When he next glances up from his books she’s gone again. He goes back to the problem. What is gravity? Why do objects accelerate at the same rate regardless of their different masses?
As the lift continues its descent, he glances at the lift operator, at his uniform with its sad oversized epaulettes, before realising that the man is staring straight back at him. Even odder, the man is sticking his tongue out the way that kids do. He has a round face and enormous eyes, and the merest wisps of hair clinging to his pink scalp. His body seems far too big for his short stocky legs. Einstein glances at his hand, positioned on the lift lever. It is the chubby hand of a baby. And back at his face. Baby face, the tip of his small pink tongue just visible. Why has he never noticed this before now? Dear God, the lift operator is a baby.
‘I do this all day,’ the baby says, his hand still on the lever, ‘can you imagine how I feel?’
‘No,’ admits Einstein.
‘I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, rising or falling. I never see daylight, I never see anything. Nobody talks to me apart from telling me which floors they want. They just shout numbers at me, as if I were a mathematician.’
‘I like numbers,’ says Einstein.
‘I know you do,’ says the baby, ‘but do you like them more than real things? It would be nice if – just occasionally – someone thanked me. Or told me how much they admired my uniform.’
‘It’s a very nice uniform,’ says Einstein.
‘You’re a terrible liar, Herr Professor Einstein,’ the baby grins.
Einstein doesn’t know what to say to this, he’d rather be outside where he can smoke a cigarette in peace. But this is wartime and there are no cigarettes and no peace.
They’re about half way down now and the lift is picking up speed. Maybe there is something wrong with it, because it shouldn’t be going so quickly at this point, but Einstein realises he is enjoying the flying sensation in his stomach, the feeling of weightlessness. He feels as if he has escaped the pull of gravity, just for an instant. He has escaped his wife.
Elsa lives in the bottom of the building, her apartment is in the basement. Here he eats cakes and drinks coffee with her in peaceful silence. Elsa’s silences are almost the best thing about her, she creates a vacuum that envelops him so that Mileva’s mournful questions, the boys’ incessant chatter, his colleagues’ boring conversations about outdated physics all fade away. She’s like a cake herself, thinks Einstein, as she digs her fork into a fat puff of whipped cream; she’s all pillowy and fair with strawberry-pink cheeks.
The next day as he escapes the apartment, he finds himself looking forward to riding in the lift. He is anticipating that feeling of freedom, of being temporarily cut off from the inertia of the marital bed and the gloomy clouds of his arguments with Mileva which seem to be tinted the same colour as the children’s bruises.
When he gets into the lift, the baby starts to talk almost immediately, ‘You’re visiting your cousin because you’re having an affair with her. You see her every morning for a little schtup and some refreshment afterwards. Sometimes you skip the schtup and just have the cake. That’s what she prefers, and probably you do too. Neither of you are that young anymore.’
‘Why –’
The baby looks at him enquiringly. The lift hasn’t moved yet, the door is still open. ‘Why – what?’
But Einstein can’t decide what the question should be.
When he arrives at Elsa’s apartment, he rushes her through to the bedroom so he can sink into her. Whenever he’s surrounded by her soft body, it feels like being swaddled in a comforting eiderdown. He doesn’t talk to her about his work, or Mileva, or the arguments.
And for some reason, although Elsa’s apartment is the same size as his and Mileva’s, it feels far more spacious. Even the heavy furniture suits her. The large woollen rugs feel soft under his feet, the chandeliers glint pretty coloured light all over the walls, the coffee cups are so thin and delicate that they are almost translucent. Perhaps she’s just a better housekeeper than Mileva.
Maybe things would have been different between him and Mileva if it hadn’t been for the first child. When they were still both students they went on holiday together and she got pregnant. They talked about getting married when he could afford it, but that would not be until long after the baby was due to be born. In the meantime she would go to her parents’ home in Serbia to wait it out. He still has the letter from her father telling him about the birth, she had been too ill to write herself.
Lieserl. That was the child’s name. She would be twelve now.
While Mileva was in Serbia he would cycle to work at the patent office, the wheels spelling out some complicated rhythm on the cobbled streets and he would try and work out how exactly his life had changed, now that he was a father. Except it all felt too theoretical, the only real noticeable change was that Mileva was no longer around so there was an absence, not an additional presence. But when she finally returned she seemed slightly shrunken, as if something had been sucked out of her.
‘Have you figured out what the question is?’ says the baby.
‘No, not really,’ says Einstein. His mouth feels dry, he needs coffee.
‘Isn’t it something about different masses falling at the same rate?’ the baby looks rather pleased with itself, as if it’s figured out something quite profound. ‘Isn’t it about the peculiarity of gravity?’
‘How do you know all this about me?’ asks Einstein.
‘Because I’m your baby.’
Einstein is finding it difficult to breathe. The lift definitely feels as if it’s accelerating way too fast now, perhaps it is out of control and they are plummeting to the depths of the building. They must be falling to their deaths. ‘What do you mean, my baby?’ He wipes sweat off his forehead.
‘I’m your first child, the one you never saw.’
Down goes the lift, surely they must be past the basement now where Elsa is waiting patiently with hot coffee for him, but it shows no signs of stopping. Einstein can feel their descent in the pit of his stomach, and he wants to vomit.
He’s sitting at his desk staring at the walls, as Mileva bangs around his study, piling books on top of other books, ‘You never even saw her!’ She has said this before, many times. ‘You couldn’t even be bothered to get on a train and visit your own daughter.’
‘There was no time. I had to work and it was too far away,’ he tries not to sigh because that only makes Mileva crosser, ‘but I can imagine just how she looked because you described her so beautifully in your letters. Her little chin, her soft hair.’
‘Those were my words! That’s all she is to you – just words. Symbols on a page, like your work. You reduce everything to symbols; light, bodies, the Earth...’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. That is my job, it’s what I do.’ You used to do it too before you got married, he wants to add, but decides he’d better not.
‘Lieserl was just a problem you had to solve, so you wrote a letter and got rid of her. That was your solution, but perhaps it was wrong.’
‘You agreed!’ He is exasperated now. They wrote the letter together. He signed it but she agreed to it.
‘Because I had to! I couldn’t just show up here with a baby!’
‘You could have stayed there with her. If you’d really wanted to.’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me about what I wanted! You never asked what I wanted!’ This comes out as a quiet scream, ‘You didn’t even want to see her!’
And so they go round and round. Nothing changes, everything stays the same.
There must have been things for Lieserl, Einstein realises now. He sent money to Mileva just before the birth. Wouldn’t there have been toys or perhaps a blanket embroidered with her initial in one corner, like the ones wrapped around his sons when they were both babies. He wonders what happened to all those things. When Mileva returned after the birth, she was carrying a small suitcase that seemed to weigh her down as if it were
filled with rocks. Only now does he wonder what was inside.
When she is outside in the garden with the boys, Einstein walks softly to their bedroom, opens the drawer containing her clothes, and starts looking. He pushes aside piles of her underwear, pairs of the tough brown stockings she insists on wearing and corsets that would squeeze the life out of any man, until he gets to the wooden bottom. Nothing. He looks around the room for the suitcase, but when he sees something dark in the shadows under the bed he changes his mind. Let Mileva keep her secrets. He has his.
Today when Einstein leaves to visit Elsa, winter has begun and the apartment building is cold. This will be the second winter of the war and already fuel is scarce. As he gets into the lift Einstein thinks that the baby’s uniform looks tattered and baggy and its eyes appear dim.
‘Are you alright?’ he asks.
‘Thank you for asking,’ the baby replies, ‘your concern touches my heart.’ It doesn’t appear to be sarcastic.
‘Why aren’t you a twelve year old girl?’ he dares to ask it, ‘how did you get to be a lift operator?’
The baby smiles sadly, ‘I could be anything, really. You don’t even know if I’m dead or alive.’
Einstein stares at the scruffy braid, peeling away from the baby’s uniform. It must have been a golden colour once, but now the shine has worn off and it’s an indeterminate shade of brown dirt. One of the epaulettes has come loose and is flapping in the draught of air from the concertina door as the lift jerks down towards Elsa. But for the first time he doesn’t feel hungry for cream cakes or sugary kisses and he wonders why he thinks he needs this plump blankness in his life.
They stop.
‘You’re here,’ announces the baby, and cranks open the door.
Einstein stays where he is.
‘Go on,’ says the baby, ‘she’s expecting you. She bought some more cakes this morning.’
But he can’t move.
‘You can’t be late for her. You’re never late.’
When he finally leaves the lift he walks in the opposite direction to Elsa’s apartment until he finds the narrow uncarpeted stairs that are only ever used for emergencies. He slowly walks up them until he gets to the street level. He needs fresh air.
In the study again, with Mileva.
‘The lift operator told me that he was my baby. My first baby.’
‘What! What the hell are you talking about?’
‘He is a baby, actually. When you look at him properly. It makes sense.’
Mileva looks at him, her eyes round, ‘Sense? You’re mad. You’ve gone mad.’
‘Do we know what has happened to Lieserl?’
‘You know perfectly well what happened. She is living near Novi Sad, with a nice family who look after her well. Just as we – you – arranged.’
‘She’s living? Really? Do we know this?’
‘Well, we haven’t seen her. But then you never did see her, so how would you recognise her now?’
This is so indisputably true that Einstein is silent. How would he recognise his own daughter unless someone else told him who she was? He is reliant on the word of other people. And he has learnt not to trust that in science so why should he trust that in the rest of his life? He feels dizzy, as if he’s been turned upside down.
He finds an atlas and draws a line on the map from Berlin down to Novi Sad, cutting across roads, railways, mountains, rivers. Somewhere on this paper land is his daughter, but she may as well be in a different world to his. He can only imagine her as a dot in the half tones of the map, and himself on the black line of the railway track as it meanders across the two dimensional terrain, too slow or self-important or lazy ever to reach her.
The next time he sees Elsa he has to invent a reason for missing a visit. An important departmental meeting, he says, and she doesn’t reply. She talks instead about trying to get her daughters married off, she thinks he is lucky to have sons. She doesn’t know about Lieserl and now it feels too late to tell her.
For the first time he wonders how she manages to get hold of so many cream cakes when there is rationing. ‘Can I take one home?’ and he gestures at the plate spilling over with cream and jam. He has to carry the cake out of Elsa’s apartment in his cupped hand, but the baby doesn’t mind. Its eyes widen when it sees the cake and it crams the whole thing into its mouth.
‘Thank you,’ it gasps. The lift hasn’t moved, the baby has been too busy eating to bother with the door or the lever.
‘That’s alright,’ says Einstein. He pauses, ‘Where do you go when you’re not here?’
‘Go? I don’t go anywhere. I’m not real, am I? I’m in your head, man. You still don’t understand do you?’ Even with a light dusting of sugar on its uniform, and a faint moustache of whipped cream around its mouth, it manages to look both dignified and cross.
‘But if you’re not really here, then how does the lift move?’
The baby slams the door shut and starts the lift, ‘Is it moving? Are you sure?’
Einstein thinks about it, ‘Well, I feel the motion right here,’ and he taps his stomach.
‘Why does that make it real? Can you trust your memories or your feelings? You thought you were in love with your wife and here you are schtupping Elsa. Or perhaps she’s make-believe too. Perhaps you’re a junior patent officer with a girlfriend you never bothered to marry because you were both too Bohemian to do that, and a twelve year old illegitimate daughter called Lieserl who likes to go sledging in winter and owns two pairs of ballet slippers. And you daydream about beams of light and clocks and trains, and go home each evening and doodle your thoughts, never able to turn them into anything other than scribbles. And perhaps you’re happy, Herr Professor Einstein. Really and truly happy. Can you imagine that?’
The lights in the lift snap off and they are in pitch-black. The lift starts to accelerate down past the basement, and as it freefalls through space Einstein finally knows what it means to be free of gravity. And all the associated grief.
No numbers
When my gran was in hospital she was so thin that her body was barely a bump under the covers. Her hands lay motionless on the sheet, her face making everything that was happening here too real for me to bear. She faced the TV although I didn’t think she was actually watching it. Cartoons, football, reality talk shows; all of them edged by such definite beginnings and endings.
She was dressed in a hospital shift, her arms bared to provide access for the drips. On the first visit I took her hand and she smiled, she was still able to do that. Sitting and holding the paper-light hand of a dying woman wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be, because I would have done anything to make it easier for her. Even so, my mind kept scurrying away to hide, and I had to make an effort to haul it back into this room full of machinery and pastel; lemon yellow bed sheets, peach cushions and grey oxygen pumps.
Alongside them was a more deadly colour. Dark blue ink on her left forearm creating a five digit number. Even in summer she had always worn long sleeves and one way that I knew she was ready to go was when she stopped covering it up, no longer having the energy to hide it or hate it.
This number was given to her in the camp. I don’t remember when I first saw it but I always knew it was there. But it wasn’t something that could ever be spoken out loud, it was unmentionable. Like the name of God.
Even when I was a kid and good at maths, I saw that there was a tyranny associated with integers in the way they marched forward with such regularity. They didn’t allow for gaps. I didn’t think they left any room for imagination or contradiction.
She died just as the credits rolled by for some sitcom that gets repeated regularly, something about the war that was maybe supposed to convince us that it was all over, that we were allowed to laugh about it now.
When the final measure of oxygen escaped her, I let myself stroke her arm and touch the tattoo for the first time. Ran my little finger over each of the five integers and wondered if they’d always been thi
s blurred. There was a horrible fluidity to them, as if whoever had tattooed her had done it hastily and with no more thought than scrawling a bill on the back of an envelope.
In maths lessons at school I drew wobbly lines of Venn diagrams to solve problems. Our teacher chalked a question onto the board: If there are twenty girls at a party and twelve have brown hair and fifteen have brown eyes, how many have both? and I bent over my notebook, creating intersecting circles. Then she added How many have neither? and I realised I’d assumed they all had at least one or the other.
Now the problem was unsolvable and I crosshatched the intersection of the circles with neat red lines, covering up the mistaken numbers I’d written there earlier, thinking about innumerable crowds of blond-haired blue-eyed girls surrounding the darker girls.
‘Never get a tattoo,’ my grandmother said during an otherwise unremarkable shopping trip to Brent Cross, as she gripped my hand tightly. I was sixteen and just beginning to realise that she was holding onto me for her own benefit rather than for mine.
Maybe she disliked cartooned stars or butterflies that couldn’t tremble in the breeze or rosebuds that would never open. Pictures that were just bad copies of real things, that provided no room for imagination. I didn’t like them either, those sorts of tattoos always seemed pointless to me.
This was just a week after she’d found a packet of cigarettes in my bag and there had been a row. I was angry because she had gone through my bag after she’d smelt smoke on my school uniform. I was sixteen so it was legal, I told her. It was wrong, I was a disobedient child, she shouted, did I want to die of some horrible coughing disease? And I could tell she was thinking, I survived all that so my granddaughter could kill herself with cigarettes? I could only shake my head, and so she won.
She managed to link my disobedience to my future death in her own mind and maybe in mine too. I never smoked again and I agreed not to get a tattoo.
The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space Page 13
