The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  ‘Or unwilling,’ Dr Brenner said under his breath, ‘if we’re keeping an open mind.’ He hesitated, then led the way into the storage room.

  ‘Unwilling?’

  Brenner shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. I should thank you for taking an interest, I suppose. I had thought of asking Dr Bonhoeffer for a psychological assessment. Certainly I see no evidence of head trauma, or any other form of impairment, besides the amnesia. I had her do some mental faculty tests, and the results, if anything, were rather better than average.’

  ‘Is there any evidence of alcoholism?’

  ‘No. We took a blood test when she arrived, but of course quite some time had gone by. It can’t be ruled out.’

  ‘I noticed a slight stammer, although she could have had that before.’

  ‘Indeed. In any case, after a coma that’s to be expected. The faculty of speech is the first thing to disintegrate.’

  Kirsch was brought up short by the sight of a complete human brain, pickled in formaldehyde, sitting on a bench in a large glass jar. All around the dimly lit room were shelves full of similar jars, each one containing a specimen of some kind: brains, fetuses, lungs or other internal organs. It was brains Dr Brenner was interested in. He had written several papers on head trauma and the pattern of its effects.

  ‘She’s also been having vivid dreams,’ he said. ‘Nightmares. Possibly involving injuries to the mouth area, which may be significant.’

  ‘Really? How so?’

  ‘I’ve found them to be associated with issues of enforced silence, an inability to speak out. Or sometimes with strong feelings of guilt.’

  ‘Well.’ Brenner frowned. ‘Her dreams aren’t my concern.’ He switched on a light above the table. ‘But I concur with your tangible observations. As you know, I believe the damage was done when she went into her coma. In such cases neurological symptoms can take almost any form.’ He paused to admire the larger of the two brains in front of him, squinting through the heavy glass. The last traces of colour had been bleached from the tissue, leaving it a creamy, fibrous white. ‘In any case, the patient doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger. In fact, she’s almost recovered, physically.’

  ‘I understand you plan to discharge her.’

  ‘Unless there’s some deterioration in her condition. We’ll watch her for a few more days. But there’s no point in her being here if we can’t effect an improvement.’

  ‘But she has nowhere to go.’

  ‘Someone will come forward eventually. Missing persons and so forth. I’m sure the papers will be only too happy to run a photograph. In the meantime, there are residences, aren’t there, for destitute women?’

  There were, a few, some run by church organisations, others by the municipal authorities. Most were run along prison or military lines, with residents put to work for their keep. Suicides were regular occurrences. Most of the women Kirsch had spoken to preferred life on the streets.

  There was only one thing he could do.

  ‘I’d like to investigate the possibility that the cause of the amnesia is psychiatric,’ he said, ‘rather than simply neurological.’

  Brenner looked mildly affronted. ‘I’ve never heard of a psychiatric disorder that puts its sufferers into a coma. Perhaps I’ve missed something in the literature.’

  He turned to a second, noticeably smaller brain specimen. He picked up the jar, peering at what appeared to be an area of tumorous tissue above the right temporal lobe.

  ‘We could be seeing the effects of shock.’

  Brenner turned the jar around in his hands. The brain bobbed. ‘She wasn’t raped, you do know that? In fact, I saw no evidence of recent sexual activity.’

  Kirsch could not help picturing the examination, the patient dragged unconscious onto the table, Brenner squinting between her upraised legs as his stubby fingers delved and probed.

  ‘That said,’ Brenner added, ‘she’s certainly no blushing virgin. She almost certainly gave birth at some time. And there’s no wedding ring on her finger.’

  ‘An attacker might have removed it.’

  ‘It would have left a mark. I found none.’

  Brenner’s indifference was suddenly easier to understand: the Einstein girl was not, in his eyes, respectable. She belonged to a class of women who were prone to misadventures, usually at the hands of men, but which they had invariably brought upon themselves.

  ‘In any case,’ Kirsch said, ‘she’s clearly undergone a traumatic experience.’

  ‘I’m not sure anything’s exactly clear, Dr Kirsch. The police have found no evidence of foul play.’

  ‘Then how do they explain –’

  ‘They have a theory, for what it’s worth, that the woman is simply deranged, and was all along. They say they’ve seen similar cases. A deranged woman might well decide to take a swim in a lake in late October. She might think to herself it was the middle of July.’ Brenner smirked. ‘Of course, this theory is very convenient, since it means they’ve nothing to investigate.’

  Brenner took a pen from his pocket and began to write in the logout book. Nothing could be removed from the department without a record being kept. Finally he looked up. ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘If you’ve no objection, I’d like to request that the patient be transferred to the clinic for observation.’

  Brenner’s pen was still for a second. ‘I can understand your interest, Dr Kirsch. Patients this unencumbered are hard to come by. One has a free hand, more or less.’

  ‘I can assure you, it’s not my intention –’

  ‘Of course, she has no means that we’re aware of. No way of paying.’

  ‘Her fee would be waived.’

  ‘With the director’s approval, I assume.’

  ‘It’s potentially a very interesting case. I’m sure he’d agree.’

  Brenner looked at Kirsch over his spectacles, then went back to work. ‘Very well, I shall request a referral. Just as soon as I see his signature on the paperwork.’

  After his visit to the main hospital, Kirsch returned to his desk at the clinic to find a sealed envelope resting on the blotter. It contained a letter from Dr Bonhoeffer informing him of the director’s return the following Monday and summoning him to a meeting first thing in the morning.

  Eight

  Oranienburg, 2 November

  Dearest Martin,

  I just heard about the transport strike in Berlin, and I hope it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to receive my letters, or that they’ll sit in a depot for weeks and weeks, uncollected. Father says I should be careful what I write to you, because sooner or later the strikers will open the envelope looking for money, especially if the whole thing drags on. Do you think the strikers will interfere with the mail? I can’t bear the idea that my words, which are only for you, could end up being passed around for entertainment among such awful people. It’s silly of me, but I can’t get the idea out of my head. It’s not that I imagine the words I have for you are so very special. I dare say they have all been used a million times before. But they are special to me, because they come straight from my heart, and are words that I have never used before to anyone else, and hope never to use again to anyone but you – there! You see, I am already minding what I say. There is no need to hope. I know I could never replace you in my heart, however that were to come about … And now I am sinking into all kinds of sad speculations when there is no reason – when I should be happy. All because of a silly strike!

  So please, dearest, let me know as soon as you can that you have received this letter, and set my mind at rest. I haven’t heard from you for over a week as it is, and there is so much I need to talk to you about, so many things to be decided before June. I know it seems like a long time yet, but if we don’t make up our minds, the whole event will be decided for us. I am already having quite a struggle keeping Mother from taking charge. She has such fixed ideas about how a wedding should be (a ‘society wedding’ she keeps calling it, although I
think the concept is faintly loathsome, don’t you?), but I am afraid to give way to her all the time without consulting you first. She is already drawing up a list of the magazines she deems suitable to cover the reception, and will no doubt enlist Father’s support to make sure she is not disappointed. Do you really want a whole hour of opera before the dinner? Mother is so anxious to show off her acquaintance with Ruth Jost-Arden, who I know sings marvellously, but an hour? And do you want your poor little bride struggling down the aisle with a train, like a big queen ant? But then I suppose that is not something you should worry yourself about, being a man, but it worries me. I think Mother has been watching too many newsreels.

  I expect you are wondering about going down to Reinsdorf on the 13th, and of course I will be there on the Sunday as you suggest. I haven’t seen your mother and father for so long. Tell them I am looking forward to seeing them. I think the war memorial idea is splendid. What better way could there be to remember your dear brother Max, and all those other brave young men? I am sure the necessary funds will be forthcoming.

  I have to finish now or else I will miss the post. Hans-Peter is going to drive down for me. Do write, my dearest, when you can, or whenever your poor lunatics allow it. I hate it when I don’t get a letter. Mother says it puts me in a foul mood all day.

  Your loving (there I go censoring myself again – that should be adoring!)

  Alma

  Nine

  He used to see Max when the autumn came, when the fogs crept in at dawn, making haloes round the gas lamps, crackling on the tramway power lines, softening the lofty outline of the apartment buildings on the Schönhauser Allee. He remembered his little brother when the ends of the avenue vanished into cloud; so that it was possible to think of it as small and incomplete, a splinter floating in a grey void – full of detail, stained and decayed with the passage of time, yet isolated, like the fragment of a frieze, or a picture torn from an illustrated book.

  What he remembered most were the holidays they had in Mecklenburg, when they were boys. He and Max would go down to the lakeside and watch the mist rising off the water, twisting in silver threads towards the sky. They would stand with their backs to the woods as it rolled landward, until the white light enfolded them and they could see nothing else. It was their secret game. They would get up early, before anyone else was awake, and take out a rowing boat (something they were under strict instructions not to do unsupervised). Max always manned the oars, pulling out across the water until they had reached the deepest part of the lake. Out of sight of everyone, they would drift in the silence, feeling like explorers on the edge of the world.

  They discovered that if you lay back in the boat, it felt as if you were rising, floating free of everything, drifting up into the sky. You were cut off from the world, but at the same time closer to the heart of Creation, souls on the threshold of Heaven. And when the mist began to clear and the shore reached out to them again, it was like drifting back down to Earth.

  Max loved astronomy. On his twelfth birthday their Uncle Stefan gave him an old brass telescope. On clear nights he would stare through it for hours, even taking it with him on their trips to the country because, he said, the air was cleaner out there and the stars brighter. Their parents encouraged him. Their mother taught French at the local high school and their father ran the family firm making mathematical instruments: compasses, dividers, protractors. They held learning – science, particularly – in high esteem. Religion hardly merited a mention. It was a subject that produced impatient sighs or dismissive paternal mutterings from behind the newspaper. The churches had simply been wrong about the universe too many times. The Earth was not flat, despite appearances, and the sun did not travel around it once a day. For all their claims of intimacy with the Supreme Being, the men of God had merely tried to set in stone everyday human perceptions. It had taken imagination, scepticism and the rigorous methodologies of science to reveal that these perceptions were false.

  Years later, during the war, they went up to Mecklenburg one last time. They were days of forced good humour and unspoken foreboding. Max had received his commission in the infantry and was a few days from heading out to France. Their elder sister Frieda had just got engaged to Julius, a lieutenant in the navy. Martin was on leave from the Rumanian campaign, where he had been serving as a medical officer with the 9th Army. Back then, his hands were still steady enough for surgical work. Everyone was there – for the last time, as it turned out.

  It was their father’s idea: a holiday among the lakes near Schwerin, like they used to take. Better than skulking around at home, he said. Kirsch was sure he had other reasons: the farewells would be less solemn at the end of a holiday, less final. It was a way of making the fear more manageable, for their mother mainly; a way of marshalling optimism. The woods and the lakes did not change. They would always be there. In Mecklenburg they could believe in the possibility of living by their own measure of time.

  All the same, there was a fragility about the celebrations. Even the delicacies were artificial: lemonade laced with spirits instead of champagne, the cigars Frieda’s fiancé had given them as a present, which turned out to be made of dried cabbage leaves soaked in nicotine. Everyone tried not to talk about the war, but news of the revolution in Russia intruded. Kirsch remembered his little sister Emilie running into breakfast with a newspaper. Violence had erupted in St Petersburg and Moscow. The Tsar had been forced to abdicate. Surely this meant the war would soon be over, and the boys could stay at home. Everyone crowded round to read the report, but Kirsch caught the look in his father’s eyes. The country was in no mood for peace, even if peace was on offer. The mood was for victory at any cost, if only so that the dead would not have died for nothing. There had been cheering in the streets when the U-boats were told to sink neutral ships in Allied waters, though that was almost certain to bring America into the war.

  In the Kirsch family there had been the same absence of celebration at the start of the conflict. With the parades and marching bands and the singing in the streets, it was as if a huge party was going on to which they had not been invited. When Martin declared his eagerness for the fight, his mother had slapped his face and run out of the house. In the event, his eyesight had proved too weak for front-line duty. But that did not lift the sense of foreboding at home. They still had Max to worry about, Max with the blond hair and the eyes like jade, the boy who never stopped asking questions, though he seemed to know everything. The boy who made everyone laugh. He had no Achilles heel to keep him safe.

  All through his officer training he had been reading Albert Einstein. He turned up in Mecklenburg with the professor’s latest book. He was eager to talk about it – because no one at the barracks was interested, Kirsch assumed; or perhaps because it kept them from talking about other, more important, things.

  Of all the great men of science, Einstein had always enjoyed a special place in Max’s affections. Growing up, he pounced on any book or paper that set out to explain Einstein’s work, even when the mathematics was beyond him. Visitors to the house were quizzed on their knowledge of differential calculus and asked to help decipher it if they could (which was not often). Back then, what seemed to please Max most was Einstein’s demolition of received ideas – the more inviolable the better. For Max, Einstein was an iconoclast, smashing the false idols of accepted wisdom, however jealously guarded.

  One of Einstein’s first targets was the aether, a sacred concept for theologians and scientists alike since the days of Aristotle. The aether was supposed to be everywhere in the universe, invisible and undetectable, just as God was everywhere. As far as science was concerned, it was the medium through which light waves passed, just as sound waves passed through air and sea waves passed through water. It had to exist because simple experiments had proved beyond doubt that light was not a material thing, but an undulation, a disturbance that travelled through something else. When pairs of light beams fanned out from two narrow points, they interfered wi
th each other, producing alternate bands of greater brightness where peaks and troughs coincided and darkness where peaks met troughs and troughs met peaks. It was an effect only waves could produce. But about the mysterious aether Einstein was suspicious. Was it scientific to accept the existence of something that eluded all attempts to observe it?

  ‘Two thousand years of religion and two hundred years of science.’ Kirsch could still picture the delight on Max’s face. ‘Demolished in a single equation.’

  Max loved nothing better than to see the great and the good proved wrong. For him it meant freedom, a weight being lifted. He was free to imagine anything.

  Einstein’s equation said light was not a wave, but a stream of energy particles he called quanta. Like a volley of tiny bullets, a light beam was quite capable of travelling through the voids of space without the need for aether to carry it. And, unlike a wave, these quanta had mass, just like the objects that emitted them, which meant they would have to be affected by gravity in the same way. A beam of light passing by a massive object like the sun would change direction, giving to an observer a false impression of where it had come from.

  At the time, all this had struck Martin Kirsch as fantastical. How could light – the purest form of energy – have weight? Mass and energy were two different entities, one material and permanent; the other intangible, a quality not a thing. An object might be hot, but heat itself had no substance. It needed mass to exist, the way a thought needed a mind. But Einstein said mass was simply energy in a different form. He denied both its solidity and its permanence, even its clear distinction from the space that surrounded it. Mass was simply energy vastly concentrated. As Max explained it, the material universe could be thought of as nothing less than frozen light. At the heart of all material was the immaterial.

  What Max did not know was how Einstein’s ambiguous quanta would change the world. Or how Einstein would come to detest his creation, and devote himself to its destruction. All that was still to come.