policeman . . .
I would have liked to believe that Bob and George were John and Leif. The alternative, that several parties unknown and probably inimical were on my trail, was distinctly unpleasant. Most peculiar of all was Cousin Gustaf. Should I get in touch with him? First I thought I would. Then I thought I had better leave well enough alone. Then I decided I would go to bed and let my subconscious wrestle with the dilemma. I have a great deal of faith in my subconscious. Sometimes it’s the only part of my brain that works.
WHEN I WOKE UP next morning I felt terrible. At first I couldn’t imagine why. Then I remembered my cousins. The dilemma was still unresolved. Apparently my subconscious had taken the night off.
It wasn’t until I was brushing my teeth that the dream came back to me.
Not surprisingly, Leif had been the featured actor. Dressed in leggings and a tunic open to the waist, his fair hair shoulder length, he wore a smith’s leather apron and flourished a hammer the size of Thor’s fabled Mjolnir. Outside the crude shelter where he was working was a sign: ‘Wayland’s Smithy; Good Work at Low Prices. If you didn’t get it at Wayland’s, you paid too much.’
Hypnotized by the ripple of bronzed muscle on his arms and chest, I didn’t notice the object on the anvil till his great hammer was high in the air. It wasn’t a sword or a piece of armour, it was a chalice – a footed cup made of silver and bound with strips of gold. Inlaid garnets and scarlet enamel flashed in the light.
My dream self sprang forward with a voiceless shriek, trying to save the precious thing. I was too slow; but just before the hammer struck, a figure materialized out of nowhere and a long, thin arm snatched the chalice away. The figure was that of the silhouette cutter, his face no longer meek and humble, but set in a grin of fiendish triumph. He clutched the chalice to his meagre bosom. The hammer crashed on the anvil, starting a progression of ringing vibrations that grew louder and louder. The silhouette cutter began to vibrate, as if the atoms of his body were spinning off into space. His body faded until nothing was left but his grin – and the shape of the chalice, blazing with internal light so dazzling it hurt my eyes.
I decided I needed a cup of coffee. Or three.
While I made it and drank it, I sent a silent apology to my subconscious. It hadn’t solved the problem I had set it before I went to bed – to call or not to call Cousin Gustaf – but it had reminded me of something important.
Leif’s presence in the dream probably didn’t mean anything except that all of my mind, sub – and super- conscious, has excellent taste. The silhouette cutter was one of those random contributions one often finds in dreams; he was a bizarre figure, and the encounter had been unusual. The point of the dream was the chalice. It had numerous mythic connotations – Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail, the chalice from the palace . . . No, that was from an old Danny Kaye movie.
I wrenched my frivolous mind back to business. The important thing was that the dream chalice was no figment of my imagination. It actually existed. I had seen a photograph of it only a few days before.
I had been kidding myself when I tried to dismiss ‘Wayland’s work’ as a meaningless joke. The phrase had nagged at me for days, while I packed and shopped and cleaned out the fridge and called the kennel and performed all the other chores my temporary absence required. Finally, the day before I was due to leave, I succumbed. I spent several hours in the museum library, looking up objects to which that enigmatic description might apply.
The reference was even more ambiguous than I had supposed. Wayland was a northern god originally, but his story had travelled far and endured for centuries. ‘Wayland’s work’ might describe an art object produced anywhere in northern Europe over a period of several hundred years – Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Celtic – or even treasures brought back from Russia or Byzantium by far-ranging Scandinavian traders.
‘That’s not my field’ is a statement often made by scholars to excuse their ignorance when they are asked to explain something they don’t understand. However, northern Europe between 400 and 1100 a.d. is
The popular impression of the Germanic tribes is that of bloody-minded savages trampling the delicate blossoms of civilization underfoot. In all the stories I had read they were the villains. The Vikings burned villages, looted churches, raped and murdered; the Saxons fought noble King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table; the Vandals gave their name to successive generations of destroyers. Admittedly they were a crude lot, but their opponents weren’t much better. They were courageous explorers, fighters, and traders. The might of Rome, which had crushed the civilized empires of the Near East, faltered and fell in the German forests. Many a Roman standard graced the hut of a Germanic chieftain after the defeat of the legion that had carried it.
The Vikings became the finest seamen of their time, daring the perils of the unknown west. Even I knew that Leif the Lucky had been the first to discover America, centuries before Columbus. What I didn’t know, or had forgotten, was that the Scandinavians also followed the caravan routes to the east. The tribes from whom the name ‘Russia’ derives were northerners. Tall blond warriors formed the honour guard of the emperors of Byzantium, and traders brought back coins minted in Damascus, Baghdad, and Tashkent. As a runic inscription on an ancient tombstone put it, ‘Valiantly we journeyed afar for gold; and in the east we fed the eagles.’
Among the objects brought back to Scandinavia by traders or looters was the chalice of my dream. Discovered by a farmer ploughing his field, it had been buried over a thousand years earlier by an owner fearing attack on his home. He had never retrieved it. Perhaps the powdery traces of his bones had been scattered by the same plough that turned up his treasure.
The chalice was now in a private collection in Stockholm, which undoubtedly explained its appearance in my dream. The name and address of the museum was in my lost notebook, along with other notes I had taken that afternoon. The loss was not irretrievable; I could find the same reference books in local institutions. Or I could call Gerda, Schmidt’s secretary, and ask her to look up the information.
The hell with it, I thought. And the hell with Cousin Gustaf, too. No busman’s holidays for me.
I hung around the room for another hour, fighting off energetic chambermaids who wanted to clean, and hoping the telephone would ring. I used all the makeup I normally don’t have time to bother with, and tried on three different outfits before I settled on white slacks and T-shirt, with a kelly green scarf. I did my nails. The phone still didn’t ring, so I cleaned out my purse. Among the papers in it was the slip of paper on which I had scribbled Cousin Gustaf’s address. Schmidt had also given me the references Gustaf had mentioned. Odd, that; it was the sort of thing John might do, inventing unnecessary and seemingly respectable references to disarm suspicion. One of the banks was in Stockholm. I toyed with the idea of calling, but my resentment against all the known and unknown characters who were trying to louse up my vacation was too strong. I put the papers back in my purse. The phone did not ring. I threw away the jelly doughnut. The phone did not ring.
At eleven o’clock I admitted the maid. The hell with Leif too. I would dedicate the day to sightseeing and shopping of the most frivolous kind. No museums, no antiquities. Maybe I could pick up another tall blond. There were plenty of them in Sweden.
Stockholm, which is often cool and rainy, put on one of her better shows for me that day. The colours were those of springtime innocence – clear greens, sparkling blues, soft red brick, and creamy buff. The breeze was just cool enough to justify my decision to look for a hand-knit ski sweater.
I moved out of the way of the stream of traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, that passed the doors of the Grand Hotel, and consulted my pocket map of Stockholm. Up Kungstradgardsgatan, along the park, to Hamngatan; wriggle through a small square and a side street to Drottninggatan, ‘long, narrow and filled with tiny shops,’ according to the guidebook.
Presumably I followed that route, and obviously I did not get hit by a taxi, but I don’t remember a thing about it. The shop windows finally roused me from my reveries. Clothes and food (and a couple of other things) appeal to basic instincts even more compelling than the worries that continued to nag at my mind. I tried on fifteen or sixteen sweaters, each more gorgeous than the last. The one I bought was a blend of green and grey and red and black, with silver clasps; and after I had paid for it I decided I had better start thinking seriously about finding a cheaper hotel. Prices were lower than in Munich, but not much.
By that time it was after one-thirty, so I went to satisfy another basic urge. (I am referring to food.) One of
