at Else writing and chatting. Brilliance and sweetness in equal measure. Those qualities had shone in Mor, and they shone in Else.
The sort of woman he’d consider if he ever had the chance.
Who was he fooling? Else Jensen possessed too much intelligence to consider Hemming Andersen and too much character to consider Henrik Ahlefeldt.
He guided his knife around the angle of the elbow and lowered his voice to a murmur to speak to his likeness. “Happy birthday to you.”
10
SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1943
The roller coaster hurtled around the bend and jerked to a stop. Else flopped forward in her seat, her laughter mingling with Laila’s.
They extracted themselves from the car and trotted down the stairs beside the fake mountain that housed Tivoli Gardens’ Rutschebanen roller coaster.
The idea to spend the day at Copenhagen’s hundred-year-old amusement park had bloomed inside Else with the spring weather. “One more time?” she asked Laila.
“Three times in a row is enough.” Laila smoothed her tousled dark curls. “Let’s let our stomachs settle.”
“Our stomachs?” Else said in a teasing tone.
Laila laughed and headed past a construction site where a Ferris wheel was being erected, with carriages styled like hot air balloons.
“How about the bumper cars?” Else asked.
Laila shot her a glare. “Once was enough. When Else Jensen gets into a bumper car, she tosses friendship aside.”
She had certainly gotten in some good bumps. “Carousel?”
“Much better.”
“Come on.” Else strolled through the crowd. Happy screams rose from the rides, and sugary smells floated from the concessions.
To their right rose the enormous concert hall with its Moorish dome and spires. Else and Laila had already enjoyed a show at the open-air pantomime theater with its mechanical peacock whose colorful tail served as a stage curtain.
All the color and music and fun seemed out of place in a world at war, but Else wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I’m glad you stayed in town this weekend.” Laila circled a family coaxing a cranky toddler to her feet. “The boardinghouse is dreary when you’re away. Those undergraduates—so silly and rude.”
“I’m sure we were silly at that age too.” Else’s hand brushed against the fabric of her blue-flowered spring dress. “But you’re right—they aren’t good company. And Hemming goes away each weekend too.”
“Hemming? He isn’t much of a conversationalist.”
“No, but he’s sweet and considerate.”
Laila gave her an impish smile. “Do you have a crush on him?”
Else barked out a laugh and admired the fountain to her left. “Of course not. But he’s a good sort, and I hate how the others don’t even acknowledge him.”
“If you don’t have a crush on him, why are you blushing?” Laila’s brown eyes glinted.
Else pressed a hand to her cheek. Cursed pale complexion. Might as well admit it, so she let a smile flick up. “There is something about him. Not just solid muscles, but solid character.”
“Your Viking warrior.”
Else gasped and nudged her friend. “Not mine. Can you imagine us together?”
“Kind of.” Laila smirked.
“A physicist and a shipyard worker?” Else stopped short to let a little boy run by. “Oh, I’m a horrible snob.”
