In any case, Martin did not share Max’s enthusiasm for the science of light. He felt stupid when they talked about it, which is not how an older brother wants to feel in the presence of a younger one. He listened and pondered only so that Max would not have to repeat himself and make him feel stupider still. He even wondered, from time to time, if that wasn’t Max’s real intention, the spur behind his relentless curiosity: a secret need to outshine the first-born son.
Kirsch learned later that he was wrong. The truth came to him the last time he saw Max alive: Einstein’s vision was not just a source of fascination for his brother. It was something much more important.
That last morning they took a boat out on the lake, just the two of them. It was Max’s idea.
‘We’ll sneak off at dawn, like the old days. I’ve already found a boat.’
No explanation. It was something Martin was just supposed to understand, even though it was early April and cold. As if they were boys still, and nothing – not time, not war – separated the past from the present.
Kirsch assumed Max wanted to ask him about what to expect at the front. He had to be afraid. New recruits were always afraid, though they did their best to hide it. But it turned out all Max wanted to talk about was his Einstein book. All weekend he had been carrying it around like a preacher with a Bible. He was close to understanding it, he said. He was close to seeing clearly how everything in the universe – matter, energy, space and time – was really one thing, like a giant snake, twisting and turning as it swallowed its own tail.
‘Is that what’s on your mind? Giant snakes?’
Max smiled as he looked out across the water. The sun was up. Yellow sunlight lanced through the clouds. ‘Well, what’s the point of having a mind if there’s nothing on it?’
‘And yours is on Einstein, even now.’
‘Yes.’ Max frowned as he pulled on the oars. Reflected light danced over his face, gilding his pale skin. ‘In fact, I hope he’ll be on my mind for a while yet.’
Kirsch wished he’d insisted on rowing. It might have kept him warm. He wished he understood what they were doing out there.
‘It isn’t that there’s a lot to learn,’ Max said. ‘It’s more a case of unlearning – forgetting, if you like. That’s much harder. You have to let go of your intuition. You have to accept what seems impossible.’
Kirsch remembered blowing on his hands.
‘Such as?’
Max stopped rowing and reached into a knapsack. ‘See for yourself.’
It was the book: On the Special and General Theory of Relativity, Generally Comprehensible.
Kirsch laughed. ‘You expect me to read that now?’
‘Not now. After we’ve left here. It’s a present.’
Max held out the book. Kirsch looked at it. His smile slowly vanished.
‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘It’s wasted on me.’
‘How can you say that when you haven’t read it?’
‘We can talk about all this when you get back. There’ll be plenty of time then.’
For a split second there was silence, an interval just long enough for Kirsch to understand that his brother did not expect to come back; that this book, which he so treasured, was a final parting gift.
‘Of course, of course,’ Max said. ‘Still.’ He tossed the book into his brother’s lap and picked up the oars again. ‘It’ll amuse me to think of you racking your brains over it. I’ll need something to laugh at when I’m up to my neck in mud.’
It was the first time he’d mentioned what lay before him, the first acknowledgement that there was anything troubling about it at all.
‘And when we’re back again – just like you say – we can argue about the non-existence of time.’
Kirsch didn’t read the book until several years later. By that time, Einstein’s theories had been brilliantly confirmed by observations of starlight as it passed by the mass of the sun, observations that were only possible during a total eclipse. They had made the German scientist the most famous man in the world.
But any chance of arguing with Max had gone. Two months after their visit to the lake, on 7 June, the British army detonated a million pounds of high explosives beneath German positions on the Messines Ridge. Second Lieutenant Max Kirsch was among the ten thousand men who died in the explosion, the sound of which was heard over three hundred miles away, as far as the borders of Mecklenburg. No trace of him was ever recovered.
Ten
Max’s room was at the top of the house in Reinsdorf. Everything was just as he had left it, except that some of his possessions had found their way back there from other parts of the building: a tortoiseshell comb with his name engraved along the side, a pearly white nautilus shell, a china figurine of a spectacle-wearing terrier, which he had been given as a gift and had never liked. On top of the chest of drawers, at an angle to the mirror, so that its reflection was visible from the door, was a framed photograph of Max taken a month before he had left for the front, posing in his cadet’s uniform – stiffly, but with a discernible hint of self-parody. The photograph had faded over time so that his skin was now a uniform white, his features etched in faint sepia lines. The mirror, too, had clouded with age, so that in the reflection Max was already lost behind a veil of mist.
No one had planned to create a shrine. It had happened by degrees. Because Max’s body had not been found, nor a single item of his personal effects, he had been designated as Missing in Action. The hope had remained that he might one day come home, that he had been taken prisoner by the enemy, or, like the girl in the Charité, lay in a hospital somewhere, stricken with amnesia and unable to remember his name. Now and again, the missing did come home. The newspapers carried stories about it, reports of soldiers wandering out of the East, having fought with the Cossacks, or fallen captive to the Reds. For the family there was never any particular moment when hope was finally extinguished, no crisis from which it was possible to recover and rebuild. A state of suspension, somewhere between mourning and normal life, went on for years.
All the while, Max’s room remained Max’s room. The sheets were changed from time to time, though no one ever slept in them, and the gaslights replaced with electric ones, as they were throughout the house. But that was all. In the end, it became unthinkable that anything else should be disturbed. Emilie still had the tiny box room she had always slept in as a child, though it was far too small for a grown woman. Once Kirsch had tentatively suggested she move upstairs, but she had shaken her head vehemently: she was quite happy where she was. Besides, their mother still spent time in Max’s room, she said, in the afternoons, especially when it was raining.
Emilie, blonde and willowy, verging on awkward, had never left Reinsdorf. She worked as a schoolteacher in Wittenberg, as her mother had once done, cycling there and back every day rather than waste money on the train. Instead of French, she taught geography and elementary mathematics.
For a few years before the war Kirsch had been very close to Emilie, closer than to Frieda, who was the eldest, or even to Max, whose head had always been in a book. As a child she had been high-spirited and intensely curious about the world. When grownups came to dine, she would sit in the corner of the sitting room, her hands tucked under her legs, listening attentively to the conversation. Yet somehow all that curiosity had played itself out. In its place were now sobriety and reserve, and an almost wilful plainness in dress and appearance, as if any display of vanity would invite scorn. With her dull, pale skin and pinned-up hair, it was hard to believe she had once been thought a beauty.
Her closeness to her brother Martin had diminished along with her looks. At some point, perhaps during those long years after the war, when he was mostly away, she must have decided he was not a suitable confidant any longer. He wondered if she had come to resent him: if, deep down, she felt he had abandoned her, leaving her to grow up in a house full of grief.
In all, fourteen young men from the village of Reinsdorf and the surrounding
hamlets had fallen in the Great War. The Keil family had lost both sons – Erich in 1917, Fritz in 1918 – both, coincidentally, at the age of twenty-one years and three months. An iron plaque in the church bore their names. But ten years on, plans began to be drawn up for a free-standing memorial at the heart of the village. It was a complicated project. Money had to be raised, a site purchased, a design approved. His mother sat on the steering committee, busying herself organising fund-raising events and liaising with artists. These days it absorbed most of her energies. When Kirsch went home, the latest developments were always discussed at length. This weekend was an important one for the memorial cause: a chamber concert was to be held on Sunday afternoon in the old school house, with an ensemble travelling in specially from the conservatory at Leipzig.
‘Bach, Beethoven and a transcription from Wagner,’ his father said, as they walked to church that morning. ‘Siegfried, I think.’
‘Worthy choices,’ Kirsch said. He had decided to tell the family about events at the Charité, and the all-too-likely prospect of his dismissal. But an opportunity to raise the subject had yet to present itself.
‘Oh yes, very worthy,’ his father said. ‘They suggested Rossini as an opener – the ensemble, I mean. Some overture. But the committee …’ He shook his head despondently.
‘Too light?’
‘Too Italian. Fought on the wrong side. Even Mozart was frowned upon, apparently, not being entirely German.’
Once he would have mocked such unsophisticated thinking, but no longer. In the lingering aftermath of war, expressions of patriotism were irreproachable, no matter how idiotic. Only those who had made the supreme sacrifice were entitled to criticise. Strangely, they never did.
‘I’m not sure van Beethoven was entirely German,’ Kirsch ventured. ‘Wasn’t his family from Flanders?’
‘Possibly.’
His father stopped and looked anxiously back down the path. The women were following on behind, sharing an umbrella. Kirsch’s mother walked stiffly, as if the weight of her winter clothes was too much for her.
His father continued along the track, subject closed. ‘It’s a pity Frieda can’t be here. We don’t see enough of her. Nor Julius either, of course.’
Kirsch agreed that it was a pity, although the fact was hardly anybody saw Julius these days. The same year Max died, his ship had taken a direct hit from a British cruiser, and although he had survived, that was where his luck had run out. The blast had taken his left arm and disfigured him so brutally that he refused to show himself in public. In France, so Kirsch had heard, the state had established special homes for old soldiers with gueule-cassées – broken faces – so that no one should be forced to look at them. But as far as he was aware, no equivalents existed in Germany. The disfigured took their chances on the streets or, like Julius, dwelt spectre-like in the shadows, preferring to be thought of only in the past tense, in the memory, rather than be seen for what they were.
The approved design for the memorial was on display at the front of the church, rendered in watercolour and propped up on an easel. Obelisks and blocks of carved limestone had been eschewed in favour of a massive slab of granite. A Maltese cross – the simplified military version – was gouged out of the dark rock over the words FOR GOD AND THE FATHERLAND.
The new pastor was short and overweight, with a florid complexion. With the memorial in mind, the theme of his address that morning was sacrifice: the sacrifice of Christ, Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, the sacrifice of those who had fallen in battle. Sacrifice was as old as Creation and brought about renewal, he said, just as the fallen leaves of autumn enriched the earth and made possible the arrival of spring – an analogy that greatly pleased him, judging from the way he smiled as he made it, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. Kirsch stared at the design, hearing only the water dripping from the roof and the squeaking of the pastor’s shoes. He pictured Max’s name, chiselled into the granite, his allegiance and purpose in death unequivocally set down for all eternity, lest there should be any doubt. Max and the others, the monument boasted, had died for the very ground beneath Germany’s feet. They had poured their blood into its foundations, like so many tons of human cement, and the earth in turn had rendered up the proof.
For God and the Fatherland. Kirsch wondered at his mother going along with the assertion. Max’s hero, after all, had been Albert Einstein, an inveterate pacifist who despised and ridiculed all things military. In any case, it was hard to see how God was the beneficiary of the sacrifice, or how a general European war could have advanced his interests one way or the other. Some memorials sensibly left God out of it. The fallen there had died simply for the Fatherland, a more tenable claim, though it left the choice of preposition still open to question. Given that most men at the front had been conscripted, wouldn’t it have been more accurate to say they had fallen in the service of the Fatherland? Or even by order of the Fatherland, since it was the Fatherland that had placed them deliberately in harm’s way, without giving them any say in the matter?
Kirsch looked across the aisle at the rows of care-worn faces, at Frau Keil and the farmer, Herr Kehlitz, whose boy had died at Mons during the first month of the war, and it came to him that remembering was not, in fact, the point. The memorial wouldn’t help them remember. What they most wanted was to be proud, and for that they needed their sons to be cast as heroes who had offered up their lives in a conscious and necessary act of self-sacrifice. They could not be proud of mere victims, however blameless they might be. A victim’s death was without meaning or purpose. And that, for some reason, made it impossible to bear.
One evening, when the design had first arrived and still awaited approval, Kirsch had shared these reservations with Emilie. He couldn’t speak for the other dead men, he said, but the memorial was completely wrong for Max. He would never have wanted anything so brutal and bombastic in the heart of the village. Emilie had told him urgently to keep his voice down, for their mother’s sake: ‘It’s what she wants. Don’t interfere.’
Emboldened by two glasses of brandy, Kirsch had pressed home his point. ‘I can tell you, I wouldn’t want my name on that damned lump of rock.’
Emilie had come over and yanked the glass from his hand, spilling half the contents over her dress. ‘It’s a pity it isn’t your name on it,’ she said, ‘instead of Max’s. Then no one would care either way.’
After a dreadful silence, Emilie had apologised, assuring him that she hadn’t meant it, that she had let her temper get the better of her. He had accepted her apology, waving away her concern with a smile.
He had never mentioned the memorial again.
After the service they all hurried home and prepared for lunch. Kirsch grabbed an umbrella and hurried out to meet Alma’s taxi, surprised to discover that it had stopped raining and that the sun was breaking through the clouds. He had to shelter his eyes as she climbed out of the car.
She was wearing a smart tweed outfit beneath her raincoat, and a cocked hat with a feather in it, like a huntswoman in a pastoral operetta. Her blonde hair was freshly curled. She placed a hand on his shoulder and offered her cheek. Her skin smelled of roses.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the paper?’ she said, giving his arm a squeeze.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You haven’t seen the picture?’ She reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of Die Berliner Woche. ‘It came out yesterday. Hans-Peter spotted it.’
It was the kind of publication Alma didn’t buy for herself, an illustrated weekly full of crime stories and scandal. She turned over a couple of pages and handed it over. The headline read: EINSTEIN GIRL – MYSTERY DEEPENS – POLICE BAFFLED. Underneath there was a photograph. The girl was sitting up in bed, caught in the flashbulb glare, one hand clutching the blanket to her chest. The picture was at least a few days old, because her hair had not yet been cut short. The scratches and grazes on her face looked dark and ugly, but nothing could disguise the pretty p
out of her mouth or the dark lustre of her eyes.
‘Not there, there.’
Alma’s gloved finger pointed to a pair of photographs at the bottom of the page. They had both been taken outside the hospital: Inspector Hagen, holding his impromptu press conference, mouth gaping open, hands held up as if in abject surrender; then Hagen in the back of his police car, talking through the passenger window to a man in a white coat. The man’s face was partially obscured by the flash bulb reflecting off his spectacles. The caption ran: Inspector Hagen in consultation with Dr Martin Kirsch, the eminent psychiatrist assigned to the case.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Alma said. ‘My fiancé is eminent. And the whole world knows it.’
Kirsch shook his head in disbelief. ‘How did they get my name?’
The way he was leaning in through the open window made him look like an autograph hunter.
‘You shouldn’t be so modest,’ Alma said. He sensed her watching him closely as he read the piece. ‘She’s rather beautiful, isn’t she?’
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think?’
He shrugged. ‘If you like your women black and blue.’ He folded up the paper. ‘Do you mind if I borrow this?’
‘Keep it.’ She took his arm as they walked towards the house. ‘I must say, I thought you’d be more pleased.’
He thought of his upcoming interview with Bonhoeffer and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘It just isn’t helpful, this kind of nonsense.’
‘For the patient, do you mean, or …? Because if it’s true what they say, that the poor girl has lost her memory and doesn’t know who she is, surely it can only help.’
Before he could explain, his mother had appeared in the kitchen doorway, holding out her arms in welcome.
The dining table was covered with their best lace cloth. Silver they hadn’t used in years sparkled in the pale winter sunlight. The meal was a friendly interrogation. Kirsch’s mother wanted to know everything about the wedding preparations and barely gave Alma time to eat.
The Einstein Girl Page 7