He flipped through it once, twice, very quickly, and then he took two or three deep breaths as if to calm himself down. He opened it and stared at the inside cover for a long moment. He looked up, his eyes filled with tears, and when he spoke, it was in German. “How did you come upon this book?”
“It was given to me by my father,” I said. “Do you know who it belonged to?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d know this notebook anywhere. You must tell me who gave it to you, and when, and under what circumstances. I knew the author well, you see—her name was Sophie Meisenbach, and she was my cousin.”
My heart lurched. “Your cousin?” I stammered. “The notebook belonged to a woman?” Sophie Meisenbach. Had I finally found the name of my mother?
Though I was eager to ask Karl to tell me everything about Sophie Meisenbach, I rushed through my own story first, the one Liliane had told my father about the young couple, the baby, the notebook, me. “And so you see,” I finished, “that’s why I have been searching for the authorship of this notebook. I am trying to discover who I am.”
By then Karl was openly weeping. “Sophie and I grew up together in neighboring towns,” he said. “Our fathers were brothers, twins actually, so in some ways we were even closer than typical cousins. Her father had married a Jew, so though we were cousins, she was Jewish and I was not.”
He looked at his hands and steadied himself. “Sophie was always a better student than me, though I’m not sure our teachers ever gave her the recognition she deserved, while I was routinely praised. But Sophie knew what she was capable of, or at least she wanted to find out her limits, and when I went to university, she decided she wanted to go too.”
He met my eye. “I’m very proud of the influence I had,” he said. “Her mother was against Sophie going to school, but she was her father’s only daughter and his favorite child, and he couldn’t say no to her about anything. And so he let her go. She was here in Göttingen for two and a half years.”
“Why wasn’t she on the list Frank gave me?” I asked.
“She wasn’t an official student,” Karl said. “Her parents didn’t let her enroll. She had two brothers who were attending a university near their hometown, and her parents didn’t want them to feel like she was competing with them—though for my money, Sophie’s was the better mind, by far. But Sophie would never admit it, and she didn’t want to be enrolled or to outshine them, she didn’t care—she just wanted to be here, to study, to learn.
“But like I mentioned, she was Jewish. And so a few years in, after Hitler was elected—that monster, that fool—she was forced to return to her family. When the Jews were told to leave Germany, Sophie’s family decided to stay. They thought they were safe. They thought it’d blow over, you see. And of course things got worse, and the borders were closed, and we were at war. Nobody really ever believed, you see, I mean, no one understood how far it would go. We all thought they’d be spared. I do know that they tried to escape after some time in hiding, but after they made the attempt, we lost contact with them. They were just gone. We had hoped that meant they had made it out, but we never heard anything conclusively. When they didn’t return after the war or send word, we had to assume they didn’t survive.”
We were all silent. Karl cleared his throat. “What a way to meet,” he said. “What a way to discover a long-lost cousin.” He offered me a weak smile.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m not trying to claim that Sophie Meisenbach was my mother. I only know that somehow the notebook was found with me.”
“Whereas there is no question at all in my mind, my dear, that you are Sophie’s child,” Karl said. “There is the story, of course, and the matter of the notebook and your talent for math. But there’s more. I noticed right away that there was something familiar about you—something about the shape of your face, and your mouth, I’m not sure exactly what. Something in me recognized you. And it cannot be denied, it all fits together. When Sophie fled, she was known to have been involved with a Chinaman. And she was pregnant. It was quite a scandal.”
I felt a prickle of shame at the way he said the words Chinaman and scandal, but Henry said, “That’s amazing! How wonderful.” And then, seeing my face, “Oh, poor Kat, it’s a lot to take in.”
“It is,” Karl agreed. “Perhaps that’s enough for one night. Katherine, may I take this notebook with me tonight to look over for the next couple days?”
“I don’t know, that notebook is very dear to me,” I said. “I know it sounds silly, but it’s the one thing I’ve had all my life, and it would make me very nervous to part with it.”
“I understand,” Karl said. “I promise to take good care of it. It is dear to me as well, you know. I have some photographs of Sophie and a handful of letters she wrote to me. I would be happy to turn them over to you, as insurance, if you would like to take a look. I’ve kept them safe all these years.”
“Okay,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Yes, I’d like to see them very much.”
Karl rose and tucked the notebook into his inner jacket pocket. I felt a twinge of anxiety watching it be taken into someone else’s possession, but I batted that away.
“May I ask one last thing?” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“The Chinaman. What was his name?”
“Cao,” Karl said, immediately. “Here, let me write it down for you.” And he pulled a pen out of his pocket and scribbled “Cao Xi Ling” on a piece of paper.
Chapter 20
AFTER KARL LEFT, HENRY TURNED TO ME AND TOOK my hands in hers. “I’m so happy I could dance!” she cried, but I burst into tears. “Oh no,” Henry said. “Oh no, no, no, dearest, what’s the matter? I thought this is what you wanted, I thought it’s what we came for.”
“I don’t know why I’m crying,” I said, sniffling. “I don’t know why I’m not happy. I just feel afraid, like what good could possibly come out of this? My mother was a Jew, likely murdered. My father was a Chinaman who besmirched her honor.” And here I laughed a little despite myself. “This won’t lead me to a happy place, Henry. This won’t leave me with a family.”
“Oh,” Henry said. Her eyes filled with tears. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“I mean, unless you count cousin Karl,” I said, with another pathetic laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Henry said. “I should have known. I wasn’t thinking when we talked about these things about what it must feel like for you—it was like listening to stories . . .” And now her tears overflowed. “We’ll adopt you, Kat. You can be my sister. We can spend holidays together and squabble over who gets to shower first. My parents would probably like you better anyway.” And now we were both laughing. “I just want to give you what I have.”
THE NEXT MORNING a small bundle arrived wrapped in paper and tied with a white string. The moment I saw Sophie’s letters, I knew she had been the owner of my notebook: the handwriting I’d spent my life studying was identical, the same swirling S’s, the same flourishes on the M’s. There were two photographs as well—Karl had attached a note saying that the first was of Sophie at five or six years old with her family, which included two older brothers named Franz and Albert, and her parents—Walter and Anne. Sophie was wearing a white dress with frills around the neck, and an enormous bow atop her light-colored hair. Her eyes were also light, and she was sitting up very straight with her hands folded between her parents, who were also seated—and her brothers, Franz and Albert, were wearing dark suits and standing on either side. They were posed in front of a painted backdrop of bookshelves, and everyone was looking at the camera except Sophie, who—for all the primness of her posture—was looking intently to the side, at something out of the frame.
The second photograph was much more relaxed. It was taken in front of the math building on campus, and it was of Sophie and about ten young men, including Karl. Her hair had darkened since she was a child, and now she stood at the center, wearing a long dress with one foot kicking out. Her face was laughing, her gaz
e direct. The men stood around her with their hands in their pockets, looking challengingly at the camera. I wondered what Karl had seen in me that reminded him of her: I studied her wide-set eyes, her soft, expressive mouth, and the halo of dark hair surrounding her face. I could not find a resemblance.
There were sixteen letters in all to Karl, and they were friendly and jovial, and had mostly been written in the two years he’d been at Göttingen before her. She sent news of her parents and her brothers, and a girl who, Sophie intimated, may have had a budding romance with Karl—but the purpose of the letters, it seemed, was to ask about his studies, as she always closed the same way, exclaiming, “Send me your lecture notes, please!” with the please underlined three times. “You don’t want me falling behind!”
I WENT TO UPDATE FRANK on my progress the next day and asked if he could find all the known addresses of Sophie Meisenbach and Cao Xi Ling. Frank said that because Sophie hadn’t been officially enrolled at the university, they would not have records of that nature, but that he would reach out to a city official he knew, who might be able to help. Cao Xi Ling, if I gave him some time, he would definitely be able to track down. I didn’t tell him who these people were to me, or the nature of my search, and he didn’t ask. I did tell him about meeting Karl.
“Between us,” he said, “I would watch out for Karl Meisenbach.”
“How come?”
“If it was up to me, I would have fired him a long time ago.”
“Wow,” I said. “Can you tell me why?”
“Do you know anything about our history here?”
“Only the math.”
“Some universities fought the Nazis, some put up with them, but not Göttingen. Göttingen embraced them. We were a braun Stadt—a brown city, where so many of our youth wore the brown shirts of the SA. Many faculty members stood by their Jewish colleagues, of course—but you can believe me when I say their students did not, and certainly not the people of this town.
“I tell you in confidence: if it was up to me, I would fire Meisenbach. He was a student when all this happened. Noether was his mentor. Do you think he would still be here if he had stood up for her, if he had defended her and his other Jewish professors? Well, he didn’t. Instead he took a position that only existed because they were gone.”
“Well, that wasn’t exactly his fault,” I said, after a moment. “You can’t blame him for everything that happened.”
“Then who do you blame?” Frank asked. “Everyone in this town would say that they were against the Nazis. Everyone would claim their families were part of the resistance. Do you think, given what happened, that could possibly be true? I often think that it would have been better if this place had been bombed during the war. I wish it had been.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone who remains benefited from the exiles and murders of Jews, don’t you see? We all did, we citizens of this country, whether we wrung our hands and regretted what was happening or openly celebrated when they were cast out of their jobs. We took whatever came our way and pretended it was ours to have by right.
“My father would tell you he was opposed to the Nazis, and that he spoke out against them until it became dangerous to do so. But what kind of courage is that? My father would say he stayed quiet in order to survive, that everyone who opposed them openly is dead. He was a film theorist, a scholar. He would never tell you this, never, but before I was born, he made propaganda films for the Nazi Party, and his only excuse is they asked him to, and he felt he couldn’t say no.” Frank laughed, angrily. “But his name is on the film, and that will be true forever, no matter what he—or I—can say of it now.” He scowled at his hands. “A Jewish girl taught me how to read. Ask my father now about the Nazis and he’ll tell you he hid two young nurses in our attic for the duration of the war, and afterward they went to Palestine, where they live to this day. They’ll never return here, and if they did, who would welcome them? My father thinks hiding them makes him a hero, despite his job, despite his name on a Nazi propaganda film. The families of those two girls, dead. Millions dead, and he thinks he’s a hero. Better he had died,” he said. “Better he had been killed.” There was real bitterness in his voice.
“Wow,” I said. “Maybe those girls disagree.”
He shrugged. “Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. I grew up with nurses and tutors, and beautiful things in our house. Gold candlesticks. Expensive paintings. Those girls lived in our attic. I grew up rich with stolen wealth, and we never returned it.”
“My father was a soldier in the war,” I told him. “When I was a child, I tried to imagine the terrible things he might have done. He would never talk about it. I wondered what secrets he carried inside him. It didn’t make me afraid of him, though; it made me—afraid for him.”
“The government in Bonn and most German residents do not support extending the statute of limitations on war crimes,” Frank said. “I do not think that as a country we are reckoning with our history. I do not think we’re facing up to what we did.”
“War criminals are one thing,” I said. “But Karl Meisenbach never harmed anyone. How can you really justify firing everyone who was here during the war? That seems to me just to be an accident of timing. Anyway, that kind of policy would upend society. It would ruin people’s lives.”
Frank smiled. “The tyranny of history,” he said, “is that it’s always too late for justice, the price is always too high.”
“But you can’t punish everyone,” I said. “Especially people who didn’t commit any actual crimes. When would it stop? What about Professor Behr? What about you? According to you, shouldn’t both of you be fired as well?”
I thought I’d offend him, that I’d gone too far. Instead, he laughed. “Exactly,” he said. “My point exactly.”
I left that conversation profoundly unnerved. It made me realize that something about the city of Göttingen—how pristine and untouched it remained—felt sinister in a way that Bonn, rebuilding, did not. And I realized with a jolt how at every mention of what had happened to the Jews I felt a chill in my veins, like the blood I had recently learned ran through them had gone cold.
I WENT TO SEE KARL that same afternoon, and I took him the letters and photographs he’d sent over, but he pushed them back into my hands and said, “Keep them, they’re yours.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And if you’re done looking over the notebook, could I have it back? I thought of something I wanted to take a look at.” This was a lie, but I didn’t know how to politely say I missed it and wanted it back in my possession.
“Really?” Karl said. “May I ask what you’re looking for?” He paused. “I’m afraid I left the notebook at home, but I will be sure to bring it in tomorrow. Either way, perhaps I can be of assistance.”
“Oh, it’s probably nothing. I’d rather not say until I am sure,” I said.
“Well, I hope it is something,” he said. “That would be so exciting.”
I sat in his office for another hour and a half, while Karl told me more about Sophie. His family had stayed with her family every summer. He’d been an only child, and her brothers had been like brothers to him, but Sophie, he said, had been special.
He’d been five when she was born and met her at her name day party, when she was eight days old. Her father had named her Sophie, which meant wisdom, though her mother, Anne, had preferred a more flowery name, or a more practical one. Sophie was quiet and thoughtful and carried a notebook with her everywhere she went, even as a child, drawing and making up poems. Her father doted on her, but her mother said, What good was cleverness in a girl when it ruined her mind for the practical details of life? And Sophie—it had to be admitted—was not particularly well suited for the practical details of life. She burned her baking and made a mess of her cooking. She did not seem to care for fashion or boys.
But Karl understood the key to his cousin: he talked to her and showed her things, and in return she showed him her noteboo
ks. Whenever he visited, they’d go for a walk in the woods or sit by the lake talking and talking, and drawing with sticks. Karl taught her what he knew of math, which Sophie had a passion for, and as time went on, Karl began to teach her not only addition and subtraction, but the theory behind numbers, and how to use symbols to stand for them and the relationships between them: how numbers were symbols of symbols. Sophie loved these talks and couldn’t get enough of them. And when Karl went to Göttingen, she wanted more than anything else to follow.
When she was fifteen, Sophie’s brothers came down with the mumps, one after the other in a week and a half, and her parents decided to send her away—not to France to live with her grandmother as they’d originally intended, but with a governess to Göttingen. Sophie had told Karl the trick of getting what she wanted from her parents. If she sounded too anxious about wanting to do something, no matter how harmless, they would hesitate—wondering, worried, doubting. But if she asked for the same thing in a neutral, reasonable tone of voice, as if she didn’t care which way it went, one or the next, they’d capitulate without really considering. In this case, it had worked.
It was with a sense of adventure and relief that Sophie left home. She loved her brothers dearly, and was sorry they were ill, but during her first few weeks away, she hardly thought of them. Because Göttingen was where Sophie first met Emmy Noether. In Noether’s classes, the students gathered around her, asking questions that Noether fielded with cheerful willingness, effortlessly manipulating formulae, showing the generalizations that arose from their calculations—here is the rule demonstrated by these different examples. This was the game Sophie had learned from Karl, a private language unto themselves, and now she discovered that here were others who could not just speak it fluently, but actually play inside it.
Emmy Noether was not beautiful, in her trousers and her cheeks smudged with dust, the lines deep in her face, and yet she held the attention of these men as Sophie had been told only the most beautiful women could ever do. What Noether’s mind could draw forth, from itself and from the minds of others! She engaged them wholly, led them through mazes and tunnels and traps, all of them eager at her heels—she gathered them together and then she released them to wander on their own, dazed and giddy with revelation.
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