The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  There was shouting and a deafening rumble of guns. It came into his head that he had to find his surgical instruments. There would be injured men coming in, wounds full of filth and soil. No time to take shelter. He shouted for light, saw lanterns dancing in the gloom, coming closer. Pale faces hurried by. Then his vision cleared and he found himself lying face up on the tram’s ribbed floor, a crowd of passengers staring down at him.

  No one helped him up. They must have thought he was drunk. He elbowed his way to the doors and got off at the next stop, forgetting his briefcase. A young man tossed it to him from the tram as it pulled away. The briefcase hit the kerb and burst open, scattering papers, journals and postcards across the cobblestones.

  He was shivering by the time he got home. Frau Schirmann saw him on the stairs and offered to send for a doctor, but he told her not to bother. It was just a touch of influenza, something he had picked up at the clinic, he said. He would be better in no time.

  Frau Schirmann was frightened of influenza on account of her weak lungs. She needed no more encouragement to stay away. Kirsch locked himself in his room and collapsed on the bed. The fever raged all night. At dawn he prepared another dose of Salvarsan, but his hands were shaking too much to use the needle safely. Arsenic poisoning could result from a botched injection.

  He didn’t need the Salvarsan anyway, he told himself. He probably had gone down with influenza, his system weakened by long hours at the clinic and the stresses of his professional situation. The main hospital at the Charité was full of sick people, and it was only yards from the clinic. Ancillary staff and delivery men visited both buildings, carrying germs from one to the other. His fever had nothing to do with syphilis or the shadowy brown marks that were spreading across his ribs.

  Around noon, Frau Schirmann brought him bread and vegetable broth, leaving them outside the door. By the middle of the afternoon the fever had subsided. It had been like the memory of an old illness, a reminder of suffering gone by. It wasn’t the portent of suffering to come.

  Still, Kirsch wished he could be sure. He wished there was someone he could trust, someone who would discern the truth of his condition and then keep the results to themselves. But though he thought long and hard, no one came to mind.

  He returned to the clinic on the Wednesday. In his brief absence, Maria’s sketching had changed. Kirsch sat with her in the usual treatment room, looking through her sketch-book. For the first time, fellow patients and Charité staff loomed up through the fibrous mesh of shading: Nurse Honig, complexion typically florid, but with a weight of sorrow in the arch of her brow that he had never seen before; Nurse Auerbach, pretty but expectant, her lips pressed together in an impatient line; Dr Mehring, the dome of his head as smooth as an egg, his bearing stiff and remote, as if aware of how easily he might crack. In her quest for new subjects, Maria was at last sketching from life. Her pages were crowded not with ghosts, but with living people.

  Kirsch smiled to himself. This had to be progress of some sort. Maria’s past might be no clearer, but at least she was reconnecting with the present; resisting the pull of the internal world and engaging with the real one. His greatest fear had been that she would lose her grip on reality, sinking into psychosis as the weight of her predicament bore down.

  ‘This picture of Dr Eisner, the likeness is striking.’ He held up the sketch-book. Robert Eisner had been captured with a hesitant, loitering look on his face, like someone listening in on a conversation but undecided about whether to join in. His eyes were ghostly pale except for the hard black points of his pupils.

  ‘Is he a doctor?’

  ‘Didn’t he say?’

  Maria shook her head. ‘Sometimes he wears a white coat, like you. Other times not.’

  Kirsch wondered how many times there had been.

  ‘I didn’t know he’d spoken to you.’

  Maria put her head on one side. A shaft of light from the window fell across her cheek. Her hair, just long enough now to tie back in a knot, had a coppery sheen, a hint of fire in the darkness. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He pretends he’s just passing. It’s not a very good act. He’s very curious.’

  Kirsch smiled. ‘I expect he is.’

  ‘Like you were.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘That’s what you said. When you came to the hospital. You were curious.’

  ‘Of course.’ Kirsch coloured. He wished he could reassure her that she was more than an interesting specimen, more than a potential key to professional advancement, as cases in the public eye often were. But he could think of no way to do it.

  He turned over another page of the sketch-book. ‘So no self-portrait, then?’

  ‘I’ve tried, but it’s hard. I look at myself but the picture never sticks.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve no sense of it. I draw the first line and then it’s gone.’

  He turned over another page, the last. Here there was only one face, and it was his. She had drawn him looking down and to the side. The shading had a roughness and energy that was different from the other pictures. It had been done in haste, as if Maria had been concerned to capture the likeness before it was lost – as if she feared he would soon be gone. It was like looking in a mirror, but without the blank mimicry of a pure reflection. Kirsch sat staring, surprised at the intensity of the image: the lined brow, the troubled gaze.

  ‘My God.’ He forced a laugh. ‘Do I really look this unhappy?’

  Maria nodded. Then she reached up and touched his face.

  Something scuffed against the outside of the door. It closed against the jamb with a faint bump. Footsteps tapped lightly down the corridor.

  The lunch bell sounded. Maria took her hand away. ‘I must go,’ she said.

  She got up and hurried out of the room. It was a moment before Kirsch realised that she had left her sketch-book behind.

  That evening it began to snow. Kirsch left the clinic earlier than usual, catching the tail end of the evening rush. The S-Bahn carriage was full from end to end. He stood pressed up against the door, being buffeted by the other passengers, breathing in the fug of tobacco and wet leather, his mind churning, his breath short. The crowds streamed through Alexanderplatz, mute and huddled, faces flaring into living detail as they passed beneath the street lamps, then plunging once again into shadow.

  Up until that day, it was if he had been playing a game, even if the game was masked by all the seriousness of scientific and medical enquiry. But it was a game no longer.

  East of the Schönhauser Allee it was quieter. The snow was starting to settle as he hurried up Grenadierstrasse, pausing only to take in the boarded-up front of Herr Bronstein’s gramophone shop and the splinters of glass glistening like frost on the cobblestones. A few minutes later he was outside the Jewish cemetery, staring up at the rooming house, just as he had two months before.

  It took him a while to find the street door. It was located up some steps at the side of the building, partially obscured beneath the rusting spiral of a fire escape. He pulled on the doorbell, to no obvious effect, then pounded on the door with his fist.

  ‘Hello?’

  His voice reverberated between the walls of the alley, compressing into a single note. In the tenement opposite a light went out, plunging him into darkness.

  ‘What do you want?’

  A man was looking down at him from a first-floor window. He had a shaven head and wore spectacles.

  ‘I’ve come about a room. I’m looking to rent.’

  ‘I only rent to ladies.’

  ‘It’s not for me.’

  ‘Come back tomorrow.’

  The man pulled the window shut.

  ‘I’ll pay in advance,’ Kirsch shouted. ‘If I can see something now. Tomorrow will be too late.’

  The landlord was called Sebastian Mettler and he spoke with a rasping Swiss inflexion. He couldn’t have been much more than forty, but he carried himself like an old man, stooping, one arm clamped to his side as he hauled himself up the bare wooden stairc
ase. Frau Mettler, his mother, an obese woman with a pince-nez clamped on her nose, watched from the open door of their apartment, as if afraid the effort might prove too much for him.

  ‘I’ve just the one vacancy, at the back. Not much of a view.’

  They were up on the second floor of the rooming house, where Kirsch had seen Maria. An electric table lamp threw shadows across an expanse of faded floral wallpaper. A redundant glass chandelier hung from the ceiling.

  Herr Mettler opened up a door with a brass ‘2’ nailed to it. ‘So who’s it for?’ He switched on a light and stood back to let Kirsch pass. ‘I told you, I only take –’

  ‘It’s for a student of mine.’

  ‘A student?’ Herr Mettler pushed his spectacles up his nose. ‘Well, as long as you can vouch for her.’

  The room was simply furnished, but tidy. The wrought-iron fireplace and plaster cornices lent it a Spartan gentility. Kirsch took in the table with the lace tablecloth draped across it, the sturdy wardrobe, the crucifix over the bedstead. The window looked out onto an enclosed space, washing lines and snow flakes criss-crossing the darkness.

  ‘A view of the street. That’s what I’m looking for.’

  Herr Mettler shook his head. ‘I’ve just the one room.’

  He pointed across the hall at the door marked ‘3’. It was a dark shade of red, though the paint had been thinly applied so that the grain of the wood was visible. ‘What about that one?’

  ‘Taken. For the time being anyway.’

  ‘For the time being?’

  ‘It’s been paid for till the end of the month.’

  ‘Today’s the twenty-ninth.’

  ‘Then it’s paid till Thursday.’

  ‘Is anyone home?’

  Herr Mettler squinted across the landing. ‘Couldn’t say. I don’t keep tabs.’

  ‘Can I take a look?’

  ‘What for? I told you: it’s not free.’

  ‘Not yet.’ Kirsch opened his wallet. ‘I’d be only too happy to pay for your trouble. Seeing as it’s so late.’

  Herr Mettler slowly straightened up, his back clicking ominously. The tip of his tongue made a circle around his lips. ‘I’ll have to fetch the key.’

  Kirsch took out a five-Reichsmark note. ‘I’ll come down with you. That way you needn’t trouble yourself about coming back up.’

  * * *

  Two minutes later he stood alone outside Maria’s door. The iron key was cold and heavy in his hand. He tried to picture the room. Was it as bare as the room across the landing? Was it tidy or disordered? Was there evidence of a crime, of the fraud Dr Fischer had suspected? Or of a descent into madness? He had seen rooms like that, rooms the like of which he never wanted to enter again.

  It came to him that this was why he hadn’t come sooner. It would have been hard to explain, his knowing where Maria lived. It might have led to all manner of awkward questions. That was still the case. But it was not the reason: he had been afraid of what he might find.

  With the exertion he felt giddy. The dark red door drifted before his eyes, squeezing and stretching as if it were alive. He gripped the key, held the cold metal to his face for a moment, then pushed it fumblingly into the lock.

  madness

  Eighteen

  How do I come to be here after all this time? It is natural that you should want an explanation, and though I have had long enough to prepare one, still I don’t know how best to convey it. The simplest thing would be to tell you in person, but that idea fills me with trepidation. I am not gifted when it comes to conversation, and often think of what I should say only after the occasion to say it has passed. So I am writing it all down, so that at least I may consider my words before I commit to them.

  Let me first reassure you that the circumstances of my upbringing put me at no material disadvantage. In the village of Orlovat the family I grew up with was one of considerable note. The father of the household, Zoltán Draganović, had one of the largest and grandest houses, which, unlike most, was set back from the road, with a courtyard in front to shield us from the summer dust and the gaze of passers-by. At the back there was a whitewashed veranda and enclosures for chickens and geese, an orchard of apple and cherry trees, and several outbuildings where we kept the horses and an old carriage – at least, a carriage was what my father called it, although in truth it was little better than a tinker’s wagon. We also had land which others rented from us.

  The house itself was wide and yellow, with windows painted green and plaster escutcheons above each one. The heraldic motifs, most of which had fallen off, were Austrian. This was because the Draganović clan had Austrian blood in it through the maternal line, as my father frequently explained. I understood from an early age that this was important to him, and therefore to me, but I soon discovered it was not always a wise thing to talk about. I was only seven years old when the schoolmistress accused me of giving myself airs, and the boys took to calling me names and throwing pebbles when no one was looking. For a while I was so frightened of going to school that I would faint or pretend to be sick, dousing my face with water and muttering as if in a fever. I became quite skilled at dissembling, and sometimes put my mother in such a fright that I was sorry and feigned a swift recovery. I did not tell my father about the trouble he had caused me, or about the boys who threw pebbles, because I was afraid he would march down to the school and wring their necks, as he threatened to do with anyone who insulted our family’s honour. I did not especially mind the idea of the boys being strangled, but I did not want my father to be punished for the crime. For I still cared for him in those days.

  At this time I envied my sister. Senka was a year younger than me, and although she had started school, she was soon excused and no longer had to attend. Instead she took her lessons at home, from our mother. But her lessons were not like school lessons, with hour upon hour of copying out and learning by heart. Hers were outdoors, except in bad weather, and involved learning the care of the animals and the names of the plants and insects. If it was raining she would have lessons in sewing and needlework by the kitchen fire, which I would gladly have swapped for my cold school bench and the endless exercises in spelling and arithmetic. The only schooling I received at home was in German, which my father insisted I learn for reasons once more connected with the maternal line.

  At that time he held a position in the imperial customs service and was away a great deal in Novi Sad. I was very anxious to please him and so studied hard during his absences, so that he would be impressed with my progress. My proudest moments were when he would pick me up in his arms and call me his schlaue kleine Dame. It was the first praise I ever earned from him, because it was no secret in our family that what a man most needed from his wife was a son, and that until he had one, children of the other sex were a luxury, and an expensive one at that. However, since my proficiency at German had succeeded in earning my father’s praise, I decided to work hard in all subjects, so that he would see I was some use after all, and might yet bring some credit to the family name. This did not make me any more popular with the other children but it did at least keep me away from the playground, and out of the range of their pebbles.

  As for Senka, I imagined that, as the youngest, she was being groomed for the running of the house, and this was why she did not have to study. I only discovered the real reason from one of the boys at school who, as a change from throwing stones, decided one day to throw insults instead. My sister was an idiot, he shouted, and he pulled a strange ugly face that did not look like Senka at all, but which I knew was, in some cruel way, true. By the time I got home that day, I had understood everything, and my jealousy had disappeared, to be replaced by shame.

  I grew closer to Senka after that. Her name means ‘shadow’ in Serb, and that is how close we were, always together when I was not studying. I even took over some of her lessons, which pleased my mother (though not my father, who said I was wasting my time). I taught her some reading and arithmetic – not too m
uch, as her attention would wander after a while, and there was nothing I could do to regain it. But she did learn, and I tried to learn from her, especially her way with the animals. The geese would follow her around, pecking gently at her sleeves and the hem of her skirts with their orange beaks. They would let her stroke their long downy necks too, which was a privilege granted to no one else. Whenever I approached they hissed and puffed up their feathers and sometimes chased me out of the yard altogether, if they were not in a sociable mood.

  I said that Senka was my only sister, but I learned a few years later that there had once been another. One summer day there were guests in the house, and the talk around the table turned to scarlet fever, which had returned to some villages not far away. I could tell the way my mother fell silent, and from the way my father looked at her, that the subject was painful to her. I knew that scarlet fever was much feared, and had taken many children in years past. So later I asked my grandmother if anyone in our family had died of it.

  At first she was shocked, and said it was not the sort of question a young lady should be asking, which, of course, made me quite certain that someone had died. I told her that I was good at keeping secrets and would keep this one if she would share it, and this seemed to satisfy her. She told me that the fever had taken my mother’s first-born when she was still a baby, but that I should never speak of it to anyone, or the fever would surely return to our house. This seemed quite reasonable to me at the time. One did not speak of the Devil for fear that to do so would summon him, and I assumed this was a precaution built on a similar principle. It was only after some years that I began to wonder why my family had chosen to add the burden of secrecy to what was already a burden of sadness.