Instead, I met Ingrid Bergman.
After her first lecture I had a blinding headache. And then it got worse. She challenged everything we had thought or believed in, the uncertainty spread far beyond the lecture hall, the slightest detail sometimes meant life or death for me. How long I brushed my teeth. The interval between red light for cars and green man for pedestrians. The choice between taking the steps up to the university library one or two at a time.
I counted seconds, interpreted signs. Everything stood on edge. Absolutely nothing was settled or fixed any longer.
Just then, I also received my first “approach”, as we called it. By that stage, they could have got me to do just about anything. We knew that other students had already fallen for the recruiters’ spiraling promises: they were said to come back at least once with guarantees of even bigger scholarships and increasingly adapted courses. Assurances that in future even the world of business would be crying out for our specialization.
At first I supposed that they had confused me with someone else, or that somebody in my corridor had given them my name as a joke. That I would be recruited by them did not seem likely. A fundamentally useless young man, pacifist since his teen years, unable even to decide which way to walk over the campus lawn, at this stage with unruly brown curls and apparently good-looking in a melancholy sort of a way. A lost, contrary student who could as easily have prepared a massacre at the university as study its moral consequences.
But the recruiters would not give up. Ran down the list of names with their index finger and found my name. Checked the spelling and date of birth. After they paid me a second visit I decided to try out after all, went along as if sleep-walking, counted the steps up the spiral staircase in the unused part of the university building leading to the helipad. Interpreted random parts of graffiti as signals addressed to me.
West Point was an hour away. I stared down at the shadow of our helicopter as it raced above the surface of the Hudson, but the military academy could as well have lain in another galaxy. On arrival there I vomited my entire former life out into a waste paper basket and then started, to my own great surprise and probably theirs too, to score top in the tests, one after the next. After only the third session I was selected for special training.
The requirements were clear from the start. Those of us in the special training group should at all costs continue our studies, in parallel with our course at West Point, and finish them in style, as if nothing had happened. We were to start working up our first alternate identity. The double life was demanding but manageable. I was furiously driven, a fire in my belly, wanting, it seemed, to take some sort of revenge: on existence in general, the meaninglessness of life, my father.
Since we did not have supervised studies more than three days a week, and the training at West Point mostly took place outside office hours—often late, sometimes in the form of repellent interrogation training sessions long into the night—the logistics were possible. No-one was waiting for me in my dorm. The corridor lay desolate and dark when I returned, and in the mornings I would spin the latest yarn about my fictitious girlfriend Sarah, with whom I said I was more or less living. The smoke-screens soon became an integral part of my existence.
Everything ran through my mind more or less in the same way, slid into and out of my being. Military life and moral philosophy, lectures, the Middle Ages, the violence, the ideas.
On the flight to West Point I would sit there, minutes after we had streamed out of the auditorium and I had taken one of my alternate routes to the helipad, trying to absorb what Ingrid Bergman had been telling us.
I turned my notebook this way and that without understanding in which direction I should be reading the letters. The insights which very recently had seemed so fantastic, were now little more than foreign symbols. Something which had cooled and solidified. In vain I tried to recall the heat of an hour before, the memory not only of Ingrid Bergman’s thoughts but her entire being. All that was left were random bullet points. Capitalized phrases, a rash of exclamation marks, the occasional question.
Slowly I read them out loud to myself, the pilot next to me enclosed in his headphones. “CLIQUES!”, “MIRRORS!?”, “VISCOSITY!”, “DUALISM!”, “THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH!”. Usually she wrote from left to right, but sometimes also from top to bottom. Before the end of the lecture she would join up the bullet points on the blackboard, like an intricate crossword or a Scrabble board.
Everything taken together seemed to form a gigantic cipher, full of hidden meanings, secret connections she called them, correspondences. Buried links between the history of art and weapons technology, eternal truths and the geopolitics of the day.
To begin with, we students had sat together and tried to interpret all this, help each other to understand what she was hoping to get across. We speculated over where her intriguing accent might have come from. Was she German or Dutch? I thought she was Swedish, like the real-life Ingrid Bergman. But as time passed, our relationship to her world became something much more personal and private for each of us. We all thought that our understanding was the correct one—and did not want to disclose this to anyone other than to Ingrid Bergman herself.
Nobody dared to contact her directly. The more that Ingrid Bergman drew us into the world of her thoughts, the more she seemed also to need to keep us at a distance. The most that she would do was to nod at those students she ran into on campus: she seemed to put all of herself into the lectures, emptying herself entirely.
I had been the exception. Although she must have been at least ten to fifteen years older than us—a time in her life when she should have had a firm base, a nuclear family according to the norm—she cast long looks back at me when we happened to run into each other in the library or on the lawns. It might have been my imagination, my heated dreams. But the other students confirmed it. Made comments.
In due course it was she who became my academic supervisor. After I had completed the basic course, with top grades in each subject, the idea was that I would write a dissertation and that they would arrange everything for the benefit of my double life.
I still sometimes wonder how they could have let me go so far, choosing the particular subject that I did. I can only speculate that even then Edelweiss saw me as a possible candidate for the world’s most important assignment. And that somebody who so intensively called the whole nuclear weapons system into question, could never be suspected of serving the ends of that system: that my research, in the standard way of such paradoxes, would be for him the optimal camouflage.
The working title of my dissertation was “The Atom: a Moral Dilemma”. At first, Ingrid Bergman suggested that it should center on Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher who was accused of heresy and burned at the stake. From him, threads also ran back to antiquity and the so-called “atomists” in southern Italy.
Bruno was a typical Ingrid Bergman figure—somebody who could get her animated, play a sufficient role in her own dramatization of world history: always lit up and theatrical.
But I wanted to go further. Right up to the fire. My first thought had been that the dissertation should center on Robert Oppenheimer, the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”, who after Hiroshima and Nagasaki pleaded for nuclear weapons never to be used again. But Ingrid Bergman dismissed that as conventional, even banal.
I next tried Andrei Sakharov. The Russian nuclear physicist who was one of the leaders of the Soviet hydrogen bomb project, the step after the atom bomb, and then became the world’s best-known dissident and pacifist. But think about the language, was Ingrid Bergman’s only response. By the time you’ve learned enough Russian, your scholarship funds will have run out.