The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (17 page)

When she is outside in the garden with the boys, Einstein walks softly to their bedroom, opens the drawer containing her clothes, and starts looking. He pushes aside piles of her underwear, pairs of the tough brown stockings she insists on wearing and corsets that would squeeze the life out of any man, until he gets to the wooden bottom. Nothing. He looks around the room for the suitcase, but when he sees something dark in the shadows under the bed he changes his mind. Let Mileva keep her secrets. He has his.

Today when Einstein leaves to visit Elsa, winter has begun and the apartment building is cold. This will be the second winter of the war and already fuel is scarce. As he gets into the lift Einstein thinks that the baby’s uniform looks tattered and baggy and its eyes appear dim.

‘Are you alright?’ he asks.

‘Thank you for asking,’ the baby replies, ‘your concern touches my heart.’ It doesn’t appear to be sarcastic.

‘Why aren’t you a twelve year old girl?’ he dares to ask it, ‘how did you get to be a lift operator?’

The baby smiles sadly, ‘I could be anything, really. You don’t even know if I’m dead or alive.’

Einstein stares at the scruffy braid, peeling away from the baby’s uniform. It must have been a golden colour once, but now the shine has worn off and it’s an indeterminate shade of brown dirt. One of the epaulettes has come loose and is flapping in the draught of air from the concertina door as the lift jerks down towards Elsa. But for the first time he doesn’t feel hungry for cream cakes or sugary kisses and he wonders why he thinks he needs this plump blankness in his life.

They stop.

‘You’re here,’ announces the baby, and cranks open the door.

Einstein stays where he is.

‘Go on,’ says the baby, ‘she’s expecting you. She bought some more cakes this morning.’

But he can’t move.

‘You can’t be late for her. You’re never late.’

When he finally leaves the lift he walks in the opposite direction to Elsa’s apartment until he finds the narrow uncarpeted stairs that are only ever used for emergencies. He slowly walks up them until he gets to the street level. He needs fresh air.

In the study again, with Mileva.

‘The lift operator told me that he was my baby. My first baby.’

‘What! What the hell are you talking about?’

‘He is a baby, actually. When you look at him properly. It makes sense.’

Mileva looks at him, her eyes round, ‘Sense? You’re mad.
You’ve gone mad.’

‘Do we know what has happened to Lieserl?’

‘You know perfectly well what happened. She is living near Novi Sad, with a nice family who look after her well. Just as we –
you
– arranged.’

‘She’s living? Really? Do we know this?’

‘Well, we haven’t seen her. But then you never did see her, so how would you recognise her now?’

This is so indisputably true that Einstein is silent. How would he recognise his own daughter unless someone else told him who she was? He is reliant on the word of other people. And he has learnt not to trust that in science so why should he trust that in the rest of his life? He feels dizzy, as if he’s been turned upside down.

He finds an atlas and draws a line on the map from Berlin down to Novi Sad, cutting across roads, railways, mountains, rivers. Somewhere on this paper land is his daughter, but she may as well be in a different world to his. He can only imagine her as a dot in the half tones of the map, and himself on the black line of the railway track as it meanders across the two dimensional terrain, too slow or self-important or lazy ever to reach her.

The next time he sees Elsa he has to invent a reason for missing a visit. An important departmental meeting, he says, and she doesn’t reply. She talks instead about trying to get her daughters married off, she thinks he is lucky to have sons. She doesn’t know about Lieserl and now it feels too late to tell her.

For the first time he wonders how she manages to get hold of so many cream cakes when there is rationing. ‘Can I take one home?’ and he gestures at the plate spilling over with cream and jam. He has to carry the cake out of Elsa’s apartment in his cupped hand, but the baby doesn’t mind. Its eyes widen when it sees the cake and it crams the whole thing
into its mouth.

‘Thank you,’ it gasps. The lift hasn’t moved, the baby has been too busy eating to bother with the door or the lever.

‘That’s alright,’ says Einstein. He pauses, ‘Where do you go when you’re not here?’

‘Go? I don’t go anywhere. I’m not real, am I? I’m in your head, man. You still don’t understand do you?’ Even with a light dusting of sugar on its uniform, and a faint moustache of whipped cream around its mouth, it manages to look both dignified and cross.

‘But if you’re not really here, then how does the lift move?’

The baby slams the door shut and starts the lift, ‘Is it moving? Are you sure?’

Einstein thinks about it, ‘Well, I feel the motion right here,’ and he taps his stomach.

‘Why does that make it real? Can you trust your memories or your feelings? You thought you were in love with your wife and here you are
schtupping
Elsa. Or perhaps she’s make-believe too. Perhaps you’re a junior patent officer with a girlfriend you never bothered to marry because you were both too Bohemian to do that, and a twelve year old illegitimate daughter called Lieserl who likes to go sledging in winter and owns two pairs of ballet slippers. And you daydream about beams of light and clocks and trains, and go home each evening and doodle your thoughts, never able to turn them into anything other than scribbles. And perhaps you’re happy, Herr Professor Einstein. Really and truly happy. Can you imagine that?’

The lights in the lift snap off and they are in pitch-black. The lift starts to accelerate down past the basement, and as it freefalls through space Einstein finally knows what it means to be free of gravity. And all the associated grief.

No numbers

When my gran was in hospital she was so thin that her body was barely a bump under the covers. Her hands lay motionless on the sheet, her face making everything that was happening here too real for me to bear. She faced the TV although I didn’t think she was actually watching it. Cartoons, football, reality talk shows; all of them edged by such definite beginnings and endings.

She was dressed in a hospital shift, her arms bared to provide access for the drips. On the first visit I took her hand and she smiled, she was still able to do that. Sitting and holding the paper-light hand of a dying woman wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be, because I would have done anything to make it easier for her. Even so, my mind kept scurrying away to hide, and I had to make an effort to haul it back into this room full of machinery and pastel; lemon yellow bed sheets, peach cushions and grey oxygen pumps.

Alongside them was a more deadly colour. Dark blue ink on her left forearm creating a five digit number. Even in summer she had always worn long sleeves and one way that I knew she was ready to go was when she stopped covering it up, no longer having the energy to hide it or hate it.

This number was given to her in the camp. I don’t remember when I first saw it but I always knew it was there. But it wasn’t something that could ever be spoken out loud, it was unmentionable. Like the name of God.

Even when I was a kid and good at maths, I saw that there was a tyranny associated with integers in the way they marched forward with such regularity. They didn’t allow for gaps. I didn’t think they left any room for imagination or contradiction.

She died just as the credits rolled by for some sitcom that gets repeated regularly, something about the war that was maybe supposed to convince us that it was all over, that we were allowed to laugh about it now.

When the final measure of oxygen escaped her, I let myself stroke her arm and touch the tattoo for the first time. Ran my little finger over each of the five integers and wondered if they’d always been this blurred. There was a horrible fluidity to them, as if whoever had tattooed her had done it hastily and with no more thought than scrawling a bill on the back of an envelope.

In maths lessons at school I drew wobbly lines of Venn diagrams to solve problems. Our teacher chalked a question onto the board:
If there are twenty girls at a party and twelve have brown hair and fifteen have brown eyes, how many have both?
and I bent over my notebook, creating intersecting circles. Then she added
How many have neither?
and I realised I’d assumed they all had at least one or the other.

Now the problem was unsolvable and I crosshatched the intersection of the circles with neat red lines, covering up the mistaken numbers I’d written there earlier, thinking about innumerable crowds of blond-haired blue-eyed girls surrounding the darker girls.

‘Never get a tattoo,’ my grandmother said during an otherwise unremarkable shopping trip to Brent Cross, as she gripped my hand tightly. I was sixteen and just beginning to realise that she was holding onto me for her own benefit rather than for mine.

Maybe she disliked cartooned stars or butterflies that couldn’t tremble in the breeze or rosebuds that would never open. Pictures that were just bad copies of real things, that provided no room for imagination. I didn’t like them either, those sorts of tattoos always seemed pointless to me.

This was just a week after she’d found a packet of cigarettes
in my bag and there had been a row. I was angry because she had gone through my bag after she’d smelt smoke on my school uniform. I was sixteen so it was legal, I told her. It was wrong, I was a disobedient child, she shouted, did I want to die of some horrible coughing disease? And I could tell she was thinking, I survived all that so my granddaughter could kill herself with cigarettes? I could only shake my head, and so she won.

She managed to link my disobedience to my future death in her own mind and maybe in mine too. I never smoked again and I agreed not to get a tattoo.

She was always trying to teach me to knit, helping me to bend my fingers in the correct way but everything I tried to make came out looking the same, no matter what it was supposed to be. I couldn’t follow her knitting instructions, it felt like trying to crack a code. It was far more difficult than maths.

She told me stories, real and imaginary. She told me that when she came to England in 1946 she couldn’t pronounce the word ‘tea’. On her first night here in a boarding house somewhere near Dover she had gone hungry rather than ask someone the way to the nearest café. She had kept her mouth shut and read poetry to improve her English.

She told me that where she came from, the winters were so cold she could go skating on the lake in the south of the city, and one day the ice cracked and the water beneath swallowed up a little boy. His body was never found. Afterwards I wondered if she’d known the little boy.

She told me that her parents had owned a glove factory, and I wasn’t listening properly and thought she said ‘love’.

She told me she was named after the Mona Lisa because it had been stolen in 1911, although when I was older I worked out that she must have been born several years before this.

Her stories were all about the past, set in Germany and in England. But there were mistakes in them, and gaps between them. I calculated that there were about twelve years of her
life which had produced no stories at all, or not ones she would tell me. But she must have had reasons for the mistakes and the gaps, and the stories all connected together in my head like her knitting stitches created around essential air. I sensed that if I asked her about the gaps then the knitting would come unravelled and the needles would clatter to the floor, where they would glint and be dangerous. So I never asked. I just listened.

At some point in my teens I worked out that I was three quarters Jewish and one quarter Irish. The Jewish part was also German, Austrian and Polish. The Irish part was possibly Catholic, possibly not. I wasn’t sure which part was more important but I started wearing a Star of David around my neck. She asked me to remove it, she didn’t want me to identify myself in this way. So I removed it, and I replaced it with a silver skull which she didn’t like either, but which she could tolerate.

As I got older and moved onto more complicated maths I realised that there were two circles for two sets of numbers, and these numbers mapped one by one onto the people who had survived the camps and the people who had perished. No intersection between the circles, people were either alive or dead. And there was no way of knowing which particular number was in each set. Nothing to distinguish one number from another, just by looking at it.

Now that I knew so many integers had hidden histories I no longer felt comfortable doing sums with them, it felt like treading on ashes. It was a relief to learn about the irrational numbers such as pi, or e, or the square root of two. Numbers that weren’t related to integers and that went on forever so I could spend my whole life following rules to work them out. It was a relief to learn about such individual and eternal numbers.

As I sat and waited in the hospital for the nurse to come,
I continued to hold the hand that was once hers. The next programme started on the TV and this one was a documentary, the screen full of light reflecting off rushing water but I couldn’t work out what it was. A lake, a river, an ambitious bath?

I sat on. In spite of the pale blue curtains of the hospital cubicle flapping around me and the huff of my gran’s oxygen cylinder which wouldn’t stop even though she had stopped, I eventually took this in: life on Earth may have started on the coasts of lakes and seas, in places which are both wet and dry. Liminal places that are difficult to define.

I didn’t ask her if it had been Walt Whitman and his declaration that he was vast and contained multitudes that she’d read as she lay on the bed in the boarding house at Dover, but it would have been appropriate, because:

She was an anti-Zionist who went to Israel for her holidays.

She read the Telegraph and voted Labour.

She ate bacon for breakfast and then cooked kosher lunches at the club for other Jewish pensioners.