luggage. He spoke in an undertone-obviously of Max Stratman’s importance-to the conductor who wore a black- and-yellow arm band reading ‘
Before Emily and Stratman could leave the aisle, the black-uniformed conductor reappeared.
‘Your berths are made,’ he told them in careful English. ‘There is no private toilet as in America, I am sorry. The one toilet is at the end of the carriage. We do not have a porter in each carriage, but if you ring, I will come swiftly. There is a pull-down basin to wash your hands. I hope you are comfortable.’
By the time Emily had entered her compartment, the noisy train was catapulting along at breakneck speed. The compartment was tiny but, she was sure, luxurious by Swedish standards. Everything seemed wooden, except the gleaming steel lever that secured the door.
She was more tired than she had realized. She snapped open the overnight case on her berth, removed her toilet articles, then opened the washbasin. The hot and cold water taps were both cold. She did not mind. With a tissue, she shed her makeup. Then she brushed her teeth, washed and found a towel on the berth to dry. Lifting the basin back into the wall, she searched for a comb, and pulled it through her short bobbed hair twenty times.
She undressed with haste, slipped into her white pleated nightgown, placed the overnight case on the floor, and slid between the tight covers of the sleeping berth. When she laid her head on the pillow, she found no comfort. It was both hard and too high. Poking behind the mattress, she found a second pillow, a hardpacked maroon roll, underneath. The Swedes are Spartans, she thought. She decided against removing the red roll. She would be a Spartan, too.
About to dim the lights, she heard her uncle through the compartment door. ‘Emily-
‘Yes? Come in.’
He entered, tentatively, glanced about. ‘Are you comfortable, Emily?’
‘Perfectly,’ she lied.
He balanced himself against the wall. ‘It is going very fast.’ He squinted at her. ‘You are not sorry you came?’
‘Of course not, Uncle Max. Whatever gave you that idea? I can’t wait to get to Stockholm. Can you?’
He tried to reinforce her enthusiasm. ‘I think it will be an unforgettable week. Not so much this Nobel Ceremony, but the excitement, the new faces. My main wish is that you have a good time.’
‘I will. Don’t you worry. Get some rest.’
‘Yes.’ But he was reluctant to leave. He looked down at his niece, so small, so childish, on the large berth. ‘Emily, I am sorry about what happened tonight.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens. It is life. Only it should not happen to you.’ He hesitated. ‘I was wondering. Is there-is there anything more you want to tell me?’
‘It’s out of my mind, Uncle Max.’
‘Good,
‘I took a tablet.’
‘Good night. The conductor will wake us in time.’ At the door, he halted again. ‘Fix the latch when I go.’
‘Yes, Uncle Max. Good night.’
After he was gone, she did not bother with the latch. She dimmed the lights, and rested on her back, one arm behind her head. The train bounced beneath her, but that was not what made sleep difficult. For the first time in years, she thought of her past, the time before America, her girlhood. Then she thought of the curiously arid, placid period of growing up in the new country. Her mind touched on her resolution, made when she had gone aboard the ship, the determination to become a complete woman, and her consequent failure. The resolution illuminated the events of this night.
That poor young man on the boat, she thought. He was only my guinea pig, and he did not know it. She could hardly remember his name now. But anyway, he deserved more. He would never know how he had been used, and to what extent her experiment had been unsuccessful. She had known psychiatrists, and she had read Freud and Adler, and sometimes she had the objectivity to point their perceptions inward on herself. It was crystal-clear to her now that, unconsciously, she had fully provoked the incident. The drinking had been deliberate. The invitation for six o’clock. The being stark-naked in the shower at six with both doors open. She had invited the ultimate act, not knowing that she had, and expected that he would come as he had, not knowing that she had done so. At the same time-how confusing-her saner conscious ego had not wanted it at all, had feared and despised it. The result had been inevitable. It would forever be inevitable, she knew.
The body, the lie of a body that provoked, the figure stretched below her, detached from her meditations, was her body and she could not disown it, she knew. She did not like it this night, nor any other night in memory. It was crippled inside and soiled outside, and she wished it was not her body, as she had often guessed in Atlanta that some blacks had wished to be white and could not understand a God that had so shown his displeasure. Like them, she resented the curse of Ham, and wanted normality-whatever that was-well, normality, that meant belonging, acceptance, no fears.
It had been 6.18 when the young man had gone from her stateroom. No one would understand, but that had been the exact time that the last of Emily Stratman had died. Did the Nobel people know that their laureate in physics was arriving with a corpse? The celebrated Professor Max Stratman and corpse. Stockholm. She played the word-association game. What does the word Stockholm mean to you, Miss Stratman? Quickly, now, what? And she replied, quickly, trepidation, dread, anxiety, fear, men. All one and the same, all finally-men.
My crazy mind, she thought, wandering. Wonderful, drugful tablet, work, go on, work. When will I sleep?…
On the sunny, late morning of December 2, Carl Adolf Krantz, Count Bertil Jacobsson, and Ingrid Pahl were once more, the second time this morning, the fourth time in two days, seated in the rear of a Foreign Office limousine, en route to the Arlanda Airport. Because two winners and their relatives-Dr. John Garrett and his wife Saralee Garrett, and Mr. Andrew Craig and his sister-in-law Leah Decker-were arriving at 12.35, on the same flight of the Scandinavian Airlines System from Copenhagen, another Foreign Office limousine had been dispatched half an hour earlier to the air terminus.
To make this seventy-minute ride more bearable, Jacobsson had deliberately placed himself between Krantz and Pahl. He wished no more bickering. He wanted unity before the final reception duty was performed.
Carl Adolf Krantz, however, was in no mood for bickering this late morning. His spirits were high, his beady eyes bright, his goatee bristling, as he continued the monologue he had begun after they had finished breakfast with Stratman and his niece and left them in the Grand Hotel.
He had been praising, without restraint, Stratman’s findings in the field of solar energy, and now he was extolling the winning physicist’s background and character.
‘Did you ever meet a more remarkable man?’ he asked, and did not wait for an answer. ‘Wisdom shines in his face. And his true modesty. So rare to find in a famous man. One of the marks of greatness, I would say, a humility that confesses, “Yes, I have gone so far, but there are more curtains to lift, let us go on, let us go further.” I tell you both, I cannot recollect another laureate who has impressed me more.’
‘Obviously,’ said Ingrid Pahl.
‘Yes, I liked him,’ Jacobsson agreed. ‘I hope he did not mind our staying for breakfast.’
‘I am sure not,’ said Krantz.
‘I wonder. I had the feeling he was weary-’
‘He is not a youngster,’ said Krantz, ‘and he has had a long trip. Besides, it was not weariness I detected so much as a sense of a genius whose mind is still on his work. After all, as he told us, he is continuing with his solar investigations. He has only begun. We have just come along and interrupted-’
‘He seemed perfectly fine to me,’ said Ingrid Pahl. ‘It was his niece-I thought she was a little strange.’
‘How so?’ Jacobsson wanted to know.
‘Remote-and-oh, scared.’ Ingrid Pahl considered the judgment. ‘To begin with, at the depot. She was separated from him for a moment when the photographers closed in, and she appeared frantic. I saw her face. That was just one thing. For the rest of the time, she was withdrawn. I do not know-as if she were not part of the group, a stranger-’
