The Other Einstein(67)

Sometimes, I wanted to give up, but I needed to stay stalwart for Hans Albert and Tete. I shared the toll on my self-esteem only with Helene, telling her how starved I was for kindness and affection, how alone I felt, and how thankful I was to have her in my life. Only with her could I be my true self.

I thought I was bearing it with a certain outward grace when I caught sight of myself in the mirror one afternoon. “Who is that woman?” I asked myself as I stared at my own reflection.

Broad hips from bearing children, the still trim waist hidden under the voluminous folds of an ugly housedress. Thickened nose and lips, coarsened brow. Once-lustrous skin and hair now dull. I was only thirty-six, but I looked fifty. What had happened to me? Was my neglected appearance one of the reasons Albert had turned away from me?

Just as my eyes began to well with tears, a loud, barking cough came from Tete’s bedroom. Creaking open his door quietly so as not to wake him from his nap, I stared down at my youngest son. With his dark hair and soulful brown eyes, he resembled his older brother, but his constitution was quite different. Where Hans Albert had always been a sturdy lad, Tete was delicate, always catching the latest illness. Unclean Prague had been hard on him.

His cheeks looked flushed, so I placed my hand on his forehead. He was burning up. Fear bubbled up within me. I ran out to the desk, wrote a note to the doctor, and then, asking a neighbor to watch Tete for a moment, I raced out to the street to summon a messenger. Within the hour, a doctor knocked on our door.

“Thank you so much for coming, Doctor. You were quicker than I imagined.” I had waited eight hours for a doctor the last time Tete came down with a fever, so I had expected a long, anxious wait.

“I was just in the building next door. There’s been an outbreak of typhoid, you see,” he explained.

My heart beat wildly. Typhoid? Tete had managed to survive countless colds, ear infections, and even a bout of pneumonia, but typhoid? His constitution was far too weak.

The doctor saw the terror in my eyes. He took my hands and said, “Please let me examine him, Mrs. Einstein. He may simply have one of the many flus I’ve seen around Prague. It may not be typhoid at all.”

I led him into Tete’s room, thankful that Hans Albert was still at school, and watched as the doctor examined my listless son. Whispering the Hail Mary to myself over and over, I prayed for a common cold or one of the recurrent ear infections to which Tete was so prone.

“I don’t think it’s typhoid, Mrs. Einstein. I believe that your little boy has some other sort of infection, however. He’s going to need ice baths to bring his fever down and close watching. Can you manage that?”

I nodded gratefully, made the sign of the cross, and leaned down to smooth Tete’s hair. For a moment, I saw Lieserl’s flushed, feverish face burrowed into the sheets, and my heart stopped. This isn’t Lieserl, I reminded myself. This is Tete, and he will survive. And this is not scarlet fever or typhoid but a typical flu. Yet I also knew that I couldn’t continue to expose the children to Prague’s contaminated water, air, and food. We needed to get out of Prague.

Three days after Tete’s scare, Albert returned home from the Solvay conference in Brussels, a prestigious gathering of twenty-four of the brightest scientific minds in Europe. I took special care with my appearance that evening. Then, without mentioning Tete’s illness or exerting pressure upon him of any kind, I gave him dinner and let him relax with his pipe to tell Hans Albert and me stories about the event. Albert had been so distant since we arrived in Prague, it was a relief to watch his animated face and hear about the conference. All the physics luminaries were there, the ones we’d been reading and discussing for decades—Walther Nernst, Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, and the like. But it wasn’t these old-school scientists who impressed him; he was drawn to the new band of Parisian physicists, Paul Langevin, Jean Perrin, and the famous Madame Marie Curie, who had won the Nobel Prize herself while they were in Brussels.

I had questions about Madame Curie; she’d long been a hero of mine, and I admired the scientific partnership she and her late husband had formed, the sort of relationship I once thought I’d have with Albert. Yet as his stories continued and the hours ticked by—hours in which Tete’s disturbing coughing must have become apparent even to the often oblivious Albert—my impatience grew. At the two-hour mark, after I put Hans Albert to bed and checked on Tete, I plunged in and asked him the dreaded question. “Albert, do you think that there’s any way we could leave Prague? Return to Zürich or move to any other healthier European city?”

He paused, a deep furrow appearing between his brows. “That sounds awfully bourgeois of you. I know Prague doesn’t have the comforts or sophistication of Zürich or even Bern, but it’s been quite the opportunity for me. It’s quite a selfish ask, Mileva.”

Mileva? I didn’t think he had called me Mileva since we had first eschewed the formal “Miss Mari? and Mr. Einstein” all those years ago in Zürich. Putting aside my concern at the use of “Mileva” and his unkind labels of “bourgeois” and “selfish,” I said, “I’m not asking for me, Albert. It’s for the children. I am worried about the effect of Prague on their health, Tete’s in particular. We had quite a scare while you were in Brussels.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tete became very sick last week. We suspected typhoid from the contaminated Prague water.”