The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘He’s lecturing at the School for Slavonic and East European Studies in London.’

  ‘Do they guard him yet?’

  ‘No, no. That was years ago.’

  ‘Your mother is Jewish, right?’

  ‘Perfectly right.’

  ‘Well, hell. Goddam it,’ he said. The accent was a rich mixture of Brooklyn, Russian, Yiddish. He told me why he thought we were so well met.

  A large letters project was under way – the collected and annotated letters of Chaim Weizmann. An editorial committee had been set up some years before consisting of Lewis Namier, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon, all very top-class; also R. H. S. Crossman, the British ex-statesman, who was doing the big biography of Weizmann.

  Most of the volumes had been allocated and were being worked on by political specialists, but a certain hole had appeared for the years 1931–35, Weizmann’s period out of office. For this correspondence, which apparently reflected well the Zeitgeist of that dismal era, it had not proved easy to think of the right editor. The appearance of The Betrayed Decade, with what was considered quite an intriguing name on it, might have solved one part of the problem.

  ‘The other part is up to you. How about it, Igor?’

  We were in his apartment by that time – a pied-à-terre just off Central Park South, which is where our stroll had led – and his wife, Shirley, was pouring coffee.

  ‘Well. It’s sudden, Meyer.’ We were both now on first-name terms.

  ‘It would be two volumes, of the greatest historical importance. It is kind of the prehistory of the State of Israel. He was in touch with almost everybody. Day after day, in a thousand ways, you see the moral collapse of Europe coming. You’d have running footnotes, a long introductory essay to each volume. It’s yours, I see it, I have a feeling.’

  His feeling was why I was now where I was, having mine.

  *

  It was the penthouse suite in the San Martin Clubhouse on the Weizmann Institute campus. Dignitaries usually got it. There weren’t any at the moment, which accounted for my occupancy. The plane had been hours late – a bomb scare in London – so I wearily sat and admired the glory and had a drink with Connie.

  More than ever, she reminded me of a small South American hummingbird – a confectioner’s model, perhaps. She had very neat little legs and feet. Her eyelashes flickered. Her name was Nehama, but the nuns in the convent school in Maracaibo (where she had been born) had had some trouble with this, and asked what it meant. She had told them it was consolation in Hebrew, so they had renamed her Consuelo, shortened in class to Suelo. When the family had moved to New York, the teachers there had asked what Suelo meant, and she’d told them it could either be Nehama or Consuelo, and everyone had settled for Connie.

  I said, ‘So what is the panic with Vava?’

  ‘Oh, you are too tired for these complications.’

  ‘What is the complication?’

  ‘Let me put it this way. I don’t understand it, and I’m an expert. He was a cousin of Vera’s, you know.’

  ‘Vera Verochka. Vava was?’

  ‘Your genius Hopcroft didn’t find this out from Olga?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me. Perhaps it was his bang on the head.’

  ‘Bergmann knew him in London in the thirties. He’d forgotten about it. Vava came from Vera’s hometown, Rostov. He didn’t leave Russia till after the Revolution. Then he went to Germany, until the Hitler thing started, and Weizmann got him out. He was one of his refugees. He stayed with the Weizmanns for a short time and Chaim started him off with some work at the Featherstone Laboratory.’

  ‘The Featherstone Laboratory.’ Through the echoing longueurs of the day and of the jet, I remembered somebody telling me something about this laboratory. What?

  ‘The Featherstone Laboratory in London. Weizmann’s laboratory. The one he started when they threw him out of the presidency of the organization in 1931. When he returned to science.’

  ‘Ye-es?’

  ‘Well, that’s it. So Vava stayed with them a short while, and then he got himself the job with the oil company, and found someplace to live, and they lived happy ever after, he and his wife and the little girl.’

  ‘Olga.’

  ‘Olga,’ Connie said.

  None of this seemed to answer the question, and I was too weary to grapple with it anyway, so I ate one of the oranges she’d picked for me, and listened while she told me what was going on at the Institute and who was still around. Most of the old faculty people were still around, the Sassoons, the Beylises; also a good egg from Harvard called Hammond L. Wyke.

  I said, ‘Anything further about his Nobel Prize?’

  ‘Well, fingers are crossed. There is an upstart in Japan who has his backers. That Nobel committee – I would seek to influence them in subtle ways, like financial. The unworldly scientist says you can’t. Then, Professor Tuomisalo of Finland is still with us.’

  ‘The professor of higher mathematics.’

  ‘That one. Well.’ She yawned. ‘Bat Yam is some kilometers away, with my bed in it. In the morning, you’ll ring when you want to come to the House. Ze’ev will drive round and fetch you.’

  I saw her down to her car and returned, dog-tired. It was very quiet; just the soft thud of the heavy-water plant from near the nuclear science complex a few hundred yards away. I stood at the open window and took in the scent of oranges from the dark. My eyes were jumping. I thought I saw something in rapid, jerky motion. It wasn’t an animal, or a vehicle. It seemed to be a running man.

  I watched the figure for some time, and went to bed, and tossed and turned there for hours, vaguely uneasy, sleepless.

  2

  Next morning, in the dead of winter, birds sang, sun glittered, trees shone with fruit, and God was back in business – all welcome after the London that Caroline had so pithily described. From the window I looked at the undulating grounds, magnificently undulating away in all directions. Along the paths people were ambling on bikes between the temples of science discreetly embowered here and there – all very seemly and inspiriting.

  I showered and shaved and topped off with a bit of the heavenly talc and descended for breakfast. There was only one other person in the restaurant, an Indian carefully feeding himself olives and cream cheese as he read the Jerusalem Post. I filled up a tray, and bought a paper for myself and took it near the window.

  Armies still locked together on the west bank of the Suez Canal; a very nice picture of Sheik Yamani, the Saudi Arabian Oil Minister, seraphically describing his regret at the unfortunate economic condition of West Europe; a mysterious shortage of rice among the wholesalers of Israel, portending an imminent rise in the price of the product.

  ‘Excuse me. You are Mr Druyanov?’

  The Indian was smiling tentatively down at me. Extended, he was a long, sinewy figure, slightly hunched.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Connie said you would be here today. We are good friends. Forgive me for intruding. I just wanted to say how much I admired your book. There were one or two things I would love to discuss with you, the role of Gandhi in 1939– Oh, please don’t let me disturb you.’ We shook hands, I half on my feet, and a pickled cucumber fell on the floor. He shot after it like a python. ‘There. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t eat it. Although the floor is very clean. Well, I don’t want to disturb you. I am working here; we will meet again, I am sure.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

  The first signs of trouble in Arcadia.

  I finished breakfast and rang Connie, and a few minutes later was being driven by Ze’ev, the chauffeur, to the House. We went out of the Institute and turned left into the main road of Rehovot, and then left again and up the avenue for half a mile till we reached the gatehouse. This had been the guard post in the days when Chaimchik had been President of Israel. We sped through it and along the winding path between orange groves, to pull up in the drive outside the House.

  The biggish white place sat like a swan in
the beautiful morning. The semicircular green awning was down over the window of Chaimchik’s old room, the wooden bird tray still attached to the balcony railing outside. He’d sat and fed the birds there while looking out to the Jerusalem hills, visible at this moment as a mauvish stain in the distance. I followed Ze’ev up the entrance steps and he unlocked the door.

  ‘You remember the way up to Mr Meltzer?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The wide marble staircase spiraled up from the hall: a spacious hall, quite light, quite bright, quite stately. A certain glacial quality sat upon it, the product of much limed oak. Limed oak had been the thing in the London of 1937 when Verochka had superintended the building. She’d become something of a magpie at the time. The results of her raids upon Sotheby’s and Christie’s were all around: chests, ornaments, lamps, rugs. She’d long outlived her lord; had slipped in her bath at the Dorchester on a visit to London at the age of eighty-five, and had returned in a coffin.

  I went up the stairs and along the corridor to her old bedroom; it was now Julian Meltzer’s office.

  ‘Well. So they put a bomb on the plane for you,’ he said.

  Something about old Zionists kept them like Peter Pan. He was sixty-nine and looked ten years younger: big, bland, calm, all in order. Some way above his mustache a pair of innocent eyes cannily gazed.

  ‘You didn’t happen to bring a token from your old friend Fidel?’

  I carefully opened my case and presented him with the token.

  He looked at the little cabinet for a bit and his mouth opened. Then he opened the box and looked at the cigars.

  ‘Oh, my word! I didn’t mean it. Where did you get these?’

  Caroline had got them. Her friend Willie was a gentleman cigar merchant, also a wine merchant; his father, the Earl, was.

  ‘Merry Chanukah, Julian.’

  ‘And a merry Christmas to you. Igor, these must have cost a fortune.’

  I agreed. ‘Perfectly correct. As it happens, I have a rather extended little tab for you to sign. We can go into it later. What is the mystery with Vava?’

  ‘Oh, well, Vava.’ He was still looking at the cigars with some disbelief. ‘I doubt if we’ll see anything from Vava.’ He very carefully put the cigars in a cupboard. There was another box of cigars in it, and a pile of books and files. ‘Wait a minute. I don’t think I ought to put these here, they aren’t in tubes. Might take the smell.’ He pondered a moment uncertainly. The cupboards had numerous fitted drawers. Verochka had kept her underwear here. As the correspondence showed, she had made very careful specifications for this range of cupboards. She’d driven the celebrated German architect Mendelsohn half mad. Verochka had become something of a madam as her Chaimchik had risen in the world. ‘I know.’ He went to another cupboard at the far end of the room and lovingly enriched it with the precious casket. ‘That chap wasn’t attacked for his money. They were after the letters.’

  ‘What chap?… Hopcroft?’ ‘I said, amazed.

  ‘I’ll smoke one of those tonight. My word, that’s very handsome, Igor,’ he said. ‘Yes, we’ve been having some nonsense here. You haven’t picked up any science from these letters?’

  ‘I haven’t got any scientific letters. Bergmann has them.’

  ‘You’ll pick up a bit.’ An accent of somewhere – London, N.W., perhaps–slightly asserted itself. He’d come to Palestine in 1920, had been the New York Times correspondent for years, associated with Meyer for even longer. ‘They have got keen here on Weizmann’s acetone process,’ he said. ‘It cropped up when Bergmann was in America during the oil crisis. You can make petrol from it.’

  ‘From acetone?’

  ‘Vava turned it into ketones. Do you know about ketones?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They put the kick into petrol. That’s what that letter was. The one to Fritz Haber that you sent to Connie.’

  I tried to remember the letter. It was in German. I couldn’t remember a thing about it, except that the name Vava had cropped up, and I’d ringed it.

  ‘So now they’re all at it,’ Julian said. ‘You can make the stuff anywhere. All this crisis they’re having in the West and Japan and everywhere, they don’t need it. Any piddling little country can just make its own, and the Arabs can go back to being Arabs instead of the financiers of the world.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Weizmann was, and he was a damned good chemist. He got blocked by the oil interests. He sent Churchill a stinker on the subject. They’re digging all the stuff out of the files now. Your Vava letter started a few things.’

  I stared at him. Churchill, oil interests, energy crisis.

  ‘You see, Hopcroft was mugged,’ I said. ‘He had six pounds in his wallet, which they took from him. I saw him in hospital the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Yes. Connie told me. Unlikely. Other stuff has gone missing, too, you see. Bergmann passed the word round in America. A chap got hit on the head in a place called Terre Haute, in Indiana. That’s where Commercial Solvents was, the outfit that handled Weizmann’s processes. This chap had picked up a pile of correspondence and two men came and took it off him while he was going to his car. He’s dead. We only heard about it yesterday or I’d have warned you. We won’t be seeing your papers.’

  ‘But Hopcroft didn’t have any,’ I said.

  ‘Well, they’ll know that now. He was gabby, Hopcroft, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He is gabby,’ I said. ‘He’s perfectly all right. I saw him.’

  ‘That’s all right, then.’

  ‘Olga is going to post the papers. She said so. She is going to do it on Thursday.’ I suddenly realized it was Thursday. She was popping down to Wimbledon today. Her husband wouldn’t be there. It seemed suddenly a very long way away.

  ‘Yes. Doubtful. Have a cup of coffee. Nellie!’ he called.

  Nellie came in. I’d heard her slowly typing next door. She was his secretary. She worked in what had been the nurse’s room, next door to Chaimchik’s room. She was a tiny, white-haired, lamblike creature, very gentle. ‘Hello, Igor,’ she said softly. ‘I saw you flit by.’

  ‘This man has brought me a present of cigars from his friend Castro,’ Julian said. ‘He deserves a cup of coffee.’

  I heard Nellie clacking slowly and precisely down the marble staircase, and the coffee turned up presently. Later I went to see Connie along the corridor. All the files were in her room; she was the main coordinator of research. Later still, I was working in Chiamchik’s bedroom.

  I state this because it happened in this order, but in fact I was thinking all the time of Olga, popping over to Wimbledon today, and of Hopcroft, nattering convivially in the St Mary and St Joseph, and of the unknown man in Terre Haute, Indiana, who was no longer in a position to be convivial. I was delving into the acetone process during this, and into a couple of other processes.

  3

  Chaim Weizmann was born in 1874 in Motol, a small village in Byelorussia, and as a boy moved with his family to Pinsk, a few miles away, which was bigger and even nastier. His father was a timber merchant, not prosperous, but he managed to put all of his large family through university. There was a rather sound family way of doing this. As each child completed university, he got a job and began contributing to the tuition fees of the next in line. (Years later, while Chaimchik was pawning his compasses, or scraping a living with Verochka in Manchester, he still managed to send a pound or two a month to keep two sisters going in Switzerland.)

  He soon got away from Pinsk and went to Germany to study chemistry, ultimately to the Technische Hochschule at Berlin Charlottenburg where he worked under the immediate direction of a Dr Bistrzycki. When Bistrzycki was called to a professorship at Fribourg in Switzerland in 1896. Weizmann followed him. He picked up his D.Sc. there in 1899, and went to the University of Geneva as a junior lecturer.

  Dyestuff chemistry was much the thing at the time, and this is what he had been doing with Bistrzycki. He immediately began researching and publish
ing at a great rate. In a single year he produced three very extensive papers and took out four well-documented patents. But he was busy in a bewildering number of directions.

  Switzerland was at the time a hotbed of political activity. There were numerous groups of impassioned émigrés, mainly Russian, covering a wide spectrum of contrary opinion. There were simple Socialists, not so simple Socialists, Communists (including incipient Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), Anarchists, Bundists, Zionists. The wild object of many of them was to create a revolution in unchanging Russia, and of the last group to alter an equally unchanging situation, the dispersion of the Jews.

  Zionism as a political movement was of later vintage than the others. Its basis was that the millions of Jews scattered about the world were not simply religious minorities in their different countries, as might be Protestants, Catholics, or Muslims, but a single people exiled from a particular land. The proposition was to repurchase the land, and the movement’s organizer, a Viennese journalist called Theodor Herzl (whose dignified portrait today appears on Israeli hundred-pound notes), in fact tried to do this by offering the Sultan of Turkey several million pounds for a ‘charter’ to it. The deal fell through, to the Sultan’s regret, but there were very many alternative proposals, hotly contested by the impecunious polemicists and students who made up the active body.

  Weizmann had been a Zionist for years, and in Switzerland found fertile ground and much unattached or even downright errant Jewish youth. He decided to collect what he could of it for Zionism, and with half a dozen friends arranged a meeting in the Russian library. This was a rash thing to do without securing the prior approval of G. V. Plekhanov, doyen of the squabbling émigré society and founder of Marxism in Russia. (In later life, Verochka recalled often seeing his two juniors Lenin and Trotsky meeting in a flat across the street.) Plekhanov’s disapproval could virtually be guaranteed for interlopers to his scene, so that when the founding seven arrived at their venue they found, with no surprise, that all the furniture had been removed. They held the meeting, nonetheless, standing up, voted on a Hebrew name for themselves, Ha-Shachar, The Dawn, and then voted to call a mammoth conference to recruit membership.