I laughed for real this time, and for the first time in weeks. It sounded rusty coming out, but Henry smiled encouragingly.
“The thing is,” she said, “sometimes I feel like I have this secret power that no one has ever witnessed, that no one has ever seen. And I’ve always wanted to show it off to someone who both needs it and would appreciate it.” She paused significantly, and then said with great drama, “Katherine, will you be that person?”
I laughed again. “Yes,” I said, nodding. “Yes, please, I will.”
“Okay,” Henry said. “You stay right here,” and she patted my head and went to the closet and started pulling out my mop and my broom.
Watching her I felt—how can I describe it?—a bubble of hope, just that, a tiny bubble of hope. The rest of me felt hollowed out, and scraped tender, like any part of me could break at any moment.
“Are you watching?” Henry asked. She was so cheerful, so gentle.
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “I want you to note how I start first with the broom in this corner by your window here, and how I’m going to place this washcloth and the dustpan and the mop all up against the wall. Now I’m going to sweep, sweep, sweep across the room at a diagonal, and when I reach this other corner I’m going to sweep, sweep, sweep across in this direction.” She glided across the room.
“Note how fluidly I move my arms, note how there is no wasted movement,” she said. “When I am done with this room, I will end up right where the dustpan is, and I will flick the dust into the pan just so, leave it here, and take up the mop.” Thus she narrated each of her actions until the floor was swept and mopped, and every surface was tidied and wiped down.
“Now my dear, I think it’s time for you to take a bath, and I will change your sheets and make your bed for you,” she said. “Do you want me to organize that jumble of papers on your desk?”
I nodded.
“Good girl,” Henry said. She swatted me on my behind as I got off my bed. “Be sure to wash behind your ears,” she said, and winked.
Chapter 28
THE DAY BEFORE HENRY WAS SUPPOSED TO RETURN TO Göttingen, she said, “Kat, I have something to tell you.” Her eyes met mine, and she blushed. Then she said in an odd, shy voice, “I meant to tell you right away, but it was never the right time—and anyway I don’t know why I’m suddenly so shy about it, but Karl and I have fallen in love.”
“Karl?” I sputtered. “Karl Meisenbach?”
Henry said, “Yes, Karl.” She started laughing.
“Good God, Henry. Love? Really?”
She covered her mouth with her hand, but her shoulders shook with laughter. “Yes,” she burst out. “I don’t know how it happened, I don’t know why, but, Kat, I can’t help it.”
“Oh, Henry,” I managed. “I don’t know what to say.”
I didn’t like Karl Meisenbach, was the thing. Not just because he’d lost my notebook, but because of some shift that had happened between us even before it was lost, after my conversation with Frank.
“I’m going to marry him, Kat.” She saw the look on my face and smiled self-consciously. “He’s not what you would have imagined for me, is he?”
“Not in a million years.”
Henry laughed. “You know, I’ve been thinking how glad I am we decided to go to Göttingen together, or I would never have met him.”
“Are you happy?” I asked.
Henry looked at me. She squared her shoulders. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
What was there to say after that? I was riddled with doubts, but they were my doubts, not Henry’s, and anyway, I had a terrible track record in terms of knowing which men to trust.
“If you’re happy, I’m happy too,” I said.
I ACCOMPANIED HENRY back to Göttingen, where she planned to marry Karl in a month’s time. I stayed with her in the same pension as before and joined her and Karl for dinner every evening. I watched how solicitous he was to her, how careful he was of her comfort. It was good to see, but I felt a pang of jealousy. I thought, He will treat her gently.
In the daytime, we went shopping for her wedding clothes and lingerie, and my heart ached for what I wouldn’t have with Peter. One day, I went to the university to visit Frank. I felt somewhat awkward, because I’d left Göttingen without saying good-bye and never followed up. Now I wondered if Professor Behr had told him anything about what had happened with my paper—that I’d been denied a second year of fellowship. But Frank was as warm and cheerful as the first time I’d met him.
“Katherine!” he said, shaking my hand. “It’s been far too long.” And then he said, “Ah, this reminds me—I found those addresses you’d asked for, but by the time I sent them over to the pension you’d been staying at, I was told you’d already left.”
I blushed deeply. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I know I should have taken my leave.”
Frank waved his hand. “No, no!” he said. “I meant to forward them to you in Bonn, so the fault is mine. But let me find them while I have you here.” He began digging around.
“You found the addresses for Sophie and Cao?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Frank said, moving piles of papers on top of each other, and then riffling through each page. “I just need to remember where I put them. They’ll turn up every week or so, and then I tell myself ah! I must remember to send them to Katherine in Bonn, and then they disappear again.”
I watched him go through the entire contents of his desk, and then the surface above his filing cabinet, and then his face lit up. He lifted up his coffee mug, and under it were various sheets of paper. He went through each one and finally said, “Voilà!” And handed me the stack.
There was Sophie’s family’s address in the town of Gurz of the house I had not been able to find, and the location of her boardinghouse in Göttingen, which had been paid for by her father. He had also acquired Cao’s addresses: the first in a residence hall, records for which showed all his bills had been paid on time through a scholarship from the Chinese government, and the second was a private boardinghouse quite close to where I was staying.
I thanked Frank for his help and left in search of whatever I could find out.
I WENT to Cao Xi Ling’s boardinghouse and knocked on the door, but no one was there. The house itself was a lovely old stone cottage, probably hundreds of years old. I circled it a few times, and then—too agitated to wait, set off in search of the boardinghouse Sophie had stayed at during her time in Göttingen.
When I knocked on that door, a man answered right away. He was short and plump with a halo of curly white hair framing his face, and he asked in a brisk way when he opened the door what I wanted.
“I’m looking for information about a woman who lived here about thirty years ago,” I said. “Her name was Sophie Meisenbach.”
The man shook his head and said he was afraid he couldn’t help me. This house had belonged to his late sister, who had passed away two years ago. There was nothing he could tell me about any of the people his sister had boarded. I thanked him, deflated, and walked back to Cao Xi Ling’s house, which was only ten minutes away. Close enough to meet quite regularly, I thought, as I made the walk.
This time a woman who looked to be about forty years old answered the door when I knocked. “May I help you?” she asked.
I told her I was curious about the house and its history, and that specifically I was looking for information about a Chinese mathematics student who had once boarded there.
“The previous owners were my parents, this is my house now, and the Chinese student you speak of was our boarder for several years,” she said.
“Was this his name?” I asked, showing her the paper on which Karl had written down Cao’s name. “I don’t know how it’s pronounced, I’m afraid.”
“Ah, yes,” the woman said. “He spelled his name the Chinese way, so his last name goes first, Cao, which is pronounced Cow. And then his given name was Shee Ling.”
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��Shee Ling,” I repeated after her.
“And my name,” the woman said, holding out her hand, “is Franzi.”
“Franzi,” I said, shaking her hand. “Thank you so much. I’m Katherine. If you have some time, do you think you’d be willing to answer some questions for me?”
“Of course,” she responded right away. She led me into her parlor and had me sit on a rather uncomfortable ornate old couch. It was a strange thought to think perhaps Xi Ling had sat on this very same couch, maybe next to Sophie.
“I was just twelve years old when Xi Ling came to board at my house,” Franzi began. “He was very gentle and very beautiful. I liked to look at him!” She laughed. “His German was not good, and we laughed at it. When he spoke, he moved his hands like birds.
“My mother taught him how to cook, and he liked to do it, but he stood—just so, not like a woman, but a man.” Franzi laughed again. “And every morning at sunrise, he went into our courtyard and exercised. On weekends my brothers and I woke early and snuck downstairs to watch him. It was supposed to be fighting, my brothers told me, but it looked like dance.” And Franzi raised her hands into the air as if to show me, took a breath, and let them fall.
“It says in these records that he lived here until 1951,” I said. “Can you tell me where he went?”
“Oh, no, he left much earlier than that,” she said. “Almost ten years earlier, in 1943. He said he was returning to China.”
“But it says here his room was paid for through 1951,” I said. “Was he in touch during that time?”
“No.” Franzi shook her head. “His housing was covered by a scholarship from the government of China. It paid the university and the university paid us. After Xi Ling had been gone a while, my father told the scholarship office he was no longer here, hoping to figure out what had happened. But that led nowhere. And then a year had passed, and another year, and we kept telling the university that he was no longer here, but they said he or his next of kin would have to sign paperwork withdrawing him from the program. We could not track them down, and it was all too hard, so we just took his rent for nearly a decade until one day the payments stopped.” She shrugged. “My parents felt bad, but what was there to do?”
“There was no forwarding address for his family in China?” I asked.
“None we were ever able to find.”
“Did he leave anything else behind?”
“No,” Franzi said slowly. “He owned very little—when he left, I remember he packed nearly everything into a small rucksack he carried on his back. He left behind his textbooks, and his bedding, but that was it.” She paused. “He did leave behind a copy of something he was working on for school,” she said. “I think it was an accident, because I found it wedged between his desk and the wall when I was cleaning his room, some years later. And I kept it, oh, I don’t know—out of fondness I guess. I’d long given up the thought that he’d return. Do you read mathematics? I never could.”
I answered that I did.
“Well, let me get it for you then,” she said. “Perhaps you can explain it to me.”
She returned with a sheaf of yellowing papers. The handwriting on them was quite beautiful, very different from the German style—each letter formed with careful and elegant precision, and every line of each page filled with notations and formulae, exclamation points and underlines. As I began to flip through the pages, a sense of unease took hold of me. The argument seemed familiar, like an echo of something I’d read before. And then spliced in with those papers were other papers, written in a handwriting I recognized.
“Do you know if he worked on this alone?” I asked.
“We never talked about his work.”
“Did he have friends?” I said. “Men or women, colleagues with whom he spent a lot of time?”
“He had friends, of course,” she said. “But he never brought them here.”
I nodded. A buzz of excitement and dread was coursing through my body. “Can I borrow this paper, please?” I said. “I can’t tell you why, but there’s something I need to check.”
Franzi leaned forward and looked deeply into my face, not bothering to hide the curiosity plain to read on her own. “May I first ask you a question of my own, my dear? Why the interest in Xi Ling? What are you hoping to discover?”
I looked down and blushed. “I don’t know precisely how to answer,” I said. “I thought—perhaps this man might be my father.”
“You don’t know?” she said.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I never knew my father or my mother.”
“Ah,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears. “So he didn’t make it out?”
The sight of her tears surprised and moved me, so that my own eyes filled. “No,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
She nodded and wiped her eyes. “You have something of his expression in your face,” she said. “Take the papers. They’re yours.” She reached out and squeezed my arm. “May I tell you what I know about his departure?”
“Please,” I said.
“He left with a woman,” she said. “I think she must have been your mother.”
“Yes,” I said. “She was.”
She nodded. “So their plan was to go to China by way of Bulgaria. Her family had gone ahead of her, you see—or they’d made the attempt to leave, and they hadn’t heard from them again. So their plan was to look for them and figure out where they might have ended up, and then they would get everyone to China, where Xi Ling was convinced they would be safe.”
“Bulgaria,” I said. “But she ended up in France.”
Franzi looked puzzled. “That’s the wrong direction. They must have gotten diverted somehow,” she said.
“But how would Sophie have gotten out of Germany to France?” I asked. “It was occupied by then. Surely she would have been stopped at the border and arrested immediately.”
“Well, she was traveling as me,” Franzi said. “I gave her my papers. We cut out my photo and pasted in hers.” She grinned. “I never told anyone that before. Not a single soul, not even my family.”
I gasped. “But if the Nazis had found out,” I said, “wouldn’t you have been in trouble?”
“Oh yes.” She nodded. “Tortured. Perhaps killed.”
“Were you afraid?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Every day I was afraid. How was it possible to be otherwise with those butchers running our country?”
“I mean for yourself, to have taken such a risk.”
“Oh, that.” She shrugged. “Yes. That too.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I said. “For them, I mean. And for me.”
“Oh, it was without question the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. The thing I’ve always been proudest of. I had hoped so much they made it out all right, though of course when there wasn’t any word, I guessed they hadn’t.” She smiled at me. “We mustn’t cry,” she said, but she was crying. “And anyway, I’m very glad to know that at least you made it out, and that you found me here.”
We sat for a while, quietly, drinking our tea and wiping our tears, but then it was time to take my leave. There was still the matter of the manuscript to attend to.
“Keep the papers,” she said. “And let me know how it turns out, and please, my dear—promise that you’ll keep in touch.”
I nodded and promised that I would. With another barrage of thank-yous from me and good-lucks from her, I rushed out of her house and went straight to the library.
I found what I was looking for right away, a thin, folio-style book wrapped in black leather. I opened it with trembling hands. I placed it next to the papers Franzi had given me and went through them page by page, comparing notes. It was just as I’d suspected. The book was the book Karl Meisenbach had made his name with, and the paper was the Schieling-Meisenbach theorem.
Chapter 29
I WENT TO KARL’S OFFICE IMMEDIATELY, BOTH THE BOOK and the papers in my hand.
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br /> “What is it, Katherine?” he said, looking up at me from his desk. “Is everything all right? Is Henry okay?”
I found I couldn’t speak. It seemed to me suddenly that this was a man who was capable of anything. Perhaps he’d try to kill me if I confronted him, I thought wildly, backing up against his door, my hand on the doorknob.
“For God’s sake, Katherine, settle down and out with it. You’re beginning to frighten me,” Karl said.
“Cao Xi Ling,” I said. “Schieling. I never put it together.”
“Put what together?” Karl said calmly.
“Sophie Meisenbach,” I said. “And Cao Xi Ling. You stole their theorem.”
Karl turned very pale and rose from his desk. “That’s a dangerous accusation,” he said. “You need to be very careful.”
“Stay where you are!” I said, waving the book at him. I turned the knob of the door and opened it a little. “You’re the one who needs to be careful! I have the pages right here: Sophie’s handwriting in the manuscript for the theorem that everyone thinks you wrote. Sit back down or I’m leaving right now to report you.”
“You have it wrong, Katherine,” he said. “I can explain it to you. Please have a seat, and don’t look as if you’re going to fly off, or as if I’m some kind of murderer. I’m nothing of the kind, I promise you.”
I released the door but left it open. “Against my better judgment,” I announced, “I’m sitting down. But please know if you try anything, I’ll scream.”
“I’ll take that into account,” he said, dryly. “Thank you for hearing me out.” He sat down too. “You’re right,” he began. “I did not write that paper, and I took credit for it. But I never meant to steal it. Sophie gave it to me, you see, to submit it for her, when she left.” His face contorted into a grimace. “I loved Sophie. All my life I loved her. I would never have harmed her.”
I sat in my seat, my throat tight.
He drew his hand across his face. “I submitted that paper with Sophie’s initials,” he said. “But because I had sent the paper in, the journal editor misunderstood and published it with my initials instead. And by then a year had passed, and Sophie was gone, and everyone thought I had written it. And then the way things happened—I didn’t want to take credit for it, but I didn’t know where Sophie was; I hadn’t heard from her and figured she was most likely dead—I meant to write to the journal and issue a retraction, or a correction, but I also felt superstitious about it, as if doing so could tip some scale in one direction or another. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but I felt as if explaining the situation to anyone might be dangerous, or worse, unlucky. I thought there was time to wait until I knew what had happened to her, and then it was too late, the time had passed, and I was here, and there was no explanation I could make.”
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