The Day Without Yesterday

by Stuart Clark

  ‘How does the war end?’ asked Pierre, wearily rubbing his sunken cheeks. It was one of their verbal refuges, a way to start a conversation when no one knew what to talk about. It provoked a list of automatic comments that Lemaître listened to but seldom joined in until the real conversation began.

  – Negotiation, surely. The return of Belgium.

  – No, a big push to drive them back into Germany.

  – What if it’s they who make the big push?

  – What’s stopping them now?

  The gas lamp on the table cast its earthy glow, warm in colour if not in its ability to heat their abode. Lemaître was counting the days to warmer weather, unable to shake the fear that tripping over his blanket could be the difference between life and death if a night attack came.

  Thankfully, they were rare. Like any job, the war had settled into a mundane routine. Attacks mostly came in the grey mist of dawn. Once the danger had passed and the sunlight was fully over the land, both sides settled for breakfast. This was followed by the routine drag of repairing trenches, filling sandbags, standing-to with rifles aimed over no-man’s-land in case the enemy tried a charge. For Lemaître and his squad, the day also included surveying and calculating bomb ranges. He had been transferred from infantry to artillery.

  At least the soldiers were getting meat. The word was that in the cities protein was almost impossible to come by. There was a story doing the rounds of a packhorse that had collapsed, and no sooner had the soldiers redistributed its burden and ended its misery than the townsfolk had descended with knives and butchered the animal to the bone in minutes.

  – Germany is landlocked and growing weaker; they must collapse.

  – There’ll be a revolution inside Germany.

  – What if the next lot’s even worse?

  ‘I’m not sure I’ll remember how to behave back on the streets,’ said Pierre, taking the conversation off on tonight’s tangent.

  ‘Well, you can stop belching for a start. Have some manners.’

  ‘There’s always the chance of a promotion. Being an officer must help keep you safe. Don’t you think, Georges?’

  Lemaître glanced over from his book. ‘I’m not cut out for promotion: wrong attitude.’

  Smiling was something that hardly any of them did spontaneously any more; instead they had learned to recognise a kind of grimace as the substitute.

  Michel made the gesture now. ‘After what you did today, you’re lucky you’re not back up in the forward trench.’

  The comment brought a round of tired but good-natured agreement.

  Lemaître had pointed out to his commander a mistake in the artillery manual’s mathematics. Without correction, the guns would never find their marks. The commander had not liked the interruption.

  ‘I did what anyone else would have done,’ said Lemaître. His story made him think of Jacques. From their correspondence it was now clear that his brother had taken to the military life and was rising up the ranks.

  ‘I think I’ll become a mechanic after the war,’ said Louis. His bunk was adorned with sculptures he had created from spent artillery shells.

  They were infinitely better than the souvenirs some of the other dugouts were collecting. Rats were a constant problem. Not content with just killing the vermin, some squads were hanging the carcases as trophies by their tails from wooden frameworks.

  Pierre caught Lemaître’s eye. ‘What about you? Back to university?’

  ‘To finish my thesis, yes. If there’s anything left of the university. It was in Louvain.’

  Mention of the sacked city threw a pall across the proceedings. They all knew people who had died in the wanton violence there.

  ‘We’ll be a generation of old men before we’re even thirty,’ said Louis.

  ‘Why? We’ll recover, once we get away from these stinking holes.’

  ‘I don’t mean like that. Physically, yes, we’ll recover, but I mean in our attitude. The way we think about life … and death.’

  ‘Now you’re just being morbid.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Louis was a neat man whose once young face grew more gaunt by the day. ‘All of us wake up and wonder if this is going to be our last day. We have no control over it. Sure, we can keep our heads down but we can’t stop a shell from just dropping out of the sky. Can’t even see it coming. This must be what it’s like to be old. Waking up every day and wondering if it’s your last. Perhaps it’s confronting your own mortality that robs you of youth, rather than the years ticking by.’

  ‘My belief in God and the knowledge that death isn’t the end is the only thing that stops me going insane,’ said Pierre with an embarrassed little laugh. He scanned the room, eager for confirmation.

  ‘We’d all like to believe that.’

  ‘Sounds a bit too convenient for my liking.’

  ‘Your faith will fade once peace is upon us.’

  ‘Georges, back me up here. You believe, don’t you?’

  Lemaître put down his book. ‘I do believe, but faith is not about the afterlife. For me, it’s deeper …’

  ‘Deeper!’ Michel leaned back from the table. ‘What could be deeper than having a bullet smash through your heart?’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain. The natural world is beautiful, with so much order … Isaac Newton once wrote how it led one to believe there is a creator, that the whole thing had been designed. I don’t believe that the design was fixed; there has to be change and evolution of landforms and animals, but the underlying principles of Nature are beautiful.’

  ‘Exactly. God must be real to explain all the things that science can’t. There’s just too much we don’t know.’

  Lemaître softened his voice. ‘I’m not sure you need God to do all the things that physics cannot explain yet, but I do believe you need him to make the laws of physics in the first place. I believe the Bible may even contain scientific knowledge, if you know how to interpret it.’

  He could see the sceptical look on his comrades’ faces.

  ‘I don’t mean that the ancients practised science, but think of Genesis, and the creation of Heaven and Earth. The immediate thing that God did was to create light, and the Earth. In 1905, millennia afterwards, a German …’ He ignored the rude noises and words. ‘… called Albert Einstein was working out the consequences of motion and derived an equation that shows light and mass are connected – almost certainly interchangeable. Light can be transformed into solid matter, and vice versa. How could the ancient scribes have known that light and Earth went together without divine inspiration?’

  Pierre looked doubtful, possibly even somewhat embarrassed.

  ‘I believe in … something,’ he said lamely.

  ‘That’s a start.’ Lemaître forced himself to smile. ‘After my Ph.D, I’m thinking of applying to a seminary.’

  This was, he realised, the first time he had said it aloud. Until this moment, the thought had been known only to him and to his Maker. Now he had turned those evanescent feelings into words and set the air vibrating with them, casting them from the spirit world into the material one. He felt elated.

  ‘A priest? I thought you were going to become a physicist?’

  asked Michel.

  ‘Why can’t I be both?’ asked Lemaître, genuinely puzzled. Pierre reached for the lamp and extinguished its flame. ‘Another day tomorrow, lads, best get some rest.’

  Outside they heard the tramp of boots on duckboards. It was probably a squad returning from barbed wire cutting in no-man’sland. They were the only ones who moved around much during the night. Lemaître thought of a story he had heard the previous morning. A cutting squad – perhaps the same one – had come virtually face to face with a German group doing the same thing to the Belgian defences. The two squads had stared at each other like polecats in a standoff, then turned silently and retreated into the night.

  Lemaître had thought about the encounter all day. Even in the muddy landscape of water-filled craters and bomb-bla
sted trees, where there was no nature or beauty for God to work through, He still found a way to operate. He was in the hearts of those patrolmen who chose to back away.

  Lemaître laid aside his book and settled back. The straw mattress felt quite comfortable that night.

  15

  Berlin

  1917

  According to the law of entropy, all systems tend to move from order to chaos. It is an inevitable process, inescapable and irreversible. Einstein needed only to look at the mess in his office to know that it was true. Piles of journals had toppled over; unfolded letters littered the desk.

  Everything could wait.

  He had been right: general relativity could give him a way to describe the whole universe, not just the contours of space around an individual object, but the underlying curvature of the whole universe.

  But it was a colt that needed breaking. Just when he thought he had succeeded and order prevailed, it would rear up and throw him again. Something in the maths would make no sense; the formulae would suddenly insist that the universe was like an expanded sheet of rubber, or a collapsing building.

  It reminded him of something. He lifted his head and his eye caught the portrait of Newton.

  Newton had always known that his gravitational theory was flawed. Since all the stars generate gravity, the philosopher had wondered how the universe could be stable and not collapsing. His solution was that the whole universe was the Sensorium of God, allowing the Old One to directly intervene and hold the universe in shape. Now Einstein faced the same problem. But he didn’t need God to solve it for him. Einstein winked at the portrait.

  Fighting to remain calm against the electrical surges the work was generating within him, he hunched over his writing-pad. The key was in the amount of matter the universe contained and the way it was distributed through space. He needed something that would act to oppose this. As he stared at the equations, a solution presented itself: there must be a kind of energy in the universe, unknown on Earth but capable of resisting gravity. He could see how it would fit into his equations quite simply, but the arbitrary nature of it bothered him.

  What else could he do? One only had to look into the night sky to know the universe was static, the stars unchanging in their constellations for eternity.

  He took his pen and recast the equations. When the time came to enter the new term he marked it as the inverted V of the Greek letter lambda. In his head, he called it the cosmological constant.

  Einstein’s days passed in frantic episodes of activity followed by indolence, removed from the normal run of space and time. It mattered little whether it was light or dark, warm or cold, mealtime or bedtime; if inspiration was upon him, he would work.

  When it was clement, he kept the windows open, hoping that the breeze would dust the study. As the crisper weather arrived, he would look out at the evening stars, breath escaping from him in billows of vapour, and ponder how ironic it was that he could experience more of a connection to the universe through his mathematics than by standing under the night sky.

  Things were difficult with Elsa at the moment; the divorce negotiations with Mileva were dragging on and his cousin was convinced he was stalling. When the urge to see her and the girls did hit him, he would have to remember to check the clock as he reached for his hat, to make sure that it was not the middle of the night. If they were not at home, he would continue to the university.

  He saw Ilse more regularly these days. At his suggestion she had become the secretary to the physics institute he headed, the one for which Haber had scraped together the funding. Not that it was much of an institute yet, just Ilse and him, and Erwin Freundlich, whom he had managed to rescue from the old naysayers at the observatory.

  He was at the university, staring in disbelief at a letter – thankfully not about the divorce – when there was a knock. Freundlich stepped in and closed the door behind him.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’

  ‘Come in,’ said Einstein, still preoccupied with the contents of the letter. ‘Erwin, I need your advice. Is there any evidence that the universe might be – this is going to sound a little strange – collapsing?’

  Freundlich’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘Or expanding?’

  ‘Expanding?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Einstein, ‘the space between the stars, perpetually driven to get bigger or to shrink. It seems nonsensical to me when the constellations have persisted for aeons.’

  ‘Well, the stars are in motion but very small, still difficult to measure and apparently quite random. They would almost certainly average out to zero, I think.’

  Einstein nodded emphatically. ‘And these gas clouds I hear about, the nebulae, are they the same?’

  ‘I think so. Although I have heard that some people think the spiral-shaped ones are vast collections of stars, like our own Milky Way but much further away. Is this about the cosmological constant?”

  Einstein waved the letter. ‘De Sitter doesn’t like it; tells me I’m plainly wrong. Seems everyone thinks they know more about my theory than I do. He thinks it unnatural and says he can find a solution to the equations that doesn’t need it.’

  ‘De Sitter? In Holland?’

  ‘The trouble is he has to leave out all the matter in the universe to make the equations balance. How can that be right?’

  Freundlich spoke a little more loudly. ‘You’re talking about relativity with other astronomers?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I have to. We still have to prove relativity.’

  The astronomer looked puzzled. ‘Then get me back the confiscated equipment. We can be ready as soon as the war ends – sooner if we can find safe passage. There’s an eclipse next year across America, remember? We don’t need help. We just need the equipment. I can do this, Albert.’

  Einstein retreated behind his desk. ‘Erwin, the equipment is lost until this war is over.’

  He knew that what he had to say next was not going to be easy for Freundlich to hear. ‘An English astronomer called Arthur Eddington is publishing a series of papers about relativity. They’re being written by de Sitter; Lorentz has organised the whole thing at my request. He is also forwarding my original papers, though they can scarcely be published at the moment. Eddington understands and is helping to plant the seeds of the theory in England.’ He drew breath. ‘The papers will emphasise the eclipse across America in 1918 as a way of testing whether relativity has any value.’

  Freundlich resembled a candle, melting beneath a flame.

  ‘You will have your chance, Erwin, but right now we need allies.’

  The younger man lifted his gaze from the carpet, nostrils flaring. ‘You’ve killed my career! What chance do I have now to prove myself ?’ He turned and blundered across the room.

  Einstein rushed out from behind the desk, heart thumping.

  ‘Erwin, please …’

  A sharp sensation in his stomach brought him to a halt. Sweat broke out across his brow. He doubled over in pain and fell heavily against a bookcase.

  Freundlich tried to catch him but the physicist crashed to the ground. ‘Albert?’

  Einstein spoke through gritted teeth. ‘This is a bad one.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I felt it in Switzerland … with my boys. I think, I think I have a cancer in me. Getting worse. Take me home.’

  ‘I’ll take you to the hospital.’

  ‘No, please, just take me home.’ He had no strength to beg. Freundlich struggled to get Einstein to his feet. The exertion was almost more than Einstein could bear. Everything seemed to come and go in snatches around him, but there was one sound he would never forget. When Freundlich opened the office door, Ilse had screamed.

  Elsa was in a flat spin, tidying his apartment furiously under cover of the doctor’s visit. From his bed, Einstein listened to her chaotic progress through his home, oblivious to the movement of the stethoscope across his chest. A nearby door creaked open, followed by silence. That could only mean on
e thing. Doctor or no doctor, Einstein could contain himself no longer.

  ‘Not my study, Elsa! Tidy anything else you want, but not my study.’ He could picture her standing there, blowing through pursed lips as she surveyed the mountains of papers and books, assessing her best route into the terrain. He began to kick the covers from his legs.

  Elsa appeared just in time to stop the reluctant patient from tumbling to the floor.

  ‘It hurts just to move,’ Einstein complained.

  ‘That is precisely why I have asked you to lie still.’ There was no mistaking the annoyance in the doctor’s voice. He stood on the far side of the bed, stethoscope hung round his neck, eyes narrowed.

  Einstein wondered again where Elsa had found the man.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Frau Löwenthal. It saves me explaining twice. I’m now certain that Herr Einstein does not have cancer. He has a swollen liver and, I suspect, a gastric ulcer. He’s in no danger of dying, but he will be an invalid for many weeks, possibly months.’

  ‘Months?’

  ‘Yes, months.’ The doctor looked as if he was enjoying giving the diagnosis. ‘You’ve been overdoing it.’ He forestalled any riposte by turning to pack his bag. Einstein muttered his thanks, embarrassed at ever having voiced his own dramatic diagnosis.

  He listened irritably to Elsa showing the doctor out. When she returned he said, ‘I must tell the boys. They must know their father is ill.’

  ‘And what good will that do, except worry them? Especially when their mother is poorly, too.’

  Letters had arrived from friends in Zurich and from Hans Albert informing them that Mileva had been hospitalised with chest pains. The boys were being cared for by a maid.

  ‘Mileva’s not ill. I’ve told you before, she’s a prima donna, always writing her mood in the darkest colours available. It’s all a ploy to delay the divorce.’

  ‘She’s been diagnosed by doctors. I’m not one to take that woman’s side, but you must be reasonable.’

  ‘I will look after my boys, if she really is ill … if she dies …’ Elsa’s wide mouth gaped. ‘How can you be so callous about such a thing? That’s the mother of your children you’re talking about.’