The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  I put the papers together, and Ze’ev ran me there.

  It was really a very beautiful house. The contrast between its impatient occupant and the building’s own unhurried harmony, the natural wood and stone and the several dozen fine pictures, was very striking; not more so, of course, than the many striking contrasts in the character of the occupant, whose taste it faithfully reflected. He had a splendid study in it, but his preferred place of work was a collapsible card table on the landing. There was a phone on this table, and another on a chair alongside. I took the phone off the chair and sat down. He was in a dressing gown of subdued blue stripes; natty as ever.

  ‘Nu?’

  I showed him the long last memo, and he put his glasses on and carefully read it.

  ‘What prescience, eh?’ he said admiringly at last. ‘Twenty-odd years ago, he saw this coming. Who else did? “Where the economies of even the developed countries may be dependent in a large degree on Arab oil.” I tell you!’

  ‘Yes. I don’t understand about the people in Bradford.’ I read it over his shoulder.

  I have been thinking. Perhaps the Bradford people will be able to let us know. I will think again later. That German would make a cat laugh. Never mind, he will prove the best internationalist of us all. It’s a funny world. We will celebrate the holiness of the day.

  ‘Well, you recognize the last sentence,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Goy. It’s from the Yom Kippur service. It’s the last thing he read. Unetanah tokef kedushat hayom, et cetera. He had his prayer book there. Probably he looked at it just then. Yom Kippur. When this last war broke out. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?’ His battered face was creased in a most solemn expression.

  ‘Yes. The German who made the cat laugh couldn’t be Vava, could it?’

  ‘How could it? Vava was not a German. He wouldn’t think of him as a German.’

  ‘Haber or Willstätter, perhaps?’

  ‘Certainly not. He had the greatest respect for them.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘It’s a problem. Bradford people. Was he ever in Bradford?’

  ‘Well, Meyer, I am sort of asking you.’

  He took his glasses off, and put them on again, and read the whole thing through once more.

  ‘Bradford is a place in Yorkshire, England, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘A textile place. I don’t recall anything from Bradford. Who the hell do we know in Bradford?’

  He was looking at me, so I shook my head. I didn’t know a soul in Bradford.

  He put his glasses on and off a couple of times and looked in frustration at the transcript. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Who the hell took it down?’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d ask you that, too.’

  ‘Some goddam stenographer took it down, it’s obvious.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Give me Julian Meltzer.’

  He had a somewhat inconclusive chat with Julian. Julian didn’t know who’d taken it down either. It was established that the dictation books ought to be around somewhere, though. A whirlwind round of phone calls revealed that several of them were in the basement of the Wix Library; and about five minutes later, so was I.

  The Wix Library was another magnificent building; I picked my way down to the basement and found Dan in it.

  He said, ‘Cassius hath a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much … Mashed potato, Igor?’

  ‘Mashed potato.’

  ‘That’s the stuff.’

  These were the main Weizmann archives, embracing some scores of bays of shelving. In the House there were only typed copies of the outgoing letters, translated from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, or German where necessary. Here were the originals, incoming and outgoing, plus everything else relating to the great man: photographs, certificates, drafts, invitations, telegrams, minutes, cuttings – every memento of his life, stacked in box files, shelf upon shelf. I’d done some work here, but it was an oppressive place to work in; the ceiling was low and the air heavy in the strongroom.

  Alizia, the librarian, expected me, but the notice had been short and she was somewhat flustered.

  ‘These are from 1952, Mr Druyanov. Would you like to check that everything is here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to check. I will take your word for it, Alizia.’ This statement was the more heartfelt because a quick glance at the books showed they were all in shorthand.

  ‘If you would just sign here.’

  I signed, and on the off chance paused at Dan’s desk.

  ‘Dan, can you do shorthand?’

  ‘A little … Hmm. Pitman. I will tell you something disheartening, Igor.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They do Gregg in Israel.’

  This turned out to be correct. But by the afternoon, Connie had organized a Pitman person.

  *

  There was a small gathering at my place in the evening, including Professor Tuomisalo. I was rather ashamed of my question to Connie.

  ‘We haven’t really met much, Marta.’

  ‘Well. You will be spending some time here.’ Discreet as ever. I found myself overstimulated again by the very cool mixture of brain and propriety and sexuality.

  ‘You are marvelously tanned, Marta.’

  ‘I take fruit back to my apartment at lunchtime and sun on the balcony. The winter sun is very special.’

  ‘Is the work working out?’

  ‘Of course. I told you. There’s a tiny group of us, and two happen to be at Rehovot. It’s really a most blissful situation.’

  I had seen the two, who gave no problems. Her English was excellent. So was her Russian. Everything about her was by no means ordinary. She was nine years older than I, which I had felt once or twice was in a way a pity, apart from other considerations, which were that she was well contented with her lot. She was charmingly ignorant of various areas of knowledge in which I was informed; which worked both ways, except that she was incapable of explaining hers. In other areas, of course, we suited, and she smiled calmly at me. ‘Is your life going very nicely in London?’

  ‘The life of a bachelor is always strange.’

  ‘Are you thinking soon of normalizing it?’

  ‘Well, I’m getting old.’

  ‘It’s everybody’s problem. Don’t worry, Igor.’

  ‘I’ m not worrying. How do you like my penthouse?’ I said. ‘My very private penthouse.’

  She had a look around it. ‘It is very nice. Mr Deutsch at the desk below, who is always at the desk below, is a good friend of mine.’

  ‘I see. And all your good friends will still be at the Lunenfeld-Kunin, will they?’

  ‘Oh, yes, we’re all good friends there.’

  I recalled her room at the Lunenfeld-Kunin. She was very family-minded. Her bullet-headed father kept an eye on proceedings; also her mother, and her husband and two sturdy lads: photos all about. All the people who had been there with me had inspected these domestic treasures: I had never been in a position to inspect them alone. Discretion, circumspection, propriety.

  ‘Well, we must try and see a little more of Israel while I’m here.’

  ‘That would be very nice. Where would you recommend, Michael?’ she said to Michael Sassoon, who had at that moment amiably joined us. ‘Igor would like to see something of Israel while he is here.’

  ‘December, hmm. The Dead Sea, I should think. Somewhere down low, you see. Tiberias is low, but chancy. You can get a lot of rain at this season.’

  ‘I’ve been to Tiberias. That was June.’

  ‘June, ah. It can heat up considerably in Tiberias in June.’

  It had heated up considerably in Tiberias in June, as the faintest glance from Marta acknowledged.

  ‘How are the sweet potatoes doing?’ he said.

  ‘Not much at the moment.’

  ‘Is your research man all right?’

  ‘Well, he’s hard-headed,’ I said. I couldn’t remember telling him abou
t Hopcroft. News circulated at Rehovot.

  While I pondered this, he began talking about some work in his department. ‘Mechanochemistry. it comes out of polyelectrolytes and irreversible thermodynamics,’ he said.

  Ah, does it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Polymer research, basically – membranes, that kind of thing. Quite fascinating.’

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘What does it do?’ He frowned. This was always the sticking point here, of course. Surprisingly, it did something useful. It promised, in some distant future, to provide an alternative to the heat engine by duplicating the action of muscle. Muscle apparently expanded or retracted in response to the effect of certain body acids.

  ‘Happens when you lift your hand or scratch your nose, or whatever. Quite fast, you see – no intermediate processes.’

  Muscle cord was being made out of various polymers, and the acids from something else, and the membranes that would admit one kind or the other from some other material.

  ‘You mean it works?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s primitive. The models just turn little wheels and lift weights, and so on. The interest is with the polymers, you see.’

  Others had joined the group, and in a way that I did not quite mark it became a discussion of biological membrane and the brain. Marta had become quite animated during this, in connection with some apparent rate of energy conversion that did not accord with her advanced standards, and an interested small party was arranged to go and view the experiments right away; except, as a phone call established, the man in whose demesne it lay was out, so it was decided to do it tomorrow. Vava’s batatas and the economic plight of the world were happily lost sight of. The only thing settled, really, in a little tête-à-tête, was a weekend twosome to the Dead Sea.

  4

  One of the problems with research is to know what to look for. Too little material leads to groping and stress; too much to drifting – Hopcroft’s complaint. Here there was far too much. It was necessary to write myself a short list and then check with experts that it was the right list, and then put somebody on to keeping to it. Sitting in Chaimchik’s chair, and gazing out the window to the position he occupied in the grass below, I tapped pencil against teeth and reviewed the situation.

  It was twenty-one years ago that he had been placed in position below, and the situation I was reviewing was almost exactly twenty-one years before that. What we had was a fine upstanding figure, in his prime, distinguished, full of life and vigor – indeed as remote from the moldering remains in the ground as I now was.

  The House that now sat like a museum all around me was still in the future; as was the stripy material for Verochka’s eye so delightedly to light on – where? At Harrod’s? No Institute. No Israel. The 2,500 young participants in the tragedy referred to by Connie not yet born; few of their parents born. Chaimchik was beavering away in London and elsewhere to make the national home that they would be born in.

  Of the period of his life between 1931 and 1935, I now knew more than anyone – more than Bergmann, who had lived and worked with him; more than Weisgal, who had laughed so often with him. Day by day, month by month, from the records of this prodigious witness, I knew the onset of every chill and bowel irregularity, every sleepless night, every little affair (though not as much as I wished: Verochka had spent a year ahead of me at the files, at about the time that I was seven). I knew what he said in public and wrote in private. I knew what he had thought, and bought, and had seen and done; could visualize the excellent, intelligent man, trim beard, knowledgeable sardonic eyes, delightful smile.

  Of course with all this, it goes without saying, I knew practically nothing – little more in any sensible way than he could know, presented with my catalogued particulars, of the person who would one day have to dress him in footnotes and exhibit him. Still, I knew something. I knew that at the time he had underestimated – rather patronized – mysterious Vava. Between us, we might yet do more for him than ungrateful Israel.

  In 1931, thoroughly exhausted after thirteen years of political struggle, he had found himself kicked out of the leadership of world Zionism, owing to factional differences. He was fifty-seven, and he didn’t know what to do. An early thought, naturally, was to return to science, but science had rolled on. Was he still up to it?

  At this time, Professor Richard Willstätter, Nobel Laureate, first director of the massive Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany, and perhaps the greatest chemist in the world, came to London to address the Royal Society and to receive its Gold Medal. Weizmann asked his advice. The Laureate sternly catechized him, told him he would still do, and graciously undertook to collaborate with him by mail on a small piece of research to do with protein, Willstätter’s own subject.

  Not very encouraged (and he had lately suffered some further discouragement), he went to see his old patent agent, who occupied rooms in an ancient house in Featherstone Buildings, and without much cheer took rooms there himself, which he equipped as a laboratory.

  The source of the further discouragement was particularly galling. He was still the president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which he had founded, and which incorporated in its many resolutions a most glowing one looking forward to the day. when he would go and work there. He had been privately critical of recent academic standards at this university, but at the prompting of Einstein from Princeton he wrote to them saying that the day had now come and that he would be grateful if a small laboratory and some assistance could be placed at his disposal. He was most abruptly and coldly turned down, on the grounds that no funds were available.

  Since whatever funds were available had come largely from his efforts (and because, despite being out of office, he was about to embark on a wearisome tour to collect further funds for practically bankrupt Palestine, and the extra few hundred would scarcely rock the boat, particularly in view of his scientific reputation, which was thus being meanly devalued along with his political one), this rankled.

  ‘If anything at the university can be said to be “academic,”’ he wrote to the American banker Felix Warburg, ‘it is this resolution … I am now running a lab myself here in London. It is quite a modest installation, but it answers the purpose. The total budget of this place, including the salary of my assistants and all that is necessary for somewhat advanced work, is £500 a year.’ He added that he wanted to work half the time in Palestine, ‘but should I succeed in this, I shall not be establishing myself within the precincts of the University of Jerusalem.’

  The first part of this paragraph, with its caustic disdain for ingrates who denied him £500 a year, perhaps explained the slight discrepancy deduced by Hopcroft from the rent agreement; and the second part, perhaps, the reason why the Weizmann Institute was now at Rehovot and not at Jerusalem.

  Anyway, here he was, at the ‘Featherstone Laboratory,’ as his new letter-heading grandly announced, returned from the grueling tour that kept Palestine afloat for another year, and ready for business himself. Willstätter kept his word, and the correspondence began to flow. In little time, his fertile and optimistic brain working again, the small piece of research became a wide field. The Great Depression had begun, and his irrepressible humanism led him to conceive an ambitious scheme for feeding the poor of the world with a protein food made from waste matter for practically nothing. He quite soon came up against the ‘uncaring international companies,’ who naturally enough didn’t stand to make much out of it themselves, but he persevered. Further storm clouds were building, anyway. In Germany, they were accompanied by storm troopers and Adolf Hitler.

  Aflame again with his scientific work, he resisted the fray as long as he could (replying to urgent demands from the hero-worshiping young labor leader Ben-Gurion in Palestine that he was engaged on work of ‘momentous importance’ for the world and that he had ‘no right to jeopardize such a situation for the sake of a problematic and unattractive political victory’). But he couldn’t stay away from the refugee problem. He was
still the most prominent Jew in the world. Very soon he was chairman of various refugee committees, and very soon after refugee scientists were crowding in on him.

  Early in 1933, a telegram from Berlin warmly recommended a young scientist just dismissed from the Dahlem Institute, Dr Ernst David Bergmann, and Weizmann took him in. Others followed. Then something else happened in 1933. A friend from Manchester days, Israel Sieff, one of the heads of the Marks & Spencer firm, came to see him. His young son Daniel, seventeen years old, had just died; he asked Weizmann’s advice on a suitable memorial.

  They walked ruminatively in Hyde Park, and Weizmann gave his advice. Daniel had been reading science. Weizmann thought a small research institute, bearing his name, might be the best memorial, in Palestine. He didn’t think Jerusalem was the place for it. He thought a village called Rehovot was: it was then known as ‘the gateway to the desert,’ and the Jewish Agency was running a small agricultural station there. Such an institute, apart from perpetuating the boy’s name, would serve a multiple function. It would give employment to scientists now being thrown out of Germany, who might themselves be able to give employment to other thousands. The desert had to be pushed back; science had to explore the country’s resources and make opportunities. The small barren land was the only hope for millions now trapped in increasingly hostile Europe.

  The bereaved father agreed and plans were drawn up for the Daniel Sieff Research Institute. Not long after, Weizmann was able to suggest a scientific director for it: he was greatly taken not only by young Bergmann’s scientific ability but also by his executive capacity. Also agreed, and the Institute thudded ahead, to be opened the following year, 1934. Weizmann got Willstätter – still in grave communication about protein – to come and do the job. But alas, it wasn’t the old Willstätter. The great scientist was soon to be flung out himself. Weizmann prevailed on him to continue his work in Palestine, but he died first, broken-hearted, in a rented room in Switzerland. The great Fritz Haber, too: despite comings and goings and to-ings and fro-ings, no journey’s end at Cambridge for him. He also died in humiliation. Weizmann had invited him to Palestine, too – but only his magnificent library ever arrived.