The Other Einstein(54)
What sort of mother was I? How could I have left this beautiful being behind for so long?
After nearly three weeks in which Albert sent three conciliatory letters, I wrote him about her state. I didn’t stint on the description or the possible outcome, and there was no longer any need to beg for her admission into our family. Her survival was my focus now.
On September 19, he responded, asking about Lieserl and her scarlet fever symptoms. After inquiring about how she was registered in the governmental records—an odd question under the circumstances, I thought—he begged me to return to Bern. Three weeks was too long for a proper wife to be separated from her husband, he claimed, and I needed to join him again.
How dare Albert admonish me about my duties as a wife? Was he even concerned about Lieserl’s condition? He seemed more focused on his own well-being and asked more questions about her birth registration than her health. Why was he asking about that? If he was finally considering having her with us—when, and if, she recovered—he knew that a child born out of wedlock automatically becomes legitimate after its parents’ marriage under Swiss law. He would simply need to list Lieserl’s name on his passport and be present at the border to escort her into Switzerland. His question didn’t make any sense—unless he was thinking about adoption again. Surely, he could not consider such a thing at this grave juncture.
I wouldn’t be going back to Bern any time soon to minister to Albert’s needs and tidy our home. Not without a healthy Lieserl, in any event. She was my priority and my life. Albert could not think I would leave her again.
Chapter 25
October 12, 1903
Novi Sad, Serbia
I clutched my stomach and tried to keep from crying. The last time I was in this train station, almost two months ago, I promised myself I wouldn’t pass through on my return to Bern without my Lieserl. Yet here I stood, empty-handed.
Scarlet fever broke my promise. The disease ravaged my poor baby—peeling her skin from her blistering body, taking her sight, singeing her with relentless fever, and damaging her sweet heart—until she could no longer hold on. After the life slowly drained from her, I clutched her limp body, rocking her back and forth, until Mama gently pried her from me. I didn’t stop sobbing from the moment she died until we lowered her tiny coffin into the hallowed ground of a churchyard near Ka?. On that terrible evening, Mama and Papa, our shared grief linking us together once again, had to carry me back to the Spire once night fell.
I did not leave Lieserl. She left me.
How would I go on without her?
While I waited for the boarding announcement for Bern, I sat down on the station bench, giving in to the grief I’d penned up since I hugged Mama and Papa good-bye at the station entrance. If I wasn’t pregnant again, I would insist on a very different future. I would stay in Ka?, never leaving Lieserl’s resting place behind. I would become like Mama, perpetually dressed in funereal black and making daily visits to the grave of my beloved departed. Albert and physics would become a distant memory, a hazy piece of a past I’d foresworn. They would be penance for my sin in abandoning Lieserl in the first place.
Questions and regrets plagued me. Could I have staved off the scarlet fever if I’d never left her behind for Albert? Could I have stopped the fever from sinking its final talons into her if I had arrived just a little earlier? If I hadn’t gotten off that damned train in Salzburg to write to Albert?
But I did have another baby coming. I rubbed my growing belly, this time unencumbered by restraining corsets, and willed myself to stop the tears, if only for a little while. No matter my grief, I would have to mother this new baby and create a family for him or her, regardless of how I felt about his or her father. Albert’s response to my pregnancy still angered me. “I’m happy about your news. I’ve thought for some time that you needed a new little girl…”
A new little girl? I wanted to scream. How could he think a new baby would replace Lieserl, the unique soul I had just lost? A child he had never bothered to see.
A child I wanted God to give back to me.
If only God would let me go back in time, I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. I would stay in Ka? and never leave Lieserl; surely a mother’s savage love could ward off the scourge of scarlet fever. If only God’s rules permitted me to freeze time or change it. Instead, I was stuck with Newton’s rigid laws of the universe.
Or was I?
An idea crept into my mind. I’d spent the better part of my life trying to uncover God’s hidden rules for the universe through the language of physics. Who was to say there wasn’t a rule of physics as yet undiscovered? One that would help me with my pain and suffering over the loss of Lieserl.
Perhaps God had a rule He wanted me to find. Perhaps there was a purpose for my devastation. After all, Romans 8:18 said, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
Where was the glory amid my grieving?
I stared at the station clock and the train waiting patiently beneath it. I sensed—no, I knew somehow, some way—that the answer lay before me. What was it?
The clock.
The train.
Lieserl.
In a rush, it came to me. What would happen if the train left the station not at sixty kilometers an hour but at close to the speed of light? What would happen to time? I ran through the calculations in my mind, roughing out a solution.