The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  ‘Can you give me directions?’

  The concierge looked doubtful, as if surrendering such precise intelligence to a German-speaking foreigner was potentially treasonable. ‘Wait,’ he said, and summoned the bellboy.

  The bellboy produced a grubby street map from his back pocket and led Kirsch out into the square. Kataníceva Street was a little way south of the city centre, behind what the map seemed to indicate was a large public building set in a park. Kirsch bought the map and jumped on a southbound tram. The other passengers stared at him as he fumbled for the fare, proffering dinar notes that the conductor merely shook his head at. The women averted their gaze as they moved off. The men continued to stare without a hint of apology. More than anything, a fatty, butcher’s shop smell told him he was a long way from home.

  The large public building turned out to be a church: vast, white and domed in the Orthodox style. The walls had been recently repainted; so that as the sun came out, Kirsch had to shield his eyes. There were swifts in the sky above, their piercing shrieks small in the open space. An old woman sat by the gates, a case of souvenirs and lucky charms open beside her. Kirsch stopped to buy a postcard.

  The houses on Kataníceva Street were several storeys high, with shutters, red roofs and stucco façades, some plain, some decorated with bas-relief cherubs and classical urns; houses, once imposing, now shrunk unwillingly into quaintness by the scale and power of the industrial age. Number 10 was one of the larger properties, its exterior hidden beneath a dead vine. Its fibrous limbs were wrapped like skeletal fingers round every ledge and prominence. The upstairs shutters were open, but otherwise the house had a crumbling, unoccupied look.

  Kirsch rang the bell. Feet shuffled hesitantly across a stone floor. The door opened.

  ‘Dobro jutro.’ Kirsch removed his hat. ‘Frau Helene Savić?’

  He could see nothing of the woman opposite him but the pale oval of her face and a stout silver crucifix swinging from her neck. She blinked at him, whether from surprise or the strength of the light, he could not tell.

  ‘My name is Kirsch, Dr Martin Kirsch.’

  He held out his card. The door opened a few inches further. The woman was dressed all in black with a black scarf wrapped around her head. She was middle-aged, roughly the right age for Aunt Helene, he supposed, although he hadn’t expected to find her dressed like a nun.

  Aunt Helene was reportedly Austrian by birth, a native German-speaker, as her letter to Mileva Einstein-Marić had confirmed; but this woman betrayed no sign of understanding him. Kirsch looked down, saw the huge felt slippers and the cloth with which she had evidently been polishing the floor.

  ‘Frau Helene Savić,’ he said again. ‘Is she here?’

  The woman took the card. ‘Moment,’ she said, and beckoned him inside.

  The hallway had the same look of neglected elegance. The fine striped wallpaper was dull and peeling; black mould had broken out in patches on the ceiling; a large gilt-framed mirror was cloudy with oxidation. The woman – a housekeeper, Kirsch assumed – disappeared upstairs. He heard voices: a man’s, gruff and irritable, the woman’s insistent. He listened for a third voice, the voice of another woman, but there was none. Thirty years had gone by since Helene Savić had written her letter to Mileva Marić. Perhaps she and Milivoj had separated since then. If so, Kirsch hoped they were still in touch.

  It was through Aunt Helene that Mariya had become reacquainted with Mileva. Eduard Einstein had told him that. He had also revealed that his mother was angry with Helene on that account. Kirsch could understand why: Helene was meddling in family business, picking recklessly at an old and shameful wound, bringing an unwelcome ghost back to life. Mileva had other children to think of now, besides her own peace of mind. And there was the famous Einstein name, to which she had clung even after her divorce.

  I urge you to be cautious in this matter and observe the agreements that have been entered into. That was what Helene had written to Mileva thirty years earlier. Something must have brought about the change of heart. A sudden attack of conscience, perhaps? A religious awakening? Or were there material motives? In 1903 Albert Einstein had been a patent clerk; now he was the most famous scientist in the world. Looking around the shabby hallway, breathing in the smell of mildew and stale liquor, Kirsch could imagine how thoughts of profit might take hold. If the Einsteins accepted Mariya, she might find ways to express her gratitude. And if they didn’t, if Mileva refused to acknowledge the truth, then there might be a price for silence too.

  Kirsch had decided that the truth would be his gift to Mariya: the knowledge that Zoltán Draganović had not been her father, that she was an Einstein, and her daughter too. He assumed Helene Savić would be an ally in that cause. Aunt Helene was kind and clever, Eduard had told him. She understood everything.

  Upstairs, a door opened. A man appeared at the top of the stairs: six feet tall, heavy-jowled and obese. He was tying the belt on a quilted dressing gown that was too short for him. He looked down the stairs and frowned, as if faced with an unpalatable challenge.

  ‘Good morning, Dr …’ He squinted at Kirsch’s card, apparently focusing with difficulty.

  ‘Kirsch. Martin Kirsch.’

  ‘Who are you? One of his people, I suppose.’

  Milivoj Savić spoke German with a heavy Slavic accent.

  ‘I’m here on my own account, sir.’

  The man was unsteady on his feet, though he struggled to conceal the fact. The housekeeper brushed past him and came down the stairs, muttering.

  ‘Is it a medical matter?’

  ‘I’m here about Mariya Draganović. I’d like to speak with Frau Savić, if possible.’

  Herr Savić sniffed, arching his back, as if that made him appear less drunk. ‘My wife is not here at present.’

  ‘May I ask when you expect her back?’

  ‘Two or three days. She’s in Novi Sad, visiting …’ Savić planted a steadying hand on the banisters. ‘… friends.’

  This seemed to be all the conversation he could muster. He turned unsteadily and walked back to his room. ‘I shall tell her you called,’ he said, and closed the door.

  Fifty

  Helene Savić, fifty-three years old, petite and grey-haired, sat by a window in the Queen Elisabeth Café with a cold glass of tea in front of her, waiting.

  When she was a child in Austria, tuberculosis germs had attacked Helene’s joints, and in particular her left knee, affecting the growth of her leg. Like her friend Mileva Marić, who suffered from a congenital hip displacement, she had worn an orthopaedic shoe all her life. It was an ugly thing, heavy and black, and impossible to disguise. The best she could do was conceal it beneath full-length skirts, which was one reason why she had continued to wear them long after they had gone out of fashion. She knew they made her look older than she was, even a little ridiculous during the summer months, but Belgrade was not Vienna, let alone Paris. And since Milivoj had lost his job at the ministry, fashionable clothes had been beyond her means in any case. Only now, when it was too late, did she wish she could wear something prettier, a tailored outfit perhaps, with matching jacket and a calf-length skirt, like the ones she occasionally glimpsed in fashion magazines. Just for this one day, she wished she could look young again.

  She stared out across the square beside the theatre, squinting into the light. Thin cloud moved silently across the face of the sun. Her grip tightened on the scuffed leather satchel that lay in her lap.

  The satchel belonged to her eldest daughter, Julka. The meeting with Albert had been arranged a fortnight ago – that, at least, was when she had received the telegram – but not until that morning had she thought about what to put the letters in, letters that, until then, she had kept locked away in her desk. Julka was grown up and married now, with two children and a volunteer job at the General State Hospital. She had no use for the satchel, but still Helene worried that she might miss it, that it might hold some sentimental value. She blushed at the thought of
having to explain that she had given it away.

  A wagon went by outside, horseshoes clattering over the old Turkish cobbles. The clock behind the bar read half past one.

  It had been a mistake to choose a table by the window. Albert wouldn’t want to sit where he could be seen from the street. But it was too late. Helene could not ask to move without drawing more attention to herself, and hence to Albert. The waiters were quite attentive enough already, fussing around her with menus, cake trolleys and suggestions of the day. She wondered briefly if they would recognise him. It was twenty-five years since he had been a regular visitor. But then, of course they would: Albert’s was a face the whole world knew. What was less certain was whether he would recognise her.

  There was a knife on the table. She edged forward, trying to catch her reflection in the blade. How changed she would seem to him now, how old and worn out – by time, by childrearing, most of all by the inexorable erosion of hope. Sometimes she wished she had never left Austria or, like Mileva, had found herself a husband in Switzerland, where life was easier.

  Albert had never approved of Milivoj Savić. He considered the man too stupid for her, too limited. He had all but said so to her face. She had not been put out. If anything she had been flattered that Albert should have such a high regard for her intelligence. As for his liaison with Mileva Marić, that had made Helene equally uneasy, though for very different reasons. Albert had never understood Mileva. He had never understood the depths of unhappiness of which she was capable, or her need for love.

  Mileva had all but resigned herself to spinsterhood before Albert came along. She was pretty enough in her way, but fate had given her a limp and a shy, melancholy nature. She could not dance or flatter her way into a man’s affections. The only man she had even tried to please was her father, Milos Marić, and there, at least, she had succeeded. Mileva had been his favourite, his greatest source of pride – until, of course, she had dishonoured him.

  What had Albert seen in Mileva? Surely not her command of differential calculus, her ability to understand his experiments and theories – although that was certainly a great novelty where females were concerned. Perhaps it was simply the way she took care of him, the cosiness and companionship that came with complete, unquestioning devotion. Then there was Albert’s mother. She detested the little Serbian cripple, as she had once called her. She slandered and ridiculed her so viciously that word of it regularly brought Mileva to tears. But it only made her more appealing in Albert’s eyes. Looking back, Helene saw it clearly: the way he had cultivated detachment. Even in the face of his own instincts and desires, he had forced it on himself. Defying his mother, the most important woman in his life, was hard, no doubt. But that was why he had felt compelled to do it. It was a test he could not allow himself to fail.

  What he had not seen – or had not cared to see – was how love changed Mileva’s life: how everything became centred on him and dependent on him. There was no greater proof of that than the conception of Lieserl. In Vojvodina, such transgressions against family honour were paid for in blood. Even a fiancé who anticipated his wedding night could easily end up with his throat cut. For his impregnated lover, exile and disgrace were the least she could expect. Perhaps Mileva had not cared because she was in exile already. The great Einsteinian cosmos had become her country, her world.

  Albert’s telegram had been more of a summons than an invitation. There had never been any suggestion that he might come to Belgrade. Presumably he did not want to meet Milivoj, or feared that he might be uncooperative. Unemployment had hit Helene’s husband hard. Perhaps Mileva had told Albert about his drinking and his ranting; the way he would not leave the house for days at a time. If so, Helene regretted having told her. Such things were between them. Milivoj, for all his faults, had always been an honest man.

  The waiter came and took away Helene’s glass. She was too preoccupied to stop him. He came back with the bill. She was taking money from her purse when a stranger walked into the café. He had wrinkled, freckly skin, like a peasant’s, but his shirt was crisp and his suit fashionably double-breasted. He took off his hat and looked around the room, his gaze going methodically from table to table. Then he was staring at her with a pair of pale, penetrating eyes.

  The purse slipped from her grasp and fell to the floor. She bent down to retrieve it, almost losing the satchel from her lap. When she looked up again, the stranger had gone.

  A dusty blue motor car had pulled up outside. A group of young women went by, talking in whispers. They stopped right outside the window and looked back at the vehicle. Then they turned and hurried away, giggling and clutching each other by the arm. Albert had arrived. The girls must have seen him draw up: an old man who bore an extraordinary resemblance to Professor Einstein. It would not have occurred to them that he actually was Professor Einstein, not here in this small Serbian town, where there were neither telescopes nor a university to elicit his attention. Besides, Albert was too famous, too much a legend, to be truly incarnate in any one place and time. It struck Helene that he had become, like the divinities of monotheistic religion, universal. Everywhere and nowhere. She wondered if that had been his aim all along, the secret longing that fuelled his insatiable curiosity.

  He wore an unfamiliar black hat, with a wide brim and a tall crown and a crease in the top like a cowboy’s. A pipe was clenched between his teeth. His striped tie was secured with a small, untidy knot. He came towards her, acknowledging her with a wave of his pipe. He pulled off his hat as he sat down. His hair was longer and wilder than it used to be, streaked with grey and white, the original colour only visible above his ears. Apparently the second Frau Einstein did not take as much care of him as the first.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘here I am.’

  Immediately the waiter reappeared and handed him a menu.

  ‘Coffee, black,’ he said, handing it back again. ‘Two cups.’

  It was as if he had been away for an hour or two, instead of twenty years. He fished in his pocket for a box of matches. The smell of tobacco was heavy on his clothes. As a young man he had struck Helene as quite dapper, despite his modest means, but now there was a slovenliness about him. Appearances, she supposed, were no longer of any use to him.

  It came to Helene that she was staring. ‘Albert,’ she said. ‘Dear Albert.’

  Dear Albert? What was she saying? She blushed – blushed like a schoolgirl at her first dance. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  Albert gave her an indulgent smile, his dark eyes glistening. He struck the match and applied it to the bowl of his pipe. The smoke gave off a surprisingly fruity smell. Helene found it much more agreeable than the dry, chemical stink of her husband’s cigarettes.

  Einstein seemed to read her mind. ‘An American blend,’ he said, tossing the match into an ashtray. ‘They call it Revelation. With a name like that …’ He tucked his thumbs into his waistcoat pocket and took in his surroundings. ‘This place feels different.’

  ‘It’s the same. A little shabbier.’ Helene glanced at the scuffed furniture, the white cotton curtains, now yellowed with age, the chipped and smeary wainscoting that had been badly re-varnished so that its flaws were more obvious than ever. ‘It hasn’t been done up for years. There isn’t any money.’

  ‘It’s the only place I could remember,’ Albert said brightly. ‘Always excellent coffee.’

  Helene felt sure the coffee would be a let-down as much as the café itself. The standard of provisions had declined, along with the affluence of the local bourgeoisie. Before the war, Novi Sad had enjoyed a certain strategic importance as a border town. Its bridge over the Danube was a crucial point of entry into the Austro–Hungarian empire. In the customs service and the military there were government jobs aplenty, and commercial opportunities too. These days, Novi Sad found itself marooned in the middle of Yugoslavia, a market town with more than its share of grand buildings; the last stop before Belgrade.

  ‘I shall miss that,’ Albert added. �
��The Americans know tobacco. But the art of making coffee is completely lost on them.’

  Helene had heard that he was going back to America. Could it really be for ever?

  ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked. ‘On Kisacka Street?’ Albert looked puzzled, as if the name meant nothing to him. ‘The Marić house.’

  ‘Oh.’ Albert frowned. ‘No. Zorka lives there now.’

  He tapped the pipe against his teeth, as if spelling out the implications of this statement in Morse code. Albert had never shown much consideration for Mileva’s younger sister; and she, in turn, had always been terrified of him. She had been psychologically scarred by what had happened to her in the war (Helene still shuddered to think of it). Probably no man, certainly no Serbian man, would have been eager to marry a woman who had been raped by a gang of soldiers, even assuming she had been willing. But that was no reason to avoid her. She had never hurt a soul in her life.

  ‘If she’s alone then there’s surely more room for a guest,’ Helene said.

  Albert sucked thoughtfully on his pipe. ‘The house is full of cats, apparently. She picks up strays from the street. It drives the servants mad, and her mother’s too old to stop her.’

  ‘I’m sure you’d still be welcome there.’

  ‘The hotel’s quite adequate. We’re leaving tomorrow in any case.’

  ‘We? You aren’t here alone?’

  Albert glanced out of the window. The taxi was still there, waiting. ‘I’m obliged to travel with a companion. Elsa insists, and so do my American paymasters. These days I can’t take a walk on the beach without detectives falling in behind me.’

  ‘He’s a detective?’ Helene said, craning her neck.

  ‘When paid to detect, yes. On this occasion he has other duties. Elsa imagines Nazi agents round every corner.’

  ‘A bodyguard.’ The idea struck Helene as fantastical and perverse. How could anyone think of killing Albert Einstein? ‘Does he have a gun?’