The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  He went back to Wörtherstrasse every day, hoping that Mariya might have returned or left word for him. He continued to pay the rent for her room. But she did not return; and there was no word. Towards the end of March he arrived just as a truck loaded down with furniture was pulling away from the kerb. He was almost run over trying to flag down the driver. It turned out the furniture was on its way to be auctioned. Herr Mettler had sold the property and left. The new owners appeared in no hurry to move in. The following week the windows had been boarded up.

  * * *

  A few days later he took the train out to Potsdam. It was still too early in the year for the steamer service; so Kirsch rented a bicycle outside the station and cycled south up the winding paths of the Telegraphenberg. The Einstein Tower stood on the far side, a few hundred yards beyond the summit. Smooth and white, it rose up out of the wooded hillside like the conning tower of a giant submarine. The windows were swept back, curved and organic in form, as if streamlined by evolutionary forces for speed of movement. Only the silver dome on top, beneath which stood the great vertical telescope, betrayed an element of pure function.

  It was said Einstein didn’t care for the building created in his honour. He wasn’t attuned to the architect’s Expressionist sensibilities. He had visited only occasionally, despite being chairman of the foundation that ran it. But Mariya would have gone there, Kirsch felt sure. The tower was the only place in Berlin that bore Einstein’s name. She would have wrapped up warm and come to mingle with the day-trippers for whom the Telegraphenberg was also a favoured spot, if only for the views and the clean air and the ornamental gardens laid out around the summit. Perhaps she had gone there the day before she was found by the boys on their bicycles. Perhaps, Kirsch thought, she would go there again, without necessarily knowing why: hers a mind cut adrift from the comforting certainties of linear time. Everything instead repeating. A cycle of crisis, amnesia, recovery, crisis, with no end but death.

  The day-trippers were absent that day, though the rain had eased and the sun was breaking through the clouds. The doors of the tower were locked and secured with a chain. Scaffolding clung to one corner of the structure. A loose tarpaulin flapped in the wind, heavy ropes lashing the ground.

  Kirsch headed down the slopes on the far side. The paths were steep and slippery. He was soon gathering pace, his wheels skidding on the bends. The brakes on his bicycle were dangerously stiff. Every time he squeezed them he was almost pitched over the handlebars. He was forced to use his feet. For several minutes he fought to keep his balance, before finally the path levelled out.

  He freewheeled to a halt. He was deep in the woods by this time, somewhere south of the Telegraphenberg. The trees all around were tall and sparse. Rainwater dripped from their branches, making a stealthy pitter-patter on the leafy earth. Kirsch listened, turning his head this way and that. It was hard to shake off the sensation of being watched. A memory came to him of the young pastor at Reinsdorf, something he had said about fallen leaves and the fallen of the war. It had always struck him as a poor metaphor, misleading and weak.

  A gunshot ruptured the stillness. It was some way off: a hundred yards, at least. People hunted in the woods around Berlin, with or without a permit. A dog barked. Kirsch heard a man shouting. Then nothing. A bird was sitting hunched on the limb of a tree no more than ten feet above him: a crow or a rook. Its black feathers were bedraggled, especially around its neck. Kirsch clapped his hands, but the bird didn’t fly away. Sick or stunned, it continued to watch him, unconcerned.

  The gravel path had become a track. Kirsch cycled on, his wheels sinking deeper into the mud. Black water welled up out of the ground, filling the ruts, spattering his face and his clothes until he could taste it on his lips. He rose from his seat, putting all his weight into the peddling to keep up his momentum. Black pools appeared ahead of him, as big as shell holes. The woods were drowning in them.

  After a mile it became impossible to pedal. He dismounted and pushed the bicycle, skirting round the pools, plunging through undergrowth and ferns, often losing the path altogether, only to find it again a few hundred yards further on. Burs and bindweed clung to his trousers and his sleeves. Roads were supposed to intersect the forest. Sooner or later he was bound to come across one. His watch told him he had been cycling for an hour, but when he looked more closely, wiping the mud away from the face, he found that the hands were no longer moving.

  At last he could make out smudges of gold in the sky. They told him he was heading south-west. He couldn’t have been far from the lake. He left the path and turned due west, wanting to reach the open water as quickly as possible. The ground beneath him began to rise, then fall again. In this part of the forest the trees were choked with ivy. Only the pines and willows were still alive.

  He didn’t see the house until he had stumbled into a corner of the garden. It stood in a small, landscaped clearing, a red-brown clapboard building with white shutters. A broad roof terrace, reached by an external staircase, and a peculiar port-hole window on the ground floor lent the premises the look of a seaside villa. Kirsch had seen the house before in newspapers and architectural magazines. Except for its foundations, it was built entirely of Oregon pine and Galician fir, an example of the Bauhaus style. Although the exact location was never disclosed, he knew where he was. He had reached the outskirts of Caputh. He was standing in the garden of Albert Einstein’s summer house.

  The cuttings were still there in his scrapbook. He had other photographs of Einstein standing in front of the French windows with various distinguished visitors, or staring from the roof terrace towards the lake, pipe in hand. In his mind the house had been bigger and more beautiful – not palatial, but elegant and homely. It had reflected the warmth and wisdom of its owner. The reality seemed shrunken, cramped, as if Einstein’s absence had sucked the spirit out of it.

  Clover and weeds choked the lawns. Moss had invaded the paths. The plants in the window boxes – flowering in the photographs – were dead. Kirsch laid his bicycle down and walked onto the cement veranda, aware as he approached of a faint sound, a muffled impact, like the lazy pounding of a machine.

  The outside staircase was slimy underfoot. On the landing halfway up, one of the railings was broken. Leaves had gathered in wet heaps around the roof terrace. A rolled-up parasol lay on its side. A short distance away, the lake was a strip of grey water, obscured by trees. Kirsch shivered. His clothes were cold and wet against his skin.

  The noise began again. It was coming from inside the house. A door led off the roof terrace, but it was locked. Kirsch went around to the north side of the building, peering through the shutters as he went. Everything inside was dark.

  A dirty green Mercedes with the top down stood in the driveway. It seemed someone was home after all. But it couldn’t be the Einsteins. Albert Einstein was in hiding abroad. The regime had seized his bank accounts and what remained of his property. A pro-Nazi newspaper had put a bounty of $50,000 on his head, dead or alive.

  Kirsch went to the front door. He was about to knock when he noticed that the wood was splintered around the lock. Beneath the handle was a large muddy footprint. The door had been forced. A nudge of the shoulder was all it took to get in.

  A dark, narrow hallway with a chequerboard floor. A damp, musty smell. The walls and ceilings were of wood. A narrow staircase led up to the first floor. A door, ajar, led down into a cellar. Kirsch moved towards the back of the house, where bands of light peeped through the shutters.

  There was little of interest to thieves. The furniture was sparse and plain. There were no display cabinets showing off the family silver. He stepped into the kitchen. Next to a pepper grinder, a bag of flour lay ruptured. Thousands of tiny ants swarmed over the counter and the sink.

  He felt a gentle draft on the back of his neck. The noise was coming from the other side of the interior wall: a nonchalant knocking, an ironic summons. Knives lay on the kitchen table, but none was sharp enough to serve as a weap
on. He moved out into the passage. Papers rustled. Someone was in there, in the next room. He eased back the door.

  The sunlight hurt his eyes. The windows were broken. The shutters hung from a single hinge. They swung back and forth, knocking against iron railings on the outside. The room – a small study – had been ransacked. Books and papers were strewn across the floor. Behind a plain pinewood table a man was on all fours, hastily gathering them up. It took Kirsch a moment to recognise him.

  ‘Professor von Laue?’

  The professor looked up, startled. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  ‘Martin Kirsch. From the Charité. Don’t you remember me?’ The professor continued to stare. His collar had become detached from his shirt, revealing a sliver of flesh at the base of his neck. ‘The door, it was –’

  ‘What do you want?’ von Laue said again.

  ‘I’m looking for someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A patient. Ex-patient. The one you were curious about.’

  ‘The student?’

  ‘She’s missing.’

  Von Laue frowned, then shook his head, his alarm visibly subsiding. ‘Well, you won’t find her here. No one lives here any more.’

  ‘So I see.’

  The professor deposited a stack of files on top of the desk. It came to Kirsch that he had given the man quite a shock.

  ‘Well,’ von Laue said. ‘Well. Never mind. You can help me get these papers together. Make yourself useful. It’s only a matter of time before they come back.’

  ‘Who? Before who comes back?’

  ‘Who do you think? We need to get all these to the car. They’ll have to stay at his apartment until I can think of a safer place. Find some boxes or something.’ Von Laue looked at him. ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’

  Kirsch did as he was asked. He found some old luggage under the stairs and some vegetable crates in the larder. Back in the study they got busy, filling them with papers.

  ‘The books too?’ Kirsch asked.

  ‘Anything annotated. Otherwise no.’

  They worked on in silence for a few minutes. Kirsch sensed that von Laue was embarrassed by the hostility he’d shown. He could feel the older man groping for some way to make amends.

  ‘What made you think your patient would be here?’ he said finally.

  Kirsch paused to mop his brow. His only thought had been to seek out the place where she had been found by those two small boys on their bicycles. It was a way of getting closer to her, the only way he could think of.

  ‘She was originally found less than a mile from here,’ he said. ‘I think it’s possible she was on her way to meet her father.’

  Von Laue sighed and began sifting through the bookshelves. ‘You’re a good man, Dr Kirsch. You mean well, I can see that. But your energies would be better directed elsewhere.’ He picked up a volume, examined the spine and replaced it. ‘Trust me: nothing can come of that line of enquiry.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  Loose papers fell on Kirsch’s feet, adding to the mass already carpeting the floorboards. Bending down to pick them up, he felt breathless.

  Von Laue was flicking through a book. ‘People think Albert Einstein’s work is all about distant stars and galaxies. They don’t think it has anything to do with them. What they forget is that we’re all part of the universe. We’re as much an expression of its physical laws as anything else, whether we like it or not. Therefore to change your understanding of the cosmos is to change your understanding of Man. And that is a very significant thing.’

  Kirsch was packing books. In his hand was a copy of the work Max had given him: On the Special and General Theory of Relativity, Generally Comprehensible. Max must have shared von Laue’s opinion, to some degree. Why else would he have chosen such a gift for his brother, the military surgeon?

  ‘Are you saying Professor Einstein would have no time for his own daughter?’

  Von Laue smiled. ‘Time is an issue, but not in the way you mean.’

  ‘Then in what way?’

  Outside, clouds moved across the sun. The room grew suddenly darker. Von Laue glanced out of the window into the woods. For a moment, Kirsch thought he saw someone standing there, watching from the shadows.

  ‘What do you suppose lies behind these great leaps of understanding?’ Von Laue said. ‘You’ve studied the human mind, Doctor. How is it Albert Einstein can see what’s invisible to everyone else? How can he conceive of what to others is inconceivable?’

  ‘I suppose he’s more intelligent.’

  Von Laue shook his head. ‘More intelligent than Poincaré? More intelligent than Max Planck? I doubt it. I doubt he would say so. The difference, the critical difference, lies in the independence of his thought. His scepticism, if you like. Somehow he has developed the ability to step back from any assumption, any abstraction, however deeply sunk into the bedrock of the human mind, and establish exactly what’s real and tangible, and what’s not. Linear space and absolute time were more than sacrosanct, Dr Kirsch. They were the foundation stones of rational thought. No one even considered questioning them. Einstein didn’t just demonstrate that they were illusory. He saw that they were.’

  Kirsch’s brow felt warm, the fever gently pulsing at his temples. ‘I’m not denying his uniqueness. But I don’t see –’

  ‘But you do deny it. You imagine these extraordinary perspectives can be reached without sacrifice, without change. But that’s how the truth is discovered. To perceive the world, one must step outside the world. In the gospels it says the truth shall set you free. What it should say is: the truth will set you apart.’

  What had Eduard Einstein said at their first meeting. Mariya is changing.

  ‘This is all science,’ Kirsch said. ‘Surely it has nothing to do with … with a man’s family.’

  Von Laue shook his head. ‘You don’t want to understand me. But I think you do.’ He pulled a pair of volumes from the shelf, holding one in each hand. ‘If instinctive notions of space and time are invalid, then the conventions of human society are hardly likely to be infallible. Honour, community, country, God. What are these concepts built on? Solid and tangible foundations? Something absolute, like the speed of light? Or assumptions so dubious and inconsistent the rational mind hardly knows where to begin?’ He packed the books away, then opened a drawer in the table. More papers lay inside. ‘In a sceptical world truth and certainty would go together. But look around you. Is that what you see?’

  Kirsch brought a hand to his face. He was sweating. He closed his eyes and saw the monument at Reinsdorf, the shiny black granite and the big bold lie: FOR GOD AND THE FATHERLAND.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ he said. ‘People could learn.’

  Von Laue laughed. ‘What makes you think they want to learn? My dear fellow. For the mass of humanity, it’s only delusions that make life bearable. That’s the tragedy of the human condition, if you ask me. Men need to pretend there’s meaning where reason says there isn’t. Without it what would they have in common? Human ties would dissolve. Society would disintegrate, and they’d be left to face the indifference of the universe alone. That, more than anything, is what they want to avoid; and for that, even war is a price they’re willing to pay.’

  Wind gusted against the side of the house. The shutter slammed against the frame. Von Laue picked up one of the boxes. ‘We’d better get this done. I don’t want to be here after dark.’

  He went out to the car. Kirsch went back to work, sweeping the papers by the armful into a small leather suitcase. He tried not to think of Mariya making her way to the house in her new dress and her new shoes, hopeful of finding the Albert Einstein of the news-reels: the compassionate prophet, the benevolent father. He tried not to think at all.

  He was almost finished when he came across a bundle of mail, all unopened: bills, several invitations in embossed envelopes, what felt like periodicals, to judge from the heft. At the bottom was a thick white envelope w
ith Einstein’s name and address written in a tidy feminine hand. According to the post mark, the package had been sent on 26 October from Berlin postal district C, close to where Kirsch lodged. He knew then where he had seen it before.

  Inside there was a stack of lined pages covered in the same tidy writing. They made up the complete folio of a notebook. Tucked into the final page was a sketch a few inches square: Albert Einstein, standing in front of a lectern, a kindly smile on his face.

  The first page began: How do I come to be here after all this time?

  light

  Forty-six

  I was a fool to think I could overcome a man of Zoltán’s size, even in his intoxicated state; and more of a fool to imagine that I had it in me to bury a knife in his heart. I wanted his death. He had driven my sister to hers just as surely as if he had drowned her himself. But some instinct checked my hunger for revenge and kept me from flying at him as soon as he opened the door, which would have been the wisest and most effective form of attack. It was not pity that stopped me, still less fear. It was a sense – unfamiliar yet hard, like a tumour in the flesh – that to take a human life was alien to me; that once I took that lethal step I would be changed for ever. My old self would fade away and I would begin a new existence, one where history and the ties of blood had to be forgotten, where the mind might be lively, perhaps, but where the heart would always be silent.