Very obviously, Albert was trying to divert the mood from the melancholy loss of Lieserl to the more hopeful future. But I couldn’t pretend for long. How could I act as if our beautiful daughter hadn’t lived? How could I forget her horrible, pain-filled death?
My tears began falling as soon as we entered our apartment. When I left for Serbia, I’d hoped that when I next crossed the apartment’s threshold, Lieserl would be in my arms. Instead, my arms hung unfilled at my sides—superfluous limbs.
“Oh, Dollie, it’s not so bad as that!” Albert said, gesturing around the dusty, paper-strewn living room. “I tried to keep up on the cleaning, but your Johnnie doesn’t have the knack. Anyway, I think a cluttered, busy house signals a cluttered, busy mind…and, well, I’ll let you guess what I think a clean, empty house signals.”
He smiled at me, those familiar crinkles appearing around his eyes. I reached up and stroked his cheek gently, wishing desperately that affection without sadness or anger would return to my bereft interior. Instead, the tears flowed again.
I let my hand drop down and ignored his beseeching eyes. Walking into the bedroom, I lay down on our bed, curling into a ball. I didn’t even have the strength to remove my traveling coat or boots. I was so very tired and soul-sick. Albert stared at me for a long minute and then sunk down into the mattress at my side.
“What is it, Dollie?” He sounded genuinely perplexed, as if he’d expected me to bustle in from the train station and whip up a four-course dinner with a radiant smile.
“How can you not know?” I asked, not hiding my anger at his ignorance. When he didn’t respond, I muttered, “You are a genius at everything but the human heart.”
The loquacious Albert was rendered momentarily speechless. Finally, incredibly, he guessed, “It’s Lieserl, isn’t it?”
I didn’t answer. There was no need. My silence, broken only by sobs, answered for me. Albert looked over at me helplessly.
“I imagined her here with us, Albert,” I tried to explain. “Every single day I was in this apartment with you, I was waiting for her to join us. Each time I passed a park or strolled to the market, I thought, ‘I will bring my Lieserl here soon.’ But that will never happen now.”
Our bedroom was absolutely still for a long time but for the ticking of our bedside clock. Finally, Albert spoke. “I’m very sorry about what happened to Lieserl.”
His mouth uttered the correct words of solace and consolation, but I couldn’t hear any emotion in his voice. He sounded hollow and false, like an automaton.
It seemed I had a choice. I could cling to my fury at the unfairness of Lieserl’s death and my anger at Albert for his incomprehension and selfishness. Or I could surrender my wrath and instead embrace hope for a new family life with this baby. The sort of life I’d wished for Lieserl.
Which path would I choose?
Inhaling deeply, I stilled my breathing and wiped my tears. I chose life. For a successful life with Albert, that meant choosing science. It was the language in which we first communicated and the only one Albert comprehended perfectly.
“I had a scientific epiphany, Johnnie,” I said as I sat up.
“You did?” His flat eyes began to glimmer in the glow of the streetlights streaming in the window.
“Yes, in the Novi Sad train station. You know how we have been struggling to reconcile Newton’s physical laws with Maxwell’s new theories on electromagnetism and light waves? How we’ve been trying to bridge the divide between Newton with his matter and Maxwell with his light waves?”
“Yes, yes,” he exclaimed. “It’s been confounding. Not just to us but physicists everywhere. What did you discover, Dollie?”
“I think that the notion of relativity—the one we’ve read about in Mach and Poincaré—might hold the answer. Relativity might bridge the gap between the theories of Newton and Maxwell, the new and the old. But only if we shift our understanding of space and time.”
I explained to him the thought experiment I’d had in the Novi Sad train station. “The logical outcome is that the measurements of certain quantities—such as time—are relative to the velocity or speed of the observer, particularly if we assume that the speed of light is fixed for all observers. Space and time should be considered together and in relation to each other. In this way, Newton’s classic laws of mechanical physics remain accurate but only in situations of uniform motion.”
He gasped. “That’s brilliant, Dollie. Brilliant.”
Had he really just called me brilliant? It was a word Albert reserved for the great masters of physics—Galileo, Newton, and periodically a couple of the modern thinkers. And now me?
Rising from the bed, he started pacing around the bedroom. “It seems you’ve grieved for Lieserl thoughtfully, such that something extremely important has come out of it.” Pride shone in his eyes, and I couldn’t help but be pleased with myself, despite all my self-loathing over Lieserl.
“Shall we write a paper on your theory?” he asked, his eyes sparkling. “Together, we could change the world, Dollie. Will you do this with me?”
A spark of excitement ignited within me, but guilt immediately dampened it. How dare I be pleased with Albert’s reaction? How dare I long to research and write this theory? It was my daughter’s death that inspired the insight and allowed me to see God’s patterns in science. Yet, another voice argued, couldn’t I write this theory in her memory so that her death was not in vain? Maybe this was the “glory” I was meant to uncover.
What was the right course?
I allowed my lips to form the words that my heart yearned to say. “Yes, Albert. I will.”
Chapter 27
May 26, 1905
Bern, Switzerland
The papers and books were heaped high on the large rectangular table in our living room. This table, once burnished and scrubbed and ready for meals, had become the battered hub of our research, the place from which the spark of our creativity emanated, not unlike the spark of life between Adam and God depicted in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, we joked to ourselves. These papers were to be our own miracles.
Peering between the stacks, I made eye contact with Albert. Whispering to ensure that one-year-old Hans Albert stayed asleep, I said, “Johnnie, tell me what you think of this.” Holding my paper close to the oil lamp, I read aloud to him from my paper on relativity: “Two events that appear concurrent when observed from one spot can no longer be considered concurrent when observed from another spot that is moving relative to it.”
Albert puffed on his pipe, squinting at me through the haze of its smoke. A long pause ensued before he answered. “It’s very good, Dollie.”
I glanced down at my paper, pleased with Albert’s reaction and the sound of the words read aloud. “It captures well the notion of relativity, doesn’t it? I wanted at least one sound sentence in the paper, separate from the thought experiment and the bolstering calculations, that would be understandable and quotable to a larger audience.”
“That’s wise, Dollie. This notion will reach wide, I think.”
“You do? You’re certain the wording isn’t a mistake, Johnnie?” I asked. Although my theories on relativity were indeed simple at their core, the notion itself was hard to grasp—it completely contradicted prior learning—and the math was beyond the average person. I needed to be certain I’d boiled it down to its essence.
“We may need to play with the verbiage a bit, but when we’re trying something new, there will be some mistakes along the way,” he muttered distractedly. These days, Albert repeated this phrase fairly often. With my paper and the other two we were working on together, we were generating many new theories. Between us, we jested that not only were the papers a miracle, but it would take a miracle for people to accept their revolutionary notions.
“True enough.” I slid two papers between a stack toward him. “Please take a final look at m
y calculations on the velocity of light and empty space.”
“Dollie, we’ve gone over and over your calculations. They’re magnificent. Anyway, you’re the mathematician in the family, not me. It’s you who I rely upon to correct my own numbers!” he cried out in mock exasperation.
“Shh,” I said with a giggle. “You’ll wake the baby.” Albert was right. For the past eighteen months, we’d been working on three papers, although the relativity paper was largely my own. The others—an article on the quantum of light and the photoelectric effect, and another article on Brownian motion and atomic theory—were coauthored by both of us. On those two, Albert primarily drafted the theory while I handled the mathematics, although I was intimately familiar with every word and idea.
“We are just days away from submitting this paper to the Annalen der Physik. I want to make certain every detail is perfect.”
“I know, my little sorceress,” Albert said, and I smiled. It had been a long while since he’d called me his sorceress. The past two years of our marriage had been content enough, but the childish passions and frivolities had faded in the reality of daily living. “Anyway, we’ve run it by Besso too. I know he’s not a certified physicist, but he’s as smart as any of the jokers we went to school with. And he thinks it’s sound.”
I nodded. Albert reviewed our papers with Michele Besso, who had indeed served as an excellent sounding board. Given that Michele now worked at the Swiss Patent Office too, as a technical expert a grade above Albert, and that they walked home from work together every evening, Michele had ample time to consider our theories. I knew Albert was right, but my nature tended toward worry and exactitude.
He yawned. “Shall we call it a night, Dollie? I’m exhausted.”
Funny that I didn’t feel tired at all. I should have. I rose before Albert to make sure breakfast was ready when he and Hans Albert awoke. I spent the day cleaning and cooking and caring for our one-year-old, a cherubic but fatiguing little fellow. Once Albert arrived home, I hastened to serve dinner while he spent a precious few minutes tossing the baby about. After I cleared the dinner dishes and put Hans Albert down, more often than not, the Olympia Academy arrived, picking up the debate from where we had left it the night before, whether on Sophocles’s play Antigone, David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, or Henri Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis. Only then, when the academy left, the baby was down, and the house was clean, did Albert and I sit down to our real work.
It was the time of day when I came alive.
Not that the rest of my day didn’t hold pleasure. No, the birth of my sweet, brown-eyed Hans Albert had brought me great joy. Caring for him and undertaking with him all the activities I’d imagined with Lieserl—strolls to the market, walks through the park, even his nightly bathing ritual—had been a great balm for the scars left by Lieserl’s death. As my feelings for Hans Albert, or Hanzerl, as we sometimes called him, grew, so my anger at Albert diminished. My contentment with our family and our little apartment at 49 Kramgasse, one of the most beautiful streets in Bern, ran deep. I adored strolling with Hans Albert down the lengthy Kramgasse, once part of the medieval city center, and pointing out to him the Zytglogge, Bern’s famous clock tower, as well as the obelisk-adorned Kreuzgassbrunnen fountain, the Simsonbrunnen fountain with its sculpture of Samson and the lion, and the Zähringerbrunnen fountain that showed an armored bear. I had written of my joy to Helene, who, having read much of my sadness in recent years, replied with a confession of relief.
“You go to bed, Johnnie. I’ll just read through this paper one last time, and then I’ll join you.” Bringing the oil lamp closer to me, I began to reread the familiar words for perhaps the hundredth time.
I felt Albert’s hand on my shoulder, and I glanced up at him. His eyes gleamed in the low light, and I sensed his pride at watching me toil away. I hadn’t seen that expression from him in a long while. For a brief, blissful second, we beamed at each other.
“Our life is just as we promised each other in our student days, isn’t it?” I asked him. “You used to say that we would work as students of science forever, so we don’t turn into philistines. That prediction has finally come true.”
He paused for an eternity of a moment and then said, “Quite right, my little ragamuffin.” It was another name he hadn’t used for some time. After gently stroking my hair for a moment, he whispered, “This is indeed our miracle year.”
As I watched him amble down the hall to our bedroom, I smiled to myself. I had been right to return our relationship to the language of science; love followed in science’s footsteps with Albert.
My eyes blurry from staring at the minuscule calculations, I smoothed down the cover of the paper: “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” Our names—Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić Einstein—shone beneath the title. The work was largely mine, but I understood that without my degree or doctorate, it must come with Albert’s name as well.
My new theory on relativity had revealed that time may not have the same fixed qualities that Newton, along with nearly every other physicist and mathematician since him, once believed. But an even more ancient philosopher, Seneca, had certainly understood one aspect of time perfectly: “Time heals what reason cannot.” Time and my work with Albert, in honor of Lieserl, had healed much.
Chapter 28
August 22, 1905
Novi Sad, Serbia
Helene squeezed my arm in delight. Our children ran around the square in front of the Queen Elizabeth Café, where we sat sipping watery coffee. Thrilled by the little chase, Julka led the merriment, followed by Zora and finally, unsteadily toddling in their wake, Hans Albert. As they dodged in and out of passersby, it was all I could do to quell my protective instincts to jump up and prevent his fall, even though I knew Albert wasn’t far behind them.
I glanced over at my friend, who was squinting into the bright summer sun. Deep vertical lines creased between her heavy, dark eyebrows, making her appear older than her years. Despite the worry evident on her brow, her blue-gray eyes were as soft and kindly as they’d always been.
I squeezed her arm back and said, “This time with you has been a gift, Helene.”
“I agree, my old friend,” Helene said with a satisfied sigh. “I’m so happy that you convinced us to come with you to Novi Sad.”
Just two days ago, we’d stood crying on the banks of Lake Plitvice in the tiny resort village of Kijevo. Our husbands and children stood by, confused since we’d spent a blissful week in each other’s company on holiday. “Why were you crying?” little Julka asked. Helene and I explained that we found the idea of parting hard to bear. What we didn’t say was that the languid days at Lake Plitvice with water lapping at our feet, surrounded by low red hills and fields of green dotted with blue periwinkles and reveling in each other’s easy company, had been almost too perfect. Our lives back on Kramgasse in Bern and Katanićeva Street in Belgrade, respectively, seemed bleak by comparison. A life of housework and the blank eyes of other housewives, women who found us odd and too academic for their household cares.
I made the case to Helene for an extension of our visit, but I didn’t need to beg her. The invitation to join us in Novi Sad was accepted readily, for which I was now grateful. Having Helene, Milivoje, and their children with us made easier the awkward introduction of Albert to my parents in their Novi Sad home base. Mama and Papa had grown to accept Albert from afar, but shaking hands with the man who’d impregnated their daughter—and never visited their poor, late granddaughter—was quite another thing. The presence of Helene and her family and my parents’ delight in meeting Hans Albert softened an otherwise challenging occasion.
“I think how we used to walk together every day along Plattenstrasse in Zürich completely carefree. At the time, I didn’t know how wonderful that was,” Helene said with a faraway expression on her face.
“I know. I often imagine that I’m study
ing in my little bedroom at the Engelbrecht Pension. Is it strange that I like to think of that time so often?”
“No,” Helene answered with a wistful smile. “Do you ever wish we’d kept that pact?”
“Which pact?” As soon as I asked the question, I remembered. There had only ever been one pact between us; I simply hadn’t considered it for some time.
“The one about dedicating ourselves to our studies and never marrying,” she said.
The pact seemed so long ago, struck by an entirely different person. One who hadn’t had her body riven in two—from the pain of childbirth and the inexorable suffering of child loss. That girl seemed so innocent, standing on the brink of limitless possibility, mercifully unaware that she would have to morph herself and sacrifice her ambitions to persevere in the world.
I stared at Helene. “I would be lying if I said there haven’t been moments when I wished we’d stuck to the pact. Certainly, there were dark days when I was pregnant with Lieserl and terrified.” My eyes welled up with tears. Helene was the only person in the world to whom I could speak openly about Lieserl. “But I would never have wished that my beautiful Lieserl did not exist, no matter the fear and pain. No matter the shortness of her life.”
We held hands in silent understanding. Then, gesturing to our giggling children, I said, “And anyway, if we’d kept our pact, we would never have had this.”
“True enough,” Helene answered with a broad smile.
Just then, Hans Albert, finding his sea legs at fourteen months and resembling nothing more than a young sailor on a swaying ship, fell to the ground with a cry. On instinct, I jumped up, but I wasn’t fast enough. Albert raced from the nearby table where he was holding court on physics with a group of local students, swooped down, and hoisted Hans Albert on his shoulders.
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