The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part 1: Nameless

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part 2: Quanta

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part 3: Madness

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Part 4: The Writer

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Part 5: Fugue

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Part 6: Light

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Two months before Hitler’s rise to power, a beautiful young woman is found naked and near death in the woods outside Berlin. When she finally wakes from her coma, she can remember nothing, not even her name. The only clue to her identity is a handbill found nearby, advertising a public lecture by Albert Einstein: ‘On the Present State of Quantum Theory’.

  Psychiatrist Martin Kirsch takes the case, little suspecting that this will be his last. As he searches for the truth about ‘the Einstein Girl’, professional fascination turns to reckless love. His investigations lead him to a remote corner of Serbia via a psychiatric hospital in Zürich. There the inheritor of Einstein’s genius – his youngest son, Eduard – is writing a book that will destroy his illustrious father and, in the process, change the world.

  About the Author

  Philip Sington was born in Cambridge. His father was an industrial chemist and his mother an officer in British Intelligence. After studying History at Trinity College, Cambridge he worked as a business journalist and magazine editor for nine years. He co-authored six novels under the joint pseudonym Patrick Lynch, selling well over a million copies worldwide. His first solo novel, Zoia’s Gold, was published in 2005. To date his work has been translated into eighteen foreign languages. He lives in London with his family.

  ALSO BY PHILIP SINGTON

  Zola’s Gold

  For Uta

  &

  Leo

  PHILIP SINGTON

  The Einstein Girl

  ‘He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.’

  Aristotle, Politics

  ‘We are all agreed that your theory is insane. The question that divides us is whether it is insane enough to have a chance of being correct.’

  Niels Bohr, Reply to a presentation by Wolfgang Pauli

  Zürich, 18 October

  Dearest Elisabeth,

  Here, tied up in this parcel, is the manuscript of a book, which I finally completed the day after you came to say goodbye.

  I call it a book even though it is as yet nothing more than a pile of papers, lacking even a title. Nor will this change while I am alive. I don’t dare to seek out a publisher, for reasons which will become clear to you before you reach the end. Yet my book I still call it, not out of vanity but because the moment when a book becomes a book is hard to pin down, like the moment when a succession of musical notes becomes a melody. It takes a mind to realise its character, just as it takes a mind to discern a melody.

  I ask that you take it with you when you leave. I know from experience what a long journey you have ahead of you, and I hope the story will serve, at least for a time, to distract you from the clattering of the wheels, the stale air and the tiresome intrusiveness of officialdom. In other words, I hope to shrink both time and distance so that we remain closer to each other in both.

  I hope also that my book helps prepare you for your mission in Berlin. There is so much I should have told you already. But I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognised much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

  I have one further hope, even more selfish than the others: that once you have finished reading, you will give me your opinion as to a title. If I leave the matter unresolved, then a title will only be chosen for me after I am dead. And I should hate that, even if, being dead, I am not in a position to hate anything.

  But all that is for the end of your journey. For the moment this book shall remain nameless, which you may discover in these times of fear and upheaval, is the safest way to be.

  nameless

  One

  Berlin. May, 1933

  Two weeks after her fiancé disappeared, Alma Siegel travelled across the teeming city to the edge of the eastern districts to look at photographs of the unnamed dead. They were displayed in a corridor at police headquarters, lined up inside glass cabinets, beneath each one a slip of paper bearing information on the place and date of discovery: waste ground off Danziger Strasse, 24 January; Anhalter station public lavatories, 7 February; Landwehr Canal at Kottbusser Bridge, 15 April. The corridor was busy. People came to police headquarters for many different reasons: to present themselves at the Alien Registration Office, to obtain a visa, to look for lost property or report a theft. They jostled her as they hurried by, all purpose and expedient haste, never pausing to look at the rows of frozen faces staring at them through the glass.

  Her old friend Robert insisted on coming with her. It was he who had introduced her to Martin Kirsch in the first place. The two men were colleagues at the Charité Psychiatric Clinic; and no doubt Robert felt it was his duty to rally round. In any case, he assured her, the trip to police headquarters was just a formality. Her fiancé wasn’t likely to be found among the faces in the cabinets. They belonged to labourers, immigrants, maids and ‘working women’ – by which he must have meant prostitutes. A man of Martin’s standing, a doctor of psychiatry, didn’t keep that kind of company. And so it had proved. The stiff white collars of the professional classes were rarely to be found around the necks of the unnamed dead. Their shirts were open-necked and dark coloured so as to hide the dirt. And there was a coarseness about them, a raggedness that went beyond the condition of their clothes.

  They were photographed at the scene, rolled onto their backs where necessary, lit up in the brilliance of a magnesium flash, skin starkly white against bottomless black shadow
s. Gravity tugged at their cheeks and their hair, which gave many the appearance of facing into a gale, eyes squinting or half-closed, mouths open as if gasping for a final breath. Since the beginning of the year more than a hundred of them had been gathered from all over Berlin.

  Identification was the sole purpose of the display. The slips of paper made no distinction between unsolved murders, suicides and deaths from exposure – although sometimes the distinction was all too evident: a trickle of blood running down a man’s face, a leather tourniquet twisted tight around a woman’s outstretched neck. The drowned were the worst: caked in slime, flesh bloated and split open, as if they had eaten themselves to death. The bodies were kept at the morgue for a few weeks, then disposed of. Most of the nameless dead had, in fact, already ceased to exist in any physical sense. All that remained of them, the only evidence that they had ever lived, were the police photographers’ snapshots pinned up in the corridor. Even this courtesy was temporary. After a few months the prints were taken down and filed away in the basement, never to be seen again.

  Alma brought along a photograph: Martin looking uncharacteristically suave in a three-piece suit, hair a little longer than usual so that it flopped gamely over his forehead, smiling as he squinted into the light. The police officers examined the picture and declared that they had never seen him before.

  ‘He wears spectacles,’ she said. ‘For reading.’ But still they shook their heads.

  She came back every few days, alone. The officers got used to seeing her and would give her a smile as she walked in. She wasn’t like the women they usually had to deal with, with her strawberry-blonde curls and pretty retroussé nose, her tailored jackets and polka-dot scarves. Everything about her gave off an aura of expense: her skin, her slender legs and delicate ankles, her upright bearing, the melodious clack of her heels. They escorted her assiduously to the cabinets. Sometimes they let her see pictures that had not yet gone up, that still awaited their correct bureaucratic designation. They even showed her the pictures that were usually considered unsuitable for public display: bodies cut in two on railway lines, burned black in house fires, or lying in shallow graves, grinning through decomposed flesh.

  ‘Now these aren’t pretty,’ they would say, as they opened the files. And then they would watch her closely as the dark, coagulated masses took form before her eyes, became flesh and bone, became gradually human. For all their show of reluctance, she had a sense that they enjoyed introducing her to these horrors, as seducers took pleasure in the corruption of innocence. There was camaraderie in braving the extremes of corporeal ruin and not turning away. Or perhaps what pleased them was to see her wobble on her society pedestal. That she was complicit in her degradation, came back again and again as if satisfying some depraved appetite, made them all the more eager to oblige.

  One of the older sergeants had a patch of shiny smooth scar tissue down the side of his face and an eyelid that was never fully open. ‘What makes you think he’s dead,’ he asked her one day, as they stood before the cabinets, ‘your Dr Kirsch?’

  There had been some rearrangement of the pictures since Alma’s last visit. It took her a moment to get her bearings. One of the drowned women had migrated to the bottom row, as if dragged down by her own weight, and in the top row there was now a gap.

  ‘We were going to be married,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Fräulein, but did he say anything? Anything that gave cause for alarm? Did he have enemies, for instance?’

  Alma shook her head. She had thoughts on the matter, instincts, but nothing she could explain. They concerned one of Martin’s patients, a young Slavic woman. The case had been in the newspapers for weeks, the subject of much lurid speculation. As her doctor, Kirsch had been photographed and written about, a development Alma had welcomed at the time. But that was when Martin had begun to change. The case seemed to act on him like a drug. He had been seduced, poisoned. Robert had complained about his remoteness and his secrecy. He had hinted at a fixation. This was not the Martin Alma knew, or anyone knew.

  His superiors were reluctant to discuss the case. They could not say if it had anything to do with Martin’s disappearance. They were politely unhelpful, as if concealing some professional embarrassment. But their lack of alarm betrayed a belief that Martin had disappeared of his own volition. Or if he had fallen victim to a criminal act – a street robbery gone wrong, a kidnap, an assassination – it was a crime they had no intention of investigating.

  Martin had rented rooms off the Schönhauser Allee, a mile and a half from the hospital. Alma had not been there often – only once, briefly, inside – but she knew it was not a reputable neighbourhood. To the north lay the tenements of Pankow, to the south, the seedy nightspots that were clustered like a rash around Alexanderplatz station. The area was inexpensive, he had explained, and convenient for work. But when she found him more suitable accommodation out west in Charlottenburg, he had dragged his heels.

  ‘I’ve become used to this old place. Besides, if we’re moving out of town next year, what’s the point?’

  She had put his reluctance down to inertia and a bachelor’s disregard for appearances. Space for his books and peace to work in were all he needed. But in the days after his disappearance, she had been forced to question that assumption. She wondered if what people said was true: that there were fascinations in this part of the city to which she had been oblivious.

  Her parents did not understand why she kept going in. As far as they were concerned, the sooner she forgot about Kirsch the better. They had taken a house on the Baltic for the summer and had insisted she join them there. Alma got herself a part-time job as a receptionist, just so they would stop bothering her about it.

  After work she rode the S-Bahn as it hurtled roof-high over the streets, plunging into hollowed-out buildings, squeezing past apartment blocks so close she could see her own reflection dance across the window-panes. She made the journeys her fiancé used to make, determined to see the city through his eyes. From the S-Bahn you could see things invisible at street level: a solitary cherry tree flowering in a courtyard, children washing in a tin bath, a young girl hanging up a turquoise dress from a tenement balcony. The railway was part scalpel, part movie camera, slicing the city open, parading its inner workings at fifty frames per second. It was on the S-Bahn that she felt least abandoned, as if the act of travelling turned back the clock, and brought her nearer to the future she had lost.

  Sometimes she rode the tram beyond Alexanderplatz, heading into places that had only ever been names to her before, émigré quarters officially void of interest for any recreational visitor. The capital had grown bigger and messier since the war. It had spread, metastasising over fields and forests, its proletarian masses swollen by hordes from the East: Russians and Poles, gypsies and Jews. It was not truly a German city, measured against any other German city; that was what her father said.

  Alma stared out at the strange, foreign streets, with their watchful crowds, their covered markets and temples, haunted by the thought that these were places her fiancé knew, where perhaps he was still known. Once she saw him standing in front of a shop window, hunched over to light a cigarette. She was off the tram and over the street before she realised she had made a mistake.

  ‘Do excuse me. I thought …’

  The stranger had smiled and tipped his hat, saying something in a language she could not understand.

  Alma went to the Prussian State Library to read through the old newspaper reports. A group of eager young students in blazers were helping reorganise the book stacks, wheeling trolleys up and down the corridors, talking and joking in loud voices. Berlin boasted dozens of newspapers. Alma sat in the Periodicals Room, skimming the pages, breathing in the oily stink of newsprint, fingers and palms turning slowly black. Somewhere amidst the topical clamour were surely some grains of truth, some portents of her private catastrophe.

  Martin’s patient had been found in woodland near Potsdam, thirteen miles south-west o
f the city. Two young boys out cycling had made the discovery. They were pictured in the Berliner Morgenpost: Hans and Ernst Waise, standing stiffly with their bicycles as they stared into the lens. They had gone out early that morning, a Saturday in late October, intent on reaching the lakeside town of Caputh, where they had heard the great Albert Einstein lived and sailed boats. But it had been foggy and they had lost their way. In the end, it was the younger boy who had spotted something lying by the water’s edge.

  THEY CAME LOOKING FOR A GENIUS AND UNCOVERED A SEX CRIME, the piece began. The girl was found half-naked and soaked to the skin. Her legs were cut and scratched. Other unspecified marks of violence had been found all over her body, which was so pale the boys thought she was dead. When they detected a faint pulse at her throat, they covered her with their jackets while Hans, the older boy, peddled off to get help. It was over an hour before he returned with the police.

  An imaginative feuilleton in the Berliner Illustrierte Presse reflected on Ernst Waise’s ordeal, a child of eight, left alone in the mist-shrouded forest with a beautiful, dying woman, his head filling up with tales of ghosts and evil spirits, hardly daring to breathe in case they noticed him. The boy himself later claimed that the girl had spoken before lapsing into unconsciousness again, though he could not repeat her words. He said he had even kissed her, thinking that might somehow keep her alive.

  Details of the girl’s immediate fate took longer to come out. Alma found the most detail in the topical weeklies, brash two-tone publications full of blotchy black-and-white photographs, the kind her father’s driver, Hans-Peter, read as he waited at the wheel.

  The police that attended the scene had been unsure what to do. They had taken the unconscious woman to a first-aid station in Caputh, which was equipped only with blankets, bandages and disinfectant, and then to a sanatorium in Potsdam. The staff there were also inexperienced, most of their clients being consumptives and sufferers from bronchial disease. Fearing hypothermia, they submersed the girl in a bath of hot water to raise her body temperature, a ploy the doctors at the Charité later suggested might have made matters worse. The sudden warmth would have caused the blood vessels in her arms and legs to dilate from their narrowed state, they said. Cold blood trapped in her extremities would have flooded back into the core of her body and her brain, further lowering their temperature. The same blood would have carried elevated levels of toxins and acids. It was acidosis that had probably sent her into a coma.