The Mother’s Heart
IT’S COLD ON the train platform. The station signs have been taken down because of the war, but Martina thinks she must be in Vienna. Somehow you feel a big city, even when all you can see are the necks of the hundreds of other people pushed into a tight herd around you.
Of course, when she left the mountain lab they told her nothing, just the kick in her side to wake her.
“Get up, you’re leaving, we’ve no further use for you.” The insolent “Du” delivered by a pock-faced guard who would be butchering hogs if the war hadn’t given him a uniform and a boot.
How fortunate that I travel light. She kept the ironic thought to herself. Nothing to pack, the grimy dress she sleeps in the same that she wears in daytime. With the rest of the slave laborers she was prodded at riflepoint out of the cave onto a small train along the siding.
There had been rumors for weeks that the lab would shut down. They hadn’t produced results, which wasn’t surprising, given the sloppy quality of the work. Several times the scientist in her had rebelled; she tried to suggest a different experimental design, but that earned her a beating twice, a kicking once, a day without rations all three times. After that she shrugged every time she saw another waste of hard-to-find minerals.
The train was a small one, two freight cars. The guards made sure the prisoners watched as the cars were filled with fruit and meat from the local farms, extra torture for people close to death from privation. After standing for several hours, while the peasants joked with the guards, the prisoners were shoved into a carriage whose seats had been removed. Boards had been nailed across the windows so they couldn’t see out.
For the limbo of time that the journey lasted they stood, unspeaking, like sheep knowing they are bound for the abattoir. Now and then the train stopped, flinging the sheep against each other and into the car walls, and then some timepiece clicked and they lurched forward again. Einstein’s clock, Zeno’s paradox, the train departs Innsbruck for Vienna, and for the inmates the journey lasts both forever and the blink of an eye.
When she’d made the reverse journey fourteen years earlier, leaving Vienna for her glorious year at G?ttingen, she hadn’t slept the night before out of excitement, not this near-dead state she inhabits now. As if you were going to a lover, her mother commented sourly all those years ago, even more sour on Martina’s return because her passion was reserved for matrix algebra and quantum mechanics, not the father of the child she was carrying.
At first, realizing she was pregnant, Mama had thought she understood Martina’s excitement at going to G?ttingen: physics had been an excuse for meeting a lover. But when she realized that the child was an afterthought, something that happened when a shared passion for particle decay spilled over into bed, Mama became even angrier. Papa was dying, who was going to look after him and a baby, if Martina was going to work at the Radium Institute?
When she returned to their tiny flat on the Novaragasse, Martina had been shocked at how frail Papa had become during her year away. His eyes still were filled with life, though, and he annoyed Mama by demanding all the news of the elusive atom. When the baby came, he kept her next to him in bed, showing little K?the the play of light on the ceiling through the prisms he had brought home for Martina after she’d first seen the rainbow in Sophie Herschel’s nursery.
Locked now in this dark train, Martina finds her one source of thankfulness a deep irony: Papa’s tubercular lungs, weakened by gas attacks in the trenches of the Great War, allowed him to die at home in bed, with Martina holding his frail hand. Spectral lines. Mama incensed that those were his last words.
Her tired, fevered mind is still a jumble of Papa’s death, Heisenberg’s matrix, when the train lurches to a halt once more. This time the doors are unlocked. Guards and dogs order them onto the platform where they are pushed into the midst of a pack of people as worn down as themselves.
No one bothers to ask a neighbor where they are going, how long they have to stand in the cold. As long as they are standing here, they aren’t being shot or shoved headfirst into lime pits or gas chambers. No need to think further ahead than this.
Next to Martina, an old woman keeps grabbing her arm, scrabbling at the sleeve of Martina’s threadbare coat so that it falls back, revealing how thin her arms have become. Those little bony twigs that used to be round, muscled, now end in thinner twigs covered with radiation burns.