He dictates: ‘I agree with your draft proposition that the prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind is faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense.’
The grandfather clock chimes the quarter hour. ‘Here, then, is the problem,’ Albert continues, ‘which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war – With kind regards, Albert Einstein.’
He takes off one of his old slippers, removes a small granite pebble from between his toes and sets it on top of Born’s letter.
‘I liked the young lady’s voice. Think of relativity. When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute – and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity. Mimi Beaufort. Beaufort is a remarkable name.’
‘Why?’ Frau Dukas says with a tone that suggests there’s nothing remarkable about it.
Turning towards the windows to ponder the play of dappled sunlight on the trees, Albert says: ‘It means the beautiful fortress.’
The sight of a group of Afro-American children playing in the sun makes him smile.
The leader sings: ‘My momma livin . . .’
The group sings: ‘Where she livin?’
Performing a hip-shaking dance, they sing in unison:
‘Well, she lives in a place called Tennessee.
Jump up, Tenna, Tennessee.
Well, I never been to college,
I never been to school.
But when it comes to boogie
I can boogie like a fool.
You go in, out, side to side.
You go in, out, side to side.’
Albert struggles to his feet and performs a boogie-woogie of his own devising. Still with his back to Frau Dukas, he says: ‘Take this down, please: “There remain prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of whites towards their fellow citizens of darker complexion. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.”’
‘Who is that to be sent to?’ Frau Dukas asks.
‘To me. To me, Helen. A reminder to myself. Now . . . I want you to treat the following as strictly confidential.’ He sighs heavily. ‘My personal relationships have all been failures. What man would not visit his stepdaughter when she was dying of cancer? My first wife died alone in Zürich. My daughter has disappeared. I have no idea where she is. I don’t even know whether she is still alive.’
‘Please . . . don’t allow your past to destroy you.’
‘My son – my son . . . you know, Helen – my son Eduard has been in clinics for schizophrenics for almost twenty-five years. Therapy, electroconvulsive treatment, has destroyed his memory and cognitive abilities.’
‘But not your loving relationship with him.’
‘My only loving relationship is with the Jewish people. That is my strongest human bond. I told Queen Elizabeth of Belgium: “The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler – Ich bin ein Betrüger.” I need fresh air – my liver hurts.’
Frau Dukas opens the windows.
Outside, from the radio of a battered Buick four-door sedan, comes the sound of Doris Day singing ‘Secret Love’.
Albert makes a gesture of impatience. ‘Check out that telephone directory, Helen.’
Frau Dukas does so and discovers the Beaufort family residence is Beaufort Park in Greenwich, Fairfield County, Connecticut. He wonders what Mimi Beaufort looks like. Her voice certainly holds the eternal appeal of youth. Is she going to be a new friend? A confidante perhaps. A secret love to calm his soul troubled by his age, his aches and pains and dark forebodings. The shafts of sun fall across his desk. He relishes the patterns. He flicks through the worn pages of Mozart’s Sonata for Piano and Violin in E minor, K.304.
It’s an honour to find such tenderness unfolding, such purity of beauty and truth. Such qualities are indestructible. He believes, like Mozart, he has unravelled the complexities of the universe. Its essence of the eternal is beyond fate’s hand and deluded humankind. Age allows us to feel such things.
He stares at the shadows flickering on the floor. In the patterns he fancies he sees the faces of his family, his friends and loved ones. His intimate and treasured friendships seem to him to have been cyclical. Too many have evaporated. Ever since his beginning. Long ago. In Ulm at eleven-thirty in the morning at Bahnhofstrasse B135, the house destroyed by one of the most violent Allied air attacks in December 1944. He remembers writing to a correspondent whose name he’s forgotten: ‘Time has affected it even more than it has affected me.’
Is there anything left now of old Ulm? he wonders. What of my friends and loved ones: those who have made up my life and formed me? Me: The Most Famous Face on Earth.
How kind to me were the residents of Ulm who intended to name a street after me. Instead, the Nazis named it Fichtestrasse after Fichte, whose works Hitler read, and who was read by other Nazis like Dietrich Eckart and Arnold Fanck.
After the war, it was renamed Einsteinstrasse. His response to the news sent to him by the mayor always makes him smile. ‘There’s a street there that bears my name. At least I’m not responsible for whatever is going to happen there. I was right to decline the rights of a freeman of Ulm considering the fate of the Jews in Nazi-Germany.’
He takes up his pen and writes:
Like you I cannot help my birthplace. But I can help my history of my intimacies in youth. The religious paradise of youth was my first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ‘merely personal’, from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there is the world in all its vastness existing independently of us human beings standing before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckons as a liberation. In childhood I noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it. Except perhaps for the fact I doubt there is a sentient being anywhere on earth who does not know my face.
