Martina makes no effort to smile, to be the good girl asking for a favor. This isn’t because of the war, the deprivations and tortures at Uranverein 7, or the march from Terezín to Sobibor. For ten years in Vienna she was a research leader, the acknowledged equal of her male colleagues, her opinions valued by the Institute director.
Martina expects respect, but her American department head isn’t used to women scientists. Unlike the machinists and electricians on the base, who may not understand her physics, but see her mind at work, the department head can only see her as a technician sent to Nevada from Chicago.
“Miss Memler’s past has been thoroughly investigated,” he tells Martina. “She has a high security clearance and is a valuable member of our project. People like you need to overcome your grievances and get over the past.”
“Watching people die in nitrogen chambers is not a grievance, but it was a peculiar hobby of the Memler,” Martina says.
“She told me that you yourself were a Communist, and that you might come to me to defame her,” the head says. “It seems you spent four years in the Soviet Union at the end of the war.”
“I was trapped behind Soviet lines at the war’s end, like other people in my situation. They put me in a gulag; I escaped with difficulty and walked west. You can’t investigate my past, because all my documents were destroyed in the war, but I have never belonged to any ideological party. However, the Memler’s Nazi affiliation, and the power she exercised at Uranverein Seven, are easy to find out.”
The department head stares at her. “If she is correct about your Communism, your own status here may be in jeopardy. I’d be careful about the mud I threw around.”
The warning means not just that the conversation is over. It means she can be deported. Without a hearing of any kind.
Martina returns to the barracks where she’s been given two rooms, a bedroom and a living-dining-kitchenette. There’s a phone, although of course all calls are placed by operators. She asks the operator to put her through to Chicago, but the woman tells her that her outgoing calls are temporarily restricted.
She goes to the small garden outside her barracks where she watches the sun set behind the mountain. A guard is now patrolling the front of her building. She smiles sourly. The land of the free, the home of the brave.
Back in her rooms she changes into corduroy trousers, laces up her hiking boots, dons a jacket, and fills two canteens with water. Food. She should carry something to eat, although she still—despite years of near starvation—often forgets meals. Raisins, an apple, a slab of something the Americans call cheese, that will do. She has a hat for when the desert sun comes up.
These mountains are rugged, but she crossed the Carpathians on frostbitten feet after she escaped from the Moldova gulag. She waits until full dark, then slips out the window in her bedroom. She crouches on the ground, but the sentry in front hasn’t heard her land in the gravel underneath. Nor do the two soldiers patrolling the road notice her when she reaches it.
The Army relies on the terrain, steep, inhospitable, on the barbed wire that rings the base, on the signs warning of nuclear explosions, to keep out trespassers. They rely on the fences, on fear of wild animals or rocks falling from the outcroppings to keep the inhabitants inside. The patrols are just an extra.
In the starlight, Martina finds a gully that she’s used before. She climbs to where the wire fence is camouflaged by the brush. She knows where a boulder has raised the fence enough that a thin woman can slide beneath.
She has no compass, but the stars are the same she learned with her father, the same that she saw from the Wildspitze in the Austrian Alps.
She looks up at Pegasus, blinking back tears. She’s spent her whole life in love with light and that point in the infinite where beauty is so unbearable that it feels like pain. Is it so much to ask of the Universe to let her return to that point? I don’t need a lab, I don’t need publications, only the harmonies, she pleads. The stars give her no answer, no mercy, but their light will at least guide her up the mountain, away from the barbed wire and barbed words of a weapons factory.
47
WHERE THERE’S A WILL
WE WERE ON the road before the sun was up, Alison driving my Mustang. I’d taken the tracking magnets from the exhaust and the trunk—still held shut with a bungee cord. Alison recognized the magnets: they were Metargon products. She tried to suggest someone had stolen them, but stopped herself mid-sentence, flushing with shame. Her education into her father’s activities was rocking her world.
At the entrance to the Kennedy Expressway, I told Alison to pull over. I stood on the curb until an eighteen-wheeler showed up at the entrance to the northbound lanes. I quickly stuck the magnets under his rear axle.
“Hope you’re going all the way to Seattle, buddy,” I muttered, jumping back into the Mustang.