The old woman is distressed. “Where is Joachim? He said he was going out, just for a moment, but he hasn’t come back. Have you seen him? He’s never late.” Joachim could be a husband or son or brother, it’s impossible to know.
Most of the crowd is silent. Too many years, too many humiliations, too many losses have taken away their voices. Martina has had her losses, too. Her mother and her aunts, for instance: they stood on a platform like this a year ago, disappeared into a train like the one she and her fellow sheep are waiting for. The thought of those three women twists her diaphragm with a sharper pang than hunger.
She has a panacea for pain and starvation, and she turns to it now, imagining differential equations for electric fields. From there it’s not much of a jump to quantum mechanics. For a time she doesn’t hear the whimpers and barks around her, doesn’t feel the anxiety of the woman next to her still fretting for Joachim, doesn’t feel the painful throbbing in her feet, which are swollen from cold and ill-fitting shoes. She puts a hand absently into her pocket, feeling for a pencil—Maxwell’s equations for free space are eluding her—and then remembers that all her papers and pencils were confiscated—stolen—when she was put on the train outside Innsbruck.
Perhaps it’s true, as Benjamin always said, that she is too aloof to feel the passions and griefs most people experience. Her own mother, after all, often said the same thing, only in an angrier, shorter way. If she had real human feelings, for instance, at this moment, when she is almost certainly going to her death, shouldn’t she be thinking of her child, not free space? I should write you a letter, my daughter.
Dear K?the.
She imagines the paper, the ink, the pen.
My daughter, we have had so little time together that I hardly know you. Not just because you left for England over three years ago, but all your little girlhood I was at the Institute day and night. Your grandmother saw you take your first steps and it’s she who has cared most for your fate.
The day they got the news from the Cavendish labs that announced the discovery of the neutron, Martina was so excited she could hardly choke down a piece of cake with her afternoon coffee. Long after Professor Meyer left the Institute for the day, she and Benjamin stayed talking with some of the students, pondering the implications. Benjamin’s tidy equations covering one side of the chalkboard, her own diagrams filling the other, her student, Gertrud, crying out with excitement that this explained the effect that Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot were finding in Paris. Although it didn’t speak to the odd half-life of one of the radium isotopes.
The Stephansdom clock struck eleven and Benjamin looked around with a guilty start: his wife would long since have gone to bed, his dinner would be cold and dried out by now. Not spoken: his wife’s resentment, her suspicion that more than quantum mechanics kept her husband late at the Institut für Radiumforschung.
When Martina herself reached home, she quietly stowed her bicycle in the service entrance and tiptoed up the stairs: no one in Vienna stayed up so late unless they were at the theater. And there her mother sat at the kitchen table, mouth pinched in anger. K?the said her first sentence today, her mother announced: “Oma, K?the needing milk.”
When Martina responded, How lovely, her mind only vaguely absorbing the news, her mother slapped her. “That piece of pike on the sideboard has more feeling than you. You don’t deserve a bright young child like K?the. Why did I let your papa talk me into allowing that trip to G?ttingen? Your education has destroyed you as a woman.”
Was K?the a bright young child? She always had seemed petulant, but perhaps that was my fault, not yours, my little daughter. You wanted something from me I wasn’t able to give you. I wanted you to share my excitement over the innermost secrets of nature; you wanted me to be at home with you instead of your Oma, or Frau Herschel’s Kinderm?dchen. On the days Martina’s mother still worked for Frau Herschel, K?the and Frau Herschel’s granddaughter, Lotte, played in the light, bright nursery in the big apartment on the Ring, but when Martina would ask K?the, Did you see the rainbow of light on the nursery floor? the child would only stare at her sullenly.
Right before the Anschluss, she had taken K?the and Lotte on a skiing trip in Tyrol. She tried to interest K?the in the stars, in the mystery of the explosions inside them that made those jewels twinkle and glow in the night sky. It was Lotte whose eyes grew round with wonder, K?the who gave the pinched scowl of disapproval she’d learned from her Oma, announcing it was too cold to stand outside at night.