The Other Einstein(24)

“Do you think it’s prudent to return to the Polytechnic next term where Mr. Einstein exerts so powerful a presence? Perhaps a term away at another university might give you perspective. You could return the following term, once you’ve achieved a certain objectivity about Mr. Einstein.”

A term away. My heart clenched at the thought of a longer separation from Mr. Einstein than three months, but the more I considered Papa’s proposal, the more relief coursed through me. I wouldn’t have to face Mr. Einstein, with his eager expression and hangdog eyes so capable of swaying me, for the next few months. The time away might work the necessary magic.

My gaze settled on the Lenard book I’d been carrying around with me for days. “Papa, I think I know just the place.”

? ? ?

In early October, just before my arrival at Heidelberg University, a near impenetrable fog descended on the Neckar River valley in southeast Germany that the university called home. The fog showed no sign of lifting in the days after I settled into the Hotel Ritter, where I’d stay for the term. While the physics classes I was permitted to audit were indeed world-class, led by such renowned professors as Lenard himself, I could see nothing of the rumored loveliness of the buildings and setting of the ancient Heidelberg University through its heavy veil. In fact, laden with dense mist, the forest and river surrounding the university only served to remind me, by despairing comparison, of the gleaming beauty of the Sihlwald. Indeed, sometimes I felt as though the fog had affixed to my mood, so gloomy did I feel.

Loneliness outweighed any incandescence of thought brought about by Lenard’s kinetic theory of gases and his experiments on the speed at which oxygen molecules travel. I missed the companionship, laughter, and compassion of Ru?ica, Milana, and Helene most of all, even though I hid my feelings in cheery letters to them, simulating excitement about my lectures. And in the dark hours alone in my hotel room, if I allowed myself to be honest, I missed Mr. Einstein too. But my malaise was so deep that I wondered whether missing my friends and Mr. Einstein were the sole sources of my despair.

One afternoon in late October, I returned from classes to find a letter from Helene waiting for me at the front desk of the hotel. Clutching it in my hands, I took the stairs by two, no mean feat with my leg, so that I could read Helene’s letter all the more quickly. Slicing through the envelope with my razor-sharp letter opener, I devoured Helene’s words. There, amid chatter about her studies and pension gossip, I read, “I thought Heidelberg did not allow women to matriculate. A family friend from Vienna tried to study psychology there, and she had to obtain permission from the professor on a course by course basis just to attend lectures! No credit for coursework allowed. Won’t this decision put you behind a term?”

I slowly laid her letter down on my spindly hotel desk, better suited for the morning correspondence-writing of a lady than the heavy coursework of a student. In her usual shrewd way, Helene laid her finger on the source of my unease. My ill mood did not emanate solely from the fog or even my loneliness but on the burden that this term away might place upon my career path. What if this break from my schoolwork at the Polytechnic set me back in my studies? What if I barricaded myself away from Mr. Einstein’s affections so that I could secure my career only to damage my career in the process? What if I returned, hampered by this Heidelberg term, and succumbed to Mr. Einstein anyway?

Helene’s letter set me ablaze with determination to make this term in Heidelberg fulfill its purpose. I would simultaneously do my Heidelberg and Polytechnic courses so as not to fall behind. And I would make my intentions perfectly clear to Mr. Einstein.

I decided that I’d finally respond to the letter Mr. Einstein sent me three weeks into my stay at Heidelberg. He had ascertained my whereabouts from the girls, since I never wrote him over the summer. In its scrawled pages, it contained details of the Weber lectures I missed, descriptions of talks by Professors Hurwitz, Herzog, and Fiedler, and some remarks about the requisite number theory course. Even though I scoured every line, it bore no comment or reference, obvious or covert, of our moment in the Sihlwald. Nothing. Yet within each line, I sensed the words unsaid.

My fingers had itched with the desire to write back in the weeks since he wrote it, but now I was glad that I’d resisted. I was ready to make myself perfectly clear. I wrote, “You instructed me not to write you unless I had absolutely nothing to do, and my days in Heidelberg have been hectic until this very moment.”

After chattering on about the magnificent lectures I’d heard, echoing much the same verbiage I had sent to Helene, I ended the missive with what I hoped was a clear message. I referenced a bit of gossip he’d shared in his letter—that a mathematics classmate had left the Polytechnic program to become a forester because he’d been spurned by a Zürich sweetheart—and said, “How peculiar! In these bohemian days, where there are so many paths available other than that of the bourgeois, the notion of love itself seems so pointless.”

I prayed my letter was unambiguous. Should I return, romance between us was not to be part of the equation.

No reply arrived from Mr. Einstein. Not in November. Or December. Or January. His silence told me that he had received my message. It was safe to return to Zürich.





Part II


   The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.