The Other Einstein(7)

“Are you coming, Mitza?” Mama called to me without turning around. I reminded myself that her sternness didn’t stem solely from her displeasure over the move to Zagreb. Strict discipline and high expectations were her daily prescription for righteous children; she often said, “The Proverbs say that ‘The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.’”

“Yes, Mama,” I called back.

Dressed in her usual mourning black and dark kerchief, worn in honor of my dead brother and sister, Mama walked ahead, looking like an ebony shadow against the gray autumnal sky. I was short of breath by the time I reached the summit, but I muffled my labored breathing. This was my duty.

Risking a cluck, I turned around; I loved the view from this vantage point. Titel spread out before us, and above the church spire, the vista of the town looked as though it clung to the banks of the Tisa. The dusty town was small, with only a town square, market, and a few governmental buildings at its center, but it was still beautiful.

But then I heard Mama lowering herself to the ground, and my guilt set in. This was no pleasure stroll; I should not be enjoying myself. This would be one of our last visits to the cemetery for a long time to come. Even Papa couldn’t make me feel better about our move today.

I took my place at Mama’s side before the gravestones. The pebbles dug into my knees, but I wanted to feel pain today. It seemed a reasonable sacrifice for the pain I was inflicting on Mama by sparking our move to Zagreb. Since I’d reach the limits of my local education, Papa wanted me to attend the Royal Classical High School in Zagreb. We wouldn’t be returning to Titel with any frequency. I glanced over at her. Her brown eyes were shut, and without their flinty animation, she looked older than her thirty-odd years. The burden of loss and the weight of daily minutiae had aged her.

I made the sign of the cross, closed my eyes, and offered a silent prayer to the souls of my long-departed brother and sister. They had always served as my invisible companions, a replacement for the friends I never had. How different my life might have been had they lived. Maybe with an older brother and sister by my side, I would not have been so lonely, secretly longing to play with the girls in the schoolyard, even the ones who hurt me.

A shaft of sunlight passed over me, and I opened my eyes. The arched marble gravestones of my older brother and sister stared back at me. Their names—Milica Mari? and Vuka?in Mari?—glistened in the sun as if they had just been chiseled, and I held back an impulse to run my finger along each of the letters.

Mama usually liked to keep our visits silent and reflective, but not that day. She reached for my hand and called out to the Virgin in our native, rarely used Serbian:

Bogorodice Djevo, radujsja

Blagodatnaja Marije…

Mama was so loud that she drowned out the wind and the rustling leaves. And she was swaying. I felt embarrassed by the strength of Mama’s voice and her dramatic movements, especially when two mourners in the distance peered over at us.

Still, I chanted along. The words of the Hail Mary usually soothed me, but today, they felt unfamiliar. Almost thick on my tongue. Like a lie. Mama’s utterances sounded different too, not like reverential worship but like a condemnation. Of me, certainly not of the Virgin.

I tried to focus on the wind, the crackling of the branches and leaves, the gallop of hooves as horses passed by, anything but the words coming from Mama’s mouth. I did not need further reminders that so much rested on my success at the school in Zagreb. I had to succeed. Not just for myself and Mama and Papa but for my departed brother and sister too. Souls left behind.

? ? ?

I heard the scratch of fountain pens from other students working nearby in the library, but only one man captivated my attention. Philipp Lenard. I reached for the article by the noted German physicist and began reading. I should have been reading the texts of Hermann von Helmholtz and Ludwig Boltzmann, assigned by the professor, but I was drawn to Lenard’s recent research on cathode rays and their properties. Using evacuated glass tubes, he bombarded the tubes’ metallic electrodes with high-voltage electricity and then examined the rays. Lenard observed that, if the end of the tube opposite the negative charge was painted with a fluorescent material, a minuscule object within the tube began to glow and zigzag around the tube. This led him to believe that cathode rays were streams of negatively charged energetic particles; he dubbed them quanta of electricity. Putting down the article, I wondered how Lenard’s research might impact the much-debated question about the nature and existence of atoms. Of what substance had God made the world? Could the answer to this question tell us more about mankind’s purpose on God’s earth? Sometimes, in the pages of my texts and in the glimmers of my musings, I sensed God’s patterns unfolding in the physical laws of the universe that I was learning. These were the places I felt God, not in the pews of Mama’s churches or in their cemeteries.

The clock in the university tower struck five. Could it really be so late? I hadn’t even touched the day’s assigned reading.

I craned my neck to glimpse out a well-positioned window. There was no shortage of spired clock towers in Zürich, and the clock hands I saw confirmed that it was five. Mrs. Engelbrecht was Teutonically firm with her pension dinner schedule, so I could not linger. Especially since the girls would be waiting, instruments in hand, for some predinner music. It was one of our little rituals, the one I loved best.