The Einstein Girl

by Philip Sington

  He hurries into the graveyard. His left eye is caking up with blood. He hears voices up ahead, shouting. Einstein is standing stock still. Kirsch is running towards him, one arm raised. Is there something in his hand? A knife? A gun?

  De Vries sees Einstein look at him. He seems rooted to the spot. He points at Kirsch as if to say do something. De Vries raises the Walther, gripping it with both hands. He has only fired it once before, and that was more than a year ago, the day he bought it. He went out to the woods and shot at rotten apples, missing every single one of them. He needs practice, but the bullets are too expensive. What if he misses Kirsch and hits the professor? What will he do then?

  Kirsch grabs Einstein by the arm. There is no more time. He must shoot. Now.

  ‘God help me.’

  De Vries’s hands are shaking as he takes aim.

  The unnatural way the body lurches, it’s as if some web of invisible forces keeping him compact and upright has faltered. Coordination, form and direction disintegrate into shapeless disarray. For a moment Kirsch regains his balance, a questioning look on his face, before sinking to his knees.

  Albert is running for the gate. De Vries is there with blood on his face, thrusting something into his coat pocket. It comes to Mariya that he must have fired the shot. It’s all a mistake. It’s all for nothing.

  She runs to Kirsch, helps him onto his back. She can’t see the wound. It must be under his coat somewhere. She tries to look but he grabs her by the arms, like a blind man.

  ‘Is he safe?’ His face is deathly white. ‘Is he safe?’

  It’s all he wants to know. The bells have stopped ringing. From the square she hears the slam of car doors, the growl of an engine.

  Kirsch gasps, begins to roll over. Mariya helps him down onto his side – it must be the side, she remembers that. On his side there’s less chance he’ ll drown in his own blood. She needs an ambulance, she needs to get Kirsch to a hospital. The churchyard is empty, but there must be people in the church. There must be people to ring the bells.

  ‘I’m coming back,’ she says. ‘Lie still. Lie still now.’

  His hands are still around her arm. Gently she prises them free and crosses them under his chin.

  Fifty-two

  The sun is bright in the sky. It shines in his face, almost blinding him. Has he been shot? He must have been. Better than a shell burst, at least. Better a bullet than shrapnel. Bullets are easier to extract, the wounds tidier. The hard part is stopping the bleeding.

  Already he can see the surgeon cutting the clothes from his body, the nurses cleaning the wound with forceps and cotton. Soon they will give him the chloroform or morphine to take away the pain. If only his heart would stop pounding so hard. He doesn’t want to pass out. He wants to know for certain that he wasn’t too late.

  He rolls onto his back. The sun is now two suns, yellow and hot. The nurses are dressed as nuns. With the masks and the habits, all he can see of them is their eyes: attentive yet void of expression. With a stab of regret it comes to him that the Draganović case is finally closed. There is nothing more he can do. He tries to console himself with the thought that one day, when the time is right and Mariya far away, he may write it up for a psychiatric journal. There may be lessons to learn, conclusions for men wiser than himself to draw.

  A white curtain covers a window, billowing in the wind like a sail. One of the surgeons leans closer, the trace of a frown on his brow. Beneath his mask his lips move, but Kirsch can hear no sound.

  He closes his eyes. Soon it seems that he is floating, not on the dark water of his nightmares, but on a glimmering, limpid sea. There are voices on the shore, some that he has not heard in a long time. They call to him. There was so much they want to know, so many stories he has to tell them. They have been waiting all this time.

  Still he hopes he will not reach them too soon. He wants to stay with Mariya a little longer. He wants to know that everything is all right now. He wants to look into her face and see her smile – the way she was smiling the first time he saw her. He wants a photograph or a sketch: something to remember her by. He tries calling to her, but his jaw is stiff and lifeless. His mouth will not form her name. What is her name anyway? Mariya or Elisabeth? What name will she chose, now that the choice is hers?

  When he wakes again she is sitting beside him, holding his hand. His whole body feels heavy so that even turning his head requires effort. This time when he says her name it comes out loud and clear.

  She leans closer. ‘I’m here. Lie still now.’

  Across the room a nurse is moving from bed to bed, distributing linen. She looks up for a moment, then continues with her work. The whitewashed ceiling is vaulted, as in a chapel or a medieval castle. An open window looks out onto trees. Then he remembers.

  ‘Is he safe?’ he says. ‘Is he safe?’

  ‘Quite safe.’

  ‘You were followed. It was a trap.’

  She nods, smiling, almost. ‘It’s as well you were there. Or he would be dead. You saved his life.’

  The idea has not occurred to him before. He has saved Albert Einstein’s life. No one could ask any more of him. Even Max would have been proud of him – Max more than anyone.

  For a few moments he feels no pain at all. He feels light.

  ‘He found you, at last. Your father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She brings a glass of water to his lips. It comes to him that he is, in fact, thirsty. He drinks carefully, but still the water runs down his chin.

  ‘Go to America with him. You and your daughter. It’s safer there.’

  Mariya takes the glass away and places it on the bedside table. When she looks at him again she is smiling properly.

  ‘All right then. But you will have to come with us.’

  ‘Me?’

  She is holding his hands with both of hers.

  ‘My father thought that was a fine idea. Will you come once you’re better?’

  He has often imagined America and what Mariya’s life will be like there. He sees her now, sitting on the porch of a white clapboard house. She’s hard at work, a pencil in her hand, a notebook in her lap, just like the one she had in Berlin. Through an open window he can see her father pacing up and down, puffing on his pipe as he awaits the fruits of her labours. In the yard a young girl is skipping on a rope, counting under her breath. Dry leaves tumble across the grass beneath her feet. He is walking up the path, wheeling a bicycle. Mariya looks up and smiles.

  ‘Once I’m better,’ he says and closes his eyes.

  Mariya leaves the hospital half an hour later. The policeman dozing in the corridor does not stir. She has already given his superiors a statement to the effect that she was alone in the graveyard, visiting her sister’s grave. Both the assailant and the victim are unknown to her, likewise the cause of the quarrel. So far no one has seen fit to challenge her testimony. Perhaps that will change now that there is a fatality to investigate, if the local investigators are diligent. But she doubts if that will be the case. The death of an unknown foreigner is curious, but little more than that. It poses no threat to the tranquillity of the town. Meanwhile, her father and his bodyguard are long gone.

  Her daughter arrives with Maja Lukić just as Mariya is stepping out onto the street. In honour of the occasion, she wears her new blue dress and her dark hair has been tied back with a ribbon. Mariya crouches down and holds the girl close.

  ‘She’s been very good the whole way,’ Maja says. ‘She loves going on the train.’

  ‘I wanted him to see her,’ Mariya says. She doesn’t want to cry in front of the child but it’s hard to keep back the tears, hard to keep her voice calm and level.

  ‘Him?’ Maja Lukić’s voice drops to a whisper. ‘Do you mean the famous scientist?’

  Mariya takes a deep breath. She stands up, brushes the dust from her skirt. ‘No. His name was Martin Kirsch.’ She takes her daughter’s hand and leads her away. ‘He was a doctor.’

  Dear Elisab
eth,

  I am adding this final note to remind you of my request, and to ask that you do not judge too harshly this unruly flight of imagination, which will soon exist – if it exists at all – in your mind alone, to the exclusion of all others in the world. It is your story in more senses than one, since you are both inside it as a character and outside it as a reader. Knowing this, I hope you will not be offended by my presumption; for a reader, like a man of science, cannot help but shape what he observes according to his senses, experience and assumptions. So you and I, like parents, must share responsibility for the nature of this, our offspring, however unfair the circumstances of the conception.

  I hope you found Dr Kirsch an agreeable companion over these many pages. In truth, I have yet to encounter a doctor of psychiatry quite like him. He is the kind of psychiatrist I should like to have been, had my temperament been stronger and my mind better ordered. I would even embrace the manner of his death, which is, in its way, happier than many states of life. Who would not rather die in a great cause, even an illusory one, than live without dreams?

  I like to imagine that Niels Bohr and his allies would see the merit in my novel. But my father would be sure to hate it with every fibre of his being. That is why you would be well advised never to let him see it. He would deny his part in shaping its character, as he denies his part in shaping mine, and, for that matter, yours. He would have no hesitation in calling it the work of a madman, seeing as how its characters – in you and me and Dr Kirsch – exist in different places at once, like the quanta he is so determined to pin down. But then, he calls many things mad that he does not care for. Perhaps that is easier than accepting them. Still, another part of me wishes he could see what I have written, however it disgusts him; so that he might know a little of the price that has been paid for his freedom.

  I hope I have represented candidly my own character and conduct, and the nature of my disturbance. In retrospect, I find I can see my eccentricities quite clearly, as if they belonged to another man altogether. Nonetheless, it has been hard to recount the more extreme lapses of which I am, of course, ashamed – especially knowing that they will become more frequent and more intolerable with the passage of time. I am only glad that I have succeeded in completing this story before my treatment here begins in earnest. The effort demanded inspiration – inspiration which you gave me.

  All that remains is to settle on a title. I have decided that the choice shall be yours. I will follow your suggestion, whatever it is. It is not much of a gift, but there is little else I have to give, having in this place no power and no possessions, only a few clothes, my music and my thoughts. At least you, Elisabeth, know what power may lie in the gift of a name, for better or for worse – you, of all people.

  Whatever happens, remember me as I was.

  Yours always,

  Eduard

  Historical Note

  Following the proclamation of the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases on 14 July 1933, around 400,000 people underwent involuntary sterilisation in Germany. The majority were patients in mental hospitals and other institutions. Between 1939 and 1945 a further 250,000 mentally and physically handicapped people were murdered as part of a covert operation known as T–4. The principal architects of the Nazi race hygiene programme, including Dr Eugen Fischer, were never prosecuted.

  After his father’s final departure for America in October 1933, Eduard Einstein’s mental health deteriorated rapidly. He spent the remaining thirty-two years of his life as a patient of the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich, where he underwent a variety of treatments, including insulin coma and electro-convulsive therapy. He never saw his father again.

  After a clandestine arrival in New York, Albert Einstein took up a position at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. There the quest for a Unified Field Theory continued to absorb his attention to the exclusion of almost all other problems. He was still making calculations in hospital in the hours before his death in April 1955. This labour of more than twenty-five years is today regarded by physicists as of little scientific value. The central tenets of quantum mechanics have yet to be successfully challenged.

  In 1986 previously secret correspondence between Einstein and Mileva Marić was opened to public scrutiny. It revealed for the first time the existence of a daughter born to the couple a year before their marriage. The child was referred to as Lieserl (Elisabeth), and was delivered on or around 27 January 1902, probably in Titel, a village in the then Austro–Hungarian province of Vojvodina. There is evidence to suggest she was mentally handicapped. Her fate remains unknown.

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to acknowledge the generous assistance in researching this book of Barbara Wolff of the Albert Einstein Archive at the Jewish National & University Library, Jerusalem and Osik Moses of the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech in Pasadena.

  I should also like to thank Alice Meyer for her recollections of inter-war Germany; Claudia and Heiko Geithner, Jonathan Scherer and Clare Scherer for their helpful comments on the first draft; Christopher Zach for his many invaluable insights and suggestions; Peter Straus, Stephen Edwards and Laurence Laluyaux for their enthusiastic advocacy, and James Gurbutt for giving the book a chance.

  Finally I should like to thank my parents, Peter and Dorothy Sington, for their unfailing encouragement and support through thick and thin.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Epub ISBN 9781409079187

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  Published by Vintage 2010

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  Copyright © Philip Sington 2009

  Philip Sington has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Harvill Secker

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