The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  ‘No stabbing pains?’

  Kirsch shook his head.

  ‘Loss of sensation? In the limbs, for example?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Schad picked up a pencil from his desk. ‘So no loss of reflexes? Involuntary movements, that sort of thing?’

  Kirsch remembered a glass he had broken the evening before. But what did that prove? Everyone was clumsy now and again.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about hallucinations?’

  The tie slipped through Kirsch’s fingers. ‘None. None that I’m aware of. Although I suppose one can never be completely sure.’

  Schad smiled tightly. ‘No. I suppose not. Now, I want you to look at my hand. Step a little closer, would you?’

  Kirsch did as he was asked. At the same moment, Schad quickly pulled up the blinds. Even though the sky was overcast, the light was too bright. Kirsch had to look away.

  ‘I’m sorry. I had to check.’ Schad let the blinds drop again.

  ‘Check what?’

  ‘Your eyes. They’re not adjusting to the light, are they? As quickly as they should.’

  It was true. Kirsch was forever sheltering his eyes these days. It was December and yet he had often thought of buying sunglasses.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Please, Martin, sit down.’

  Kirsch lowered himself onto a chair.

  ‘It’s a strong indicator for neurosyphilis. It suggests that the micro-organism has reached your brain, probably via the nervous system. In my experience, it happens to about three patients in ten. It doesn’t mean the disease has reached the tertiary stage, or that it ever will. But there’s a high chance you will start to experience certain impairments.’

  During the war, when the secondary symptoms had appeared, Kirsch had investigated the pathogenesis of neurosyphilis. The symptoms read like a catalogue of divine punishment: from the headaches, vertigo and numbness of the early stages to strokes, paralysis, dementia and death. In between, there were disturbing changes in personality, memory loss, hallucinations and the decay of mental faculties.

  ‘How long before …?’ He hesitated, not knowing how to frame the question. ‘How long will I be able to go on working?’

  ‘That’s impossible to say. Anything from a few months to a few years, perhaps even longer. I’m sure you appreciate there are a great many variables.’

  The colonel got busy taking a sample of blood with a hypodermic syringe. Serological tests were not wholly reliable, he said, but it might be helpful to get an idea of how numerous the bacteria had become. He would send the blood to a local hospital without using Kirsch’s name. He expected the results some time after Christmas.

  ‘In the meantime, it would be wise to assume that you’re contagious. You did say you were unmarried?’

  Kirsch put on his shoes. His hands had stopped shaking, but still it took an effort of will to manipulate the laces, to make the loops and secure them tightly.

  ‘That’s right. I’m not married.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s just as well, under the circumstances.’ Schad was carefully transferring the blood into a small, sealable phial. ‘Trying to explain these things to loved ones, it’s hard. They always assume the worst. At least you have the luxury of being able to keep quiet about it.’

  Schad was right. Under the circumstances, matrimony was out of the question, the engagement to Alma an act of insanity, or of wild optimism, at the very least. And yet none of this had been clear to him until Mariya crossed his path. Only then had he seen.

  Schad closed the phial and pulled off his rubber gloves. From behind the door came the sound of Frau von Hassell arriving.

  Kirsch reached for his coat. ‘Is there any hope of recovery?’

  Schad nodded slowly. His cheeks had coloured slightly. Apart from that his face expressed nothing. ‘There’s always hope,’ he said.

  That night Kirsch telephoned Alma in Oranienburg. He had to arrange to see her again, and soon. If he was going to break off the engagement, it would be best to do it face to face.

  ‘It’s sweet of you to call,’ she said before he’d had a chance to explain. ‘I expect you’ve heard.’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About Daddy. He’s going to be all right, I know he is. He’s as strong as an ox. Everyone says so.’

  Otto Siegel had been taken to hospital after suffering what the doctors called a cardiac episode. It was not clear how long they intended to keep him there. Pretty much the entire family had scurried to the old man’s bedside nevertheless.

  ‘Mother’s desperately worried,’ Alma said. ‘But I keep telling her he’s going to be fine. I saw him this morning and he was sitting up reading the newspaper and swearing at the nurses for keeping him there. He can’t wait to be up and about.’

  Between Frau Siegel and her daughter, Kirsch felt sure, it was Alma who was the more petrified. That her father might actually die, that something loved and irreplaceable might be snatched away from her, was a possibility that was sure to shake the foundations of her world.

  ‘I suppose you won’t be visiting for a while then,’ Kirsch said.

  ‘You know I’d love to, but Mother really needs me here. You do understand?’

  ‘Of course,’ Kirsch said. ‘Of course. You must be where you’re needed.’

  Twenty-five

  The next morning, a handwritten note arrived via the pneumatic post from the Prussian Academy of Sciences:

  Dear Dr Kirsch,

  I have looked over the notebooks you were good enough to leave with me last week. I should be happy to discuss them with you at your soonest convenience. It might be best if we were to meet in person. I shall be lecturing at the university every afternoon this week. Please feel free to call on me at any time.

  Yours sincerely,

  Max von Laue

  There were several new admissions to the clinic that day and it wasn’t until four in the afternoon that Kirsch was able to make his way to the university. After trawling around the Department of Physics for a quarter of an hour, he was told that the professor was lecturing and sent to another part of the building. He arrived just as the corridors were filling with students on their way out. He went from room to room, saw tiered seating and blackboards covered in diagrams and mathematical notation, lecturers gathering their papers or talking with colleagues. At last he found von Laue alone, smoking a cigarette beside one of the big sash windows, apparently deep in thought.

  ‘Herr Professor.’ Kirsch offered his hand. ‘I hope this is not a bad time.’

  ‘Far from it,’ von Laue said. ‘Good of you to come. I’d have come to you at the Charité, but I wasn’t sure …’

  ‘That’s quite all right.’

  ‘The notebook’s in my office. Shall we?’

  There was an old-fashioned grace about von Laue. Kirsch had noticed it even at their first, brief meeting. There was no condescension, no sense that his time was more valuable than the next man’s.

  ‘You said you’d looked it over.’

  ‘Yes.’ The professor picked up his overcoat and briefcase and ushered Kirsch back into the corridor. ‘Did I understand you correctly? The calculations were made by a psychiatric patient?’

  ‘I assume so. The notebook was found among her possessions.’

  Von Laue stopped. ‘Her possessions? Your patient is a woman?’

  ‘Is that so unlikely?’

  ‘Let’s say it’s unexpected.’

  ‘But they are calculations? They make mathematical sense?’

  ‘Well …’ Von Laue shrugged, as if the issue were a delicate one. ‘There are those who’d say they’re fanciful. The idea of a fifth dimension as anything more than a mathematical construct, that’s certainly not gained wide acceptance. But as to the execution, I’d say it’s quite rigorous.’

  They were crossing the entrance hall, heading out into the cobbled yard. It was getting dark. Everywhere students were putting on their
bicycle clips and wheeling their bicycles towards the road.

  ‘So my patient, she’d have to be a student of physics.’

  ‘I’d say so,’ von Laue said. ‘And a curiously well-informed one. These aren’t the kind of problems you’d normally give to a student. They’re too experimental, too … contemporary. That’s why I’m curious to know whose student this is.’

  ‘I wish I could tell you. But it’s an unusual case. Amnesia is involved.’

  ‘Amnesia, you say?’

  Kirsch saw a glimmer of recognition in von Laue’s eyes. The professor frowned, drawing on the last of his cigarette before tossing the butt into the gutter. In spite of the raw December wind, he didn’t seem bothered by the cold.

  ‘It’s the timing, you see,’ he said after a few moments. ‘It’s troubling.’

  ‘The timing? I’m afraid I don’t –’

  ‘Let me explain. The calculations you showed me, they’re part of an attempt to reduce a number of equations – equations describing physical laws – down to one equation: a law from which the others are derived. The first set of equations applies to the motion of objects in a gravitational field: stars, planets, asteroids and so forth. The other applies to objects in an electromagnetic field: atoms, electrons. The two sets of laws appear contradictory, that’s the difficulty. We have one set of laws for the motion of big things and another for the motion of small ones, which isn’t very satisfactory, or even plausible to most minds. It’s an important problem, perhaps the most important in physics.’

  Von Laue didn’t know it, but Kirsch had read about this before, as he knew Max would have done, and with the same hunger. When Albert Einstein had proved that light, like all forms of pure energy, was a stream of particles, and that the particles had mass, he had opened the door on a world of uncertainty. Observations and experiments had proved him right. Light was made up of quanta, pellets of energy like tiny grains of sand, travelling at immense speed. There was only one problem: the old experiments, the ones that had revealed light to be a travelling undulation, like a ripple moving across water, remained as valid as they had always been. The interference patterns continued to prove, as Einstein acknowledged, that light was a wave. The mathematics were irrefutable.

  No matter how they examined the problem, no matter what experiments they attempted, physicists were forced to acknowledge what reason and experience said was impossible: a beam of light could be either of two completely different things depending on how it was observed. The two possibilities co-existed in a perpetual state of ambiguity until interaction with an observer resolved the question one way or the other. The implications were disturbing, to say the least. If the nature of a thing was determined by the act and method of observation, how could the scientist hope to arrive at any definitive conclusions? It was as if the principles of relativity had moved on from space and time to unpick the very fabric of knowledge.

  And that was not the end of it. The old planetary model of the atom, in which electrons orbited a nucleus, the way planets orbited the sun and obeying the same physical laws, was soon dead and buried. Einstein’s young disciples – Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger – soon showed that the laws of motion did not apply in the sub-atomic sphere at all. Neither did conventional geometry. Electrons and quanta of light had no fixed positions, like objects in the larger world – if they could be said to be objects at all. Their position depended on how they were observed. It seemed they had a range of possible positions, all existing simultaneously. Their behaviour could not be predicted individually, only statistically en masse.

  Classical physics said everything, even the smallest motion of the smallest particle, happened for a reason. If one electron behaved differently from another, it was because the forces acting upon it were different. With enough information, everything could be predicted, at least theoretically. The classical universe was a mechanism, set in motion at the beginning of time, its every motion predetermined. The young apostles of quantum mechanics ridiculed this idea. In the very substance of energy and matter, they argued, the link between cause and effect was absent. A universe founded upon the physics of light was a universe in which individual events occurred for no reason at all. For the first time, the behaviour of matter became not just unknown, but unknowable. Reality was built not on the rock of action and reaction, but on the shifting sands of chance. Einstein had shown the world that the heart of all material was the immaterial; now his precious quanta were showing him that at the heart of all reason was unreason.

  But to the great physicist, this was a step too far. To the dismay of Bohr and the others, he determined to bring quantum mechanics to heel. His weapon would be a new mathematical model, one that would subordinate the upstart physics of the quanta to the strict causality of the cosmic realm. A Unified Field Theory would reveal the hidden laws that dictated to the quantum world, as they dictated to all others. Einstein would prove that everything was knowable after all, the randomness of quantum reality just an illusion.

  Four years before Mariya’s notebook led Kirsch to the Prussian Academy, the Berlin press had been camped outside, waiting for news of Einstein’s final victory. Kirsch’s scrapbook still bulged with their fantastical articles about what might follow: a future with unlimited energy, the instantaneous transportation of matter, even time travel. He himself had queued outside the offices of the Berliner Morgenpost, because it was rumoured they were going to carry an authorised report in their first edition (a rumour that turned out to be false). But so far the breakthrough hadn’t come.

  Kirsch had wondered often as he read the newspapers and journals, which side Max would have been on in this great battle of realities. Would he have wanted Einstein, his hero, to emerge triumphant? Or would the strangeness of the quantum world have proved too seductive to resist? In Kirsch’s dreams he was always evasive on the subject, as if he knew what he thought, but was not yet ready to share.

  Von Laue led the way through a courtyard full of students. It was cold.

  ‘You said the timing of these notes was troubling,’ Kirsch said. ‘What did you mean?’

  ‘Forgive me,’ Von Laue said, ‘I expect I haven’t been very clear. What I meant to say was, the last time I saw that field of mathematics – a five-dimensional geometry – applied to this particular problem, I was listening to Professor Einstein deliver a paper to the members of the Prussian Academy. That was in April. The paper wasn’t actually published until a couple of months ago.’ They had reached another, smaller entrance. Von Laue held open the door. ‘So you see, those notes you left me must be the work either of a leading physicist or of someone close to a leading physicist. At least, that was my assumption.’

  Von Laue showed Kirsch into his office and turned on the lights. It was smaller than Kirsch had expected, though comfortably furnished, with bookshelves lining the walls, a mahogany desk, a faded Persian rug, and an old ivory and brass model of the solar system on top of a filing cabinet. With a key from his waistcoat pocket, von Laue unlocked the drawer of his desk and produced Mariya’s notebook. Gingerly, Kirsch opened it. The lines of letters and symbols stared up at him, blurred and unintelligible, evidence of the dousing it had received on the way to the Academy.

  ‘These calculations then, are they complete? Do they prove something?’

  Von Laue smiled as he moved behind his desk. ‘In theoretical physics things are rarely proven, Dr Kirsch, at least in the sense that they’re shown to be true. We can’t yet observe an individual atom, any more than we can travel among the stars.’ He pulled open a pair of wooden shutters and looked out across the avenue towards Franz-Joseph Platz. ‘As I often tell my students, the human perspective places almost as many limitations on our ability to observe as it does on our ability to understand. It’s no easy matter to go beyond it. True objectivity demands dedication and considerable sacrifice.’

  Kirsch turned over a page. It was stiff and warped, but the writing was clearer. A single sheet of blotting pa
per had been carefully inserted among the leaves. A few pages on, he found another.

  ‘If nothing is proven,’ he said, ‘how do you know when you’re right?’

  Von Laue was gazing at the street lights. They flickered against a cobalt sky. ‘It’s a question of finding what’s beautiful. We look for elegance, simplicity, economy. Those are the solutions Nature prefers. Of course, it’s a very rare form of intuition that knows where to look for them. Most of us can’t see beyond the fog of our own suppositions.’ He turned. ‘Unfortunately, in your patient’s case, the work is incomplete. The last pages are missing.’

  Kirsch hadn’t noticed it before: but the final folio of the notebook had been pulled out – twenty pages or more. He plucked out the loose threads of the binding.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know where those pages are, by any chance?’ von Laue said.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Silence fell. After a moment, Kirsch stepped forward and offered his hand. ‘You’ve been most helpful, Professor. I won’t presume to take up any more of your time.’

  A look of resignation crossed von Laue’s face. ‘When your patient recovers I should be most interested in meeting her. Be under no illusions: she has a remarkable intelligence – assuming, of course, that those really are her calculations.’

  ‘I’ve no reason to doubt it. The handwriting appears to be hers.’

  Von Laue showed him out. ‘I don’t wish to sound disparaging about the fairer sex, you understand. It’s just that in all my years as a physicist, I’ve only ever known two women who could absorb Albert Einstein’s work so readily. One of them was Marie Curie, and she has a Nobel Prize.’

  ‘And the other?’

  Von Laue hesitated. ‘The other was his wife.’

  ‘Elsa Einstein?’

  Von Laue laughed. ‘No. Elsa has trouble with the household accounts. I meant his first wife.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was married before.’

  ‘Not many people do. It was in Switzerland, some years ago. She and Albert were students at the Polytechnic.’ Von Laue opened the door. ‘I think she still teaches there, as a matter of fact.’