The Other Einstein(12)

Often, in the darkness of my bedroom at night, in the silence of the hours after everyone had fallen into slumber, I wondered if I was making the wrong decision by pleasing Papa instead of Mama. I couldn’t gratify both.

Despite their differences of opinion on my path, Papa would not brook any criticism of Mama, however slyly I made it. He defended her expectations as appropriate for a mother protecting her daughter. And I knew he was right. Mama loved me and wanted the best for me, even if her vision of the best didn’t comport with my own.

Dinner ended after a stifled conversation about Newton. I was sent back to the parlor alone. Something was wrong between Mama and Papa, something unspoken but palpable. Mama would never openly disagree with Papa, certainly not in front of me, yet her manner—her unusually terse dinner prayer, her abrupt passing of plates, her failure to ask about the acceptability of the meal—spoke of defiance. To occupy myself until Papa returned, I reviewed the data we’d gathered and prepared for a second experiment to examine another one of Newton’s theories. In order to measure the impact that friction has on the motion of identically sized marbles, I had asked Jurgen to prepare three strips of wood, each with varying degrees of roughness.

I thought about Papa’s comment when I proposed this experiment: “Mitza, you are like the objects in one of Newton’s investigations. You tirelessly maintain your velocity through life unless you are acted upon by an outside force. I hope no outside force ever changes your velocity.”

Papa was funny.

As I created ramps using the different strips of wood, voices scratched at the edges of my consciousness. The maids were probably bickering again, a skirmish that resurfaced nearly every day as the dinner hour ended and the cleaning duties mounted. The voices escalated near the kitchen. What was going on? I had never known Danijela and Adrijana to be so loud before, so disrespectful. Nor had I ever known Mama to lose control of the kitchen. She was spare with her words but always firm. Curious, I strained my ears but could not make sense of the conversation.

I wanted to find out what was going on. Instead of nearing the kitchen through the parlor entrance, I crept down the servants’ hallway. Here, the wood used for the dull floors was a rougher grade, and there were no pictures on the walls, unlike the rest of our house. In the area where we lived, the floors were polished to a high gleam and were covered with Turkish rugs, and the walls were crowded with still lifes of fruit and portraits of people we didn’t know. Papa always said he wanted our house to be as fine as any home in the lauded city of Berlin.

No one expected me here. Trying to tread lightly—not easy in my heavy boots—I realized that the voices did not belong to Danijela and Adrijana. They belonged to Mama and Papa.

I had never heard Mama and Papa fight before. Soft-spoken and submissive everywhere but the kitchen—and even there, she was quietly adamant—Mama hardly even talked in Papa’s presence. What horrible event had caused Mama to raise her voice?

Drawing closer to the kitchen door, I heard my name.

“Do not give the child false hope, Milo?. She is only seven years old. You spend too much time with her, encouraging her ideas and reading,” Mama pleaded. “She is a gentle spirit, in need of our protection. We must prepare her for her real future. Here, at home.”

“My hope in Mitza is not unfounded. No amount of time spent on her is too great. If anything, it is too little. Do I have to repeat what Miss Stanojevi? told me today? About Mitza’s brilliance? About her genius with math and sciences? Her nimble way with other languages? Need I tell you again what I have long suspected?” Papa’s voice was firm.

Surprisingly, Mama did not relent. “Milo?, she is a girl. What good does it do for you to teach her German and math? To do science experiments with her? Her place is in the home. And Mitza’s home will be this home; her leg will make marriage—and children—impossible. Even the government recognizes this. Girls can’t even attend high school.”

“That may be true for ordinary girls. But it does not apply to a girl like Mitza.”

“What do you mean, ‘a girl like Mitza’?”

“You know what I mean.”

Mama was quiet. I thought she had backed down, but then she spoke again.

“Do you mean a girl with a deformity?” Mama spat out the word.

I recoiled. Had Mama really just called my leg a deformity? Mama was always telling me how beautiful I was, how my limp was hardly noticeable. That no one really took account of the unevenness of my legs and hips. I had always known that this wasn’t completely true—I could not ignore a lifetime of strangers’ stares and schoolmates’ teasing—but a deformity?

My father’s tone was filled with fury. “Don’t you dare call her leg a deformity! If anything, it is a gift. With a leg like that, no one will claim her in marriage. This gives her license to pursue the intellectual gifts God has given her. Her leg is a sign that she is destined for greater, better fates than a simple marriage.”

“A sign? God-given gifts? Milo?, God would want us to protect her in this home. We must keep her expectations realistic so as not to crush her spirit.” Mama paused, and Papa broke into the momentary silence.

“I want Mitza to be strong. I want her to walk by any klipani who mock her leg, confident that God gave her a special gift—her intelligence.”

I felt like I was viewing myself for the first time. Mama and Papa perceived me much the same way the parents in “The Little Singing Frog” saw their daughter. I heard them say I was smart, but mostly, I sensed their shame. They wanted to hide me away everywhere but the classroom and our home. They didn’t even think that I was worthy of marriage, something to which even the dullest farm girl could aspire.