The Other Einstein(58)
I squeezed her arm back and said, “This time with you has been a gift, Helene.”
“I agree, my old friend,” Helene said with a satisfied sigh. “I’m so happy that you convinced us to come with you to Novi Sad.”
Just two days ago, we’d stood crying on the banks of Lake Plitvice in the tiny resort village of Kijevo. Our husbands and children stood by, confused since we’d spent a blissful week in each other’s company on holiday. “Why were you crying?” little Julka asked. Helene and I explained that we found the idea of parting hard to bear. What we didn’t say was that the languid days at Lake Plitvice with water lapping at our feet, surrounded by low red hills and fields of green dotted with blue periwinkles and reveling in each other’s easy company, had been almost too perfect. Our lives back on Kramgasse in Bern and Katani?eva Street in Belgrade, respectively, seemed bleak by comparison. A life of housework and the blank eyes of other housewives, women who found us odd and too academic for their household cares.
I made the case to Helene for an extension of our visit, but I didn’t need to beg her. The invitation to join us in Novi Sad was accepted readily, for which I was now grateful. Having Helene, Milivoje, and their children with us made easier the awkward introduction of Albert to my parents in their Novi Sad home base. Mama and Papa had grown to accept Albert from afar, but shaking hands with the man who’d impregnated their daughter—and never visited their poor, late granddaughter—was quite another thing. The presence of Helene and her family and my parents’ delight in meeting Hans Albert softened an otherwise challenging occasion.
“I think how we used to walk together every day along Plattenstrasse in Zürich completely carefree. At the time, I didn’t know how wonderful that was,” Helene said with a faraway expression on her face.
“I know. I often imagine that I’m studying in my little bedroom at the Engelbrecht Pension. Is it strange that I like to think of that time so often?”
“No,” Helene answered with a wistful smile. “Do you ever wish we’d kept that pact?”
“Which pact?” As soon as I asked the question, I remembered. There had only ever been one pact between us; I simply hadn’t considered it for some time.
“The one about dedicating ourselves to our studies and never marrying,” she said.
The pact seemed so long ago, struck by an entirely different person. One who hadn’t had her body riven in two—from the pain of childbirth and the inexorable suffering of child loss. That girl seemed so innocent, standing on the brink of limitless possibility, mercifully unaware that she would have to morph herself and sacrifice her ambitions to persevere in the world.
I stared at Helene. “I would be lying if I said there haven’t been moments when I wished we’d stuck to the pact. Certainly, there were dark days when I was pregnant with Lieserl and terrified.” My eyes welled up with tears. Helene was the only person in the world to whom I could speak openly about Lieserl. “But I would never have wished that my beautiful Lieserl did not exist, no matter the fear and pain. No matter the shortness of her life.”
We held hands in silent understanding. Then, gesturing to our giggling children, I said, “And anyway, if we’d kept our pact, we would never have had this.”
“True enough,” Helene answered with a broad smile.
Just then, Hans Albert, finding his sea legs at fourteen months and resembling nothing more than a young sailor on a swaying ship, fell to the ground with a cry. On instinct, I jumped up, but I wasn’t fast enough. Albert raced from the nearby table where he was holding court on physics with a group of local students, swooped down, and hoisted Hans Albert on his shoulders.
“Albert should have two children on his shoulders, Helene. Lieserl would be three and a half now.” I watched Albert march around the square with our son cackling away.
She squeezed my hand tightly. “How you bear it, I don’t know.”
“I don’t. Just when I’m having a moment of joy with Hans Albert, Lieserl’s absence fills the room like a black chasm. I try to channel that energy into work.” I had told Helene about the work I was doing with Albert, the papers we were writing and the theory that Lieserl’s death had spawned. I’d described the scientific partnership we’d formed and how it filled the void left by my own professional failures. I was on the verge of expressing my excitement over the publication of my paper in the esteemed journal Annalen der Physik—in just a few short weeks, I could hardly believe—when I stopped. I had no wish to make Helene, who had no such outlet for her history degree, feel badly.
Reaching for my coffee, I took a sip and changed the conversation’s course. “How about you, Helene? Do you wish we’d kept to the pact?”
So complete was Helene’s pleasure in her children, I expected an emphatic no. Instead, she said, “Lately, yes, although I wouldn’t wish away my girls for anything in the world. You see, Milivoje and I are having troubles.”
“No, Helene!” I exclaimed, accidentally putting my cup down too hard and spilling black coffee all over the marble tabletop. “You haven’t mentioned anything in all these days together.”
“Milivoje has always been within earshot, Mitza. Or the girls. I had to be careful.”
“What has happened?”
Voice quavering, she whispered, “A certain distance has grown between us.”