“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Henry, have you gotten any packages for me since we’ve been in Göttingen?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “All the mail that came for you went straight to you.”
I started to cry. “It’s lost,” I wailed. “He lost it. He said he sent it over, but it never came.”
Henry sat down next to me and took my hands in hers. “Steady now,” she said. “Tell me what happened and we will figure this out.”
So I told her the whole story and she exclaimed that it was all too bad, but that she was certain we could sort it out and figure out where the notebook had landed.
Karl himself came the very next morning, to say that his messenger had confirmed he’d delivered the notebook. Karl talked to the owner of our pension who lived downstairs, who again insisted he had not received it.
“I want to talk to your errand boy,” I said.
“Yes, of course,” Karl agreed. “I was just going to suggest that myself.”
So we walked back to Karl’s house—a beautiful townhome in the middle of the city center. The boy’s was named Martin, and he was twelve or thirteen years old. He looked terrified when I questioned him, cringing as if he thought I might hit him.
“I came to ask about a notebook Herr Meisenbach asked you to deliver last week,” I said.
“I delivered it, I swear,” he said. “To the exact address that Herr Meisenbach directed me to.”
“This one?” I said, showing him my address.
“Yes, that one,” he said. “I went Tuesday morning and delivered it first thing, as soon as Herr Meisenbach told me to.”
I was grim. “Could you walk us there?” I asked. “To the precise house you delivered it to? And see if you recognize the person who received it?”
Martin looked at Karl, who nodded at him. “Do as the lady asks,” he said.
And so Martin led us back toward my neighborhood, glancing back at us over his shoulder the whole way.
“I trust this boy completely,” Karl said. “He’s been my messenger boy for over a year now; I share him with Professor Hass, and he has never made a mistake up until now.”
“But what’s the explanation then?” I asked. “Why would the pension owners lie?”
We had reached our street but not our house when Martin stopped. “This house,” he declared. “This is the house.” The house number was 12, where mine was 21. He’d reversed the numbers.
My heart leapt. “Did you deliver my notebook here?” I asked.
He nodded.
“You fool!” Karl burst out. “This is the wrong house!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Surely whoever took the delivery would have saved it, once they realized it wasn’t for them.”
Karl nodded. “Well, let us ask.” He knocked on the door.
A plump middle-aged woman answered the door. We asked if she or anyone in the household had received a delivery of a notebook the week before.
“No,” she said. “Not here.”
“No one in your household?” I asked. “No small brown leather notebook?”
“No,” she said. “I’d be the only one who was here during the day.”
I looked at the boy. “Who did you deliver the notebook to?” I asked.
“I delivered it to a young man,” he said.
“No young man lives here,” the woman said.
“Someone else, maybe?” Karl asked the boy. “Perhaps you have your deliveries confused?”
The boy was rubbing his hand over his face, looking nervous. “Yes, maybe,” the boy said. “Maybe I delivered it to a young girl.”
The woman put her hands on her hips. “No one lives here but me and my husband,” she said. “We haven’t any children, and we haven’t any servants, so if you delivered anything here, it would have been to me or to him, and I would have known about it.”
Martin burst into loud, noisy sobs.
My heart sank.
“Martin,” Karl said sternly. “Tell us the truth. What did you do with Katherine’s notebook?”
The boy drew his sleeve across his face. “I just stopped for a second,” he said. “On my way to deliver the notebook. Just a second to have a chat with the fellows. And I put my bag down on the street, within eyesight the whole time, I swear. And then I went on my way, but when I got to the house, the notebook wasn’t in the bag anymore. Please don’t fire me, Herr Meisenbach,” the boy said, weeping. “We need the money. My parents will murder me if I lose this job.”
“Ah, it’s just a notebook,” the woman from the doorway said. “Go easy on him, sir.”
“It wasn’t my notebook,” Karl said grimly. “Katherine, what will you have us do?”
My hands were shaking. My legs were shaking. All of me was shaking. “Take us to the place where you lost the notebook,” I said to Martin. “Where you stopped to chat.”
“I went back,” Martin said. “I looked and looked, up and down everywhere I’d been, but it wasn’t anywhere.”
“Take us anyway,” I said.
We spent a long day walking up and down streets, stepping into stores and asking strangers if they’d seen a little brown notebook filled with equations. We went to the city lost and found. We looked in more than one garbage can. At a certain point, Karl said there was no more to be done, but I made him go over every street several more times and take me to the garbage heap so we could personally ask the garbage man to look out for the notebook.
At the end of it, I cried, “How could you let it out of your hands, how could you give it to someone else to deliver; didn’t you know how important it was?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe it will turn up yet.” He started to speak, stopped, and held his hand over his eyes, overcome with emotion. I felt guilty, but I couldn’t forgive him.
“You shouldn’t have let it out of your possession,” I said. But what I really meant was I should never have let it out of my own possession. I should never have handed over the most valuable thing I owned.
We went out for dinner afterward, as there was nothing left to do, and ate wurst and beer in defeated, prickly silence. “I went to Gurz,” I told him after we were finished eating. “The day Martin lost the notebook. That’s why I didn’t come by. I looked for Sophie’s house and couldn’t find it. When I asked the people who live there now, they said that no such house existed. That her family was never there.”
Karl shrugged. “Perhaps they don’t remember,” he said. “Or prefer not to. As for the house, it is gone. I could have told you that much. Why didn’t you tell me you were going?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It was quite an ugly scene when Sophie’s family finally left,” Karl said. “And Sophie and her father weren’t able to leave when the rest of the family did.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Well, the biggest problem is they left too late. When the government was encouraging Jews to leave, they stayed put, thinking everything would blow over. And then borders started closing, and it got harder and harder to leave, and they knew they had to make it out while there was still time. Sophie’s parents wanted to go to Bulgaria or Sweden, because they had friends in both of those countries who were willing to help them. But Sophie kept saying that Shanghai was the only place that allowed Jews to enter without an entry visa, and that the family should go there. Even the United States had turned away a boat full of Jewish children. But the family thought this was outrageous: What would they do in China? And there was a war there, too. So they argued and waited, and things grew worse.
“They were protected for a while because as I’d said, Sophie’s father was not Jewish. But soon the time came when they were no longer protected, and then it was too late to leave. The war started, and there was no longer any choice but to go into hiding with the help of one of their neighbors. And they hid for several years.
“Then the neighbor who’d been helping them died, and they had no safe way to
acquire food or coal or any of the things they needed to survive. So that settled it, and at that late and dangerous date, they decided to see if they could make it to Bulgaria. But now Sophie was very sick—she was vomiting blood every day, and it seemed like she might die. They couldn’t take her to a doctor, and it was clear she couldn’t travel.
“So the rest of her family left without her, because the situation was that dire, but my uncle Walter stayed behind with her, promising to attempt an escape when she was better. And they hid for months, and my family helped as best as we could, bringing them food and money and fuel, and Sophie did slowly get better. It seemed that maybe they could hide out until the war was over, but then her father was caught by the SS, and taken away, and never seen again.”
“Why was he taken away if he wasn’t Jewish?” I asked.
Karl let out a short, bitter laugh. “For harboring Jews,” he said. “For not turning them in, for hiding with them. The truth is, by then the Nazis didn’t need an excuse. They could take you away for sneezing the wrong way, and if they came for you, you were gone.” He took a breath. “Well, you know how that would have ended. My father never got over it—the loss of his twin.” He looked away from me. “He blamed Sophie, you know. It turned out the reason she was sick, the reason she couldn’t leave when they had the chance, was that she was pregnant with you.”
I felt his words as if they had exploded in my chest. “So then what happened next?” I managed. “Where did she go?”
Karl blinked. “Well, we couldn’t take her in. She knew that. We were being watched as it was. She was less sick by then, and obviously pregnant. She sent us a note telling us she didn’t want to put us in danger, that she was leaving with Cao to go after the rest of her family, to make her escape. I never got to see her again. I never got to say good-bye. And we never heard anything again until you showed up.”
“I see,” I said. My hands were trembling. I took a breath. “And you don’t have anything else that was hers, other than the letters and photos you already gave me?”
“You have everything,” he said. “Most of the family valuables were sold or disposed of long ago. I only kept Sophie’s letters because we’d been close.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “What else did you have of her family’s before it was disposed of?”
“Nothing of value,” Karl said. “The government had already taken most everything of worth. So there’s no money or anything like that, I’m afraid.”
My face flushed. “I didn’t mean money.”
“Yes, well,” Karl said. “You never know.”
I didn’t have any response to that, and took my leave soon after. Two days later I left Göttingen, sick at heart.
Chapter 23
WHEN I ARRIVED BACK IN BONN, THE AIR WAS cloudy with smoke and the stinging sharpness of tear gas. Police thronged the sidewalks, and scores of students marched in the roads. I heard glass shattering nearby and could sense the crowd of people undulating, pressing against the lines of police as they shouted and surged forward. And yet, nothing felt out of control, only on the brink of something about to happen. “Move along!” a policeman shouted at those of us who were emerging from the train station, waving us ahead, so that we moved parallel to the crowd, away from the station. And so I walked alongside one side of the police, and the protesting students walked along the other.
The mood in the air was somehow both exhilarating and dangerous, like some dark festival, and when I asked a fellow traveler walking beside me if he knew what had happened, he said it had started as a protest of the German Emergency Acts legislation, which would allow the government to restrict civil rights in the case of an emergency. But the protest had grown to include the war in Vietnam, police brutality, and oppressive governments everywhere. Now the students were holding a candlelight vigil for the victim of an assassination attempt, and for a student who’d been killed a year before in another protest against a visit from the shah of Iran. The crowd was moving toward the Capitol, where thousands of students were already gathered, holding hands and waving candles and singing and shouting.
Later, people who had been in Bonn in the late sixties would talk about the protests as a terrifying, electric time, when it felt as if anything could happen—so much shouting in the air, so much violence breaking through the surface. I felt it, too, but after Göttingen and Gurz, I preferred the crowd and its buzzing danger, welcomed it in fact, and as I entered my apartment, it felt like I’d come home, and I fell into my bed as if I had escaped some dark fate by returning.
In the following days, I met up with my friends Maz and Otto and Leena and Renate, who were astonished I’d returned alone. Maz and Otto had paired up while I was gone, and they’d assumed that Henry and I were also lovers. “Is she all right?” they wanted to know. “Why are you back without her? Did you fight?” I assured them that she was fine, that I’d left on good terms. I tried to hide how anxious and unsteady I felt after my trip. I didn’t tell them anything of note that had happened, not even when Renate told me about a trip she’d just returned from to Poland where she’d met a woman who’d rescued hundreds of Jewish babies by learning the plumbers’ trade and smuggling them out of their houses. She’d been caught by the authorities and had both her legs broken and been sentenced to death, but then had miraculously escaped prison with the help of an old admirer just to go back to it again. I listened hungrily to Renate’s stories but found myself holding back and not knowing quite why. I felt restless, as if my trip to Göttingen had shaken something loose, a dissatisfaction, a dormant anger. I felt it as a raging in my blood.
Thus began my season of being another kind of person in the world, when I became more body than mind. On the streets, the student protests continued, expanding to other injustices in the world. I joined them, but hardly paid attention to what they were shouting. Instead, I walked up and down the streets of Bonn, merging in and out of the constant crowds, partially alone, partially embraced in a throng of strangers. I felt my muscles working as I walked, I felt my body’s hunger and its every ache. In those days I felt electric. I looked at everyone, I noticed everyone looking at me.
I was aware of the other bodies around me as sacks of warmth and bone and muscle. So many mouths, yelling. So many arms and legs and torsos pressed together, chanting, shouting, pushing forward. I shouted with them. I pressed my body against their bodies, until I had shouted my throat raw, until my body was hot with the heat of the crowd, and all I heard was the wave of voices bearing mine up so that it was no longer distinguishable. Then I broke away and pushed through the bodies and into an open street. I walked farther and farther from the crowd and kept walking. I wanted to go dancing, so I went dancing. I drank until I was dizzy. I let strange men walk me home at night and did not ask their names as I led them up the stairs. I wanted to be reckless and waste myself on life. I wanted their lips on my body, their breath on my breath. Not closeness, it wasn’t closeness I was seeking, but contact, and it felt like oblivion.
One day someone gave me LSD on a sugar cube, and I put it on my tongue. It was my first time trying drugs, and as soon as the sugar began to melt I felt a surge of excitement course through my body. It frightened me, and I spit the lump of sugar out on the sidewalk. I excused myself from the party and walked home. I sat in my bed and wondered—what am I doing?
Outside, a storm came. The lightning lit up my room. The thunder followed. I lay down in my bed and thought of my mother. I wondered if she thought of me when storms came, as I always thought of her. The rain began to pound upon my window, insistent with questions. What was the temperature of lightning? What was the velocity of light? Numbers blinked in and out, glowing like fairy lights. What was the distance of the earth to the sun? The logarithmic constant of e? I thought I could see the underlying structure of the universe pulsing beneath everything. I felt untethered from the earth, like I was flying. I felt as if I’d died.
I don’t know what brought me out of this state, or how
I eventually came back to myself, just that when I did, I felt different—as if two parts of myself had broken apart and then come together and adhered incompletely. I rose from my bed and discovered that in the last few weeks I’d lost so much weight that my bones showed through my skin, and that my skin itself had thinned and turned sheer as a pair of stockings, so that I could see blue veins running up and down my arms and hands. I didn’t feel weak, but as if I had been reduced to my essential core self, as if everything excess had been trimmed away.
When I went to my office at the university, there was a letter waiting for me from Charles Lee. “Of course I remember you,” it began. “And I have thought of you often. I read your note with great interest that only grew the more I read. I think you have stumbled upon a solution! As for the trouble you say you run into with regards to randomness, I wonder if it might help to take a look at the Kobalesky formula.” He ended, “Wishing you the best of luck, and awaiting further news with eagerness.”
This note was just what I had needed, a jolt to get me back to work. All of a sudden the things that had troubled me didn’t seem so insurmountable. I thought I could see a way forward. Revisiting the Mohanty problem was like drinking a clean draught of water after a long illness: refreshing and energizing. My paper raced as it grew. It was a matter of getting it down fast enough: after climbing and climbing, I was finally running downhill.
It was a thrilling but frightening time—I was so close to accomplishing what I’d longed for, and the closer I got, the more afraid I became. I had joked to Henry that the worse my personal life was, the better my work, and ever since, I’d become afraid that this was true, as well as its inverse—if my work was going well, some catastrophe must be in store in my life. I became increasingly superstitious, afraid to cross the street lest I get hit by a car and die before I was able to finish, afraid to leave my apartment for fear that I would be hit by some unforeseen obstacle that would stop me in my tracks.
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