The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  She let her skirt down again, brushing off some lint that had caught in the fabric. ‘My father wasn’t poor. He had a government job and wore a uniform on feast days.’

  Were these clear memories, Kirsch wondered, or another dream?

  ‘And where is he now, your father?’

  ‘Dead.’ She walked over to another stand, where more hats were on display, fingering the rims in a perfunctory way. ‘All my family are dead.’ She picked out a black felt Derby. ‘How about this one? Does this suit me?’

  ‘For a day at the races perhaps. What makes you think all your family are dead?’

  She pulled the Derby down low on her forehead, so that her eyes were lost in shadow.

  ‘I was outside yesterday, in the grounds. There’s a bench I like to sit on.’

  ‘I know. I’ve seen you there.’

  ‘Oh, you have.’ She brought a hand to her cheek.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I remembered finding my father’s grave. The snow and the fresh earth. That wet earth smell. I think he was buried in that uniform.’

  ‘That’s all you remember?’

  ‘I remember how I felt.’

  ‘And how was that? Sad, I suppose.’

  ‘No. I remember the feeling very clearly.’ She took off the Derby and replaced it with a blue straw cloche, the brim turned up at the forehead in a style Alma had said was passé. ‘I felt free.’

  After Karstadt’s they travelled on crowded trams to Alexanderplatz, then set out on foot along Kirsch’s usual route: past the stalls on Grenadierstrasse, though they were fewer in number than usual; past Herr Bronstein’s boarded-up music shop, past the pumping station and the synagogue on Rykestrasse, where a lone policeman steadily eyed the procession of worshippers making their way inside. If Mariya recognised the surroundings, she did not say so. She did not say anything. She walked ahead steadily, neither looking around nor stopping to take her bearings. Now and again, as they reached a street corner, Kirsch would hold back, watching to see if she became confused or disorientated; but each time she carried on, giving him not so much as a backward glance.

  Outside the cemetery she stopped. The gates stood open. In the half-darkness Kirsch could see a handful of figures moving around; caretakers perhaps, clearing away dead flowers or digging new graves. The light of their cigarettes floated in the gloom.

  ‘I came this way before,’ she said, her breath making a plume in the cold air.

  Herr Mettler took a long time to answer the door. Even then he seemed reluctant to open it more than a few inches.

  ‘What do you want? I thought …’ He caught sight of Mariya waiting on the pavement. His voice fell to a whisper. ‘What’s she doing here?’

  ‘I want you to show me that room again. Number three.’

  A wireless was on inside: rasping voices and crackles of applause. Herr Mettler stepped back from the door. Kirsch took Mariya by the arm and led her into the hallway. She was slightly out of breath.

  ‘If you give us the key, we’ll find our own way,’ Kirsch said.

  Herr Mettler grunted and went back into his apartment. There came the sound of a brief consultation, then he reappeared, beckoning Kirsch over.

  ‘I’ve a party interested in taking that room,’ he said, breathing on his spectacles and polishing the lenses against his sleeve. ‘So if she wants her things, you’ll have to take them now.’

  They were standing in a narrow parlour. Keys hung from hooks. Old shoes were lined up along the wall. A smell of boiled potatoes drifted in from the kitchen.

  Kirsch reached into his jacket. ‘Suppose I pay her rent for another week?’

  Herr Mettler shook his head. His prospective tenant was a good one, he said, the kind that settled in for the long term – an aristocrat, in fact: the kind of tenant you did not want to lose. The more he explained, the more certain Kirsch became that he was lying.

  ‘Suppose I pay two weeks then, just to be going on with? I think it might be good for Mariya to move back here, away from the clinic.’

  ‘Here? You mean, permanently?’

  ‘For a few months at least.’

  ‘No, no, that’s impossible.’

  ‘Why? She wasn’t any trouble. You said so.’

  ‘That was before.’ Mettler glanced back towards the kitchen. ‘No one wants her kind in the place.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘People don’t feel safe.’ Herr Mettler screwed a finger against his temple. ‘Never know what they might do, do you? What are asylums for?’

  Kirsch opened his wallet. ‘Thirty days, cash in advance. I can leave a deposit now.’

  Herr Mettler looked past him into the hallway. ‘Where’s she wandered off to?’

  Kirsch turned. Mariya was gone. So was the key to Room 3. ‘She must have …’ He went to the foot of the stairs. ‘Mariya?’

  In the street outside, a bottle burst against the cobblestones. A dog started barking. Herr Mettler hurried to the front door and threw the bolts. Kirsch set off up the stairs.

  Rapid footsteps echoed in the alley.

  ‘Mariya?’

  Nobody answered. He hadn’t wanted her to go up alone. He’d wanted to takes things one step at a time. A sudden rush of recollection might have unforeseen consequences. It might be dangerous.

  What about suicide? Have you considered that possibility? Maybe she threw herself off a bridge.

  A light went on in one of the first-floor rooms. Kirsch hurried up to the second floor. Just as he arrived outside Room 3, the door clicked shut.

  She wanted to be alone. It was her room, after all, or had been. Her things were still in there: clothes, books, the photograph album. He knocked gently.

  There was a cold draft at his ankles. He knocked again.

  ‘Mariya?’ He listened: nothing. He tried the door handle. It was not locked.

  Inside the lights were still off. A bar of yellow from a nearby street light was stretched across the ceiling. It was surprisingly cold.

  He flicked on the light switch. The bulb had gone. He squinted into the darkness, took a few steps forward. Mariya was not there.

  Noiselessly the window swung open. The curtains billowed. The faraway roar of the city grew louder.

  He ran to the window, flung it open, looked out over the little iron balcony. The gas lamps down below were unusually bright. Kirsch had to shield his eyes. But there was no body lying shattered on the pavement, no crowd of onlookers gathered round. A man was lighting a cigarette. He looked up at Kirsch as he tossed away the match.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Mariya was standing beside him.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’

  She hunched her shoulders. ‘I saw you down there. Is that possible? I thought I remembered seeing you.’

  He put his arms around her and held her close. She seemed impossibly light. He picked her up, carried her inside and set her down on the floor.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you.’

  Her arms were still around his neck, her face hidden in the folds of his coat. He felt himself moving closer again, a brief weightlessness like the moment before a fall.

  She kept her eyes firmly shut while he kissed her, as if making a wish. Then she framed his face in her hands and kissed him back, her eyes flickering shut again as their bodies slowly relaxed. They stayed that way for a long time, standing in the cold darkness, the bare boards beneath their feet creaking. Kirsch did not think to ask her what else she remembered. For once, it did not seem important.

  It came to him that this love was not, after all, a dream or an indulgence or a flight of madness. It was a gift, a rescue.

  He shivered. The room had a small fireplace, the fuel already laid, but it would take a long time to heat up the room.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Mariya said. ‘Can we eat something? I didn’t have any lunch.’

  ‘No lunch? Why not?’

  ‘I was nervous. Couldn’t you tell?’

&nb
sp; ‘As a matter of fact, no.’

  What kind of a psychiatrist am I? Kirsch thought. And the answer came back: one who has affairs with his patients.

  ‘I know a place,’ he said.

  Twenty-two

  He winced when Alma threw her arms around him. The cold weather had inflamed the wound in his arm. Beneath his coat, the flesh was bloated and angry.

  ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. I fell. Ice.’

  It was Sunday morning. Shafts of blinding sunlight pierced the railway station canopy, dappling the cavernous interior.

  ‘You’re lying.’

  Kirsch rubbed the spot. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I know what happened,’ Alma said. ‘One of them attacked you, didn’t they? Daddy was telling me about it: how people who work in asylums are always being attacked.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. Anyway, it’s a clinic, not an asylum.’

  The train driver blew his whistle. Kirsch opened the carriage door, lending Alma his good arm.

  ‘Even worse,’ she said. ‘At least asylums have guards. If something happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do.’

  Her scolding was good-humoured, but the underlying purpose was serious, just as it was familiar: Alma wanted her future husband to leave the clinic and find work in a more wholesome branch of medicine, one less steeped in misery and degradation. Psychiatry was fine at the theoretical level. But the mentally ill themselves were tainted, and that taint rubbed off on anyone who lived among them.

  It came to Kirsch that this would have been the perfect moment to tell her about his likely departure from the Charité and his new research for Dr Fischer. But there was no point any more. He had resolved to tell her that the engagement was off. Now that he was no longer deceiving himself, he could not go on deceiving her. He had only to work out what to say, and when to say it.

  He had suggested they spend the day at Potsdam, by the lake. He told her he wanted to get out of the city for a while. She had agreed gladly, although it was not until they were on the train that Kirsch found out why: they would be able to stop off at Zehlendorf and visit the villa she planned to make their home.

  ‘It’d be good to get the feel of the neighbourhood,’ she said. ‘They say it’ll soon be the most desirable in Berlin. A lot of famous people live there. We’ll hold parties, and there’ll be photographs in the press.’

  ‘Only if we invite the press,’ Kirsch said. ‘Which we won’t.’

  Alma extracted a pin from her hat. Her blonde hair had a freshly curled bounce to it and smelled faintly of alcohol.

  ‘You sound like Daddy.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘You know how he feels about the newspapers.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s very …’

  ‘Reactionary?’

  ‘Old-fashioned.’

  ‘That’s letting him off lightly.’

  She sighed and squeezed his arm as the train dived beneath the S-Bahn. Grey steam funnelled past the windows. ‘He just wants things to be how they used to be. You can understand that, can’t you? For his generation change always means losing something they care about.’

  Kirsch thought of his mother, still crying alone in Max’s room; of his sister, Emilie, listening from her little box room down below.

  ‘It’s too late,’ he said. They were crossing a freight yard. The spires and chimneys of the city were shrinking into the distance, stark against a fold of cloud. ‘Things can never be how they used to be. Time may not be linear, but it isn’t circular either.’

  Alma wrinkled her nose and nestled against him, her head heavy against his shoulder. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. We’ll go and live in Zehlendorf and do as we please.’

  She straightened up as the conductor appeared. A few minutes later they were rolling through a tangled landscape of fences and muddy plots still harbouring ice and snow in their furrows. Alma talked about the wedding preparations. The important issues had already been decided, but there were endless smaller details to mull over: the bridal bouquets, the bridesmaids’ dresses, the order of service, the musical entertainment, as well as the seating plan for dinner, which was reorganised almost daily, even though the invitations would not be going out for months.

  ‘Do you think your sister Emilie could be persuaded to be a flower girl?’ Alma’s hands were cupped around his. ‘I know she’d be a lot older than the others, but it would be so nice to include her in the ceremony, don’t you think?’

  ‘A flower girl?’ The idea seemed faintly preposterous.

  ‘Of course, we’d make the dress for her,’ Alma added.

  Kirsch wondered if this was really the point, to make sure Emilie did not let the side down with one of her dowdy schoolroom outfits. ‘The thing is, she’s rather shy. I’m not sure she’d want the attention.’

  ‘But she’s a teacher. And she plays the piano, doesn’t she? She played the very first time I was there – rather passionately, I thought.’

  Kirsch remembered the occasion, the trance-like state that his sister seemed to enter, the way her body swayed, much like patients he had known at the clinic in various stages of disconnection from the world.

  ‘That’s different. When she plays, I don’t think she’s really … there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In her mind.’ He looked at Alma. Two tiny vertical creases had appeared between her eyebrows. ‘I suppose I could ask her if you like.’

  The train rocked them so that their bodies gently collided. Alma was sitting close to him, her thigh in contact with his, an unusual occurrence in a public place.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘if she’s shy as you say. As a matter of fact, I sometimes got the impression when she was quiet like that, it was because she didn’t like me.’

  There was so much noise at the lakeside restaurant that it was impossible to talk without shouting. Most establishments around Potsdam had closed for the winter, but the good weather had tempted a late influx of day-trippers from the city, and every table was taken. Some chubby-faced boys were playing outside while their parents finished their meal. Unsupervised, they were soon punching and kicking each other, the smallest of them screaming unheeded.

  Again and again Kirsch’s gaze drifted towards the lake. In the distance a sailing boat was tacking into an easterly wind.

  ‘It’s so bright out here. I should get some sunglasses.’

  ‘Your head’s been buried in books too long,’ Alma said. ‘Your eyes aren’t used to the sky.’

  Kirsch watched as the boat came about, the white sails filling, the stern carving a foamy arc through the water. A few years earlier, Albert Einstein had told a newspaper about his new love of sailing. It had been different in his youth, he said. Then he had preferred trekking in the mountains. He had done some of his best thinking in the high passes of the Alps, on long walks with friends. But recently he had grown tired of the uplands. Mountains impeded his view. Instead, he had grown to love the Earth’s desolate places, the sea and the prairie, anywhere vast and unending to the gaze. At first, Kirsch had been puzzled by these reports. The majesty of nature, it seemed to him, was nowhere more visible than in the mountains, among the glaciers and the soaring peaks. Countless artists and poets had found their inspiration there. But the more he read of Einstein’s work, the better he understood: to escape a thousand years of received ideas required boldness and independence of mind. It was not majesty the physicist needed, nor inspiration, but emptiness, distance – a place to think what, for the mass of humankind, was unthinkable. On the water Einstein came closest to the perfect objectivity he craved. Was it possible Mariya had travelled out here in search of the same searing clarity? Perhaps that was why she had come to Berlin: to break old ties and devote herself instead to knowledge and truth. Kirsch found himself wishing that were not the case. For if Mariya saw everything clearly, then she would see him clearly too.

  ‘I was only concerned that you might want a rest.’
>
  Alma was talking about their honeymoon.

  ‘A rest?’

  ‘Instead of traipsing round basilicas all day. Still, we needn’t do that. We can lie around on the Lido and stuff ourselves.’ She pushed a hand across the table so that their fingers intertwined. ‘You do look on edge these days. You’re working too hard, everyone says so.’

  ‘Who’s everyone?’

  Alma looked at her plate, pushed at some vegetables with her fork. ‘I talked to Robert the other day.’

  ‘Ah, Dr Eisner.’

  ‘Don’t be like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so mean about Robert. He’s done nothing to you.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  Alma shook her head. This was apparently something that had been on her mind for some time. ‘I know he plays the fool sometimes, but he’s really a very good sort. I’ve known him for years. And have you forgotten he’s the reason we met?’

  Kirsch did not reply. He was thinking back to Friday evening: he had returned Mariya to her room at the clinic and found Eisner hanging around in the corridor. It was unusual for him to stay later than he had to. ‘Looks like you’re making progress,’ he had said with the trace of a smirk on his face. Kirsch had not stopped to talk. He had gone straight to the washrooms and checked in the mirror for smudges of lipstick, before remembering that Mariya did not wear any.

  ‘What did he say exactly?’

  Alma sighed. ‘He said you’ve been taking on too many difficult cases. Beating your brains out. He’s concerned about you.’ Alma took a sip of iced water. ‘That girl, for instance, the one in the papers. You’ve been spending an awful lot of time on her.’

  Kirsch picked up his fork and dabbed at his food. ‘Of course. I can’t have the press saying the eminent Dr Kirsch isn’t up to scratch.’

  ‘Suddenly you care what the press say? I know you better than that, darling.’

  Alma put down her glass. The ice clinked against the lip.

  ‘It’s a difficult case,’ Kirsch said. ‘But I think I’m making progress.’

  At a table across the room laughter erupted. Tell her now, he thought.