Listening to him, I felt slightly breathless. For a moment I was disoriented. The thing was, part of me understood. Karl had stolen someone else’s work and claimed that he had written it after making zero contributions. He’d taken advantage of a mistake, had profited from the death of the real authors. And yet, when Peter had finished my paper for me, what had infuriated me most was my desire to tell no one else, to just take it.
I cleared my throat. “You say Sophie brought you her paper,” I said. “Why didn’t she submit it herself?”
“Well, of course she couldn’t while she was in hiding, and then I suppose she wanted to leave it somewhere safe.”
“That makes sense. Can you tell me how she ended up leaving? How did her father get caught?”
“Ah,” Karl said. “This is the part of the story I’m not proud of. When her father discovered that she was pregnant, he was furious. He came to our house, to ask me who had done this to her, because I had been in Göttingen with her.
“I should have claimed ignorance. I should have said I didn’t know. But I was shocked, too, to hear how far she’d let it go with the Chinaman.” He raised his hands and looked at me pleadingly. “So I told her father about Xi Ling. I told him it was a shame and a travesty. I said a lot of things that I ought not to have said.
“I didn’t know it then, but Sophie and Xi Ling hadn’t seen each other for months at that point. I don’t think he knew she was pregnant. But Sophie’s father was furious. She had always been his favorite, you understand, and when everyone told him he was spoiling her, he still gave her everything she asked for. And she’d been writing to Xi Ling even after they’d gone into hiding, which would have put them at risk. So he felt betrayed by her and humiliated. And of course there was no news from the family, who he’d sent off ahead of them. When everything came to light, he forbade her from contacting her lover and made her burn her papers—not just their correspondence, but all her work notes as well.”
“What?” I said, aghast.
“Yes.” Karl nodded. “He made her burn all the work she’d done during her years in Göttingen. He let her keep most of our letters to each other, but if they contained any kind of mathematics in them, he made her burn those, too. He blamed his leniency with her in her early years, he blamed her education and her modern ideas for everything that happened—not just her pregnancy, but her falling in love with a foreigner, the breaking apart and exile of her family.” Karl paused and gazed at me thoughtfully.
“She looked like such a delicate creature, your mother,” he said. “But she was tough. When she told me what her father had made her do, she didn’t cry a single tear. She just handed me what she’d managed to hide and said it wasn’t safe anymore with her where she was. And she asked me to try to publish it. And I promised that I would.
“But then her father was found by the SS and taken away. Someone had seen him when he visited our house and reported him. How Sophie evaded capture I cannot fathom. When I went to find her, she was gone. And when I went to find Xi Ling to tell him what had befallen her, he was gone as well.
“And all I know of what happened next, I’m afraid, is the story you told me when we first met.”
“What happened to Sophie’s family?” I asked.
He shrugged. “All gone,” he said. “No one ever came back.”
“You said it was my fault she stayed behind,” I said, accusingly. “You made it sound like I’d killed her. Like she and her family could have escaped if not for me.”
“I didn’t,” Karl said, sounding genuinely shocked. “You must have misunderstood.”
I waved this off impatiently. “So why is Xi Ling’s name spelled wrong on the paper?”
“That’s not my fault. The title page got lost in the sending. I gave them the title and his name over the telephone, but they didn’t ask me to spell it out.”
“Where is my notebook? The one that your messenger boy supposedly lost? You have it, don’t you?”
“No, Katherine, I don’t,” Karl said. “I wouldn’t have kept it—I knew what it meant to you. That, at least, is the truth.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him, but what could I do? Every story I knew about a woman, it occurred to me, involved a story of theft. And I knew that everything that happened next was my decision. I would have to tell Henry what I had discovered. I would have to tell the world. That was what was right, from the perspective of justice, from the perspective of truth. And yet my best friend loved this man. It was an impossible conundrum without any kind of elegant solution.
“You have to tell Henry all this,” I said. “Before your wedding.”
“I can’t.” Karl’s eyes filled with tears. “It would break her heart.”
“You need to tell her by tomorrow.”
He fell on his knees: he took my hand. “I’m begging you,” he said in his office, though his door was open. “I’m on my knees to you.”
I was horrified. “Get up,” I hissed. “I don’t want you on your knees. I just want you to tell the truth.”
“I can’t lose Henry,” he cried. “I love her. She’s my whole life. Please don’t do this, Katherine,” he said. “Please show me some mercy.”
“It’s not about mercy,” I said. But I was sickened by the sight of him on his knees, and I fled.
For the entire next week I waited for Karl to tell Henry. I thought about telling her myself, but soon enough I had waited too long and felt that I couldn’t, and I was aware that this was the same excuse Karl had used for why he had never clarified the authorship of the Schieling-Meisenbach theorem. I felt dirty, corrupted by my involvement thus far. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went back to Karl’s office and said, “I’ve written a letter to Henry.” I waved it in his face. “I’m going to tell her. I’m going to tell her tonight. No more excuses. No more waiting. I know it will destroy my friendship with her, but I’m prepared. I can’t let this go on.”
Perhaps it was the resoluteness in my voice that made Karl forgo the hysterics. This time there was no dropping on his knees, there were no tears. He just said, “Very well. I agree with you, Katherine. I will tell her.”
WHEN HENRY CAME HOME that night, I was sitting in the living room, waiting up.
I stood up. “Henry, darling,” I said, but she raised her hand to quiet me.
“No,” she said. “I know what you want to say. But, please, let me talk first.”
“Okay,” I said, a little afraid.
“Karl told me everything,” she said. “But there’s something you don’t know.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking she would present her argument and I would knock it down.
“I’m pregnant with Karl’s child.”
“What?” I breathed. “How?”
“How do you think?” she retorted.
“How long?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Two months? Three months?” She took a breath. “Do you see how this changes everything? It’s all settled. I can’t do this without him.”
I sank back down again, openmouthed, completely at a loss. Henry sat down beside me. She looked so vulnerable, her hands shielding her belly as if I threatened what she carried there.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“I love him, Katherine.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, without thinking it through. “You’re pregnant. That’s okay. We can deal with that.”
She shook her head.
I said, “Remember when we first came here, and you said let’s give up men? Let’s do it. Let’s throw men to the wolves, let Karl sink or swim, let’s raise your child together. I’ll help you. This is our chance.”
Henry stood up and turned away from me, shaking her head. “It’s too late for that,” she said. “I love him. His life is my life now. I can’t.” And then she said, “Katherine, for the sake of our friendship, for the sake of our love, please don’t expose him. I’m going to marry him. I’m going to have his child. Please do
n’t ruin everything for us before it even starts.”
“Did he tell you what he did?” I asked. “Do you know what he did to Sophie and Xi Ling? To my mother and father?”
“I do, but they’re dead. What can we do about it now?” Henry asked. Her voice was harsh and desperate. “I’m your best friend. And Karl is your cousin, and we’re going to have a child together. Promise you’ll stand by me and protect me. Be our child’s godmother. Please. I love you,” she said. “Please help me.”
“Did he get you pregnant on purpose?” I asked. “Were you going to get married before you knew?”
“How can you say that?” she cried. “What does it matter? There’s no going back from this.” And then she burst into deep, racking sobs that tore at my guts. She cried for what seemed like forever, and though I wanted to resist, I was moved, and I sank off the couch to the ground and put my arms around her.
I thought of Sophie, her life’s work gathered together in her hands, the father she had loved her whole life standing above her, telling her to burn it, holding her responsible for the weight of misfortune that had befallen her family. I imagined her kneeling in front of the fire, her family already gone, knowing the risk her father had taken in staying behind to care for her.
Sophie had burned her work for him. She had known that she might lose everything and everyone she’d ever loved, and she’d looked at the man she’d always trusted and, on his command, destroyed everything he’d asked her to—all she’d created, all she’d dreamed of, she’d fed into the fire with her own hands.
I found myself whispering to Henry, “Okay, okay, I’ll protect you. I will do as you ask. I choose you.” But as Henry began to calm herself, I thought of my mother Meiying at fourteen years old, facing the dwarf men soldiers. She had been fearless, her father’s favorite child, and still he had not hesitated to sacrifice her when he thought it might save her brothers. And that had broken her: I knew it had. It had made her leave my father and me. It had broken her for love.
Henry sat up and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Thank you,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. I didn’t respond. “Kat?” she said after a moment. “You won’t change your mind, will you? What are you thinking?”
“I’m just thinking what terrible things we do to each other,” I said. “What terrible things we do in the name of love.”
Chapter 30
I STAYED IN GÖTTINGEN UNTIL HENRY’S WEDDING TO Karl. I thought, perhaps, that she would change her mind. But she went through with it, and I stood beside her and held the flowers for her. The whole time they were exchanging their vows, I couldn’t stop thinking of Karl on his knees weeping. I wished I could scrub the memory from my mind.
After, Henry said, “We’re really family now.”
“Yes,” I said, and meant it, but I also knew that once I left, we would never be close again.
THE DAY I LEFT GERMANY, the streets were covered in snow—a mathematician’s dreamscape, everything smoothed over and rendered in outline, transformed into an abstraction of itself. Instead of Massachusetts, I went home to Michigan, where I told my father what had happened with Peter, as well as with Henry and Karl.
“I’m thinking of dropping out of my PhD program,” I admitted.
“How close are you to finishing?” my father asked.
“I just have to defend my thesis,” I said. “But at this point no one even believes it’s actually mine.”
My father let out a sigh and looked out the window. “Sometimes I think of your third-grade teacher, Mrs. Linen,” he said. “And regret that I mishandled her.”
“Because you didn’t back her up enough? Well, if it makes you happy to hear, you were right,” I told my father. “I should never have gone to graduate school.”
“I never said that.”
“You said I’d never get a job over a man.”
“I never said that, either!”
“Yes, you did,” I insisted. “When I told you I was going to apply.”
“No,” my father said. “I wanted you to know that you’d have difficulty. That the odds were stacked against you.”
“You thought I hadn’t noticed?”
“No,” my father said. “I’m sure you had. Katherine, the problem with you is you never let anyone finish what they’re trying to tell you. You’re too defensive, too eager to insist that you know best.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m a know-it-all, I’m a show-off. I get it.”
“No!” my father said. He raised his hand. “Stop it! Enough. What I was trying to tell you just now is I wish I’d pulled you out of Mrs. Linen’s class and found you a teacher who encouraged you more. And what I was trying to say about graduate school, and what you still won’t let me finish saying, is this: I wanted you to know that I knew you’d have difficulty. That it’d be hard to get a job. And that when the time came, I’d be behind you all the way. I wanted to tell you not to worry about money, that I could support you if you needed. But all you wanted to hear was that it’d be easy. You wanted me to say you’d never have problems. That your talent would knock down all the doors. You were only willing to listen if you thought I would say what you wanted to hear.
“Katherine,” my father continued. “I’m your father. I am here to help, and always will be. Even if you’ve discovered this Karl fellow, and found out Sophie and Xi Ling are your parents, it doesn’t change who we are to each other.”
I nodded, eyes full. For once, he’d told me just what I needed to hear. I didn’t know what to say in response, but after that conversation, I had to acknowledge I’d been wrong about a lot of things. I had been overly defensive, always spoiling for a fight. I know now that this came from a sense of my own vulnerability, being made to feel all my life that I didn’t belong, that anything could be taken away. All my life I’d been forced to fight my way through, and I no longer knew how to stop.
I went for a walk around our old neighborhood, past the pond, along the creek, and to the library. It was closed, but lit from the inside, and I walked around it, marveling at how small it was. For my entire childhood it had loomed so large, but it was really just a little building, somewhat dingy, a bit run-down.
I walked home and let myself into the garage. I parked myself in front of the old radio, and just the sight of it comforted my loneliness somewhat. I wiped off the dust that was clogging it with a cloth, and then I wiped down the chair in front of it and sat down. I put on the earphones and took a breath. What would I say? I thought about Peter. I thought about Henry and Karl. I put the headset down. I got up. I walked away.
WHEN IT WAS TIME, I went back to graduate school to defend my thesis. The whole time, I could hardly breathe. Peter was still chair of my committee, but we hadn’t spoken since Germany. Afterward each of my professors stood up and shook my hand. Peter was the last to do so, waiting until the others had left.
“Katherine,” he said, and his eyes were full of unshed tears—I shook my head and pulled my hand away.
“Please don’t,” I said. I had seen how happy Karl and Henry were together, despite everything. I had thought to myself that what Peter had done wasn’t nearly as bad. If Henry could still love Karl, why couldn’t I have Peter? But Peter had done what he’d done to me, not to somebody else. I couldn’t look in his eyes. “I can’t talk to you,” I said. I forced myself to walk away.
PETER ONCE TOLD ME a story that went like this:
Once there was a great artist who was very famous and very old, and at the height of his renown, he fell in love with a young woman who toyed with his affections. This famous artist wooed her in the most public way, sending her expensive gifts, making her extravagant promises—until one of his disciples confronted him one day and asked, Why, at the height of your renown, do you risk everything by making a fool of yourself? Do you not know you’ve become a laughingstock? That you’ve put your reputation at risk?
The famous artist smiled, and said, “Who am I not to be made a fool of for l
ove?”
How nice it would be if we could all be the artist! To love and be loved with abandon. And yet what an imbalance exists in that story. How blind it is to how careful women must be: how for us, the stakes have always been higher. I wouldn’t have minded risking everything, if Peter had also been risking just half of what I would have been required to risk. Actually, I could have been satisfied if he’d just understood what I was risking, and that I also wanted to be the artist in the story, and why.
I was not able to find a teaching job after graduate school, as my father had predicted, but neither was my situation as dire as either of us had feared. Rob and Leo invited me to join them to work at their lab. Leo had married and was expecting his first child by then, and this gave me a momentary pang. So much had happened while I was away—in just two short years their lives had moved forward in ways mine had not, and I couldn’t help remembering my gentle flirtation with Leo and wondering what if. It seemed obvious to me then that Leo was the kind of man who would make someone happy, and I wondered if from the beginning I’d made the wrong choices. I wondered, too, if the problem was me, if I was the kind of woman who couldn’t make someone else happy.
Aside from these musings, I worked with both Rob and Leo quite happily on applications from my work, such as how to use prime numbers to build an encryption system that even now is being used to protect data in—for instance—every credit card transaction that takes place. The very unpredictability and unknowability of primes is what makes this system work. The irony is, if the Riemann hypothesis were to be solved, then the code of the primes could finally be cracked, whereupon the system Rob and Leo and I built would become useless, and all that data compromised.
The Tenth Muse Page 22
