“The name is as beautiful as they are.”
“Yes, I’ve always been partial to the name. It’s quite lyrical. Fagus sylvatica can live for nearly three hundred years. If given enough space to grow, they can reach nearly thirty meters. Crowd them, and their growth is stunted,” she said with an enigmatic smile.
I caught her unspoken meaning; in our own way, we were like Fagus sylvatica. I grinned back.
I glanced down at the hiking path. I was wary of my footing, even though I had not taken a misstep yet. I became so engrossed with the ground that I bumped into Milana, who had stopped suddenly. When I gazed over her shoulder to see what lay before us, I understood why.
We had reached the Albishorn, the peak of these woods, with its legendary vista. Spread before us was the vivid blue of Lake Zürich and the Sihl River, set off against white-capped mountains and rolling green hills dotted with farms. The blue of the Swiss waters was so much more brilliant than the muddy Danube of my youth; the Albishorn’s accolades were well deserved, particularly since the air was filled with the crisp wonder of the mountains’ ample evergreens.
I felt reborn here.
I took in a big breath of the invigorating air. I had done it. I had not been certain that I could manage this hike. I had never tried anything like it before. Only when the girls begged me to come—and Helene pointed out her own success on past Sihlwald hikes despite her limp—did I concede. Helene really left me with no excuse. Although her limp resulted from a childhood bout of tuberculosis in her hip and not a congenital hip defect like mine, her gait approximated my own. How could I claim that my disability prevented me from trying?
I had learned something new about myself. The unevenness of my legs was not as marked on uneven terrain. My disability was actually more pronounced on even ground. I could climb as well as any of the girls. What freedom.
I glanced over at Helene, and she smiled at me. I wondered if she had experienced the same self-doubts and the same revelation on this trail, even though she had hiked with her father growing up. When I smiled back, she reached for my hand and gave it a little squeeze. She released it only when she walked closer to the tip of the Albishorn for a better view.
The sun had set by the time we stumbled back into the Engelbrecht pension. The foyer seemed overstuffed and dim compared to the clear, bright, simple beauty of the wilderness, not to mention that it smelled cloyingly musty, no matter the cleaning lengths to which Mrs. Engelbrecht went. The maid helped us struggle out of our packs and rumpled coats, and we giggled with the effort.
“You girls are quite a sight!” Mrs. Engelbrecht said as she entered the foyer. The commotion had attracted her attention, and although she usually liked order and quiet in the pension, she could not help but laugh along with us.
“What a day we’ve had, Mrs. Engelbrecht!” Ružica said in her usual singsong.
“The Sihlwald was breathtaking as usual?”
“Oh yes,” Milana answered for us all.
Mrs. Engelbrecht turned to me. “And you, Miss Marić? How did you find our jewel?” She had raved about the Sihlwald to me before our departure, reminisced about walks that she and Mr. Engelbrecht had taken there in the early days of their marriage.
The words to describe my experience did not come easily—for me, it was so much more than a mere hike—and I stammered. “It was so very…”
“So very…?” Mrs. Engelbrecht asked expectantly.
“Miss Marić adored it, Mrs. Engelbrecht.” Helene came to my rescue. “Look, the Sihlwald rendered her speechless!”
Milana and Ružica chortled, and Mrs. Engelbrecht indulged us with another smile. “I’m delighted to hear it.”
Mrs. Engelbrecht pointedly glanced up at the clock on the wall and then scanned us. “Perhaps you will want to freshen up before dinner? It will be served in fifteen minutes, and the windy boat ride across Lake Zürich has wreaked havoc on your hair. Unordentliches Haar.” She emphasized the unsightliness of our appearance.
Even though we were brilliant university students outside the Engelbrecht pension, within the pension doors, we were ladies who were expected to be respectable at all times. I patted my hair. I had carefully braided it this morning, then swept the heavy braids together on top of my head in a topknot, thinking it would withstand the hike and return boat trip, but I felt a mass of curly tendrils slipping out of the braids, knotting together in places.
“Yes, Mrs. Engelbrecht,” Ružica said, answering for us all.
As we tromped upstairs to our rooms, I tried to untangle one particularly stubborn knot. No success. As Milana and Ružica tromped off to their respective rooms, Helene reached from behind me to help. I paused as she teased out the hairs.
“Do you want me to come to your room, and we can take turns with each other’s hair? Otherwise, I’m not sure we will make dinner in fifteen minutes,” she asked.
“Please.”
After I unlocked my door, I grabbed two combs and some hairpins from my dressing table. We settled onto my creaky bed, and Helene began the painful business of fixing my hair. We visited each other’s rooms often enough, but this was the first time I recalled ever working on each other’s hair, although I’d spotted Ružica and Milana creating styles for each other often enough.
“Ow,” I yelped.
“Sorry. There’s nothing for this birds’ nest other than a thorough combing. You’ll have your revenge in a few minutes.”
I laughed. “Thank you for encouraging me to come today, Helene.”
“I’m so glad you did. Wasn’t it wonderful?”
“Yes, it was. The view and the woods were magnificent. I never thought I could manage such a climb.”
“That’s ridiculous, Mileva. You were more than capable of that hike.”
“I was worried about holding everyone back. You know, with my leg.”
“For a brilliant girl who’s had so much success in the classroom, you’re awfully unsure of yourself elsewhere, Mileva. You did wonderfully today, and now you have no excuse not to join our hikes,” Helene said.
A question about Helene had been haunting me since we met. “Your leg seems not to concern you at all. Don’t you ever worry how people perceive you?”
Helene’s heavy brows knitted in confusion. “Why should I? I mean, it’s a nuisance—sometimes I’m a little unsteady on my feet, and I might not be the quickest in the bunch—but why should it affect how others see me?”
“Well, in Serbia, if a woman has a limp, she’s not suitable for marriage.”
Helene stopped brushing. “You’re joking.”
“No.”
She placed the brush down on the bed, looked me in the face, and reached for my hand. “You’re not in Serbia anymore, Mileva. You’re in Switzerland, the most modern country in Europe, a place that would never adhere to such ridiculous, antiquated ideas. Even in my homeland of Austria, which seems like the hinterlands compared to progressive Zürich, such an idea would never be tolerated.”
I nodded my head slowly. I knew she was right. Still, the notion of unmarriageability had been jangling around in my mind for so long, it almost seemed a part of who I was.
• • •
This perception started years before with an overheard conversation. I was seven, impatiently waiting after school on a cold November day for Papa to return home. I had a surprise for him, one I hoped would make him smile.
Bored with pacing around the parlor, I grabbed a book off the shelf and sunk into Papa’s armchair. Tucking my legs under me, I curled around the leather-bound, gold-embossed book, an exterior that belied the dog-eared, well-loved pages within. Although our family library contained many books—Papa believed that it was everyone’s duty to become educated, even if his or her upbringing, like his own, did not provide a formal education—I returned to this collection of folk and fairy tales over and over. The stories
were a bit simple for me at seven, but the book contained my favorite tale, “The Little Singing Frog.”
I was halfway through the tale about a couple who prayed for a child and, when they received a frog daughter instead of a human girl, became embarrassed by her differences and hid her away. Just as I was about to read my favorite scene, where the prince hears the frog girl’s singing and decides that he loves her despite her appearance, I erupted in a fit of laughter. Papa had snuck into the room and was tickling me.
I gave him a big hug, then excitedly stood up and pulled him across the room. I wanted to show him the ramps I’d built, based on the sketches I made in school earlier that day. “Papa, Papa, come see!”
Weaving through the fussy green velvet and walnut furniture to the one and only undecorated corner of the parlor, I led Papa to the experiment I had created, based on an earlier dinner conversation about Sir Isaac Newton. We talked about Newton at dinner often. I liked his idea that everything in the universe, from apples to planets, obeyed the same unchanging laws. Not laws made by people, but laws inherent in nature. I thought I might find God in such laws.
Papa and I had discussed Newton’s writings about the force of objects in motion and the variables that affect them—more simply, why objects move the way they do. Newton intrigued me because I suspected he might help me understand why my leg dragged while other children’s legs skipped lightly down the streets.
Our conversation had given me the idea. What if I made my own little experiment, exploring Newton’s question about how increasing mass affects the force of objects in motion? Using strips of wood leaning on book stacks, I could create ramps with different inclines, and if I sent different-size marbles down those ramps, I would have a wealth of data to discuss with Papa. After school, I had begged the strips of wood off Jurgen, our house steward, and then leaned them against carefully stacked books, five books for each of the four ramps to be exact. Once I had tinkered with them for over an hour to ensure the inclines were exactly the same, I thought they were ready for Papa and me to perform the experiment.
“Come on, Papa,” I implored, handing him a marble slightly larger than the one in my own hand. “Let’s see how the size of the marbles affects their motion and speed.”
Grinning at me, Papa ruffled my hair. “All right, my little bandit. An Isaac Newton experiment it is. Do you have your paper ready?”
“Ready,” I said, and we knelt on the floor.
Papa lined up his marble on the ramp. After checking to make sure I did the same, he called out, “Go!”
For the next quarter hour, we released marbles down ramps and recorded the data. The minutes flew by in a blur. It was the time of day when I felt happiest. Papa really understood me. He was the only one.
Our housemaid, Danijela, interrupted us. “Mr. Marić, sir, Miss Mileva, dinner is served.”
The peppery, meaty scent of my favorite pljeskavica wafted through the air, but still, I was disappointed. I had to share Papa over dinner. True, Papa and I dominated the dinnertime conversation—Mama barely spoke except to serve—but her presence dampened my enthusiasm and Papa’s openness. Mama had so many expectations about who I should be, and none of them included a scientific little girl. Why aren’t you like the other girls? she often asked me. Sometimes, she filled in the name of a specific Ruma child; there were any number of ordinary little girls in Ruma for her to pick from. She never explicitly filled in the question with the name of my late sister, but I knew that was implicit. Why wasn’t I more like Milica might have been had she survived?
Often, in the darkness of my bedroom at night, in the silence of the hours after everyone had fallen into slumber, I wondered if I was making the wrong decision by pleasing Papa instead of Mama. I couldn’t gratify both.
Despite their differences of opinion on my path, Papa would not brook any criticism of Mama, however slyly I made it. He defended her expectations as appropriate for a mother protecting her daughter. And I knew he was right. Mama loved me and wanted the best for me, even if her vision of the best didn’t comport with my own.
Dinner ended after a stifled conversation about Newton. I was sent back to the parlor alone. Something was wrong between Mama and Papa, something unspoken but palpable. Mama would never openly disagree with Papa, certainly not in front of me, yet her manner—her unusually terse dinner prayer, her abrupt passing of plates, her failure to ask about the acceptability of the meal—spoke of defiance. To occupy myself until Papa returned, I reviewed the data we’d gathered and prepared for a second experiment to examine another one of Newton’s theories. In order to measure the impact that friction has on the motion of identically sized marbles, I had asked Jurgen to prepare three strips of wood, each with varying degrees of roughness.
I thought about Papa’s comment when I proposed this experiment: “Mitza, you are like the objects in one of Newton’s investigations. You tirelessly maintain your velocity through life unless you are acted upon by an outside force. I hope no outside force ever changes your velocity.”
Papa was funny.
As I created ramps using the different strips of wood, voices scratched at the edges of my consciousness. The maids were probably bickering again, a skirmish that resurfaced nearly every day as the dinner hour ended and the cleaning duties mounted. The voices escalated near the kitchen. What was going on? I had never known Danijela and Adrijana to be so loud before, so disrespectful. Nor had I ever known Mama to lose control of the kitchen. She was spare with her words but always firm. Curious, I strained my ears but could not make sense of the conversation.
I wanted to find out what was going on. Instead of nearing the kitchen through the parlor entrance, I crept down the servants’ hallway. Here, the wood used for the dull floors was a rougher grade, and there were no pictures on the walls, unlike the rest of our house. In the area where we lived, the floors were polished to a high gleam and were covered with Turkish rugs, and the walls were crowded with still lifes of fruit and portraits of people we didn’t know. Papa always said he wanted our house to be as fine as any home in the lauded city of Berlin.
No one expected me here. Trying to tread lightly—not easy in my heavy boots—I realized that the voices did not belong to Danijela and Adrijana. They belonged to Mama and Papa.
I had never heard Mama and Papa fight before. Soft-spoken and submissive everywhere but the kitchen—and even there, she was quietly adamant—Mama hardly even talked in Papa’s presence. What horrible event had caused Mama to raise her voice?
Drawing closer to the kitchen door, I heard my name.
“Do not give the child false hope, Miloš. She is only seven years old. You spend too much time with her, encouraging her ideas and reading,” Mama pleaded. “She is a gentle spirit, in need of our protection. We must prepare her for her real future. Here, at home.”
“My hope in Mitza is not unfounded. No amount of time spent on her is too great. If anything, it is too little. Do I have to repeat what Miss Stanojević told me today? About Mitza’s brilliance? About her genius with math and sciences? Her nimble way with other languages? Need I tell you again what I have long suspected?” Papa’s voice was firm.
Surprisingly, Mama did not relent. “Miloš, she is a girl. What good does it do for you to teach her German and math? To do science experiments with her? Her place is in the home. And Mitza’s home will be this home; her leg will make marriage—and children—impossible. Even the government recognizes this. Girls can’t even attend high school.”
“That may be true for ordinary girls. But it does not apply to a girl like Mitza.”
“What do you mean, ‘a girl like Mitza’?”
“You know what I mean.”
Mama was quiet. I thought she had backed down, but then she spoke again.
“Do you mean a girl with a deformity?” Mama spat out the word.
I recoiled. Had Mama really just called my leg a
deformity? Mama was always telling me how beautiful I was, how my limp was hardly noticeable. That no one really took account of the unevenness of my legs and hips. I had always known that this wasn’t completely true—I could not ignore a lifetime of strangers’ stares and schoolmates’ teasing—but a deformity?
My father’s tone was filled with fury. “Don’t you dare call her leg a deformity! If anything, it is a gift. With a leg like that, no one will claim her in marriage. This gives her license to pursue the intellectual gifts God has given her. Her leg is a sign that she is destined for greater, better fates than a simple marriage.”
“A sign? God-given gifts? Miloš, God would want us to protect her in this home. We must keep her expectations realistic so as not to crush her spirit.” Mama paused, and Papa broke into the momentary silence.
“I want Mitza to be strong. I want her to walk by any klipani who mock her leg, confident that God gave her a special gift—her intelligence.”
I felt like I was viewing myself for the first time. Mama and Papa perceived me much the same way the parents in “The Little Singing Frog” saw their daughter. I heard them say I was smart, but mostly, I sensed their shame. They wanted to hide me away everywhere but the classroom and our home. They didn’t even think that I was worthy of marriage, something to which even the dullest farm girl could aspire.
Mama didn’t answer, a long silence that signaled her return to submission. Papa spoke for them both, more calmly. “We will get her the education that her fine mind deserves. And I will teach her an iron will and the discipline of mind. It will be her armor.”
Iron will? Discipline of mind? Armor? This was to be my future? No husband. No home of my own. No children. What about the hopeful ending of “The Little Singing Frog,” where the prince sees the beauty within the frog daughter’s ugly exterior and makes her his princess, clothing her in golden gowns the color of the sun? Was this not to be my fate? Didn’t I deserve a prince of my own, no matter how horrible I was?
The Other Einstein Page 4