Mattias Berg - The Carrier

The very old doctor sat totally still as I told her this, like a beautiful statue. Then she nodded and continued with her story. Said that it had been an unusually beautiful morning in the city below our aircraft, that she was lying out in the yard dressed only in her underwear, more or less knocked out after a long shift at the hospital. “One always recalls irrelevant details like that,” she said, “with such precision.” She had, for example, wondered if it really could be a spark from a passing tram which suddenly lit up that ornamental stone lantern with such magical light. An instant later all shadows in the yard vanished. The sun, which had been shining so strongly just a moment ago, could no longer be distinguished against the sharp white glare of the whole sky.

Gradually she became more and more consumed by her account, started to spin around on her stainless-steel stool, wave her arms about. Tried to convey how the air had been filled with smoke and dust in the same instant, that the only thing which she could see of their old house was a lone beam sticking up crooked and twisted from the ground a little way off. When she then looked down at her own body she saw that she was naked. Being a scientist, she began—“funnily enough,” as she now expressed it—to muse over where her underwear might have gone, how it could have vanished without she herself being at all damaged. Then she felt her face and realized that her mouth was just an open hole. That her lower lip was hanging down in a long flap and a five-inch shard of glass was poking out of her shoulder.

With the same peculiar absent feeling, as if she had seen all this in a movie, she called out for her husband and children. After hearing no answer from them, she took her place in the long lines which led to the hospital, as if sleep-walking. Many were walking with their arms sticking out strangely from their bodies, making them look like human scarecrows, which also puzzled the medical student in her. Until she understood that they held them like that to avoid touching their own burned bodies.

But the most striking thing, she recounted, was how they had all walked along in silence. How nobody screamed in pain and anguish or yelled out for their lost lives. Just this ghostly, deathly silence—from that moment on, ever since.

I said to the very old doctor that I still regarded the Bomb with a certain relief, since it had in my opinion ended the war and in that way saved many hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives, both American and Japanese. That I would soon be closing my eyes for ever certain that what we did was merciful .

She nodded again, otherwise as still as before. Then she got up and walked to my bunk. Kneeled, kissed my forehead lightly, said that she forgave me. That she had already forgiven us all.

At that I took hold of her head—so very like Amba’s: even the shape of her skull—and smashed it against the bedhead. It split at once, spilled out over my pillow and bed linen. Like a soft-boiled egg.

At midnight we landed at Dulles, after circling for fifteen minutes before being given permission to descend. Edelweiss no doubt wanted to demonstrate his power. That he held everything in his hand. Our escort appeared just to the right of the line for passport and visa control: on his sign it said “MR KERN” in handwritten capital letters. As if we were just any business group.

And it all seemed illusory. Edelweiss had his operatives among both the personnel and passengers. In front of us and behind us, shoes and clothes had to be removed, demeaning rituals behind half-closed curtains, people taken aside for regulation body searches. But we did not even have to place our enormous luggage on the conveyor belt. Because we had made a pact with the grand master, the very inventor of the concept of “war games”.

While Ingrid and Jesús María then went to the women’s restroom together, to assume their new looks, I walked up to the man with the sign. His appearance was familiar even though I could no longer recall his name. There were so many, after all, so interchangeable. And this one was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. His age suggested that he belonged to the ranks of the unpromotable, but he was probably perfectly suited for this assignment. Sufficiently skilled not to mess it up. Sufficiently limited not to understand what was really happening.

He gave me a regulation powerful handshake, looked at the hybrid. He did not seem to recognize me through the disguise and my new look from the cosmetic surgery in Ursvik. Then I stood chatting with him for a while, waiting for the “ladies”, as he put it. Touched on the obvious topics of conversation, weather, football, gossip. Everything but politics. Somewhere beneath the tense surface of the situation—I could not imagine the extent of it, that I might even get to see my family, for a moment at least, before they were all snatched away from me again—there was still my depth of experience and training. Everything we had done to ready ourselves for a moment like this. For all that could conceivably happen. And more—for the inconceivable.

When Ingrid and Jesús María emerged from the restroom, after an absurdly long time—Jesús María with an intensely red wig, Ingrid with silvery-gray hair and a darker face color, to cover the burn marks from Kleine Brogel—guards appeared from nowhere and asked them to follow along to the security check. The escort and I could only stand and watch. I knew that this was no more than another power move by Edelweiss, that he wanted to demonstrate that at any moment he could crush us like small spiders under his indescribable weight.

Yet my heart was in my mouth when the metal detector gave out a sound. A dull rhythmic buzzing which stabbed through the arrivals hall. Jesús María seemed uncomprehending, waved her arms about in her now exaggerated Irish way, tossing her curly red hair: according to her passport she was now called Scarlett O’Hara.

After some brief theatricals, the mistake was quickly and seamlessly put right and Jesús María was let through, with a cursory body search for the sake of appearances. But I still found it hard to get my pulse back under control. The moment was closing in on me. I had assumed that the entire exchange would take place in separate corridors, hidden passageways, without any of us noticing each other. Amba and the kids set free and Ingrid in custody at last. Me handing her over with the briefcase to Edelweiss—and in return getting his guarantee that they would never harass my family again. At the same time releasing me to the freedom of determining my own fate, deep down under the eternal ice.

But this too would no doubt play out entirely differently from what I could ever have imagined. No-one, except for Edelweiss—and maybe Ingrid herself—could foresee that.

When she approached our escort, whose expression had not altered one iota during the incident at the metal detector, the now much older woman with her silver-gray hair in a topknot shook his hand so strongly that she almost seemed to be making a point. Ingrid probably wanted to show both him and me that she had her strength back. Seemed to have hardly a trace left of either the heavy anesthesia or the incident in Belgium. My plan already felt weak and uncertain. I had an uncomfortable feeling that it was all an elaborate set-up by Edelweiss. That everything in some way revolved around me and not Ingrid. Desmond “Des” Kern, the Core of the Poodle.

After Jesús María had joined us, still gesticulating wildly over the slight to her as an unofficial guest—she too showed herself to be a reasonably good actor—we started moving. Our escort turned off in the direction of the visa line but, without drawing any attention to himself, led us surprisingly smoothly through the enormous mass of passengers who had just landed.