The Other Einstein

by Marie Benedict

  A single envelope sat in the mailbox, and I examined it. From the handwriting, I knew it was from Mama, but the slim package couldn’t fit the photograph for which I’d hoped. I trudged upstairs to our tiny living room. Dust flew out of the cushions as I settled onto the ocher settee. No matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t clean away the must of the previous tenants.

  Dear Mitza,

  I am sorry to write you with terrible news. Scarlet fever has been running rampant throughout the countryside again. Although we have taken every precaution to protect Lieserl against it, she has contracted the disease. The red rash has already appeared on her face and neck and has begun spreading to her trunk. Her fever is very high, and cold baths will not abate it. This, of course, presents the biggest concern. The doctor has examined her and informed us that there is nothing to do but let nature take its course. And pray.

  We are giving her the best possible care, but she is quite uncomfortable and longing for you. You may wish to come.

  Much love,

  Mama

  Scarlet fever? No, no, no, not my Lieserl.

  Children died from scarlet fever all the time. Even if they didn’t die, they suffered terribly during the illness. Scars, deafness, kidney and heart failure, encephalitis, and blindness were just a few of the long-term ramifications for survivors.

  I had to go.

  Wiping my tears away, I raced to our bedroom to pack my things. As I pulled down my trunk from the top of the armoire, I heard the front door slam. Albert was home early. I kept packing. There was a train—the Arlberg train—that evening that would start the long journey to Novi Sad and from there to Kać, where Lieserl was staying with my parents now that Papa had gone to the Spire for the summer months. I didn’t have a spare moment to fuss over Albert’s return home.

  “Dollie?” he called out, sounding perplexed. He was used to me greeting him at the door.

  “In the bedroom.”

  The smoke from his pipe preceded him into the bedroom. “Dollie, what are you doing?”

  I handed him the letter from Mama and continued packing.

  “So will you go to Kać?”

  I looked up, startled at his question. How could I stay away? “Of course.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until Lieserl recovers.”

  “Can’t your mother handle this? You could be away for an awfully long time. A proper wife shouldn’t leave her husband alone for too long. How will I manage?”

  I stared at him. Had he really just asked me those questions? For all his selfish inquiries, he hadn’t asked a single question about the scarlet fever or Lieserl’s condition. Where was his compassion and concern for his daughter? All that seemed to matter was his inconvenience at my absence. I wanted to scream at him. Shake him senseless, even.

  Instead, I said, “No, Albert. I’m her mother. I will handle her illness.”

  “But I’m your husband.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. “Are you telling me I cannot go?” I said loudly with my hands on my hips. Albert looked shocked. He had never heard me raise my voice.

  He didn’t answer. By his silence, was I to surmise his objection? I didn’t have time for his selfishness or whatever ridiculous thoughts were passing through his head.

  I snapped the lid of my trunk closed, grabbed my citizenship papers, and put on my gray traveling coat and hat. Lugging my battered tin and leather trunk off the bed, I began to drag it out the front door of our apartment and down our steep stairs, no small feat with my limp. As I pulled the trunk out onto the street to hail a passing hansom cab to take me to the train station, I looked back up the steps.

  Albert stood at the top of the staircase, watching me walk away.

  Chapter 24

  August 27, 1903, and September 19, 1903

  Salzburg, Austria, and Kać, Serbia

  A terrible thought plagued the initial leg of my long journey to Kać. Had I gone too far with Albert?

  Part of me hated that this thought even occurred to me, but storming off and defying his wishes, no matter how outrageous and unjust they were, could undo all the groundwork I’d laid for his acceptance of Lieserl into our life in Bern. If she survived the scarlet fever, that was. Should I appease him in some way? The thought of it rankled terribly, but I needed him on my side. Especially since I suspected I was pregnant with another child.

  At 3:20 p.m., the train pulled into the Salzburg, Austria, station. I had exactly ten minutes while the train boarded more passengers before it continued on to the next stop. Was it enough time to write and send Albert a note? I decided to take the chance.

  Weaving through the throngs of new passengers boarding my train, I hobbled down the aisle and steps and over to the nearest kiosk. I grabbed a sepia postcard of Schloss Leopoldskron, a castle near Salzburg, and two five-heller stamps. Four minutes until the train departed. What should I write? I contemplated several approaches but couldn’t decide.

  I finally settled on a greeting—a familiar nickname to signal that I was no longer fuming, but I wouldn’t lead with an actual apology—when the whistle sounded. Glancing up, I realized that I had only one minute to board the train before it left the station. I’d spent too long on the postcard. With my limp, the distance stretched out long before me, and I panicked. Could I make it? I tried to race toward my train car—toward my daughter—but a surge of passengers disembarking from another train blocked my way. As I tried to dodge through them, my lame foot caught on the hem of my skirts, and I fell to the ground. A kindly older couple reached down to help me up, but it was too late. My train had left the station.

  Hysterically crying, I shrugged off the couples’ hands and rushed over to the ticket master’s office. When would the next train for Novi Sad, Serbia—where Papa would pick me up and take me by carriage to Kać—depart? The first one left in fifteen minutes, and it would require that I take two additional connections to make it back anywhere close to my original arrival time. I bought the ticket.

  I raced to send a telegram to Papa about my change in arrival and the whereabouts of my luggage and then hastened to board the train. Even though it had factored into my delay, I decided to take the postcard with me back on board and send it from our next stop, Budapest. But this time, I wouldn’t deliver it to the post for mailing myself; I would enlist a train agent to do it for me. I wouldn’t take the chance of leaving the train again.

  As the train bumped along—my stomach along with it—I scrawled a note to “Johnnie,” inquiring after him and updating him on my journey. I needed to know that Albert and I were settled as I went to go fight for Lieserl’s life.

  The train arrived in Novi Sad the next afternoon, a whole half day later than I’d planned. Papa, who’d already secured my trunk from the earlier train, was waiting with a carriage to take me the twenty kilometers to Kać. He greeted me with a grave smile and warm embrace, and he confirmed that, as far as he knew, since he’d been at the train station for nearly a day awaiting me, Lieserl’s condition was unchanged. Then we slipped into an uncomfortable silence. The controversial topics of my marriage and my failure to visit the baby since the wedding loomed large between us, preventing any of our historical intimacy.

  When the carriage pulled into Kać, red crosses outlined in black were painted on nearly every door in town. The symbol of scarlet fever was everywhere. I had never seen so many red crosses, not in any of the scarlet fever epidemics I’d experienced before. No wonder Lieserl was ill. I felt sick at the thought and instinctively clutched my stomach. How would I protect this new baby from infection should I catch it?

  “Is it so bad?” I asked Papa.

  “It’s the worst outbreak I’ve ever seen,” Papa answered. “With the worst symptoms.”

  The Spire’s towers grew closer, and instead of being elated at reuniting with my daughter, I grew more afraid. What would
be the state of my poor Lieserl? What if I’d arrived too late?

  Before Papa could even stop the horses entirely, I jumped from the carriage and ran into the house. I passed the local doctor’s carriage parked out front. Had Lieserl taken a turn for the worse?

  “Mama!” I called out, dropping my traveling bag at the foot of the steps.

  Climbing the curved stairs as quickly as I could, I heard her call back, “In the nursery, Mitza.”

  I pushed open the door to the nursery and gasped at the state of my daughter. Her face and throat were a deep crimson, as, undoubtedly, was her trunk. Her eyes were rolled halfway back in her head, an undeniable sign of high fever. Mama was dipping a cloth into a bowl of ice water and rubbing it on Lieserl’s body, while the doctor sat at her side. I smelled rose water and wintergreen in the air and spotted a row of jars along the dresser. Mama was using her arsenal of home remedies: quinine; dressings of rose water and glycerin mixed with oil for the skin; wintergreen for fever; mint for the itching; monkshood, belladonna, and woodbine combined with jasmine to calm the system. Would any of them help my poor baby?

  Mama and the doctor looked up at me, their eyes full of worry. “She took a turn for the worse this morning, Mitza,” Mama said. “The fever took her in its grasp.”

  I kneeled beside Lieserl’s bed. I had arrived too late. Stroking her blond hair, damp from sweat or Mama’s ministrations, I whispered in her ear, “Mama is here, Lieserl. Mama loves you.” And I wept.

  The days passed in a haze as I kept vigil by Lieserl’s side. The doctor was right; there was little we could do for her besides make her comfortable and pray, which Mama and I did constantly. I gave up worrying about my own health and scarlet fever’s potential effect on my unborn baby and focused instead on the very sick but still living child who lay before me. Lieserl hadn’t opened her eyes fully since I returned home—the fever never lifted—so I had no idea if she realized I was there. Or indeed, if she even remembered who I was. She had grown so much in the year since I had last seen her; I’d left behind a six-month-old infant, and I now stared down at a year-and-a-half-old child.

  What sort of mother was I? How could I have left this beautiful being behind for so long?

  After nearly three weeks in which Albert sent three conciliatory letters, I wrote him about her state. I didn’t stint on the description or the possible outcome, and there was no longer any need to beg for her admission into our family. Her survival was my focus now.

  On September 19, he responded, asking about Lieserl and her scarlet fever symptoms. After inquiring about how she was registered in the governmental records—an odd question under the circumstances, I thought—he begged me to return to Bern. Three weeks was too long for a proper wife to be separated from her husband, he claimed, and I needed to join him again.

  How dare Albert admonish me about my duties as a wife? Was he even concerned about Lieserl’s condition? He seemed more focused on his own well-being and asked more questions about her birth registration than her health. Why was he asking about that? If he was finally considering having her with us—when, and if, she recovered—he knew that a child born out of wedlock automatically becomes legitimate after its parents’ marriage under Swiss law. He would simply need to list Lieserl’s name on his passport and be present at the border to escort her into Switzerland. His question didn’t make any sense—unless he was thinking about adoption again. Surely, he could not consider such a thing at this grave juncture.

  I wouldn’t be going back to Bern any time soon to minister to Albert’s needs and tidy our home. Not without a healthy Lieserl, in any event. She was my priority and my life. Albert could not think I would leave her again.

  Chapter 25

  October 12, 1903

  Novi Sad, Serbia

  I clutched my stomach and tried to keep from crying. The last time I was in this train station, almost two months ago, I promised myself I wouldn’t pass through on my return to Bern without my Lieserl. Yet here I stood, empty-handed.

  Scarlet fever broke my promise. The disease ravaged my poor baby—peeling her skin from her blistering body, taking her sight, singeing her with relentless fever, and damaging her sweet heart—until she could no longer hold on. After the life slowly drained from her, I clutched her limp body, rocking her back and forth, until Mama gently pried her from me. I didn’t stop sobbing from the moment she died until we lowered her tiny coffin into the hallowed ground of a churchyard near Kać. On that terrible evening, Mama and Papa, our shared grief linking us together once again, had to carry me back to the Spire once night fell.

  I did not leave Lieserl. She left me.

  How would I go on without her?

  While I waited for the boarding announcement for Bern, I sat down on the station bench, giving in to the grief I’d penned up since I hugged Mama and Papa good-bye at the station entrance. If I wasn’t pregnant again, I would insist on a very different future. I would stay in Kać, never leaving Lieserl’s resting place behind. I would become like Mama, perpetually dressed in funereal black and making daily visits to the grave of my beloved departed. Albert and physics would become a distant memory, a hazy piece of a past I’d foresworn. They would be penance for my sin in abandoning Lieserl in the first place.

  Questions and regrets plagued me. Could I have staved off the scarlet fever if I’d never left her behind for Albert? Could I have stopped the fever from sinking its final talons into her if I had arrived just a little earlier? If I hadn’t gotten off that damned train in Salzburg to write to Albert?

  But I did have another baby coming. I rubbed my growing belly, this time unencumbered by restraining corsets, and willed myself to stop the tears, if only for a little while. No matter my grief, I would have to mother this new baby and create a family for him or her, regardless of how I felt about his or her father. Albert’s response to my pregnancy still angered me. “I’m happy about your news. I’ve thought for some time that you needed a new little girl…”

  A new little girl? I wanted to scream. How could he think a new baby would replace Lieserl, the unique soul I had just lost? A child he had never bothered to see.

  A child I wanted God to give back to me.

  If only God would let me go back in time, I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. I would stay in Kać and never leave Lieserl; surely a mother’s savage love could ward off the scourge of scarlet fever. If only God’s rules permitted me to freeze time or change it. Instead, I was stuck with Newton’s rigid laws of the universe.

  Or was I?

  An idea crept into my mind. I’d spent the better part of my life trying to uncover God’s hidden rules for the universe through the language of physics. Who was to say there wasn’t a rule of physics as yet undiscovered? One that would help me with my pain and suffering over the loss of Lieserl.

  Perhaps God had a rule He wanted me to find. Perhaps there was a purpose for my devastation. After all, Romans 8:18 said, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

  Where was the glory amid my grieving?

  I stared at the station clock and the train waiting patiently beneath it. I sensed—no, I knew somehow, some way—that the answer lay before me. What was it?

  The clock.

  The train.

  Lieserl.

  In a rush, it came to me. What would happen if the train left the station not at sixty kilometers an hour but at close to the speed of light? What would happen to time? I ran through the calculations in my mind, roughing out a solution.

  If the train left the station at rapid speeds approaching the speed of light, the clock’s hands would still move, but the train would be moving so quickly that light could not catch up with it. The faster the train accelerated, the slower the hands would move, ultimately freezing once the train reached the speed of light. Time would effectively
freeze. And if the train could go faster than the speed of light—an impossibility, but for argument’s sake, assumed—then time might roll backward.

  There it was. The new rule was so simple and natural. Newton’s laws about the physical universe only applied to inert objects. No one needed to be bound by the old rules anymore. Time was relative to space. Time was not absolute. Not when there is motion.

  This new law was so simple and natural. Elegant, even as it challenged Newton’s physical laws that had held fast for hundreds of years and the new laws about light waves proposed by Maxwell. It was the sort of divine law for which I’d been searching my whole life. Why did God only allow me to see his handiwork after so much suffering?

  But I did not have a train that traveled the speed of light or faster. I had no way to halt or roll back time. My newly uncovered law wouldn’t bring Lieserl back.

  Chapter 26

  October 13, 1903

  Bern, Switzerland

  On this occasion, Albert came to the Bern station.

  “Dollie,” he cried out merrily as he lifted me down the final step from the train. “How your belly has grown in only two months!”

  In truth, my belly was a little larger than when I’d left, although hardly big enough for the usually dreamy Albert to notice in normal circumstances.

  I tried to smile as we left the station and hopped in a hansom cab to our apartment. I attempted to leave the sadness of Kać behind as I breathed in the familiar antiseptic smells of Bern—the crisp Swiss air with hints of evergreen, the freshly scrubbed laundry drying in the wind, the woodsy smell of freshly lit fireplaces. I struggled to focus on our new little girl, as Albert kept calling the baby in my belly, and his warm welcome home. I even endeavored to listen to his chatter about his boss, the director of the Swiss Patent Office, Friedrich Haller. I even nodded encouragingly when he said, “You’ll see. I’ll get ahead so we don’t have to starve.”