A Bend in the Stars Page 4

  Vanya’s hands were cold with shock. He could barely believe what he’d heard. Yuri had traded himself for Miri’s promotion. His sister would never want that. She’d think Yuri didn’t believe in her; she’d want to earn her own way—and would never dream of putting Yuri in danger. She loved him more than her career. Surely, if Yuri knew his sister at all, he must have understood that. Still, it surprised Vanya that Yuri had done this for Miri. He hadn’t expected such bravery.

  Vanya could hear Yuri still trying to silence the elder surgeon, but he continued bumbling, “Of course, you, Dr. Rozen, you’re likely the only one among us who knows how to use a gun, who might survive if it comes to it.”

  “I can’t believe it.” Vanya didn’t mean to say it out loud, but he did.

  “Believe what?” Miri asked. She’d sneaked up behind him. He jumped and tried to force a smile. She’d changed into the same white uniform as Yuri, only she wore skirts.

  Vanya kissed her hand. “It’s not important now.”

  “Dr. Abramov,” Yuri called. His voice was relaxed as if nothing had passed between him and the elder surgeon. “I hear you. You’re ready? Sukovich can’t wait much longer,” he said as he turned the corner. “Ivan Davydovich?” Yuri stopped, held out his hand. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” Vanya said. “I don’t miss anything, in fact.”

  Yuri blinked at him, startled. Before he could say another word, Miri strode away. “We need to go. Now,” she called over her shoulder.

  V

  Vanya stood in the gallery of benches that lined the balcony above the operating theater and watched his sister below as she marched into the room, emanating confidence. He was filled with pride because, regardless of what Yuri had done, Vanya knew she’d earned this day, this position. She’d worked toward it ever since she saved their cousin all those years earlier. Yuri followed her with a smile as if he’d done nothing wrong. And Vanya found that as much as he wanted to be angry with Yuri for his lies, it wasn’t that simple. Yuri had given Miri the greatest gift anyone could give. It was a supreme act of generosity.

  The men around Vanya, students and surgeons, were crammed together shoulder to shoulder with no room to spare. Vanya was sure his sister hadn’t expected so many people to watch, but word must have spread that Dr. Rozen’s woman would be operating for the first time on her own and they’d all come to witness the spectacle. The space filled with the smell of stale clothing and carbolic.

  “She’ll kill him. Mark my words,” a man next to Vanya said.

  “Of course she will. Why would they trust a woman with a man’s life?” agreed another.

  But what about Sukovich himself? None of them discussed the crime or the hatred that could kill them all. Vanya kept his mouth shut and his hand in his pocket, fingering the letter from Eliot. He spotted the elder surgeon from the hallway in the front row.

  Miri looked up to address the gallery, and the room went silent save for a moan from the fishmonger. Vanya knew Miri didn’t want to waste time talking, but she had to follow protocol. She introduced herself as Dr. Abramov, the lead surgeon, Yuri as her assistant, and then presented her patient, his condition, and her plans for the operation. When she turned to begin, a nurse fastened her mask for her, and the men in the balcony all leaned forward, up on tiptoes.

  “I’ve heard she’s as skilled as Olevovich was at that age,” one murmured, comparing Miri to the chief of surgery.

  “That’s a lie,” another disagreed. “Leave women to tend to their own.”

  Vanya was tempted to challenge them, but he held his tongue, letting their criticism boil with the heat that crept into the gallery and left the voyeurs dripping. As Miri worked, Yuri stood over her and pointed to the patient, to implements. Behind his mask, Vanya was sure Yuri was whispering instructions. And he was also sure Miri wasn’t listening. Vanya knew the look in his sister’s eyes. It was pure concentration. She was doing the work on her own. Dissecting the spleen from surrounding tissues. A complicated, blood-filled procedure she was handling perfectly, it seemed.

  And then, suddenly, Vanya heard the man next to him hiss, “Too much blood!” He leaned even further forward. The comment was followed by other murmurs around them.

  “She’s enlarged the tear.”

  And: “She’s killing him.”

  Quickly, Yuri took the instrument from Miri and she stepped back. A nurse began using sponge after sponge in the fishmonger’s chest. Had Miri made a mistake? Or, as she’d predicted, had they operated so late that his body had given way?

  “Hold this,” Vanya heard Yuri say in a voice louder than it needed to be. “I’ll tie it off.” More blood and sponges. Miri eased down to Sukovich’s side and stroked his palm just as Vanya used to stroke hers when they were children and she was scared. Finally, Yuri made a show of handing Miri a curved needle, asking her to close the incision. At that, Miri let go of Sukovich. She leaned in and narrowed her eyes. The look, the posture, Vanya knew. She was doing all she could to hold back the darkness, and tears. She was angry and ashamed. Couldn’t Yuri see that crack in her? Why didn’t he say anything to defend her, to tell the room it was Miri who’d made the correct diagnosis, that she’d started perfectly?

  “What we expected,” the man next to Vanya said. Was he smiling?

  After the last stitch was tied, the men around Vanya surged toward the exits, but Vanya stayed. Baba had raised them to respect pain, to fight through it, but that didn’t mean Miri needed to feel it on her own. Vanya wanted to comfort her, but she’d never forgive him if he did that in front of her peers. And so he waited in case the room cleared and she looked for him. But she didn’t. She disappeared through the side door without even glancing up at the gallery. “Damn Yuri,” Vanya muttered. He could have helped more.

  Vanya checked his watch and realized he still had time to run to the university for his lecture. As much as he didn’t want to go, he knew he should. Baba was right; Kir didn’t need more ammunition. It was lucky he hadn’t canceled after all. Vanya hurried through the hushed hospital, past people waiting in line to be seen, and through the heavy front doors. Outside the street was loud—a main thoroughfare—packed with the frenzy of Kovno’s workers. Vanya bobbed past carts piled with vegetables, fish, and coal, past wagons loaded with soldiers and cannons. On the corner closest to the edge of the square, he waited for the tram. A woman across from him was selling blankets. They hung from lines on display like laundry. A small girl played in them, pressing her hands into their wool while her sister batted at her profile. The tram choked to a stop. Vanya elbowed his way on.

  As the noisy tram slinked through the city, Vanya reached into his pocket and ran his fingers over Eliot’s letter. An expedition. Coming to Russia. Even now. Incredible. He burned to read the rest, but he couldn’t manage it on that crowded tram. If only he could solve the math before the eclipse. He tried to push past what had happened to Miri and concentrate on his equations for relativity. At least that was something he could fix.

  He asked, again, the question he’d been asking himself every day for five years. How to account for acceleration? And gravity? How he wished he could ask his Papa. Baba had been mother and father to them both, more than any child could hope for, but Vanya longed for those afternoons he’d spent in his father’s workshop as a child. “Look around,” Papa used to say. His father had sold watches and clocks. When he could, he’d taken in repairs and taught Vanya about the gears and mechanisms. “No clock can ever be perfect.” The first time Papa had said that, Vanya was nine years old. He was bent over a workbench, clutching a screwdriver and a loupe. The smell of grease was thick between them along with the remnants of smoke from Papa’s pipe.

  “I don’t understand,” Vanya said.

  “You see all these clocks on the walls? Not one tells the same time as another. Even if their hands point to the same hour and minute, their second hands aren’t in sync.”

  “We could fix that.” />
  “Perhaps we could make it look precise to the human eye, but to make it truly exact is impossible. It is beyond any human ability. No clock can precisely match another.” Papa smiled through his thick beard. “You’re fighting nature. Think about it, my boy. If time existed naturally, every clock in this room would read the same.”

  Vanya had never considered it before but nodded as the idea worked through him. “You’re right. The moon doesn’t tell time.”

  “Of course not! Our watches can’t mark the rising or setting of the sun or the moon—those change every night. What’s it matter to the moon or to the stars what any clock says? Still, time is important to us. For trains. For anything with a schedule.” The idea was radical. Vanya knew it even then and he loved his father for it. Later, after he’d lost his parents, when he discovered that the great scientists of the day were focused on the problem of synchronizing clocks, he couldn’t turn back. Especially not when he discovered Einstein’s work at the patent office was dedicated to reviewing inventions for aligning clocks, inventions such as pneumatic tubes and blasts of air. His father was right: time was a human invention. Like Einstein, Vanya came to believe time was relative. And defining a second or an hour was arbitrary—but sequence was absolute. A tree falls. It cannot rise up and become whole again, just as an egg breaks and its shell cannot be reassembled, regardless of how anyone defines the time it takes for these events to happen. How did that fit into field equations?

  He closed his eyes to picture the problem, but then the tram stopped hard and sent Vanya into the window. Looking out, he realized he’d missed his stop. Not by much. He hurried for the door and ran down the cobbled streets toward the university.

  VI

  Vanya ran into the auditorium where he was scheduled to speak and found every seat was already taken. Still, he hoped he could slink down the aisles to the stage unnoticed, avoid the need to return false smiles and handshakes. Quickly, quickly he hurried with his head down and his hands in his pockets. It helped, he knew, that most of the audience expected this behavior from him. Since Vanya had applied to the university eight years earlier, he’d been the center of attention and held apart, much to his dismay. He wrote his entrance exam in twenty minutes, scoring perfectly, while others toiled for more than six hours and still didn’t derive every answer. Once he started classes, he didn’t have to attend lectures that explained proofs and methods because he came to solutions on his own. Instead he spent hours in the library digging into Minkowski, Einstein, and others. Students and professors alike watched him from afar. He heard them whisper, calling him “that odd Jew.” He learned to be grateful that he was left alone. It gave him time to work.

  It was Kir Romanovitch, the chair of the new Theoretical Physics Department, who was the first to breach the barrier and come near Vanya. Kir approached him in the library one night when he was working late. Vanya was sitting under a smattering of light that rendered Kir a towering shadow. His dark suit and hair made him hard to see in that setting, but the smell of his cigars was as distinct as any line. Without smiling or extending his hand, Kir put a copy of a recent math journal in front of Vanya. “Mr. Abramov, you know this Henri Poincaré?” Kir said, pointing to an article. “You’ve studied his gravitational waves?” Vanya was so stunned that such a powerful man was paying him any attention that all he could manage was a nod. “Good. I don’t care that you’re a Jew. You’ll lecture on Poincaré next week.”

  Vanya was thrilled. He practiced with Miri, writing and rewriting that lecture. Only a few professors attended, but word spread that the Jew’s work was astounding, and others began to approach him, asking for his advice or help. Vanya was happy to work with anyone he judged serious by their commitment to math. Those who wouldn’t sleep until they had a solution, or a hint of a solution, were those he gladly spent long hours with in the library, working through equations. He loved going over problems with them, much as he loved talking through his own ideas with Miri at home in Baba’s kitchen. Though Vanya didn’t bother with compliments when answers were correct, his colleagues were drawn to him, to his passion. Of course there were plenty who persisted in resenting him, but they didn’t concern him as long as they stayed out of his way.

  After he was awarded his degree, he was elevated to professor, a position that made him formally “useful” and gave him the freedom that came with that status: higher pay, the chance for advancement, and the ability to travel anywhere in the empire. Useful Jews were part of the czar’s plans for Russification. To unify his empire, to assimilate its outliers, Nicholas needed modern, educated Jews, and the promotion meant the czar’s men gave not only him a wider berth, but Miri and Baba, too. It was how Vanya had helped Miri get her training to become a doctor and how they were able to remain in a house in the section of the city where they lived—where only useful Jews were now permitted. Every year, more students came to learn from him. And every time he gave a lecture, the auditorium was full. That day he walked in after Sukovich’s surgery was no exception. There wasn’t a free seat in the room. It was good he came, after all: his absence would have been noticed.

  Vanya took hold of the chalk and put the folded piece of paper with his spare notes on the lectern. He decided since he wanted to work through the question of acceleration anyway, he might as well do so here. Perhaps if he could explain it to his colleagues, he’d figure out how to use it for himself.

  The solution he needed for relativity held two sides, linked by an equal sign. On one side sat the distribution of matter and energy in space—the stars. On the other sat the geometry of space—the stage. The two were linked, not separate. He compared this relationship to apples bobbing in water. Every time the apples moved, the water also moved, putting the equation back into balance. One always affected the other—in different ways at different times. How could he express that? In his mind, Vanya ran through his notebook, ticking through pages and pages. He needed a framework, what mathematicians called a tensor, to represent all four dimensions. He focused on the Italian mathematician Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro because Ricci’s tensor accounted for acceleration. It was so new, Vanya figured no one in the audience had even heard of it.

  He turned to the board and started working at a furious pace, sensing rather than calculating the curves and height of space as they changed under his chalky fingers. When he came up short, he knew it because he could feel it. Each time he erased his work and started again. A cloud of dust sent him into a coughing fit and he didn’t pause to recover. Nor did he take questions.

  “Another way to understand this problem,” he said, rolling a clean board out from the corner. “Imagine you’ve put a blanket on a laundry line.” He thought about the tram stop earlier. “A child stands behind the blanket and sticks her hand into it so you see her fingers’ profile on the opposite side. That sheet is equivalent to space. That hand is equal to a star, or even a galaxy. The correct tensor, and equation, will define both and include time—marking when the hand and the blanket were in that position. And when she moves her hand, imagine it’s fused to the fabric. Just as a star can’t simply leave space, her hand can’t lose contact with the wool. It doesn’t matter how it changes, or accelerates, or when. The correct equations will still hold true.” That’s what he was after. That’s where Einstein had failed. “Watch,” he said when one person asked for clarification. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes past the hour that he noticed he’d run late. “Sorry,” he said, stopping abruptly, knowing he was no closer to a solution. He’d been so focused on the math that he was surprised when he turned to face the audience and found rows and rows of men working to keep pace, copying every notation he’d made—not seeming to care that he’d gotten nowhere.

  Vanya took a bow, as was expected of him. Before he stood, he was swarmed. “Professor,” they all seemed to yell at once. “Why gravity? Why are you focused on gravity and acceleration?”

  “To understand spacetime, we must understand gravity,” Vanya said. “It slows time
.”

  “Isn’t that what the German is saying?” one student asked.

  “Professor Einstein?” Vanya asked. “He’s Swiss now.”

  “He has German blood. How can we trust that?”

  “He’s a worthless Jew,” another said. And the room went silent.

  Vanya cleared his throat and tamped down his anger, steadied his voice even as his face turned red. “The country Einstein calls home doesn’t matter. Nor does his religion. Ideas matter. Science above politics,” Vanya said, knowing it was more of a wish than reality. The truth was that, like Einstein, everyone in that auditorium thought of Vanya as a Jew before they thought of him as a scientist. Even Vanya himself thought that way. That was likely what fueled his obsession with him, the fact that Vanya had more in common with Einstein than with any man in his field. Both were outcasts from the day they were born. This bond kept Vanya fascinated. Since he’d first read about the theory of relativity, he’d tried to dig as deeply as he could into Einstein’s life. All he found, all that was available in Russia, were tidbits he could learn from journals and newspapers. Back in those early days, most established professors around the world dismissed Einstein as a radical at best and a fool at worst.

  Vanya taught himself to read German so he could master Einstein’s publications. He saw Einstein adopted a patent examiner’s approach to writing scientific papers—he didn’t cite foundational sources. And Vanya began to do the same. He was chastised for it but he refused to change. Why did it matter who inspired him or came before him? His work was replacing that entire foundation anyway.

  Vanya once paid double the value of a journal just so he could own a photograph of Albert Einstein. He propped the picture up on his desk at home. In the photo, Albert stood in front of the Bern clock tower near his patent office. He had a thick mustache and curls. His eyes looked sleepy. His jacket was too large. His tie wasn’t straight, and his collar, was it crooked? Vanya was a fatherless eighteen-year-old when he found that photo, and afterward he tried growing his own mustache—unsuccessfully. He also stopped making sure his suits were well tailored and his own ties were straight. Baba hated it, said that, as a Jew, Vanya couldn’t afford to look the way he did, but he fought back, countered that what mattered was math not religion. He could be sloppy in appearance but not in work. Since he continued to progress, there was little she could do to stop him. But when he tried to convince Miri to do the same, to stop worrying about the tightness of her braids and the starch in her collars, Baba scolded him. His sister, Baba said fiercely, was a woman fighting for respect. She couldn’t afford to be sloppy anywhere.