Dr. B

Daniel Birnbaum

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780008374525
• eBook ISBN:
  9780008374501
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The former director of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm makes his literary debut with this dramatic and riveting novel of book publishing, émigrés, spies, and diplomats in World War II Sweden based on his grandfather's life

In 1933, after Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany, Immanuel Birnbaum, a German-Jewish journalist based in Warsaw, is forbidden from writing for newspapers in his homeland. Six years later, just months before the German invasion of Poland that ignites World War II, Immanuel escapes to Sweden with his wife and two young sons.

Living as a refugee in Stockholm, Immanuel continues to write, contributing articles to a liberal Swiss newspaper under the name Dr. B. He becomes increasingly entangled with British intelligence agents who plan several acts of sabotage on the orders of Winston Churchill. But when the Swedish postal service picks up a letter written in invisible ink, clearly by Dr. B. himself, the Allied plotters are exposed. But could a Jew living in exile and targeted for death by the Nazis have wanted to tip them off?

Illuminated by the wartime experiences of the author's grandfather, Dr. B. is a riveting story of émigrés, spies and diplomats that shines a light on a forgotten corner of World War II history.

'A superb thriller, a cross between Tom Stoppard's Travesties and The Thirty-Nine Steps … You can't put it down. This is an astonishing debut and Daniel Birnbaum is clearly a talent to look out for' The Jewish Chronicle

'If you're looking for a ridiculously brilliant story, you can stop looking … He's got the world's best story – he's got Dr B' Svenska Dagbladet

'An astonishing thriller-novel … reminiscent of both Hjalmar Söderberg's Doctor Glass as well as the dreamy melancholy in The Rings of Saturn by W.G Sebald' Aftonbladet

'A moving evocation of a life beset by conflicts in a troubled time' Kirkus Reviews

SUNFLOWERS

Immanuel knew nothing about the island. But he was sure the light that morning was more golden than anything he had ever experienced and the pale woman on the jetty the most ethereal creature he had ever set eyes upon. He could barely make out her shape. She was almost diaphanous, her hair translucent, the breeze giving it life. The sound of the engine grew louder, and he could see the boat approaching, although the reflections on the water made it hard to focus. This morning was nothing but sun.

Now she was already standing in the bow of the motorboat that had come to fetch them. In her white dress her body could only be described as a shimmering light. Helios was the god of the sun, but of the seas too, he thought, as he stepped aboard, firm-footed but happy nonetheless to hold on to the strong arm of the boatman. Helios gave us something priceless, the gift of sight. He dwelt in a light-filled palace on the great river at the eastern ends of the earth.

Thoughts flitted across Immanuel’s mind as if he were not really up and awake, but still lying in relative comfort on the sofa in Mittag-Leffler’s mathematical library. A slim volume with the puzzling title On the Motion of a Rigid Body about a Fixed Point was the last thing his eyes had rested on for a few seconds before the shifting images of sleep displaced it. He had slept badly and woken repeatedly with a gnawing sense of unease, as if misgivings concerning the immediate future were already confirmed.

He was still in this state of mind, and the monotonous drone of the engine heightened the sensation of riding through a dream, but not a dream that belonged in the night. From his slumped position on a white leather bench right at the stern he could make out the boatman’s muscular back ahead of him, but the impression this gave was of traveling under the glistening water and not on top of it.

Impatient shouting from the bow interrupted his thoughts. The athletic boatman appeared to be doing the splits, with one foot on the deck and the other on the lowest of a flight of stone steps that was surprisingly grandiose for a little island of otherwise frugal wooden structures. Immanuel’s gaze followed the steps up. A series of small terraces could soon be seen, lined by statues and enormous rhododendron bushes. The young woman, who had been friendly enough but of few words when she met him on the jetty and had then stood bolt upright in the bow throughout the short journey, seemed to have disappeared into thin air. For a second he thought he saw her figure flash past behind a railing quite a long way up the steps.

Or maybe it was reflected light, tricking him into seeing things that weren’t there. He found it hard to clear his vision, his eyes still slightly dazzled after the boat ride. But suddenly he caught sight of something unexpected. High up, amid the huge treetops, stood a gray stone building of almost ridiculous dimensions. It was partly concealed by leaves, which had already turned to flaming red. It was autumn, but still as warm as high summer. In front of the castle, for a castle it was, were Norway maples and laburnums.

“You’ll have to wait here until Miss is back from the house,” the boatman said, with no great warmth. “Madame doesn’t want the guests to go up by themselves, under any circumstances.” He turned away with a gesture that clearly implied he had said what he was going to say and now was going to mind his own business. Silence fell, an oppressive silence.

“Thank you for the ride. It was quick. Smart boat, by the way,” Immanuel said, in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere. That his Swedish was less than perfect was not going to stop him making casual conversation. It was something he had resolved to do from the moment he arrived in his adopted country.

The boatman seemed little interested in chat. They were both now standing firmly on the quay, with the terraces at their backs and the pale-green water in front of them. On the other side of the bay the leafy gardens of Djursholm were visible, and behind the rich autumn reds was the hint of one grand villa more stately than the rest. Somewhere it must be possible to make out parts of the Mittag-Leffler Institute, where Immanuel had spent the night so he could walk down through the wooded neighborhood at dawn and be on the jetty at the allotted time. Unusual for a breakfast meeting to require a motorboat journey, he thought, turning to look back in the other direction, up toward the villa that seemed now, in the wavering morning light, to be floating among the treetops. He followed the elegant lines of the Louis XVI–style building, and for a second he forgot his uneasy feeling; a feeling that in fact he was to have every reason for, given the deception the trip would demand of him.

The house stood on massive foundations. They must have transported huge quantities of stones here on barges, he was thinking, when a sudden metallic noise roused him from his musings. The boatman, his blond hair swept back, had dropped something heavy and compact onto the quay, making them both jump. In a split second the man had bent down and picked up the object, before hastily slipping it inside his blue sports jacket. It was a pistol, small and hard, black as tar. A piece of coal, hard, absorbing all the sunlight, it was so black.

The whole thing happened so quickly, it was difficult afterward to be totally sure it hadn’t been a figment of Immanuel’s imagination. It hadn’t occurred to him that the man piloting the boat that had picked him up from a wooden jetty in the tranquil setting of residential Djursholm would be armed. There was silence, apart from a dull thud every so often when the boat moored several meters below them hit the quay. The engine was turned off now, and with some curiosity Immanuel gazed down at the elegant craft. He was familiar with these neat, speedy wooden boats from his visits to friends at Lake Garda, but he hadn’t seen a single one since arriving in these latitudes.

“Has it been imported from Italy, maybe?” he asked aloud, to break the silence.

The boatman turned to look at Immanuel, blinking nervously into the sun, but still said nothing, as if he hadn’t heard the remark, or deemed it irrelevant. Perhaps he had found the incident with the pistol embarrassing. Or perhaps he was unaware that the guest had seen the handgun that had dropped to the ground momentarily, only to be just as swiftly slipped into the holster in all likelihood concealed under his jacket.

Seagulls landed close to the bow of the boat, unperturbed by the presence of the two men. They fought over a small, shiny fish jumping around on the stone surface.

“Everyone knows it’s a copy that Kassman had built of the old boat, the one that went up in flames,” the boatman said suddenly, almost reproachfully.

“Kassman? Who’s Kassman?”

“No problem for the likes of Gunnar Kassman to find a new engineer and a new gardener,” the boatman went on, as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Who wouldn’t want to work for a boss like him? Especially if you’re not that fussy about the true source of the money. No, Director Kassman entertained women with champagne and caviar, and men as well. The motorboats were moored here at the quay until midnight, before heading back to town. Who cared if one of the boats went up in flames at daybreak, and a young engineer and a groundsman vanished into the deep? Who cared about it, except for Karin, who was to have married Axel a few days later? She was only nineteen, too young to marry maybe, but that’s how it was. Her life was over then.”

He stared blankly across the water, now an even deeper green, until the sound of light footsteps could be heard approaching.

There she was again, in front of him. Delicate, gossamer, as if the rays of the autumn sun could shine through her. It came as a surprise when, with a gesture up toward the castle, she began speaking, her voice soft yet firm.

“Miss Lorentzon knows you’re here. She’s working with Madame in the salon but wants you to wait on the grand terrace.”

“The grand terrace.” Immanuel repeated the words hesitantly, unsure why he felt the need to do so.

She set off up the steps without checking whether he was prepared to follow. But follow he did, of course. He could barely keep pace with her as they climbed up the steep stone ledges, and he was already regretting his decision to take with him the weighty tomes from Mittag-Leffler’s library. He could perfectly well have collected them on his way back into the city, but now the massive leather briefcase his wife had purchased on one of their final days in Warsaw was as heavy as if loaded with the same flat slabs that were under their feet. They hurried up the gravel paths that zigzagged between the flights of steps leading them toward the increasingly imposing mansion.

The young woman—he guessed she was the same Karin about whom the man with the gun had been speaking, and into whose destiny he had been given an unwarranted flash of insight—almost flew along the balustrade ahead of him. Panting, he managed to catch up with her, and for a few seconds they walked side by side. He turned to her and, with a boldness, an impertinence even, that surprised him, breathlessly asked a question he hoped would instigate a conversation.

“So you were working here in Mr. Kassman’s time?”

Whatever had got into him? This woman’s sad fate was none of his business. Not in the slightest. She had nothing to do with the task ahead, which was already quite complicated enough, nor with the subtle game that formed the purpose of the entire visit and should undoubtedly be his focus.

As it turned out, his impertinent question had no effect. The luminous figure had increased her lead and now disappeared through a glass door standing open on the object of their climb, the grand terrace. He mounted the last step and, gasping for breath, put his heavy bag down on the ornate flagstones, set in a lavish mosaic the likes of which he had never seen, even in villas he had visited in northern Italy.

He dropped into one of the chairs on the terrace and was aware at once that behind the white curtains moving gently in the breeze something was happening. He heard the dulcet tones of a woman’s voice, apparently reading from a script, and another slightly deeper voice interrupting in Russian and then making comments on the reading in what seemed to him to be very broken Swedish. Sometimes the more pleasing voice delivered long pages without intervention. It sounded flat and slightly forced, as if they were in a hurry to work through a large body of text.

“But who is this new independent woman? She is a child of the large-scale capitalist system. She is not a rare apparition, but as an everyday phenomenon she was born simultaneously with the infernal din of machines and of factory sirens summoning the workers. The independent woman, of whom our grandmothers and even our mothers had no idea at all—she exists, she is a real, living person.”

She was interrupted by a testy comment in Russian. There was a clatter of china and the sound of other voices chiming in with questions about entirely different matters, followed by silence. The mellower voice resumed but was obliged to repeat the phrase “real, living person” several times. After a short pause, the reading continued.

“Independent women are a million gray-clad figures, pouring out of working-class quarters in an endless stream, and at daybreak, when the dawn sky still battles with the dark of night, they set off for the mills and factories and railway stations.”

At this point the reading was cut short by prolonged throat clearing.

“Right, right. That’s enough. Thank you, Emy. Thank you. We’ll continue this afternoon.” Silence fell, and it sounded as though the women had left the terrace room without noticing Immanuel’s presence.

From this position he could gaze out over the fountains in the garden and the lush vegetation of rhododendrons and exotic trees, and he thought how out of place they looked in this Nordic archipelago. He leaned forward to inspect the sunflowers growing nearest to the villa. Their extraordinarily long stalks reached up to the terrace. They seemed to be staring him in the face, like huge black pupils.

“They turn during the course of the day and follow the sun, as if they have no choice but to look straight into the ball of fire,” a woman’s voice behind him declared suddenly. “Madame loves them. They’re one of the reasons she rents the villa. She’d really like to buy it, but who knows what the future will bring? We tie the sunflowers back with string so they don’t collapse under their own weight. But they’ll wither soon anyway, now it’s autumn. Do forgive me, my name is Emy Lorentzon, Madame Kollontai’s secretary. You’re extremely punctual. Did you have a comfortable trip across?”

Immanuel nodded to the young woman who had appeared beside him, but there was no time for even a pleasantry in response before she carried on with her account of the flowers’ daily rotation around their own axis.

“Heliotropism, a tendency Madame has taken an interest in, as something with potentially profound significance for social movements. It’s hardly surprising if that intense mass of light creates the right conditions for a completely different type of politics, is it? Pavel Dybenko, who spent many white June nights on the Baltic Sea, introduced her to these ideas. You know the story about the Lapland sunflowers that grow so far north they never have the chance to turn their heavy heads back at dusk?”

Miss Lorentzon gave him a searching look, like a teacher with high expectations of her student, and continued without waiting for a response.

“Because there’s no dusk, ever, nor is there the essential respite dusk brings. For the twelve longest days of the year the flower twists in a spiral until it finally strangles itself. And in exactly the same way the stalk of north European socialism is threatened by the optimism of its own blooms, or ought we say, extremism?”

She smiled serenely at him, as if her words were the most natural thing in the world, so self-evident they hardly needed voicing. He looked closely at the young woman, utterly convincing in her gray suit, thoroughly proper and exemplary. A secretary, a typical secretary at an embassy in a north European capital. Behind her he glimpsed the indistinct shapes of the dark-centered heads in a sunflower sea, motionless in the morning calm.

Nebulous thoughts flashed across his mind without really taking shape. Dybenko, the naval officer, the Ukrainian giant in the Baltic Fleet. The love affair that nearly had the woman he was about to meet expelled from the party. He recalled the words the irreproachable Albert Oeri earnestly and repeatedly pronounced: She is an authority, perhaps our greatest authority, on the field of carnal love.

He was roused from his musings by a booming voice.

“And you’ve been sent here by Albert Oeri, editor of Basler Nachrichten, a man my Swiss friends hold in such high regard they overlook his political stance, by and large.”

Her appearance was so sudden, he didn’t quite grasp what had happened, but there she stood in all her splendor, wearing a long morning gown of dazzling silk.

“I presume you see yourself as a liberal voice in the continental darkness. You’re a journalist, I understand. And you wish to ask about the woman question. Or, as you wrote in your letter, ‘so-called feminism’—is that so?”

Madame Alexandra Kollontai gave him a piercing look. Under the arched brows her gray eyes appeared lit from within, their luster truly uncommon. And now this warm iridescence was directed at him in a way that made abundantly clear it would be difficult to hide anything from this woman. Had he been far too rash in taking on this project? Had he overestimated his own ability?

In any event it was too late to change his mind. Now he was standing in front of this formidable person, with no possibility of beating a retreat or holding anything back. Or more accurately: she was standing in front of him with such a clear advantage that the notion of him staging any kind of subtle maneuver was ridiculous. Of course he had heard about her charisma and her unfading beauty. But he could never have foreseen the authority she commanded physically, the aura of absolute power surrounding her. He pulled himself together and took the plunge.

“Your Excellency, that is correct, I arrived here in the city some time ago after many years in Warsaw, and I continue to work as a correspondent for Basler Nachrichten. I am first and foremost German, and my mother tongue is German. I am delighted to hear that in your circles too the esteemed journalist Dr. Oeri enjoys the respect he deserves in these dark times.”

“So you’re the one with the pen name Dr. B. I was only reading you yesterday. You wrote about our problems in Finland.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Immanuel answered, unsure whether her remark held any criticism.

“Basler Nachrichten has another correspondent here in Stockholm,” she said.

How could she know that? Gabriel Ascher, for years the Vatican City correspondent, had been in Stockholm for a while now, an awkward situation in several respects. Immanuel had never liked Ascher, and there would obviously be stiff competition for space.

But he had no time to expand upon that. Kollontai continued, in a more conversational tone, “You spent the night at Mittag-Leffler’s villa on the other side of the water, my secretary tells me. Isn’t that what you said, Emy?” She turned to seek the younger woman’s confirmation, but Miss Lorentzon had quietly withdrawn.

With a gesture into the light-filled room, Kollontai invited Immanuel to take a seat in one of the two gray armchairs, relatively modern for a palace. “Another splendid house I’ve considered renting as a summer residence in the past. I suppose the famous library is still there, but I heard that plans for the mathematical institute itself were put on ice after the bankruptcy. Anyway, I prefer spending weekends out here on the island, and I hope we’ll be able to move in properly next summer. I’m contemplating bringing some of the legation over—at the moment I’m getting help from Kassman’s old staff. You’ve met Karin, poor girl. She’s working for me now, and her brother pilots the boat.”

So the man with the gun was the gossamer woman’s brother. That explained his vehemence, and his despair. But aloud Immanuel said, “Yes, the library is still there. Thousands of mathematical treatises on mahogany shelves stretching up to the ceiling. Excuse me, but who is this person Kassman who builds a palace on an island in the Stockholm archipelago?”

“Of course, I’m sorry. You don’t know Director Gunnar Kassman, do you? I’d forgotten you’re new to the city. A great friend to Russian culture, a financier with connections on both sides of the Baltic Sea. He hit problems around the same time as Mittag-Leffler was declared bankrupt. And now both villas stand empty. Speaking of which, you will of course be aware that Sonja Kovalevsky, our first female mathematician, was awarded her professorship thanks entirely to Mittag-Leffler. A forward-looking scholar, an exemplar. Higher education wasn’t open to women in Russia, and under Professor Weierstrass in Göttingen, who naturally saw her talent, only private study was possible. You’ve heard of Kovalevsky?”

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue
• Sunflowers
• The Boy in the Tower
• Café Ogo
• The Opera Bar
• Look at the Wonder and Beauty
• Invisible Ink
• 17 Villagatan
• Snow Crystals
• Letter to Germany
• The Spaniards Inn
• Wagner Evening
• Grand Mal
• 32 Frejgatan
• Rheinmetall
• Afterword
• Source Notes
• About the Author
• About the Publisher