The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘The twenty-ninth or thirtieth.’

  ‘The twenty-ninth is Saturday – very restricted flights. I don’t want to push you – I mean, don’t hurry your work here. But Kammermann will be in London the twenty-eighth.’

  Kammermann. Weizmann’s confidant of the 1930s. ‘I didn’t know he was alive.’

  ‘He’s just alive. He’s been a recluse for years. They are sending him to Switzerland. He will be in London a day and a night. A specialist is seeing him. He will be at Brown’s Hotel.’

  ‘You want me to see him?’

  ‘Well, he will see you, which is something. He doesn’t see people. He was interested in your book. I just spoke with his doctor, Brodie.’

  ‘All right. Can he remember anything?’

  ‘Who knows? But he undoubtedly has political papers. He didn’t answer our letters. It would be nice to have the papers.’

  ‘Okay, Meyer.’

  The other call I made myself. I knew Caroline would be at her parents’ place tonight. She was going to Hampshire to Willie’s tomorrow; she was staying there the whole week and not coming back till the following Monday, the thirty-first, so I wouldn’t see her till then. I hadn’t liked the way we’d signed off on the phone. Also, of course, she didn’t know of the parcel from Olga.

  ‘Hello, Caroline,’ I said when I got through.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ she said loweringly.

  ‘No trouble. Good news. Vava’s letters turned up.’

  ‘Yes, she told me she’d sent them.’

  ‘Oh, you spoke to her?’

  ‘I went to see her, with Hopcroft. She phoned him. She got them the day Hopcroft had his accident. Her friend went down and got them.’

  ‘I thought that. Well, that’s good, and anyway they’re here and all’s well. Are you packing up and so on?’

  ‘Yes, I’m packed. What are you doing?’

  ‘I’ m going to Midnight Mass tomorrow in Bethlehem.’

  ‘Well. All in the family, I suppose, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite. Would you like to give my mother a ring and tell her that? She might be tickled.’

  ‘All right. Anything else to tell her, like when you’re coming back?’

  ‘Yes – Thursday, the twenty-seventh.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you said the twenty-ninth or thirtieth.’

  ‘Meyer wants me to see an old personage who is passing through London on Friday. So I’m coming Thursday.’

  ‘Oh, you want me to make arrangements.’

  ‘No. I only rang to say hello. It was nice of you to go and see Olga. What’s she like?’

  Odd.’

  There was really nothing much doing with her; monosyllabic, situation distinctly strained. This was a pity. She’d been a good assistant, Caroline.

  ‘Well, it was only hello,’ I said.

  ‘All right. Hello. Happy Christmas,’ she said rather grudgingly.

  I repeated the salutation and hung up, brooding.

  Not a good idea.

  4

  On Monday I dropped Vava and got back to volume 15. Connie had set matters in hand and there were answers to my large pile of queries. A lot of work had been done in the archives, but I still had to go there myself for some hours in the morning.

  Everything with Weizmann’s own autograph was kept in plastic envelopes and had to be examined there. He’d had a habit of adding handwritten P.S.’s and comments in the margin that hadn’t got back to the carbon copies.

  To his ladyloves, often the only source for his private views on factional disputes, he had confided stray comments of political importance. All to be explained in footnotes. Verochka had shown admirable detachment here. Obviously, she hadn’t liked what she had read. But her sharp eye had seen what might later be needed. Hard to tell, of course, what she had destroyed.

  His attachments were well signaled, the customary overture ‘Dear Friend’ accelerating rapidly over a couple of weeks to steamier terms. A consistent pattern in the content, too: a paragraph of endearments abruptly followed by several much longer ones, stiff with political views. He had simply needed somebody: opposite gender, young. Not to be seen in the Birley portrait, but you could just spot it in the photos. There was a look, a certain mercurial flicker that had never apparently left him. Until the bleak end. Almost everything had left him in the end. The man who had written 1,083, letter in 1934, had written three in 1952, Of course he had written something else in 1952, but I put this severely out of mind and attended to the enthusiasms of a livelier decade.

  5

  I thought the best thing to do about sweet potatoes was to write a report for Meyer, and let him worry about it. I would outline the problem, of which he was at the moment unaware, and present my conclusions. The snag was that I didn’t have any. I wasn’t even certain that I knew the problem. The whole thing was very unpromising, and my silence led Ham to inquire what was eating me. We were making a slow pilgrimage to Bethlehem; numbers of others were doing the same. I was seated next to him, and Marta and Marie-Louise were in the rear.

  ‘It’s carotene,’ I said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It can’t have anything to do with petrol.’

  ‘Perfectly correct.’

  ‘Weizmann thought it did.’

  ‘You can’t be right all the time,’ Ham said.

  ‘If he’d thought about it for twenty years, you’d think he might have half a chance, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Tell Uncle.’

  I told Uncle. He swore a bit from time to time – not at the problem, but at other pilgrims, many on donkeys. We were part of a straggling procession. Bethlehem is not much above ten minutes out of Jerusalem; it had taken us nearly an hour already. It was still quite early, just after ten, but we had to find our alloted parking place. A sticker on the window gave its number.

  You couldn’t bring a car into town without a sticker, and you couldn’t get in at all without a ticket. We were stopped frequently at roadblocks by young soldiers with automatic weapons. They gave us quite jovial Christmas greetings, however, and the nearer we got the more evident the festive spirit became.

  Little stars were twinkling, in the approved manner, like diamonds in the sky, and a glow was radiating from the little town on its holiest night. It came from the television lighting that ashenly illuminated the scene like a piece of flashlit police evidence. The Church of the Nativity was on high ground, and our parking place on rather low ground, which meant a long trudge up.

  I didn’t know how much Ham had caught of my problem amid the confusion. The trouble was that the problem had rarely remained the same for more than a couple of hours. It had kept subtly changing itself. Originally it had been the simple one of obtaining Vava’s papers, but then it had become the more complicated one of obtaining his bacterium and his sweet potato as well. All of these had been posers in their hour, but at least they had been understandable posers. The carotene and the Grignard were something else, and because I wasn’t a scientist I didn’t know how to explain them. I simply knew that they would become problems because Chaimchik had said so; at least, I thought he had said so, which was another problem.

  It was true that experts on the various problems were to hand, but to get proper answers you had to feed experts proper questions. It suddenly struck me that I had presented no single expert with the whole problem. I had gone running to separate ones with separate bits of it. This was because the problem itself had been revealed in piecemeal form.

  Weiss, when primed, had unscrambled Greenyard into a reaction and Le-Roy-Parma into a chemist; Dan had directed me to where he lived in Cromer-le-Poyth; and Beylis had explained that he could have had nothing to do with Grignard. Except – wait a minute – no, he hadn’t. He’d said carotene could have had nothing to do with the papers I’d shown him.

  Could there be some other papers?

  No, there couldn’t. Expert Weiss had directed me to the papers. He had known everything that Weizmann had done with the
Grignard reaction from the mid-thirties onward. And Weizmann had published nothing for thirteen or fourteen years before then, which took us back to the twenties or earlier. Which wouldn’t work, because there’d been no Grignard until the thirties. Or had there?

  This reflection was so novel that I stopped short, and Ham walked on a few paces, and the women, following behind, bumped into me. We had trudged up the hill and were crossing Manger Square. It was thronged with pilgrims, all looking, in the blinding chalky light, like characters from an early flickering movie.

  Jesus freaks abounded, the younger ones, from affluent lands sitting on the ground and begging. Numerous old Arabs were going about selling felafel and shashlik, and younger ones were having a marvelous time feeling the girls. There were thousands of girls to feel. A troupe of young Franciscan monks, brown-habited, cruised with their guitars, bizarrely singing ‘Jingle Bells.’ A grotesque scene, stranger by far than the remote one it was celebrating; a Bartholomew Fair. To add to the madness, peals of bells continuously clanged.

  I was rooted to the spot and gazing about, bedazzled.

  ‘What’s up?’ Ham said.

  ‘When did Grignard react?’

  ‘What’s that?’ He was shouting and cupping his ear. We had begun to move again, pushed from the rear. I yelled my question again.

  ‘Grignard? His catalytic reaction? I don’t know. The turn of the century, I think. Why?’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ I said.

  It was a proper thing to say. We were ducking into the entrance of His earliest standing church. Inside was a Roman temple. The normal entrance had been bricked up at some time in antiquity to prevent the entrance of horsemen and camels. Numerous legends had developed about the need to be as a little child before one could get into the place. It was built over a cave in the rocky hillside, the presumed site of the Birth. The Emperor Constantine, in a rash of enthusiasm, and at the behest of his newly converted mother, Helena, had built the first one, but Justinian had pulled it down and built this one. He had done it by the year 537, and this was it: a Roman temple, soberly designed for the exercise of a cult – in this case the cult of Christ, and therefore quirkily constructed in the form of a cross to conform to faddish new Christian modes.

  It was a handsome building, designed by a sound temple man, but constructed, for reasons of economy, out of local materials; four rows of tremendous Corinthian columns, ten in each row, of pink Bethlehem marble supported the roof. It was already nearly six hundred years old when the stupefied Crusaders, coming from places with hardly any buildings to speak of, had first cast awed eyes on it. Generations of acolytes had been swinging censers through it ever since, which accounted for the exceedingly strange smell – the earliest sort of Christian smell.

  We made our way to where the Western Christmas was being celebrated and found the church already crowded; it was after eleven. It held about a thousand, standing, which is what everybody was doing, shuffling and snuffling in heavy clothing in the chill.

  The big white church was sumptuously decorated: pictures, statuettes, flowers. Red curtains hung on windows and doors. The white-and-gilt altar shone triumphantly. Six long candles, in enormous virginal candlesticks, flanked the cross, interspersed with vases of gladioli. A picture of the mother of Christ hung from the gallery, above which the gilded organ pipes thrummed sonorously. Candelabra hung from ceilings and walls; the place was a blaze of color and light, added to by the television arc lamps.

  The Latin Patriarch was performing an office before the altar while the priests sang Jesus Redemptor. Then the Patriarch recited the lesson; and then everyone was singing again in Latin.

  I was experiencing some confusion. Grignard had reacted at the turn of the century? I was not perfectly clear which century I was in. Rather too many appeared to be in evidence round here. In some bemusement I gazed at the gorgeous antique vestments of the Patriarch; he was just departing to change into some other vestments. I had seen a photo of him, in the afternoon paper, arriving at the church. He’d arrived in his Mercedes, which had struck me as odd at the time – a grander mode of arrival surely than that of the pregnant lady who now gazed calmly down at him from below the organ pipes. There was a faint smile on her face, not unlike that of Verochka in the photograph, as though waiting for something to happen.

  Suddenly it happened. A voice sang:

  ‘Dominus dixit ad me:

  Filius meus es tu,

  Ego hodie genui te.’

  The Lord said to Me:

  Thou art my Son,

  I have begotten Thee this day.

  It was midnight. The Midnight Mass could begin; which, with the return of the Patriarch, even more gorgeously attired, and to a perfectly glorious Gregorian chant, it did. In a moment, the chant was drowned by a wild clanging of bells and a thrilling peal from the organ, which had practically every hair on my head standing up. The miracle had occurred. He had been born.

  Simultaneously, a semicircle of words lit up in blue above the organ pipes: ‘GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO’; and a Star of David flashed alight in electric bulbs overhead. The Star of David? A second blink showed that it was not. It was another six-pointed star, a representation of the one that had directed the Magi to this place. At the identical moment, it seemed to have directed me to one. I was still prickling all over with the miracle; and I got it then, or perhaps a moment later, when the procession of priests passed. Words were entwined in the embroidered hems of their silk garments, and I screwed my head sideways to read the words and, as I did so, recalled an earlier occasion when I had screwed my head sideways to read words.

  The Gloria was succeeded by the Alleluia and the Gospel and the Credo; and then the Sanctus and the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei – marvelous all of them, not much marred by the Patriarch passing by with a doll in his arms.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ Marta said to me.

  ‘The miracle.’

  ‘You don’t believe in miracles.’

  ‘I do.’

  The Patriarch went below to put the doll back in the cave while Lauds went on. They went on for a long time. It was after two when we streamed out.

  ‘What was the problem with carotene?’ Ham said, yawning, as we went down the hill.

  ‘You can’t get chutney out of it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You get something else.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll buy it. What?’

  ‘God knows,’ I said happily, which was true enough. I didn’t, anyway. I thought I might, though, after a bit of a nap. It looked as if I’d only have a bit of one. Lots to do on Christmas Day, and tidings of joy for some, I shouldn’t wonder.

  Chapter Nine

  I skipped breakfast and just had a cup of coffee while waiting for Ze’ev to pick me up. I’d rung Beylis as soon as I’d got up, but he was in the shower and I couldn’t be bothered to wait. I was aflame with my idea and wanted to check it immediately.

  ‘SUPPER – NO CHUTNEY’ were the words in the margin; but in the body of the thing it had said something else. It had said, ‘He wishes for GREENYARD’S PICKLES – CHUTNEY.’ Well, he hadn’t. That was obvious. She had heard him say Grignard, and assumed it to be chutney; as I’d assumed the Star of Bethlehem to be the Star of David. But she had hung on to her assumption for rather longer.

  Christmas Day was a workday at the Institute, and also at the House. Connie called down the stairs as soon as I arrived.

  ‘Igor – is that you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Professor Beylis on the phone. You called him?’

  ‘Coming.’

  I raced up the stairs and took the phone in her room.

  ‘Emanuel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rejoice, Emanuel!’ I commanded.

  ‘I am always ready,’ he said equably. ‘About what should I rejoice?’

  ‘In the glory and mystery of carotene.’

  ‘I rejoice in it.’

  ‘When did Weizmann work with it?’

  ‘
Did I say that he did?’

  ‘I am saying that he did.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a quiz. Let me think.’

  ‘When would he have had occasion?’

  ‘Well, as I’ve told you, the authority is Kuhn, and Kuhn came to it through vitamins while working with Willstätter on protein, so –’

  But we found nothing then. When else?’

  ‘There is an else, is there?’

  ‘There must be an else. It isn’t a quiz, Emanuel. I need to know when he could have worked on it.’

  ‘Well, carotene is a pigment. Coloring matter,’ he said slowly. But that would have been very early on.’

  ‘It could have been very early on.’

  ‘In that case, perhaps … his dyestuff work. I don’t know.’

  ‘When did his dyestuff work go on till?’

  ‘Oh, about 1910.’

  ‘And when did it start?’

  ‘That’s how he did start.’

  ‘What – the turn of the century?’

  ‘That sort of period.’

  Ten years, then. ‘Where did he do most of it?’ I said.

  ‘In Manchester. He did dozens of papers there.’

  ‘What’s that – 1904?’

  ‘Yes. About then.’

  Six years. ‘Could he have known about Grignard then?’

  ‘Oh, dear. Are we still with Grignard?’

  ‘Could he?’

  ‘Grignard, 1904? Yes. He could.’

  ‘What could he have done with Grignard then?’

  ‘Oh, now really, Igor, I can’t do it off the top of my head. If you’ve got the papers there – have you got the papers there?’

  ‘They will be here. I think so.’

  So go through them. It’ll tell you – if you see the word “magnesium” somewhere, give me a ring. It might be an odd word with things in front or behind. Don’t worry about that. Just look for the magnesium.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, and put the phone down. I seemed to be panting slightly.

  Connie was looking at me queerly.

  ‘What is all this?’ she said.