The Other Einstein(57)
“We are just days away from submitting this paper to the Annalen der Physik. I want to make certain every detail is perfect.”
“I know, my little sorceress,” Albert said, and I smiled. It had been a long while since he’d called me his sorceress. The past two years of our marriage had been content enough, but the childish passions and frivolities had faded in the reality of daily living. “Anyway, we’ve run it by Besso too. I know he’s not a certified physicist, but he’s as smart as any of the jokers we went to school with. And he thinks it’s sound.”
I nodded. Albert reviewed our papers with Michele Besso, who had indeed served as an excellent sounding board. Given that Michele now worked at the Swiss Patent Office too, as a technical expert a grade above Albert, and that they walked home from work together every evening, Michele had ample time to consider our theories. I knew Albert was right, but my nature tended toward worry and exactitude.
He yawned. “Shall we call it a night, Dollie? I’m exhausted.”
Funny that I didn’t feel tired at all. I should have. I rose before Albert to make sure breakfast was ready when he and Hans Albert awoke. I spent the day cleaning and cooking and caring for our one-year-old, a cherubic but fatiguing little fellow. Once Albert arrived home, I hastened to serve dinner while he spent a precious few minutes tossing the baby about. After I cleared the dinner dishes and put Hans Albert down, more often than not, the Olympia Academy arrived, picking up the debate from where we had left it the night before, whether on Sophocles’s play Antigone, David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, or Henri Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis. Only then, when the academy left, the baby was down, and the house was clean, did Albert and I sit down to our real work.
It was the time of day when I came alive.
Not that the rest of my day didn’t hold pleasure. No, the birth of my sweet, brown-eyed Hans Albert had brought me great joy. Caring for him and undertaking with him all the activities I’d imagined with Lieserl—strolls to the market, walks through the park, even his nightly bathing ritual—had been a great balm for the scars left by Lieserl’s death. As my feelings for Hans Albert, or Hanzerl, as we sometimes called him, grew, so my anger at Albert diminished. My contentment with our family and our little apartment at 49 Kramgasse, one of the most beautiful streets in Bern, ran deep. I adored strolling with Hans Albert down the lengthy Kramgasse, once part of the medieval city center, and pointing out to him the Zytglogge, Bern’s famous clock tower, as well as the obelisk-adorned Kreuzgassbrunnen fountain, the Simsonbrunnen fountain with its sculpture of Samson and the lion, and the Z?hringerbrunnen fountain that showed an armored bear. I had written of my joy to Helene, who, having read much of my sadness in recent years, replied with a confession of relief.
“You go to bed, Johnnie. I’ll just read through this paper one last time, and then I’ll join you.” Bringing the oil lamp closer to me, I began to reread the familiar words for perhaps the hundredth time.
I felt Albert’s hand on my shoulder, and I glanced up at him. His eyes gleamed in the low light, and I sensed his pride at watching me toil away. I hadn’t seen that expression from him in a long while. For a brief, blissful second, we beamed at each other.
“Our life is just as we promised each other in our student days, isn’t it?” I asked him. “You used to say that we would work as students of science forever, so we don’t turn into philistines. That prediction has finally come true.”
He paused for an eternity of a moment and then said, “Quite right, my little ragamuffin.” It was another name he hadn’t used for some time. After gently stroking my hair for a moment, he whispered, “This is indeed our miracle year.”
As I watched him amble down the hall to our bedroom, I smiled to myself. I had been right to return our relationship to the language of science; love followed in science’s footsteps with Albert.
My eyes blurry from staring at the minuscule calculations, I smoothed down the cover of the paper: “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” Our names—Albert Einstein and Mileva Mari? Einstein—shone beneath the title. The work was largely mine, but I understood that without my degree or doctorate, it must come with Albert’s name as well.
My new theory on relativity had revealed that time may not have the same fixed qualities that Newton, along with nearly every other physicist and mathematician since him, once believed. But an even more ancient philosopher, Seneca, had certainly understood one aspect of time perfectly: “Time heals what reason cannot.” Time and my work with Albert, in honor of Lieserl, had healed much.
Chapter 28
August 22, 1905
Novi Sad, Serbia
Helene squeezed my arm in delight. Our children ran around the square in front of the Queen Elizabeth Café, where we sat sipping watery coffee. Thrilled by the little chase, Julka led the merriment, followed by Zora and finally, unsteadily toddling in their wake, Hans Albert. As they dodged in and out of passersby, it was all I could do to quell my protective instincts to jump up and prevent his fall, even though I knew Albert wasn’t far behind them.
I glanced over at my friend, who was squinting into the bright summer sun. Deep vertical lines creased between her heavy, dark eyebrows, making her appear older than her years. Despite the worry evident on her brow, her blue-gray eyes were as soft and kindly as they’d always been.