The Other Einstein
Page 1
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Copyright © 2016 by Marie Benedict
Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Lisa Amoroso
Cover images © Susan Fox/Trevillion Images, murphy81/Shutterstock, Jack1e/Shutterstock, Marina Sun/Shutterstock, Runrun2/Shutterstock
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Terrell, Heather, author.
Title: The other Einstein : a novel / Heather Terrell.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046814 | (hardcover : acid-free paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Einstein-Marić, Mileva, 1875-1948--Fiction. | Einstein, Albert, 1879-1955--Marriage--Fiction. | Women physicists--Germany--Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3620.E75 O84 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046814
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part II
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Part III
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For Jim, Jack, and Ben
Prologue
August 4, 1948
62 Huttenstrasse
Zürich, Switzerland
The end is near. I feel it approaching like a dark, seductive shadow that will extinguish my remaining light. In these last minutes, I look back.
How did I lose my way? How did I lose Lieserl?
The darkness quickens. In the few moments I have left, like a meticulous archaeologist, I excavate the past for answers. I hope to learn, as I suggested long ago, if time is truly relative.
Mileva “Mitza” Marić Einstein
Part I
Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.
Sir Isaac Newton
Chapter 1
Morning
October 20, 1896
Zürich, Switzerland
I smoothed the wrinkles on my freshly pressed white blouse, flattened the bow encircling my collar, and tucked back a stray hair into my tightly wound chignon. The humid walk through the foggy Zürich streets to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic campus played with my careful grooming. The stubborn refusal of my heavy, dark hair to stay fixed in place frustrated me. I wanted every detail of the day to be perfect.
Squaring my shoulders and willing myself to be just a little taller than my regrettably tiny frame, I placed my hand on the heavy brass handle to the classroom. Etched with a Greek key design worn down from the grip of generations of students, the knob dwarfed my small, almost childlike hand. I paused. Turn the knob and push the door open, I told myself. You can do this. Crossing this threshold is nothing new. You have passed over the supposedly insurmountable divide between male and female in countless classrooms before. And always succeeded.
Still, I hesitated. I knew all too well that, while the first step is the hardest, the second isn’t much easier. In that moment, little more than a breath, I could almost hear Papa urging me on. “Be bold,” Papa would whisper in our native, little-used Serbian tongue. “You are a mudra glava. A wise one. In your heart beats the blood of bandits, our brigand Slavic ancestors who used any means to get their due. Go get your due, Mitza. Go get your due.”
I could never disappoint him.
I twisted the knob and swung the door wide open. Six faces stared back at me: five dark-suited students and one black-robed professor. Shock and some disdain registered on their pale faces. Nothing—not even rumors—had prepared these men for actually seeing a woman in their ranks. They almost looked silly with their eyes bulging and their jaws dropping, but I knew better than to laugh. I willed myself to pay their expressions no heed, to ignore the doughy faces of my fellow students, who were desperately trying to appear older than their eighteen years with their heavily waxed mustaches.
A determination to master physics and mathematics brought me to the Polytechnic, not a desire to make friends or please others. I reminded myself of this simple fact as I steeled myself to face my instructor.
Professor Heinrich Martin Weber and I looked at each other. Long-nosed, heavily browed, and meticulously bearded, the renowned physics professor’s intimidating appearance matched his reputation.
I waited for him to speak. To do anything else would have been perceived as utter impertinence. I could not afford another such mark against my character, since my mere presence at the Polytechnic was considered impertinent by many. I walked a fine line between my insistence on this untrodden path and the conformity still demanded of me.
“You are?” he asked as if he weren’t expecting me, as if he’d never heard of me.
“Miss Mileva Marić, sir.” I prayed my voice didn’t quaver.
Very slowly, Weber consulted his class list. Of course, he knew precisely who I was. Since he served as
head of the physics and mathematics program, and given that only four women had ever been admitted before me, I had to petition him directly to enter the first year of the four-year program, known as Section Six. He had approved my entrance himself! The consultation of the class list was a blatant and calculating move, telegraphing his opinion of me to the rest of the class. It gave them license to follow suit.
“The Miss Marić from Serbia or some Austro-Hungarian country of that sort?” he asked without glancing up, as if there could possibly be another Miss Marić in Section Six, one who hailed from a more respectable location. By his query, Weber made his views on Slavic eastern European peoples perfectly clear—that we, as dark foreigners, were somehow inferior to the Germanic peoples of defiantly neutral Switzerland. It was yet another preconception I would have to disprove in order to succeed. As if being the only woman in Section Six—only the fifth to ever be admitted into the physics and mathematics program—wasn’t enough.
“Yes, sir.”
“You may take your seat,” he finally said and gestured toward the empty chair. It was my luck that the only remaining seat was the farthest away from his podium. “We have already begun.”
Begun? The class was not designated to start for another fifteen minutes. Were my classmates told something I wasn’t? Had they conspired to meet early? I wanted to ask but didn’t. Argument would only fuel the fires against me. Anyway, it didn’t matter. I would simply arrive fifteen minutes earlier tomorrow. And earlier and earlier every morning if I needed to. I would not miss a single word of Weber’s lectures. He was wrong if he thought an early start would deter me. I was my father’s daughter.
Nodding at Weber, I stared at the long walk from the door to my chair and, out of habit, calculated the number of steps it would take me to cross the room. How best to manage the distance? With my first step, I tried to keep my gait steady and hide my limp, but the drag of my lame foot echoed through the classroom. On impulse, I decided not to mask it at all. I displayed plainly for all my colleagues to see the deformity that marked me since birth.
Clomp and drag. Over and over. Eighteen times until I reached my chair. Here I am, gentlemen, I felt like I was saying with each lug of my lame foot. Take a gander; get it over with.
Perspiring from the effort, I realized the classroom was completely silent. They were waiting for me to settle, and perhaps embarrassed by my limp or my sex or both, they kept their eyes averted.
All except one.
To my right, a young man with an unruly mop of dark brown curls stared at me. Uncharacteristically, I met his gaze. But even when I looked at him head-on, challenging him to mock me and my efforts, his half-lidded eyes did not look away. Instead, they crinkled at the corners as he smiled through the dark shadow cast by his mustache. A grin of great bemusement, even admiration.
Who did he think he was? What did he mean by that look?
I had no time to make sense of him as I sat down in my seat. Reaching into my bag, I withdrew paper, ink, and pen and readied for Weber’s lecture. I would not let the bold, insouciant glance of a privileged classmate rattle me. I looked straight ahead at the instructor, still aware of my classmate’s gaze upon me, but acted oblivious.
Weber, however, was not so single-minded. Or so forgiving. Staring at the young man, the professor cleared his throat, and when the young man still did not redirect his eyes toward the podium, he said, “I will have the attention of the entire classroom. This is your first and final warning, Mr. Einstein.”
Chapter 2
Afternoon
October 20, 1896
Zürich, Switzerland
Entering the vestibule of the Engelbrecht Pension, I closed the door quietly behind me and handed my damp umbrella to the waiting maid. Laughter drifted into the entryway from the back parlor. I knew the girls were waiting for me there, but I didn’t feel up to the well-intentioned interrogation just yet. I needed some time alone to think about my day, even if it was just a few minutes. Taking care to tread lightly, I started up the stairs to my room.
Creak. Damn that one loose step.
Charcoal-gray skirts swishing behind her, Helene emerged from the back parlor, a steaming cup of tea in her hand. “Mileva, we are waiting for you! Did you forget?” With her free hand, Helene took my hand in hers and pulled me to the back parlor, which we now referred to among ourselves as the gaming room. We felt entitled to name it, as no one used it but us.
I laughed. How would I have made it through these past months in Zürich without the girls? Milana, Ružica, and most of all Helene, a soul-sister of sorts with her sharp wit, kindly manner, and, oddly enough, a similar limp. Why had I waited even a day to let them into my life?
Several months ago, when Papa and I arrived in Zürich, I could not have imagined such friendships. A youth marked by friction from my classmates—alienation at best and mockery at worst—meant a life of solitude and scholarship for me. Or so I thought.
Stepping off the train after a jostling two-day journey from our home in Zagreb, Croatia, Papa and I were a bit wobbly. Smoke from the train billowed throughout Zürich’s Hauptbahnhof, and I had to squint to make my way onto the platform. A satchel in each hand, one heavy with my favorite books, I teetered a bit as I wove through the crowded station, followed by Papa and a porter carrying our heavier bags. Papa rushed over to my side, trying to relieve me of one of my satchels.
“Papa, I can do it,” I insisted as I tried to wriggle my hand out from under his grip. “You have bags of your own to carry and only two hands.”
“Mitza, please let me help. I can handle another bag more easily than you.” He chortled. “Not to mention that your mother would be horrified if I let you struggle through the Zürich train station.”
Placing my bag down, I tried to extricate my hand from his. “Papa, I have to be able to do this alone. I’m going to be living in Zürich by myself after all.”
He stared at me for a long moment, as if the reality of me living in Zürich without him just registered, as if we had not been working toward this goal since I was a little girl. Reluctantly, finger by finger, he released his hand. This was hard for him; I understood that. While I knew part of him relished my pursuit of a singular education, that my climb reminded him of his own hard-scrabble ascent from peasant to successful bureaucrat and landowner, I sometimes wondered whether he felt guilty and conflicted at propelling me along my own precarious journey. He’d focused on the prize of my university education for so long, I guessed that he hadn’t actually envisioned saying good-bye and leaving me in this foreign place.
We exited the station and stepped into the busy evening streets of Zürich. Night was just beginning to fall, but the city wasn’t dark. I caught Papa’s eye, and we smiled at each other in amazement; we’d only ever seen a city lit by the usual dim, oil streetlamps. Electric lights illuminated the Zürich streets, and they were unexpectedly bright. In their glow, I could actually make out the finer details on the dresses of the ladies passing by us; their bustles were more elaborate than the restrained styles I’d seen in Zagreb.
The horses of a for-hire clarence cab clopped down the cobblestones of the Bahnhofstrasse on which we stood, and Papa summoned it. As the driver dismounted to load our luggage onto the back of the carriage, I wrapped my shawl around me for warmth in the cool evening air. The night before I left, Mama gifted me with the rose-embroidered shawl, tears welling in the corners of her eyes but never falling. Only later did I understand that the shawl was like her farewell embrace, something I could keep with me, since she had to stay behind in Zagreb with my younger sister, Zorka, and my little brother, Miloš.
Interrupting my thoughts, the driver asked, “Are you here to see the sights?”
“No,” Papa answered for me with only a slight accent. He’d always been proud of his grammatically flawless German, the language spoken by those in power in Austro-Hungary. It was the first step u
pon which he began his climb, he used to say as he badgered us into practicing it. Puffing up his chest a little, he said, “We are here to register my daughter for the university.”
The driver’s eyebrows raised in surprise, but he otherwise kept his reaction private. “University, eh? Then I’m guessing you’ll want the Engelbrecht Pension or one of the other pensions of Plattenstrasse,” he said as he held the cab door open for us to enter.
Papa paused as he waited for me to settle in the carriage and then asked the driver, “How did you know our destination?”
“That’s where I take many of the eastern European students to lodge.”
Listening to Papa grunt in response as he slid into the cab alongside me, I realized that he didn’t know how to read the driver’s comment. Was it a slur about our eastern European heritage? We’d been told that, even though they adamantly maintained their independence and neutrality in the face of the relentless European empire building that surrounded them, the Swiss looked down upon those from the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And yet the Swiss were the most tolerant people in other ways; they had the most lenient university admissions for women, for example. It was a confusing contradiction.
Signaling to the horses, the driver cracked the whip in the air, and the carriage rumbled down the Zürich street at a steady clip. Straining to see through the mud-splattered window, I saw an electric tram whiz by the carriage.
“Did you see that, Papa?” I asked. I’d read about trams but never witnessed one firsthand. The sight exhilarated me; it served as tangible evidence that the city was forward-thinking, at least in transportation. I could only hope that the way its citizens treated female students was also advanced to match the rumors we’d heard.
“I didn’t see it, but I heard it. And felt it,” Papa answered calmly with a squeeze of my hand. I knew he was excited too but wanted to appear worldly. Especially after the driver’s comment.
I turned back to the open window. Steep green mountains framed the city, and I swear I smelled evergreens in the air. Surely, the mountains were too distant to share the fragrance of their abundant trees. Whatever the source, the Zürich air was far fresher than that of Zagreb, ever redolent of horse dung and burning crops. Perhaps the scent came from the crisp air blowing off Lake Zürich, which bordered the southern side of the city.