Her stammering was less pronounced. That was the only clear improvement. On the other hand, she seemed even less connected than before to the here and now, even more prone to drift into silent introspection. The change made Kirsch uneasy.
‘That’s enough for today,’ he said finally. ‘We’ll talk again tomorrow. In the meantime, there’s something I want you to do.’ He reached into his briefcase again and took out a sketch-book and some pencils. ‘I want you to draw: anything you like, it doesn’t matter what. The more drawings the better. When you run out of paper, I’ll get you more. Will you do that for me?’
She nodded, watching him silently as he got up. He gathered the postcards from Potsdam, then changed his mind and placed them back on the table. At the same moment she reached for the sketchbook. For an instant his fingers brushed against the back of her hand before she hastily withdrew it.
Walking away down the corridor, he could still feel the touch of her skin on his, like static.
He worked into the evening, travelling to and from the reference library with as many volumes as he could carry. Among the case histories there was one in particular that caught his eye. The patient, known as Hans J, had been found wandering aimlessly around the market square in Nürnberg. He was taken at first for a vagrant, but on questioning was found to have no knowledge of his identity, nor any memory of how he came to be there. He was taken to a local hospital and examined for signs of injury. He was also questioned extensively by police officers and medical staff, whereupon he claimed his name was Peter Kleist and that he himself was a police detective. He had travelled from Berlin, he said, in pursuit of a criminal, whom he called Schwarz. Although there were palpable inconsistencies in his story – and no record of a Detective Kleist in the Berlin police force – he insisted it was true more and more forcefully, day by day. He even engaged the nurses and patients at the hospital with elaborate stories of the cases he had cracked.
A week later his real identity was discovered. Hans J turned out to be an unmarried bank clerk from a small town in Swabia, around a hundred and fifty miles away. He had apparently left the bank for lunch as usual one afternoon and then vanished. For a time it was feared that he had drowned himself in a nearby river – he had apparently been seen on the bridge – and the local police went as far as to organise a search downstream. Although Hans J was able to return to his former life, he continued to experience periodic bouts of amnesia and was eventually discharged from the bank. His memory of the Nürnberg episode also disappeared with unusual speed, and when examined by a psychiatrist a year after the event, he had apparently no recollection of it whatsoever.
According to one paper, similar cases had been documented elsewhere: two in France, another in Switzerland, several in England. The author referred to the condition as psychogenic fugue, a rare type of amnesia characterised by sudden, unexpected journeys, often taking days. In addition, sufferers frequently lost all notion of their identities, and sometimes assumed new, fictitious ones. In each case, investigation of the circumstances had revealed an episode of psychological trauma immediately prior to onset. Hans J, for instance, had that very morning received a letter from a longstanding female acquaintance rejecting a proposal of marriage. He was also later accused, although not convicted, of embezzling money from his employers in the months leading up to his disappearance. Although the cases were few, there was evidence to suggest that flight was not merely a means of escaping painful or embarrassing circumstances, but a defensive response, intended to protect the individual from suicidal or homicidal impulses. In several cases, suicide, actual or attempted, had followed a return to the normal pattern of life. In one, admittedly controversial case (controversial in that the authorities did not believe his claims of amnesia to be genuine), a man whose wife had betrayed him had gone on to attempt murder.
There was a lengthy addendum to the case history of Hans J, which Kirsch was still reading when the telephone rang. It was Inspector Hagen. He was anxious to know if there was any improvement in the patient’s condition.
‘Fundamentally, no, there isn’t.’
‘Fundamentally?’
‘She still remembers nothing, or next to nothing. She recalls having a ticket, for a boat or a train.’
‘This is near Potsdam?’
‘I think so.’
‘Then it’ll be the train. The steamers don’t run this time of year. Where did she buy this ticket?’
‘She doesn’t remember.’
There was a pause on the line, a sound of muffled voices. It came to Kirsch that there were other people at the other end of the telephone.
‘In your opinion, Doctor, is she insane?’
‘That may be a legal term, Inspector. It’s not a medical one.’
Hagen sighed. ‘You know what I mean. Is she normal? Might an unbalanced mind be responsible for this whole incident?’
Kirsch recalled what Dr Brenner had said about the police and their theory of choice: that his patient had been of unsound mind all along. No one had abducted or assaulted her; so there was nothing more for them to do, and nothing for the visiting public to fear. Kirsch was happy for them to think that if it meant they would leave him alone.
‘Some form of psychological trauma may well be involved. I think it’s very likely.’
‘Trauma?’ Hagen was disappointed. What he wanted to hear was that the girl was mentally ill, plain and simple. But that was a dangerous path, at the end of which lay incarceration in an asylum. ‘And who might be responsible for this trauma? If anyone.’
‘When I have some answers, I’ll be sure to let you know.’
Hagen wasn’t finished. ‘What about suicide? Have you considered that possibility? Maybe she threw herself off a bridge.’
‘And why would she do that?’
‘She has a child and no ring on her finger. For plenty of people, that’s reason enough.’
‘She gave birth at least a year ago, Inspector. Probably several years.’
‘Guilt has a way of creeping up on you.’
‘We don’t know if the child is even alive.’
Kirsch felt a sharp stab of pain in his arm. The whole of the left side of his body had become cold and heavy, as if turning slowly to stone.
‘I suppose it’s commendable that you should be so protective of your patient, Doctor,’ Hagen said. ‘All I’m suggesting is you avoid jumping to conclusions. If this girl’s really the victim of a crime, it’s the oddest one I’ve ever come across.’
Fourteen
Frau Schirmann was throwing the bolts on the street door when he arrived home that evening. The door to her own apartment stood open behind her, a smell like cats and fish glue drifting out into the hall.
‘I was afraid for you, Dr Kirsch. I was going to telephone the police.’
She peered out at the dark street, one hand braced against the jamb, revealing a heavy silver bracelet around her scrawny wrist. Kirsch wasn’t sure of her age – about seventy-five, he supposed. There had been a Herr Schirmann once, but he had died years ago.
‘You know I often work late. You shouldn’t worry.’
He helped her push the door shut.
‘Herr Bronstein’s been taken to hospital. Some men broke into his shop.’
Kirsch didn’t know any Herr Bronstein, but that was no surprise. Frau Schirmann often regaled him with news of people he had never heard of, people, he assumed, who lived locally and with whom she had contact. The news was almost always bad, death and disease being the mainstays. Once a son of Frau Hammerstein had won a useful sum of money with a lottery ticket, but this was bad news too, since it revealed a tragic predilection for gambling.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he said, beginning to climb the stairs to his rooms on the second floor. ‘Let’s hope he makes a swift recovery.’
‘They say he may never recover,’ Frau Schirmann said. ‘And his wife can’t manage the shop. She knows nothing at all about music.’
Kirsch stopped. �
�Music?’
‘Eight ribs broken and his face blown up like a balloon. They punctured a lung.’
‘He sold music?’
Frau Schirmann looked up at him with her milky pupils. ‘The little place at the top of Grenadierstrasse. With the red velvet in the window.’
He knew the place. It was there he had bought a gramophone record the evening he first saw Maria. He tried to picture the man that had served him, but all he could recollect were his rectangular spectacles.
‘Of course. Send Herr Bronstein my best wishes.’
Kirsch carried on up the stairs, but Frau Schirmann didn’t move.
‘Oh, Dr Kirsch? You had a visitor earlier. Did you see him?’
‘A visitor?’
‘A man called Bucher. He said he would wait for you in his motor car.’
Kirsch hadn’t noticed any car outside. The name Bucher meant nothing to him either. ‘What did he want?’
‘He had something to deliver, he said, but he wouldn’t leave it. A big man. I didn’t want to let him in. Should I have done?’
It came to him that there had once been a patient called Bucher at the clinic, a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violence. Or was it Buchner?
‘No, Frau Schirmann,’ he said. ‘You were right to be careful.’
Kirsch had a narrow bureau desk with a fold-down top, which he had bought second-hand from a dealer on the Kurfürstendamm. It was the only thing he could lock except for the wardrobe, and he was sure Frau Schirmann had a key to that. It was in the desk that he kept Alma’s letters, an old scrapbook, mementoes and photographs from the past that he wanted neither to look at nor to discard. It was also where he kept the Salvarsan and the needles and the book Max had given him that last morning in Mecklenburg: On the Special and General Theory of Relativity, Generally Comprehensible.
He picked up the book – Max’s Bible – and carefully turned over the pages. He had begun to read it after Max left for the front, but had soon put it aside. Generally comprehensible it might have been, but it required more concentration than he had been willing to give it. Besides, he wasn’t ready to give his attention to the work of a pacifist, a man whose loyalty to the Fatherland was at best invisible, and who regarded the sacrifices of his countrymen with indifference.
One incident in particular had set Kirsch against him. Two months into the war, ninety-three of Germany’s most eminent scholars and scientists had put their names to an open letter entitled An Appeal to the Cultured World. It was published in all the leading dailies and translated into ten foreign languages. Its aim was to champion Germany’s cause abroad, and to justify the violation of Belgian neutrality. The war, it explained, was a war of self-defence, which had been forced on Germany by her enemies. Most of Einstein’s colleagues had signed it, including his mentor, Max Planck.
Planck’s work on energy quanta had been essential to Einstein’s. It was Planck who had lured Einstein back to Germany from a life of obscurity in Switzerland, Planck who had championed the Special Theory of Relativity, helping to get it accepted across the scientific world. But still Einstein would not sign. His name, when it appeared at all, was found on leftist appeals for the creation of a united Europe, and tracts that placed the blame for the war on aberrant male psychology. To Einstein, it seemed, there was no justice in war, no right and wrong. There was only madness, a congenital, collective insanity eclipsing both free will and self-interest. As the war dragged on, year after year, even these surfacings ceased, as if Einstein himself no longer saw any point to them. Germany – the whole of Europe, indeed – was a madhouse. And madness was not a condition that even science had the means to cure.
But Einstein didn’t leave. He didn’t return to Switzerland, or take up a post in neutral Holland, where life would have been easier. Apparently the madhouse had its attractions. This was the time when he completed the General Theory of Relativity, his most important work to date. Being at odds with the people around him, cut off from non-scientific discourse, didn’t cloud his vision or dull his intelligence: if anything, it made them sharper.
The war shuddered to an end. Kirsch felt bewildered, lost. No one could explain the sudden paralysis on the western front any more than they could explain the war. Certainly the generals would not explain it. The word defeat never crossed their lips. The talk was all of betrayal: of the army, of the working class; above all, of the two million dead. The war could not be over, because they hadn’t yet won. And they were always going to win.
People wanted answers. Kirsch wanted answers. He wanted to know what it had all been for. Every effect had a cause – so reason told him – but what had caused this war? He had always taken for granted that European civilisation led the world in industry, art and science. But what had it led the world to? That was when Albert Einstein strolled onto the stage; a man who had been right where the rest of the human race had been wrong. A prophet, vindicated.
For Kirsch it began with the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung on 14 December 1919. The front page was still there in his scrapbook. It was given over completely to a photograph of Einstein, eyes cast down, one hand curled thoughtfully beneath his jaw. Beneath it was written: A New Giant in World History: Albert Einstein, whose researches mean a complete overthrow of our views of Nature, and which rank as equal with the discoveries of Copernicus, Keppler, and Newton.
Einstein’s theories of light had at last been confirmed by observation. British astronomers had recorded the deflection of starlight by the gravitational pull of the sun, exactly by the degree that Einstein had predicted. Every paper in Berlin carried the news. Einstein’s face was everywhere. It turned out the German press were not even in the forefront of the coverage. The papers in America and Britain had been running the story for days. It didn’t matter that the physicist was German, or that his discoveries had no obvious practical consequences. It didn’t matter that the theory was mathematical and hard to follow – the American press reported that only twelve people in the whole world understood it. What mattered was that it overturned everything that had gone before. The old certainties of the mechanical universe, the crowning achievement of European thought, had been revealed as a fiction. In their place was a universe whose nature could be accepted by the human mind, the way a mathematical proof was accepted, but which, like infinity or the Divine purpose, could never be truly perceived, let alone felt – except perhaps by Einstein himself and the twelve unnamed Illuminati described in the New York Times.
Kirsch was among the crowds that clambered for a glimpse of him. He was among those who crowded into his lectures at the University of Berlin. Thousands did the same. Talk of Einstein was everywhere. In bars and shop queues, people who had never given a passing thought to the nature of light or gravity argued over the meaning of his work. Sitting in the smoky darkness of the picture house, Kirsch watched the newsreels: everywhere Einstein went, the crowds turned out for him. Statesmen, monarchs and movie stars lined up to be seen at his side. Kirsch watched his triumphal visits to London, Paris and New York, then Scandinavia, South America and Japan: Einstein on podiums, Einstein descending from ocean liners or open-topped limousines, Einstein drawing diagrams on blackboards, talking or smiling or shaking hands, always a sea of faces turned towards him, like bathers basking in the glow of a bright new sun. Einstein’s enemies, the nationalists and anti-Semites, started calling him ‘the Jewish saint’. By the end of the year, his was the most famous face in the world.
Kirsch did not rejoice at Einstein’s fame. To him it was an intrusion. Max had been there ahead of the millions. He had felt the truth of Einstein’s vision instinctively, had absorbed and understood it, long before it reached the newspapers. He had seen what was to come. The last days and weeks of his life he had been living in Albert Einstein’s universe.
This was when Kirsch finally returned to the book. It was obvious that Max was never coming back. Kirsch would have no guide through Einstein’s strange new universe, except Einstein himself. If he wa
nted to learn its secrets, if he wanted to see what Max had seen, he would have to travel alone.
When he was a child, Einstein said, space and time made up a universal system of reference, an invisible box inside which the galaxies turned and the planets spun. A mile was always a mile, no matter where it was measured; and time ticked by at a constant rate throughout the universe. Every object, position and trajectory could be measured against this absolute scale. The motion of objects, or of observers, no matter how fast, changed nothing. It was a vision founded on the everyday experiences of men whose lives were governed by the clockwork regularity of day and night, tides and seasons, and the fixed geography of planet Earth. It was a universe ruled by Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation; a celestial mechanism, balanced, precise and predictable. It was a universe in which nothing happened without a reason, in which every effect had a cause. It was a universe in which all it took to know the future was to know the past.
But by the time Einstein was a student, cracks had begun to appear in the sacred notion of the absolute scale. Observations in the field of electro-magnetism, the science of light waves and electricity, were proving hard to explain. First in Berlin and then in America, physicists had carried out experiments to measure the effect of the Earth’s motion on the speed of light. The Earth, they knew, travelled around the sun at thirty kilometres every second, while at the same time spinning on its axis. Using a form of triangulation, they compared the speed of light leaving the Earth in the direction of its orbit, with light beams leaving in the opposite direction. They expected the planet’s speed would add to the speed of the light beams in one direction and subtract from their speed in the other. In the mechanical universe, where time and space were fixed, velocities had to add up. The speed of a man walking forward along a moving train was, with respect to the world outside, simply the sum of his walking speed and the speed of the rolling stock. But the experiments yielded a different result: no matter at what speed the source of light was travelling, or in which direction, light itself always reached the observer at exactly the same speed. Light – in fact the whole spectrum of electromagnetic radiation from radio waves to X-rays – didn’t obey Newton’s laws of motion. Its speed could not be added to or subtracted from.
The Einstein Girl Page 10