The Other Einstein(22)

Mr. Einstein waited. Only once I nodded did he announce to the others, “I would like a moment more. Why don’t you go on, and we will catch up?”

The others headed toward the dirt path down the mountain, but Helene hesitated. Her eyebrows knitted into a familiar expression of wariness. “Are you certain, Mitza?”

I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“All right then. But don’t take more than a minute, Mr. Einstein. We have a train to catch.”

“Of course, Miss Kaufler.”

Staring at me pointedly, she said, “You will keep him on course, won’t you, Mitza?”

I nodded again.

Once the others passed out of sight, Mr. Einstein pulled me down gently to sit next to him on a fallen tree trunk. The vista spread out at our feet, and while I knew I should be enjoying the view, glazed with the soft pink of the setting sun, I was uncomfortably nervous instead.

“It is breathtaking, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It is.” My voice sounded shaky. I hoped he didn’t notice.

He turned to face me. “Miss Mari?, for some time now, I’ve been having feelings for you. The sort of feelings one doesn’t have toward a classmate—”

I heard him speaking as if in a dream. While I had suspected this—even longed for it, if I was honest with myself, despite everything I professed to the girls—now that he was actually uttering the words, I was overwhelmed.

Pushing off the log, I tried to stand. “Mr. Einstein, I think we should return to the path—”

He touched my arm and gently pulled me back down onto the log.

He took my hands in his. Leaning toward me, he placed his lips upon mine. They were unexpectedly soft and full. Before I had the space or time to think, he kissed me. For a minute, I surrendered to the softness of his lips on mine and allowed myself to kiss him back. Heat rose to my cheeks as I felt the touch of his fingers on my back.

Izgoobio sam sye. These were the only words I could think of to describe how I felt at that moment. Roughly translated from the Serbian, they meant lost. Lost as in directions, lost from myself, lost to him.

Parting briefly, he looked into my eyes. I found it hard to catch my breath. “You astonish me once again, Miss Mari?.”

As he touched my cheek, I hungered for another kiss. The intensity of my longing startled me. I calmed myself, took a deep breath, and said, “Mr. Einstein, I can’t pretend your feelings are unreciprocated. However, I can’t allow them to derail me from my course. Sacrifices have been made, and I’ve worked hard to proceed down this path. Romance and professions don’t mix. For women, anyway.”

His bushy eyebrows raised, and his mouth—those soft lips—formed a surprised circle. Obviously, he had expected compliance, not this resistance.

“No, Miss Mari?. Surely bohemians such as ourselves—separate and apart from others with our vision and all our cultural and personal differences—can have both.” His words pulled at me. How I wished his bohemian vision was indeed possible.

Forcing myself to be strong, I said, “Please do not take offense, Mr. Einstein, but I can’t proceed with this any further. I may share your bohemian beliefs and your sense that we’re different, but I have to push my own feelings aside for the sake of my professional goals.”

Brushing off the bark and crushed leaves from my skirts, I started toward the path. “Are you coming?”

He stood and walked toward me. Clasping my hands in his, he said, “Never before have I been so certain of someone or something as I am of you. I will wait, Miss Mari?. Until you are ready.”





Chapter 8


August 29, 1897, and October 21, 1897

Ka?, Serbia, and Heidelberg, Germany

The paper, curled and worn, fluttered down to the floor. I watched as it spiraled languidly in the tepid breeze that had drifted in through the bell tower’s slat windows. The book by Professor Philipp Lenard had been open to the same page for over an hour, and I had not read a single word.

I reached down to pick the paper up from the scuffed wooden floor. I sat in the vaulted bell tower of the Spire, our summer house in Ka?, where we decamped for the warm months. This place, nicknamed for the two towers that adorned each end of the Tyrolian-style villa and the central tower at its center, had been my family’s summer respite since I was a child. No matter where we moved for Papa’s governmental jobs or my schooling—in turn, the eastern Austro-Hungarian towns of Ruma, Novi Sad, Sremska Mitrovica, and then Zagreb—the Spire was the one location I could always call home.

I’d spent my childhood summers in the bell tower of the Spire, watching from its windows the shifting rural landscape of sunflower and corn fields and reading piles of books. It was my hideout, my dreamscape, the place where I read fairy tales as a child and began fantasizing about a life as a scientist. Currently, it was the place where I hid from everyone.

I stared at the paper in my hand. Scribbled across the surface was Mr. Einstein’s address in his sprawling handwriting, as bold as his personality. He had hastily pressed it into my hand as we exchanged farewells the evening of the Sihlwald trip with an earnest request that I write him over the holiday. I used this flimsy slip as a bookmark so I would have an excuse to carry it with me everywhere. Although I refused to part with the address, I promised myself that I would not use it to write him. I adhered to this vow, even when full-blown conversations with him about physics and math appeared in my head. I knew that, if I wrote him, I would be continuing the nascent relationship that started in the Sihlwald, and this would make near-impossible the sort of career for which I’d worked so long, with Papa’s unwavering support. I knew of no professional woman who was also married, so why should I begin with Mr. Einstein something that I could never finish? For consolation, I clung to the picture that Helene and I had painted of a single career life, abundant in culture and friendships.