Fr?ulein Martina looks at the two girls. In the tiny room where the Herschels now live, it’s impossible to have a private conversation: the same thing is true in her own flat, across the hall. She thought, growing up, that her parents’ four rooms were tiny and squalid compared to the large light flat where the Herschels lived on the Renngasse. Now the new government has moved three other families into her home. She and her mother mourn their lost rooms just as much as Frau Herschel grieves for her ten rooms and private baths.
“A man was pushed off a building,” K?the says loudly. “We told you on the way home, but you wouldn’t listen. We saw it. These other men picked him up and threw him off, just as if he was a doll, and they laughed. They said he’d been an ugly Jew when he was alive and now he was pretty because he was a dead Jew! And your stupid atoms won’t save you from someone doing that to you.”
“That’s enough coarse talk to your mother,” Frau Herschel says sharply, adding to Fr?ulein Martina, “Your own mother is frightened; we all are frightened, so Frau Saginor says these things. I tell her that K?the repeats them, and that perhaps she shouldn’t complain about you quite so much, but—”
Fr?ulein Martina smiles as Frau Herschel breaks off, mid-sentence. “I know what Mama says: that if I loved my child as much as I love physics, K?the wouldn’t complain about my work. I’m sorry that I didn’t notice the man who was pushed yesterday. What a terrible thing for the children to have seen.
“The trouble is, we had to leave the lab early on account of the curfew, but my mind stayed in the library, not with what was happening on the street. My mother is right: that’s my biggest fault, not seeing what’s in front of me. Or second-biggest.”
The biggest, according to Frau Saginor, being Martina’s coldness, but even as she speaks to Frau Herschel, Martina’s mind scurries from her daughter and the dead man, back to the Institute library.
“I hadn’t been able to find a reference I was looking for,” she tries to explain. “It was an old paper by a German chemist, Ida Noddack; I finally tracked it down this afternoon. No one paid attention to it when she published it, because she criticized Fermi’s study of uranium decay, and his work is supposed to be beyond criticism. Still, when I first read it, I did wonder if we should redo Fermi’s experiments, and go down to elements below lead. When I suggested as much to Professor Dzornen, he said we didn’t have the resources and that we had to accept Fermi’s results. Anyway, there’s no better experimentalist in physics today. But Noddack suggested that U-235 doesn’t decay into trans-uranic elements, but into—”
K?the interrupts her mother with a loud scream. She grabs the teddy bear from Herr Herschel, darts to the window and hurls the bear down to the courtyard. “Now he’s dead, and a good thing, too, ugly Jew bear. No more useless klatsch-klatsch-klatsch from his stupid mouth!”
The shock in all the adult faces makes K?the run from the room, trailing her knitting. Little Charlotte, stunned only for a second, leaps up and follows her. The adults hear the two girls kicking and shouting in the hall.
Herr Herschel goes out and separates them. He speaks with a sternness that is unusual for him. “K?the, you must go to your own home now. We will see you again for lessons when you can behave in a civilized fashion.”
He pulls his granddaughter away from the Saginor child, shocked to see her small face contorted with such hatred. It’s not enough that the Austrians hate us, we have to hate each other, he thinks. The antipathy between little Charlotte and K?the seemed to date from birth, long before the Nazis took over Austria, but the way they all have to live now, five or more people to a room, makes everyone edgy.
The Matzo Island, Frau Herschel used to call the Leopoldstadt where the Saginors live. Like most people of her age and class, she’d been contemptuous of the slum which poor Jews from the eastern reaches of the Habsburg Empire had flooded in the days after the Great War. She doesn’t use that phrase now that they are living there themselves.
On the Matzo Island, their daughter flirted and pouted and danced and sang with Moishe Radbuka, a violinist. No one could resist Sophie when she acted irresistible, least of all a Matzo violinist. The violinist gave Sophie Herschel a baby, whom she called little Charlotte, an olive branch to her mother, who seized on the infant with glad hands. When Martina Saginor had a baby only a few months later, no one knew who had given it to her.
“Martina, such an odd child, an odder woman, one wonders how the child K?the was conceived,” Frau Herschel used to say. “Perhaps some explosion in the lab produced a baby.”
Tonight, instead of punishing little Charlotte for fighting like a ghetto cat, as her grandmother wishes, Herr Herschel carries her down four flights of stairs and out into the courtyard. They find Teddy, dirty from the mud and the slops on the cobblestones, but otherwise intact.
Herr Herschel picks up a scrap of paper torn from a magazine and wipes the bear with clumsy fingers. Perhaps his wife can clean Teddy with one of the mysterious concoctions she is able to manufacture out of their minute rations.