A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

“Hello, Karel. It’s been an age, hasn’t it?”

  She kissed him lightly on one cheek, even as he was wrestling her name from the depths of consciousness.

  Zette Borg. The low-temperature physicist from his days in Cambridge. Zette Borg—known by all the men as the Ice Queen, but less for her specialization than for her nature. Americans would not be so coy—he’d bet they called her a ball breaker.

  “Zette. How good of you to meet me.”

  Of course Leo would recruit her. It made sense. The low-temperature people, once you got them off their obsession with absolute zero, knew as much about particle behaviour as anyone.

  It had been an age. He struggled to remember when. Many, most, of his colleagues had gathered around him when he had been told he would be interned in 1939. Had she been one of those?

  “Leo’s rather tied up this evening. He’ll join us later if he can. If not . . . a domani.”

  She slipped one arm through his and steered him firmly through the waiting room to the cab ramp.

  “Forty-fourth and Broadway,” she told the driver.

  She settled back. Szabo could not settle. Everything was a question. He could ask a thousand questions if she let him.

  “Is that where we work? Or where we live?”

  “Neither. I’ve a table for two booked at Sardi’s. I figured the first thing you’d want is a decent meal.”

  Figured. How very American. Meal . . . how very . . . how very refugee . . . the life of the belly.

  O, Canada.

  O, America.

  O, Manhattan.

  §30

  He’d seen nothing like Sardi’s since his last visit to Vienna. If London had anything like this—a crowded room decked with the detritus of showbiz, buzzing with the bustle of Broadway—he hadn’t found it—or, more precisely, no one had bothered to show it to him. His English colleagues took him to their clubs and professional bodies—the Athenaeum or the Royal Society, and on one bizarre occasion the Swedenborg Society—rather than restaurants. There was one London club devoted to the theatre—the Garrick—but he’d never been there and he doubted very much whether it had photographs of Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy on the walls or whether it served cannelloni.

  Sardi’s was alive. He’d been in London clubs where he could swear none but the waiters were. And he remembered a novel by Dorothy somebody or other—there’d been a copy in the makeshift library in the Ontario camp—in which a London club member dies in his leather armchair, clutching his scotch and soda and his copy of The Times, and no one notices for two days.

  “Stop grinning and order!”

  He snapped to to find himself holding a Sardi’s menu and being gently berated by the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  “Anyway, what’s so funny?” she added.

  “The English,” he replied.

  She looked around and said a little too loudly, “Well, I bet there are none of the buggers in here tonight. And I never found them funny for a moment.”

  By the main course she was ready to talk shop. She never used the words nuclear, fission, or bomb, but it occurred to Szabo that they could probably discuss the assassination of J. Edgar Hoover and not be overheard in the hubbub.

  “Leo is trying to gather the Oxbridge team around him. He wants Rudolf Peierls—who somehow managed to escape internment. And he wants Hermann Bondi, who didn’t. They came for Hermann about six months after they came for you. The silly sods. Just when I thought that sort of nonsense had stopped, they had another push and rounded up every Italian chef in London and the finest minds in Cambridge. By June, you couldn’t put tomato sauce on your neutrinos for love or money.”

  It hadn’t been a team. Too disparate for that. It was perhaps an invisible web of ideas, of exchange. She was being, dare he think it, sentimental. He doubted she ever felt that way about an individual.

  “Hermann is here,” he said.

  “Here? Where?”

  “I meant in Canada. I don’t know where. We didn’t get sent to the same camp. But he was on the boat coming over.”

  “Then I’m sure Leo will find him. Meanwhile, Peierls is back in England—probably determining the atomic weight of boiled cabbage or some such rot—when he should be with us.”

  “The last I heard, and admittedly I am out of touch, Peierls was designing a cyclotron. Hardly boiled cabbage”

  “Don’t be obtuse. You know what I mean. The English wouldn’t let him work on radar because it was vital war work and he was German. As a matter of fact, he has citizenship now, and he’s working on thermal diffusion, but I rather think that’s only because they haven’t a clue that this, too, might be vital war work. The English can be such idiots.”

  Szabo could not disagree with this, but Zette had a hatred of England that could not be shared or emulated by someone not born and brought up there.

  §31

  She had an apartment on West Seventy-third, just off Central Park, in the looming shadow of the Dakota building.

  When Szabo asked where he might be staying, she took him home with her.

  The fuck was passionate and heartless. She took him with a loud desperation. He was a machine—the rod to her cleft. After eighteen months and more of enforced celibacy he found it in him not to mind being ravished by beauty. His own desperation much the quieter.

  §32

  In the morning, she sat opposite him at the tiny kitchen table. A crimson terrycloth dressing gown up to her cheekbones, her hair lost in a high white spiral turban of towel. The most beautiful barber’s pole in the world.

  In all the camps he had been in there had been men whose sense of deprivation would express itself verbally after only a matter of hours. Interned for weeks, months even, one had to learn to turn off to the sexual fantasists for whom life without women was no life at all or else the welter of sexual imagery—so often begun as testament to virtue and beauty, and so soon descended to “what I wouldn’t do to her if I got half a chance”—would bore and appal the most polite of listeners. Zette Borg, devoid of all makeup, damp and staring into her coffee, was the stuff of wankers’ dreams. What wouldn’t the priapic internee do to her given the half chance? Probably what he had just done.

  The smell of coffee, better by far than anything that had passed by that name in Canada or England, drew him out of his reverie.

  “Do you know if Leo has made any arrangements for me to live or work?”

  She looked up. He could almost swear she was smiling.

  “Work? Well you’re on the staff of Columbia University. In fact, I think you’ll find at the end of the month that you’ve been on the payroll since the first of the month. American universities are generous. The equivalent of £1250 a year and you won’t have to teach a thing. We none of us do. We pursue our livelihood in theories. Live? Usually they’d book you into the Taft hotel in Times Square. There’s a Taft in every city. A bit like Woolworths or the Home and Colonial. It seems that when he wasn’t busy being president, Mr. Taft opened hotels wherever he went. The one in Times Square is particularly bad. In fact it’s a knocking shop.”

  “Knocking shop?”

  “English slang for a brothel. It’s not a brothel, of course. It’s the sort of hotel to which you’d take a woman to whom you were not married. I rescued you from that.”

  “And now?”

  “You might as well stay here.”

  Such diffidence. As though she might simply shrug and say “so what” if he opted for the knocking shop.

  “I mean, it’s not over till it’s over, is it?”

  She took her coffee and vanished once more into the bathroom.

  Szabo wondered about the imprecision of “it.”

  §33

  Leo Szilard chose to live in a hotel. Hotels supplied him with something that struck at the heart of the refugee sensibility—room service.

  For tea, he chose the nearest thing he could find to a patisserie in the vicinity of Zette’s apartment—on Columbus Avenue between Seventy-
first and Seventy-second streets.

  “They have this überphrase—” he told Szabo.

  “Überphrase?”

  “A catchall. It is diner. It can mean several things. At one extreme ham and eggs . . . ‘sunnyside up’ I understand—it’s logical, graphic—‘over easy’ baffles me . . . at the other extreme diner might mean cake and tea. Never presume what diner means until you see their menu. That, and don’t cross against the lights are all you need to know about life in New York.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, I was forgetting their coffee. I think it violates one of the laws of physics. One cannot see through real coffee down to the trademark on the bottom of the cup. It ought not to be possible, any more than one can see through the Large Magellanic Cloud. Yet the Americans have done this. After years of patient experiment they have made coffee so thin one can see through it. Who knows what America might yet achieve? With our help they might bend light or fuse hydrogen atoms.”

  “But we’re here for tea. Why am I suddenly apprehensive about a pot of tea?”

  “Don’t be. I have trained them to make tea. Pot to the kettle—”

  “—Not kettle to the pot? Leo, you’re beginning to sound almost English. The very people from whom you just rescued me. Isn’t it time you told me why?”

  It was typical of Leo to move effortlessly between the flippant and the serious.

  “Eighteen months ago, I went to see Einstein and the two of us composed a letter to President Roosevelt urging the development of a United States atomic project. We were quite clear about our belief that the Germans were doing the same. It was months before we received any reply, and while the reply was positive, we still have next to no funding. Hence the convenience of Columbia University. At Einstein’s request, you and Zette are on salary until I do have funding. Meanwhile, I have raised money . . . privately . . .”

  “Privately?”

  “Begged, borrowed, scrounged . . . the last word fits best—that is what I have become, a scrounger . . . scrounging to begin industrial production of graphite and uranium.”

  “Then you’ve raised a fortune.”

  “Shall I say modest production. I intend to build a reactor.”

  Szabo thought better of pressing Leo too far on this. He could not conceive of the building of a nuclear reactor as a modest enterprise.

  “What’s my role?”

  “Help Fermi build the reactor. It will take a while before we can do anything off the drawing board. Meanwhile, you have an office . . .”

  “I’ve seen it. It’s empty. I don’t have a drawing board. A desk, a chair. Not so much as a speck of dust or a paper clip.”

  “I love empty. Empty is beautiful. The beauty of empty is you get to fill it. We may be short of money, but we are rich in talent. We already have an ad hoc coalition of minds. Arthur Compton at Chicago, Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi here at Columbia, Hans Bethe at Cornell, Eugene Wigner at Princeton. All us meddling foreigners. And of course we have Teller. I couldn’t keep Teller out of this if I tried.”

  “And long-term?”

  “Long-term? Long-term we need uranium in quantity. I hear rumours of huge stockpiles of uranium oxide out on Staten Island, but that’s Staten Island for you. It’s very existence is a rumour. I’ve never met anyone who’s been there. It may be mythical. And, of course, we need plutonium, too.”

  “They called it plutonium?”

  “I’m not sure they had any choice. At least fifty different people suggested it. And who would ever call an element seaborgium? So . . . while you build us a graphite reactor, others will go down the parallel routes. Build more cyclotrons, plants for chemical diffusion, perhaps a heavy-water reactor to make plutonium-239.”

  It was almost the last thing he expected. A heavy-water reactor. The very thing he had deemed a waste of time in the extraction of deuterium was now the bottle that held the genie of plutonium.

  “You know, Leo, I recall the English had a phrase to describe what you are doing. They call it belt and braces.”

  “Oh? What does it mean?”

  “It means a man in deep fear of his trousers falling down.”

  §34

  In the June of 1942, Magda Ewald (trombone) vanished. Méret did not ask what had become of her. No one did. She was replaced in the Vienna Youth Orchestra by a skinny boy who looked as though he did not have the lungs to play brass, and played nowhere near as well as Magda.

  §35

  Chicago: December 2, 1942

  It was twenty feet high, twenty five feet across, and looked for all the world like a giant doorknob. They called it a pile—and they had built it by piling up layers of dead graphite in alternate layers with graphite carrying a uranium load. It was nicknamed the egg-boiling experiment, but its formal name was Nuclear Reactor CP-1.

  Despairing of ever getting his pile completed by commercial firms, Enrico Fermi had taken over a squash court under the stand at Stagg football field, University of Chicago, and assembled two teams of scientists to build the pile themselves. The bomb beneath the bleachers, Szabo called it. No one bothered to tell the University of Chicago.

  Szabo thought he would freeze in the big, unheated squash court, but the sheer effort of lifting hundreds of thousands of pounds of blocks into place offset any cold. It was like a game he had played in childhood, when his father had challenged him to build a sphere with the multicoloured wooden blocks in his toy box. And when he succeeded they had all the fun of knocking it down and building it all over again. What he would never get used to was the dirt. Graphite dust on every surface, turning the floor into a skating rink, and everyone in the room into a nigger minstrel, black of face and white of teeth.

  They were still filthy when the observers arrived, thirty to forty people crowding the balcony of the squash court to watch the test. Outside it was even colder than inside. Leo Szilard arrived bundled up in his Astrakhan overcoat and homburg and gloves and galoshes. He could have been at home in Budapest, wandering in from a winter stroll down some forgotten boulevard in some forgotten decade of a forgotten empire. Once inside he didn’t take any of it off.

  Around noon, a safety device cut in prematurely and shut the reactor down far short of critical. Most men would have sworn, Fermi just said, “I’m hungry, let’s get lunch.”

  They trekked outside across snow so cold it shone blue and creaked like a wooden ship when they set foot on it. The Americans had just introduced petrol rationing. Leo said, “The day they ration cake I surrender to Hitler.”

  It was gone quarter to four before the reactor approached critical again. The last cadmium rod limiting the reaction was slowly removed at 3:48. The uranium went into spontaneous fission and began a chain reaction that Fermi shut down after four and a half minutes. They had generated half a watt of power.

  Szabo had known what to expect of the pile. It wouldn’t buzz or hum; it wouldn’t melt down. He had no expectations of his colleagues. He had wondered if they’d cheer—after all they’d been present at the world’s first chain reaction—but the mood was quiet. There had been no whizzes and bangs, just the mechanical recording of data on a roll.

  Fellow Hungarian Eugene Wigner would not let the moment fizzle out, and with a straw-bound bottle of Chianti seduced the Italian in Fermi away from the scientist long enough to splash wine into paper cups. There was no toast. They all looked at Fermi in silence. Then someone said, “Enrico, this is history. You must sign the bottle.” And he did.

  Twenty minutes later, only Szabo, Fermi, and Leo were left on the balcony. Someone had taken the piece of history home with them.

  Leo’s mood had changed, but then Szabo had always known it would.

  “Enrico, this will go down as a black day in the history of mankind.” Fermi said nothing. Nor did Szabo.

  §36

  Vienna: February 14, 1944

  It was her birthday.

  Her twentieth.

  A hurry-home day.

  She had no idea what her
father had planned. Before the war he had surprised her. Something unimagined, something extravagant. These days he surprised her in more modest ways, but still surprised her.

  She boarded a tram at dusk, just outside the Konservatorium. There was snow on the streets. Not enough to stop a tram—little or nothing could do that—but it left the interior dank and moist, the floorboards running with water, the passengers glistening, the windows blurry with condensation.

  Two stops on, a man took the empty seat next to her. It was gloomy, no lamps lit for Allied bombers to see from above, and she only realized it was Roberto Cacciato when he spoke to her.

  She had been in a daydream, mentally rehearsing her part in a Mozart symphony. Her right hand twitching at the neck of an invisible cello.

  “What have I missed?” he said.

  It jerked her back to the moment.

  “Oh . . . the Prague. You missed the Prague symphony. In fact, I think you’ve missed every rehearsal we’ve had for it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Not much for a clarinet to do in it. Besides, I know the part backwards.”

  “Why don’t you come?”

  He tapped the brown paper parcel he was holding.

  “There are other things one must do.”

  She was about to ask him what he meant when the tram braked suddenly. She wiped at the condensation on the window next to her. There were soldiers running in the street, then the front door of the tram opened and an SS Hauptsturmführer stepped onto the platform.

  She turned to look at Roberto, but as the front door had opened so had the rear and he had leapt through it to the street and run off.

  As he rounded the back of the tram, running as fast as a man with a club foot can, three soldiers out in the square shouldered their carbines almost idly, and without a word of warning, shot him in the back.

  He fell face down on the thin sheet of snow, a spreading red stain over his heart on the back of his blue jacket, his hat cartwheeling off to spin to a standstill twenty paces away.