Einstein turns to Fräulein Dukas. ‘I hope to arrive in Dover no later than …’
On the table lies a stack of unopened mail. The range of national postage stamps is even more impressive than usual, but one large brown envelope catches Einstein’s eye. It has no stamps at all. Nor does it bear his name; just the words Villa Savoyarde.
‘Where did this come from?’
Fräulein Dukas looks up from her notepad, waving away an importunate sand fly. ‘It was delivered by motor-cycle messenger. He wanted to give it to you in person, but Detective Dejaeck …’
She nods towards the hall. The envelope is sealed with wax and marked Confidential. Fräulein Dukas does not open mail marked Confidential.
Einstein tears open the envelope. He knows who it is from. Only de Vries sends his mail by private courier.
‘I’ll just be a moment,’ Einstein says and carries the papers inside.
In the sitting room he stops and listens. A rustling sound from the hallway reveals that Detective Dejaeck is reading a newspaper. Elsa is upstairs. The carriage clock on the mantel ticks lightly twice a second. Even before he reads, Einstein feels the clinging fingers of the past. They reach out to claim him. Will an ocean away be far enough? Will he reach his chosen haven at Princeton only to find his old sins hidden in his luggage, waiting to be unpacked?
De Vries’s latest report is reassuring on the main points. He has uncovered no hint of a conspiracy in the Draganović affair, no suggestion that fraud or blackmail was ever contemplated. If Mariya Draganović had a conspirator, it was her psychiatrist, an ambitious but apparently unstable character whose devotion to her case has given rise to comment. There are suggestions of a liaison between the two of them, rumours of a more than professional attachment, but nothing more troubling. That still leaves the possibility that the girl’s claims were the product of a deluded mind, that somewhere, probably in Zürich, she heard the story of Lieserl Einstein and made it her own. Such fantasies are often concocted by damaged minds, perhaps as a means of repairing a chronic sense of insignificance or isolation. Even so, the psychiatrist in Berlin noted no such tendency in Mariya Draganović, no sign of advanced psychosis. Nor was it Einstein’s impression that she was insane. If the woman had been obviously insane, he would have let the matter rest.
Whatever the truth, the girl is no longer being treated at the Charité. De Vries considers it unlikely that she will ever surface in any significant way again. All Einstein’s fears, it seems, were unfounded.
He lowers himself onto the sofa, letting one hand come to rest on the edge of the seat. He finds he craves detail. There is still too much he does not know, uncertainties that may one day coalesce into something threatening, like the remnants of a tumour imperfectly excised.
If the girl was not lying and if she was not mad, then she must simply have been mistaken. Lieserl has been dead for years. At least, that was what they told him. He tries to recall the moment when Mileva gave him the news, the exact circumstances. But he can’t.
A small photograph is glued to the bottom of the final page, the kind used in passports and passport offices, which is probably where de Vries acquired it. This face is more like the one he remembers. Mariya was there in the crowd at the Philharmonic Hall. He had hardly begun to speak when he noticed her. There are usually pretty women at his public lectures, but something in her face held his attention. He found himself looking at her again and again. ‘Have we met?’ he asked her afterwards, as she came through the crowd towards him. It was not a conversational gambit, an opening line. It was the only explanation he could come up with: that they had met before, the memory hovering just out of reach, tantalising and sweet.
What does it matter? There’s no threat here any longer, no potential scandal to prevent his settling in America. The girl is gone and will never return. Only the photograph remains troubling – the very sense of recognition that he once found so compelling. Was it his own flesh and blood he recognised? Was that it?
He pushes his fingers through his long white hair. Why would Mileva lie? To hurt him? But he wasn’t hurt, not a bit. The news of Lieserl’s death, true or false, had no practical consequences whatsoever. Or did that very fact make the deception possible – in fact, easy?
Enclosed with the report is a letter, addressed to the girl. De Vries has attached a note. This item of correspondence appears to have been sent by a resident patient at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic. He calls himself Eduard, but I have not yet been able to ascertain his full identity. Einstein already knows it. The handwriting is unmistakably his son’s.
He begins to read. With the stiffening sea breeze the house is getting cold. He needs his pipe and his jacket. The clock ticks on the mantel. Eduard. He never thought of Eduard, assumed he was far away in a world of his own, incapable of scheming. Or did someone put him up to it? Did someone arm him with information he was never supposed to have? In his absence, old grievances have festered, becoming cankerous.
When he has finished reading, he tears up the letter and de Vries’s report and tosses the pieces into the fireplace. Then he goes out again onto the veranda.
Fräulein Dukas picks up her pad and pencil. ‘I hope to arrive in Dover no later than May twenty-sixth,’ she says, reading back his dictation.
Einstein sits down, shielding his eyes from the sun. Soon the past will loosen its grip. Soon. His life will be lighter, clearer. He will do great things in Princeton. He will tame the Young Turks of quantum mechanics and rescue the sanity of science, once and for all. Once he is free.
He picks up his pipe from the ashtray. The fire in the bowl has gone out. He sucks on cold, tarry air. ‘No later than June first. I shall need to be away a little longer than I thought.’
Forty-eight
Orlovat, 28 April
Dear Dr Kirsch,
Please forgive me if the curiosity that drives me to write this letter is unwelcome to you. It is a month since I left Berlin. In that time I have tried my best to do as you told me: to forget the city and everything that happened there. But I find there are things I have to know and equally things I need to tell you. For though I am no longer your patient or your responsibility in any other way, I fear my sudden departure might have caused you anxiety, or that it might have left you with the wrong impression of my feelings or my state of mind. I think often of the time you spent on me, the protection and care, and the possibility troubles me that I have in return caused you only disquiet.
The first reassurance I seek is that you are well and recovered from the fever. Your friend Dr Schad assured me that you were on the way to recovery and I had reason to believe he was right. Your temperature had fallen; you were at last eating, and you had begun to sleep peacefully without those violent dreams that so frightened me during those first two days. I wish now that I had stayed longer, if only to satisfy my own anxiety, but when you know the truth I hope you will not judge me too harshly.
One of the last things you told me was that you thought you had done no good at the Charité. I had the impression that you thought you had failed me, that your efforts had been for nothing. I want to inform you that you were wrong. If you had recovered a little sooner or if I had left Berlin a little later, you would have seen this for yourself. Today as I write, my memory is all but restored. There are some moments, some episodes from my recent past, that I still cannot recall clearly, but they are few and getting fewer all the time. I have recovered a solid sense of who I am without recourse to invention or second-hand memories. I have needed mental strength to do this, to face what an instinct deep within me was determined to bury in the deepest, darkest place. But that strength, I now know, I found thanks to you. From a distance it is clearer to me than ever: without you I would have continued to exist only as a ghost of myself, learning in time perhaps to play the part, but never to live it.
I was tending you at Herr Mettler’s when the knowledge I had lost began to resurface. It reappeared little by little, in no clear order.
At first I hardly noticed that it was there at all. While you were sleeping that first night I explored the room where once I had stayed, and examined the possessions that were presumably mine. I found the travelling trunk and went through the contents: the books on science, at once so formidable and familiar, the many postcards I had bought but never sent; the photograph album with its empty frames – a clue that sadness lay in my history and would be there for me should I insist on rediscovering it. Gradually the memories of what these things were and what they meant to me drew closer, like something on the tip of the tongue that cannot quite be grasped.
I did not struggle too much to reach them. These were idle moments I passed between sleeping and caring for myself and my patient, for which occupation I was very grateful. Did you know that Frau Mettler let me use her kitchen, and even helped me prepare the food once she learned how ill you were? I found my way around the district quite well, and to Dr Schad’s as you requested. I even took a short cut back from Grenadierstrasse one morning without thinking about it. That should have told me that my memories were returning, but it was another, more concrete clue, that brought the realisation home.
I took seriously what you told me, about Germany not being safe for me any more, but I had no clear idea what form the danger might take. All Herr Mettler would tell me was that people were in the habit of disappearing, and that I should keep off the streets at night. I followed his advice and even when I ventured out during the day – when, I admit, everything seemed quite as normal – I tried to keep my wits about me. I supposed that if I was to disappear, I would first have to be seized and overcome. So I mostly avoided the emptiest streets and alleys, while checking over my shoulder regularly in case anyone was following me. Sometimes I got myself into quite a state, imagining that I had seen this or that stranger before. When I saw someone watching me, it was often all I could do not to turn and run away. Then I did see someone, not following me, but watching the house. I had seen him that morning as I went out to buy bread and milk, hanging around the gates of the Jewish cemetery: a rough-looking man with a florid complexion and a hard, steady gaze. He was there when I returned, not in plain view, but this time inside the cemetery, moving aimlessly from stone to stone, his hands in his raincoat pockets. Herr Mettler thought he was most likely a reporter. Reporters had turned up at his rooming house before, he said, asking impertinent questions. But the man outside did not strike me as having anything to ask. He struck me as a hunter, waiting patiently for his prey to break cover.
Back in the room, I went to the window. I could see no sign of the man, but that did not mean he had gone. Part of me was afraid, part of me said the fear was irrational. The man might simply have been a mourner come to pay his respects to a loved one. But in the back of my mind I must already have been thinking of flight, for as I was weighing the possibilities, I went to a drawer in the chest of drawers where I had a stack of clean petticoats and chemises. Without thinking about it, I reached into the middle of the stack and took out a passport and a handful of banknotes. This was where I had hidden them months before. It was only when I held them in my hand that I realised what I had done: I had remembered.
Dr Schad visited later that day. You were right to put your trust in him, for he was very solicitous and clear in his prescriptions. I asked him about your underlying condition and if what you had told me in your feverish state was true. Perhaps mindful of your privacy he said little. All the same, I had the impression he thought the news must have come as a great shock to me, enough to change whatever feelings I might have had for you. Then he said that I was lucky, being young enough to fix my sights on someone new. He seemed to be under the impression that I was more to you than a patient. I did not correct his assumptions, though at times I wish I had. You see, it was not on account of your illness that I left you so suddenly.
It was the postcards that were responsible, the postcards I must have purchased but never sent. It was the morning of the fourth day. I had left the house as usual to buy food, going out the back way via Herr Mettler’s kitchen. As usual I went to the little bakery at the far end of Tresckowstrasse, but they had run out of bread so I walked a little down the Prenzlauer Allee, looking for another. I had not gone far when I passed a little shop selling newspapers and tobacco. On a display outside the door were postcards of Berlin just like the ones in the room: the exact same views of the exact same places, and others besides. It was the shop where I had bought them.
I had no conscious purpose in stopping, but I did stop. I began to sift through the pictures, especially the newer, coloured ones. It was something I had been in the habit of doing ever since I left my home country. Besides the streets and monuments, some of the cards had pictures of animals: dogs, horses and cats with long fur and bows around their necks. I chose a postcard of some cats and went to pay for it. That was when I remembered who the postcards were for, who they had all been for. I stood in the shop motionless as the memories toppled into my consciousness one after the other, question following answer following question with such speed it made my head spin.
I dropped the postcard and ran out into the street. By now it was busy with people going off to work. They were crowded onto the trams and streaming along the pavements towards Alexanderplatz station. I had my passport and my money in my coat. There was nothing to stop me getting on a train there and then. I felt safe in that crowd, shielded and hidden by its numbers. If I went back to Wörtherstrasse, I was afraid I might never get away again. The watchers would come for me and your warnings would have been for nothing. So when I reached Alexanderplatz I bought an underground ticket to the Potsdam station and from there took a tram to the Anhalt station. There was a train to Munich leaving seven minutes later. This stroke of luck seemed like a confirmation that I was doing the right thing. I bought a ticket and hurried aboard.
I hope you will understand the need I felt to be gone when I tell you that the postcards had all been intended for a child. It is she I remembered in that little shop, she who had heard nothing from me for five long months. She is my daughter. Her name is Anna and she is nine years old. A few days after I left Berlin we were reunited. I am determined now that we shall not be separated again.
It is troubling to me that anything so precious could have been driven from my conscious mind. Often I feel guilty that my love for Anna was not strong enough to hold fast, even against the darkness that enveloped me. What kind of mother is capable of forgetting her child? I have to remind myself that children are all too often forgotten in this world, and that it is not always by choice that the innocent are abandoned. The good opinion of society is an imperative few men have the strength or the courage to resist.
For most of her life Anna has been forced by the circumstances of her birth to live apart from me. It is difficult for a woman with a child out of wedlock to find work as a schoolteacher, even in these modern times. Be that as it may, Anna now lives with me. We have moved back to the country, to the village where I was born. Here the disapproval of the school authorities may be outweighed by their need for staff, or so I have been led to believe. In any event, Anna and I will never be parted again.
You asked me often why I had come to Berlin. I can tell you now that it was on her account. I hoped to dispel a shadow that has hung over Anna’s life since birth, though she has always been unaware of it and always will be if I have my way. Please forgive me if I do not set down in writing the exact nature of it. If I have the good fortune to see you again, I will conceal nothing from you. But for the time being, suffice it to say I failed in my task. The questions remain unanswered, though they trouble me now less than they did. I wonder sometimes if this, like so much else, is thanks to you. In any event, I see more clearly now that this shadow is mine and mine alone. It will die with me and vanish. Neither Anna nor those that go after her will see it, even in their dreams. Light is not truly light until it is observed, so the great minds tell us. In the same way, there can be no disgrace in a story that is never
known.
It is my selfish dream that one day you will come to us here. Anna is a bright and beautiful child, full of curiosity and kindness. There is so much she would delight to learn from you. Even if the time given to us is brief, I would gladly take every hour of it, no matter what care you might need from me. You told me you were done with Berlin. Perhaps this unlikely haven will provide you with the tranquillity you crave and so richly deserve.
If not, please know that you have for ever my gratitude and love.
Your friend,
Mariya
Forty-nine
The train rumbled into Belgrade over a massive iron bridge. His first sight of the white city was of crowded waterfronts and wooded slopes crowned with churches: a southern city of squat houses and red roofs. It wasn’t until he was in a taxi that he found the obligatory grandeur of statehood: wide boulevards and palatial buildings with cupolas and wedding-cake façades. On the streets the horse-drawn carts and carriages outnumbered the trucks and motor cars. The dress of both men and women was funereally sombre and devoid of contemporary style. In the afternoon heat, the city had a lethargic, provincial air: puffed up and vaguely menacing, the kind of place where gentlemen carried knives, the better to avenge any slight to their honour.
In the lobby of the Hotel Moskva, Kirsch consulted the city telephone directory. It was a slender booklet containing just a few thousand names, although the concierge made a point of flipping through the pages, as if to emphasise its heft.
‘Exchange automatski,’ he said, pointing to a telephone cabin at the far end of the lobby. ‘Absolute private.’
Kirsch found the name and number he was looking for, and wrote it down on a scrap of paper, along with the corresponding address.
‘Do you know where this is?’ he asked.
The concierge squinted at the paper. ‘Yes, yes.’ He gestured over his right shoulder. ‘Kataníceva Street.’
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