Benjamin was right, after all, when he said Martina lacked something essential for human relations. He had meant love, perhaps he’d meant she should adore him, but what she was really lacking was judgment.
She had shaken her head a little in the cave at Innsbruck, sad at her own blindness, but the Memler interpreted that as insolence. Her guards stripped the dress from Martina and easily found her papers, sewn into the hem. The sight of her own coarse stitches made Martina think of her mother. Even in a slave labor camp you don’t have to sew as if you had donkey’s hooves instead of human fingers, she heard Mama saying, and smiled, careful this time to keep her expression to herself. Still, that interior smile allowed her to watch impassively as the Memler put her papers inside a notebook.
The guard flung Martina’s dress at her feet. After she put it on, and put on the threadbare joke of a coat, she said, “My last words to you as your professor, Fr?ulein Memler: you cannot think clearly or do meaningful research if you are consumed by rage or spite.”
Memler struck her hard across the cheekbone with her ring-crusted fingers, and Martina felt the blood lace down her face. So her poor body still had some blood in it. Her monthly flow dried up long ago and she wondered sometimes if her whole body had turned to something inanimate, a piece of skin filled with sawdust.
“I should lock you in the pit,” Memler growled, but the guard reminded her that the transport to Vienna was waiting: they’d already given the escort the number of prisoners who were in transit. Locking up one prisoner meant redoing all the paperwork.
It was Martina’s last sight of Memler, rubbing her rings, as if the blow to her professor’s face had also cut her own fingers. Her last sight until six days ago.
The Memler’s thick flaxen hair has darkened; she’s cut her obscenely fat Hitler-Jugend braid into a fashionable Debbie Reynolds perm, but her posture—the obsequious bob of the head to the senior man in the group, the arrogant gesture to the work crew—Martina would have known her anywhere.
The Memler is even more astounded by the sight of Martina. She stops what she’s saying to the men in mid-sentence.
“Du bist aber tod!”? she gasps at Martina, her skin turning an unhealthy white.
“You are not the queen of the uranium torture field, now, Fr?ulein Memler,” Martina says, also in German, in a voice of ice. “If you must address me, you will do so politely, or not at all.”
Red blotches appear in Memler’s face. “Was machst du—was machen Sie hier?”?
“The better question is, what are you doing here? Do your new masters know what you did in the caves beneath Innsbruck? It will be most instructive for them to find out.”
The Memler smiles unpleasantly. “I’m helping defeat Communism. The past is of no interest to them.”
She turns to the men, who are looking at her curiously. “A lab technician I used to know in Austria. Forgive us for speaking German; we haven’t seen each other for many years.”
Her English is heavily accented, but grammatically correct. Memler was always a hard worker, that was the good thing one could say.
“Ah, the concussion you suffered in the Nazi weapons plant has affected your memory.” Martina smiles at the men around Memler. “You came to the Institut für Radiumforschung as my student. I remember how eager you were then to learn from me. And now you are here, perhaps you may learn again.”
Martina asks one of the work crew what it is they’re installing. A computing machine, something built in Chicago to help Professor Dzornen’s team with their neutron scattering computations. Martina starts to walk past them, then sees the little smirk lingering at the corner of Memler’s mouth, the mouth that shouted “Heil, Hitler” not so long ago. She stops to stare at the computing machine, walks around it, inspects the side panels as the men watch her uneasily. The Memler is shifting her feet, unable to hide that Martina’s behavior is making her nervous.
“I would gladly see the interior,” Martina says to an electrician, one of the crew who has often worked with her. “The design would be most interesting.”
The electrician looks cautiously at his own boss. Memler says sharply that it would be a serious error to tamper with the machine, that he is most strenuously forbidden to unscrew the side panels.
Martina smiles tightly at Memler. “You have just shown it to me, Miss Memler. Ich gratuliere dir.”§
Martina goes to her own lab, really, to her own two meters on a bench, where she is working out what she’s seen in the bubble chambers.