A Bend in the Stars Read online

  Vanya answered every question the students and professors asked after his lecture. One by one, the crowd thinned until Vanya was left alone. He stayed at the blackboard and continued. He was close. He could feel it. But was Ricci the right tensor?

  “Maybe I can help?” The voice came from a shadow in the back of the auditorium. Vanya startled. The chalk snapped.

  “Kir?”

  “I said I might be able to help,” Kir said, smiling. He was halfway down the stairs in the auditorium, coming straight for Vanya. He wore his signature black suit. Strong like a Russian bull is the phrase that came to Vanya when he looked at Kir, because of his build and his self-assured arrogance. It was that demeanor, his ability to intimidate, not his work, that had earned Kir his title as department chair. He was a proficient mathematician at best, Vanya had come to learn.

  “I’m fine, sir,” Vanya said, forcing a smile of his own. “I don’t need help.”

  “Yes, but it’s all so interesting,” Kir continued. They were the same words he’d used at Vanya’s very first lecture on Poincaré. Back then, Vanya was so flattered his face had flushed. Kir had patted his back. His palm spanned the entire width of Vanya’s left side. “You’re certain what you’ve presented is correct?” Kir had asked Vanya’s twenty-year-old self.

  “Of course.”

  “Good, good. Then you won’t mind if I check your notes?” Kir was already reaching for the stack of papers in Vanya’s hands. “See if I can make sure you haven’t missed anything?” Vanya couldn’t object. Nor did he want to, not then. Kir was the center of his academic universe, the chair of his department. There could be no higher compliment. Vanya had handed over everything he had, expecting to hear back soon. But he didn’t.

  It took six months for Vanya to realize what had happened. Vanya’s lecture on gravitational waves was published and credited to Kir and Kir alone. When Vanya confronted him, Kir smiled. “You know this is my work. You merely made suggestions.”

  “But…,” Vanya tried.

  “Did you write a single word that appeared in that article?” No. Vanya hadn’t. His work was confined to numbers and equations. Kir’s grin grew. “Don’t forget, I was the one who gave you that article. Do you think you would have come up with anything if it hadn’t been for my guidance? You must learn there’s an order to things.”

  “B-but,” Vanya stuttered, feeling the first shock of shame. “The others who attended the lecture, surely they know?”

  Kir leaned closer and whispered, “Remember, you’re a Jew.” That was when Vanya understood that no one would defend him. No one would risk their career and family for him.

  Vanya’s work brought Kir fame—and power. Scientists across Russia elevated him to the top of the academy, and that only made Kir bolder and more aggressive. “Tell me what you’re working on so I can help,” Kir would say when he tracked Vanya in the halls or waited for him in Vanya’s office under the guise of giving him another article to study. “You should be grateful I’m looking out for you. Protecting you.”

  Vanya tried to cloister himself away while digging deeper into Albert Einstein. Still, Kir found his ways. He waited at the tram stop, lurked in the halls outside the classroom and in the stacks at the library. He even hovered over Vanya when he helped his peers. Eventually, Kir told Vanya that to retain his position, he’d need to present a lecture every month. Before the lecture, he had to submit his notes to Kir. Vanya had no choice but to agree. He couldn’t lose his professorship—he needed it for Baba and Miri as much as for himself. They’d be thrown from their house, even from Kovno, if he was demoted and declared no longer useful. What did it matter if Kir saw his notes, he said to himself the first time he handed them over. Then Kir returned them, the exact same equations, only rewritten in Kir’s hand. “I’ve added ideas,” Kir said with a smile. “And I’ve already circulated these to the department.” Which meant he’d told the other professors the work was his, not Vanya’s. Surely they knew the lie, but still no one said a thing. It was a wonder Vanya had published that single article in which he declared Einstein’s math mistaken. He’d only managed it because Kir thought the business of Jew arguing against Jew was below him.

  “This lecture today, it was about your fight with Einstein, no?” Kir said now, standing in front of Vanya in the auditorium. The sound of voices and footsteps slid from under the door. For a second, Vanya thought about running, but didn’t. His hands went cold. Sweat slid down his back. Kir continued. “You forgot to give me your notes for today.”

  “I—I wasn’t prepared ahead of time. I’m sorry.”

  Kir frowned. “You know I can get you anything you need to solve this.”

  “You couldn’t get me funding. For the eclipse.”

  “No.” Kir dropped his chin, and something like disappointment flashed across his face. It was the first time Vanya had ever seen him flinch. “No. The czar is staring down war. Using his coffers for bullets, not photographs. Besides, pictures are nothing. It’s math that matters.” Kir cleared his throat. “Let me look at what you have.” When Vanya hesitated, Kir continued, “A family like yours needs help. These are tough times. With war on the horizon, I can keep you safe.” Kir held out his enormous hands, pointing toward Vanya’s notes, and Vanya handed over what he had—the piece of paper he’d stashed in his pocket before he’d left with Miri. Kir raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. As he looked over the paper, he murmured, “Tell me. Your sister. Did she save that Jewish wretch this morning?”

  Shocked, Vanya spoke without thinking. “My sister has nothing to do with this.”

  Kir didn’t take his eyes off the paper between them. He added, “Did you hear about my promotion? I run the university now. Appointed by the czar himself.”

  “Congratulations. On your new position,” Vanya mumbled. Then he hurried to the side door. He tripped. Fell into the first row of seats and righted himself. He’d banged his shin, badly. He tried to walk without limping, felt his face burning red with pain and anger.

  “Good day, Vanya Abramov,” Kir called after him. “My regards to your family.”

  VII

  I almost killed him,” Miri said. She and Yuri stood in a corner at the end of the women’s ward. It was late and all the other doctors had gone home. Miri’s arms and legs had never felt so heavy, and her head ached. She’d seen dozens and dozens of patients after the fishmonger’s surgery, but he was still all she could think about.

  “You saved him. The diagnosis, that was the hardest, most important part,” Yuri said.

  “Don’t say that. Not to me. He would have died if you weren’t there.”

  “Every surgeon makes a mistake their first time.”

  “Not like that. I don’t deserve it.”

  “Surgeon? The title?”

  “And your comfort. You should be chastising me.”

  “Never. Let me play for you. Please? You’re a surgeon now, and I promised I’d play when you became a surgeon.”

  He was so secretive about the piano. She only discovered by accident that he played, late one night when the hospital was deserted. Miri had just begun her apprenticeship with him three months earlier. She’d stayed to watch over a lonely old woman who surely wouldn’t make it through the night. Miri knew the nurses could tend to her patient in her absence, but she was fond of the woman and wanted to stay with her until the end.

  Near midnight the woman took her last breath. Miri pulled the sheet over her patient’s face, then stood and walked toward her office. Miri meant to fetch her things and go home, but she was stopped by music. Gorgeous, tragic music. It came from the piano in the basement—the only space the hospital had had for the instrument when it was donated. The notes were quiet and slow. Melancholic. She tiptoed around the hard, squared edges of the stone stairwell leading down to the basement, needing to see who could play so beautifully.

  She tried not to make any noise. She didn’t want to interrupt, assumed it was a patient’s brother when she saw a ma
n at the keyboard. And she didn’t want to be seen. Baba had warned her against being alone with strange men enough for her to know better. As she slid closer, she heard more fury in the notes. Then a finger that dragged instead of struck. Miri wedged herself against a crate of bandages stacked along the wall. The smell of damp mixed with the earthy scent of the underground.

  The pianist played by the light of a single candle that lit the keyboard, not his face. He didn’t have music in front of him; he played as if the instrument were an extension of himself, his fingers dancing at an impossible pace. And then a pause. Miri held her breath until he sank back into the keys, this time at a softer, slower rhythm. How long did she listen? She couldn’t say. When he finished, he bent forward in exhaustion. Miri felt she was intruding on a moment more intimate than any man would want a stranger to see, but in that silence she was trapped.

  Eventually, the man let out a mournful sigh and pushed back from the piano. When he turned, she saw his face. She must have made a noise at her surprise. “Who’s there?” he asked.

  “Miriam Davydovna.” He looked as startled as she felt, staring into the dark, searching for her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.” She wanted to say more, to explain she’d been moved by the music, that it was the most gorgeous she’d ever heard, but she didn’t dare. Not with him looking for her like that.

  “Do not apologize.” His lips turned up. It wasn’t quite a smile but it was close, and it helped her step forward. “Music is meant to be shared. How long were you there?”

  “Not long.” She hated lying. “Awhile. You play beautifully.”

  “It’s an awful hobby.”

  “How can you call it awful?”

  “What doctor’s down here in the basement instead of up with his patients?”

  “A human one,” Miri said.

  They walked back up the stairwell together. She said she should be getting home, but he invited her to stay and have tea. Before she’d seen him as a mentor, as a brilliant surgeon focused on medicine, but now she wanted to know why a musician with so much talent hid in the basement playing for no one. Why wasn’t he at home, with his family? She’d been working with him for months, she realized, and yet she knew nothing about him.

  She set a tray of biscuits on the table. The chair scraped the floor as he pulled it out for her. Babushka taught her grandchildren to be aware of their surroundings at all times, to look for clues that could reveal a person’s true story, what lay beneath their veneer. It was crucial to know who would risk their life to save yours, but before, Miri had never dared to try to scrape beneath Yuri’s surface. Now she took in his buttoned-up vest and jacket, his stiff doctor’s coat. Appearance was important to him, that was clear. How had she missed that scar just above his lip? The skin had been stitched back together. It was a cut she’d treated on many children, the result of a fall, but Yuri’s scar wasn’t that old. It was still tinged pink, not white. Didn’t he say he’d left Zhytomyr recently? “You never told me why you left home,” she said.

  He kept his eyes on the steam coming off the tea between them. “Please, don’t ask me about home, or about the piano.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s my only request.”

  “Will you play for me again?”

  The biscuit in his hand snapped. “When I secure your promotion.”

  She was certain he’d forgotten that promise made years ago. But now he took her hand as they stood, again, in the dark hospital, with Sukovich recovering near them. He guided her down the squared marble staircase and back into the basement, invited her to share the piano bench. She sat so close their legs pressed together. She could feel he was nervous.

  “This is Schubert. A sonata. His saddest and most gorgeous,” Yuri said.

  “That’s why you like it? Because it’s sad?”

  “No. And yes.” He shook his head. “I think it sits where it should.”

  He played even more beautifully than she remembered, and just as the music had carried her away before, it did so again. She felt his love and loss. The sadness he’d never wanted to share with words poured out, tangling with her own anguish over Sukovich and her mistake that could have cost him his life. Yuri’s hands moved so quickly there was a dark rage to them, and then they stopped, paused before sneaking back into the light. By the time he finished, they’d both been transported beyond themselves, and as the keys still vibrated, he turned and kissed her with a passion she’d never felt from him before. She wrapped herself around him, broke into goose bumps at the electric thrill of his hands, his fingers reaching up her skirt. He’d never touched her like that, and she found herself lost and open to him. But just as he trailed the top of her stockings, he pulled away.

  VIII

  After his confrontation with Kir, Vanya didn’t bother taking the tram back to the house. He ran with an abandon he hadn’t felt since their summers in Birshtan, where he and Miri used to spend the hottest months of the year with Baba at their dacha. The summer cabin was tucked in the hills, near a river and sulfur springs. It was small, with two rooms and a loft where they slept, tucked in by flowers, trees, and Baba’s vegetable gardens. They’d stopped going when Vanya was made a professor, but before that they spent every summer under their grandmother’s eye, training in self-defense the way she herself had once been trained after she escaped Odessa and was saved by the Romani in their camp in the woods. “Enjoy what we have but always prepare for it to disappear,” she’d said. Though Baba meant the warning to be taken seriously, those summers were idyllic. The only time they’d been able to truly relax and laugh since their parents died. Vanya and Miri spent half the summer floating in the water, stuffing themselves with berries and vegetables so fresh the soil on them was still moist. The other half they spent skinning what they’d killed. Or, to be precise, Vanya spent watching Miri skin what she’d killed because he could never bring himself to do either. And when she was done, they would run, play games, and race, pretending an enemy was behind them. Which was how Vanya ran now, only none of what he ran from was a dream. Kir hovered as real as Baba had warned.

  Vanya stormed through the back door, ran up the stairs, and went straight to his room. He hurried past stacks of books on the floor, over piles of notebooks, and stumbled into the chair at his desk. His hands shook. It took three tries before he could strike the flint and start a cigarette. Then he leaned back and looked around at the papers covering the walls. Every sheet was filled with notations and calculations—his work on relativity. Vanya closed his eyes. If Kir took credit for Vanya’s work on relativity, he’d never be able to secure his post at Harvard. And there was no doubt Kir meant to threaten Miri. How had Vanya gotten his family into such a mess? He bowed his head so his curls fell on his face, and he pinched the skin on the bridge of his nose, trying to balance himself. Numbers and equations were the order he understood, not university politics.

  As he leaned back, the envelope from Professor Eliot fell from his pocket. It was crinkled and covered in chalk. Vanya scrambled to pick it up, pulling the paper with so much force that he ripped it and the folded article alongside the letter landed on the bare floorboards. He started, again, from where he’d left off.

  By the time you read this, Clay is likely to be well on his way. Perhaps he will have already arrived. I’m enclosing the announcement in English. It includes the equipment he’s bringing in case that might be helpful. I’ve elected to send this quickly rather than delay for a translation.

  I’m hoping you’ll find your way to Professor Clay. I don’t know him personally and can’t provide an introduction, but from what I can deduce he’s well respected in Chicago. Both his equipment and intentions appear to be top notch.

  We at Harvard are still eager to have you and your family join us in Cambridge according to our original terms. We wish you luck.

  Original terms. That meant they’d only help Vanya and his family if he had both the equations and the photographs. And the news that this professo
r Clay was coming meant Vanya still had a chance at both. The room around him fell away as he pictured what he had to do to get his family out of Russia. Riga wasn’t far. Just a few days by train. And he had thirty-nine days to make his way there. He could use his savings to bribe the right officials for papers and a train ticket. And if he had the equations, there was no question Clay would invite him to join the expedition and allow him to use one of his photographs to prove his math. Vanya would even pay for the privilege if he had to. He reached for his Russian-English dictionary. He’d taught himself to read enough English that he could translate the article himself tonight and as he cracked the spine to get started, he grinned. He could still save his family. And he could still beat Einstein.

  IX

  The next morning, earlier than usual, Miri sat in the kitchen. She hadn’t slept and wanted to get to the hospital early to check on Sukovich. If he was awake, she wanted to be the one to tell him what happened, to check his sutures and to change his bandages. When Vanya made his way downstairs, he looked exhausted. His eyes were nested in dark circles, his hands stained with ink. Somehow he looked taller and thinner, as if he were receding into himself. He leaned down and kissed her cheek. He didn’t say anything to try to alleviate her guilt and shame over the operation. He knew better. Instead, he refilled her cup with tea and added one spoonful of jam, just as she liked it.