Hopeful Monsters (4 page)

My father was saying 'By an extraordinary coincidence, just at the time when there is a total eclipse at these places there is also just such a bright star almost directly behind the sun - '

Some of the Allied and Prussian officers were looking down at the man and the woman in the chair. The woman was taking money from the wallet of the man; she leaned and kissed him on the forehead. Then she looked up at the Allied and Prussian officers. One of them looked away and seemed slightly to spit, as if he were taking tobacco off his tongue. The woman who had taken the money put her tongue out at him. I wondered - But why is the man who is like a drop of oil or ointment paying no attention?

My father was saying ' - So they will be able to tell, from the observations recorded by their instruments, whether or not, when the light from the star passes close to the sun, it is bent or curved or whatever; and so whether or not the nature of space is bent or curved. I mean they will know from calculations where the star behind the sun will actually be and they will see from their observations where it will appear to be - ' My father broke off. He too was now watching what was happening between the woman and man in the chair and the Allied and Prussian officers.

I said Tm listening.'

My father said 'But how will they have made their calculations except through observations?'

I said 'What?'

My father said 'Where was I?'

The woman was climbing off the lap of the man in the chair. The Allied and Prussian officers were moving away. I wondered if I should talk about the scene with my father: then I found that I did not want to.

I said 'So you mean, they won't be able to prove it.'

My father said 'Oh well, they may think they've proved it.'

I thought - But is it about this, or the scene in the hotel, that I want to talk with my father?

Sometimes during these days I went with my mother to her soup-kitchen in one of the poorest parts of Berlin. There was the impression of going down into ever greater depths under water; it was as if I now had to imagine myself in some diving-bell or bubble. The soup-kitchen was in a cellar; there were grey women

and children like shadows against walls. I thought - If they or I touched, there would be no oil or ointment to spread! I helped with the handing-out and washing-up of plates. My mother seemed at home among these shadows. She told them what to do; she arranged them in formations against the walls. I thought - Perhaps it is easier to feel what should be done with shadows.

My mother said 'This is not like the grand tea-parties you go to with your father!'

I thought - But why do you say that my father does not love you? Is it because you see him as a shadow?

Sometime during that summer I became ill; I had a fever; I lay in bed and stared at the wall. I thought - There, and there, are shadows! But the sun is too dangerous; you are bent, this way and that, by gravity.

There was one other particular occasion that I remember from the times when my father and I used to have tea in the Adlon Hotel. This must have been later in the summer when the terms of the Treaty of Versailles had become known, because the Prussian and Allied officers were no longer easily speaking to one another. A scene occurred between one of the French officers and one of the Prussians (must not memory depend on events having some connection with symbols?). A group of French officers had been drinking. One of the Prussian officers stopped and spoke to one of the waiters - this was the one with blond and glittering hair - and the waiter smiled and put an arm round the Prussian officer's waist. One of the French officers made a remark that seemed to be about the Prussian officer; the waiter looked at the French officer and rolled his eyes and bit his lip. Then the Prussian officer went up to the French officer and clicked his heels and bowed (how can there be this sort of behaviour unless there are archetypal images?); he said something to the French officer while the French officer languidly fitted a cigarette into a holder. Then the French officer was turning and bowing and clicking his heels; I suppose in a moment there would have been the business with leather gloves and face-slapping; but then an older Prussian officer - one with a monocle, yes, and a shaved head and wrinkles at the back of his neck - was going up to the French officer and laying his hand on the arm of the young Prussian officer and was speaking to the Frenchman in loud and bad French. I understood what he was saying just because he articulated so carefully. He said 'Gentlemen, we do not have to quarrel amongst ourselves, surely, when we have

amongst us a more natural enemy.' And then he turned to a table at which there was one of the groups of men who were now like drops of oil or ointment perhaps having touched a surface and spread. This group did not have any women with them: they were just, with their heads bent over a table, like one of the diagrams that my father used to draw to illustrate how people's visions might rebound on themselves.

Then the French and Prussian officers laughed; they put their hands on each others' arms; they were no longer clicking and bowing: the incident was over. And so for a moment there was not the renewed enmity between the Prussians and the French. But it was as if the men who had their heads together had still noticed nothing; they were content to show to the outside world just the backs of their large, vulnerable necks.

When my father and I were walking back through the Tiergarten - it must have been late summer because there were a few falling leaves - my father hit at the leaves with his stick and said 'Oh dear, oh dear!' I knew that this time he had been watching the whole of the incident in the hotel: it did not seem sensible now not to talk about it. I said 'What was all that?' He said 'What was all that?' He sat down on a seat by the path and stretched out his legs. He said 'How much do you know about that sort of thing?'

I thought - You mean, about the Prussian officer and the waiter with blond hair: that sort of thing?

He said 'You know your mother is Jewish?'

I said'Yes.'

He said 'And you are half Jewish.'

My father had his hands in his pockets. He had stretched his feet so far out that he was almost horizontal.

I thought - Oh you mean, that sort of thing.

He said 'Perhaps it is one of the things impossible to talk about.'

I said 'You once promised to tell me anything I wanted to know.'

He said 'What do you want to know?'

I thought - How can I tell you if I don't know?

Then - You mean, those men in the Adlon Hotel were Jewish?

Then - They are not what I call Jewish!

My father said 'The Jews are the most remarkable people in the world. It is difficult even to say this, because for some reason it is taken to be condescending. But they have some sort of knowingness that other people have not got. They know this themselves; other people know it. But no one quite knows what it is. Something has

gone wrong. Jews should be running the world, but they are not. I think they know this, but don't want to talk about it.'

I said 'Why not?'

My father said 'I don't know; and I mean, even if I thought I did - '

Then he sat upright and hit at the leaves with his stick. He said 'Damn!'

I said 'Professor Einstein is a Jew.'

He said'Yes.'

I said 'And my mother's friends - '

He said 'Some of them.' Then he murmured as if to himself 'They won't take the responsibility.'

I said 'For what?'

He swung his stick to and fro on the ground as if it were a mallet. He said 'For being the children of God, for taking a chance to be the grown-ups of God: but then, how can you grow up if you are the children of God?

I said 'And can't you help them?'

He said 'Help them?' He seemed puzzled.

Then he turned to me and said 'Your mother is a fighter.'

I thought - But I know my mother is a fighter!

He said 'One day you will see the point of your mother.'

I thought - But of course I see the point of my mother!

I suddenly felt very tired. I wanted to go home.

I thought - When things get too difficult, it is as if there is a bright light coming down.

I said 'Is that why people don't like them?'

He said quickly 'Oh of course, people are envious of them.'

I thought - Anyway, people do like them!

I said 'Let's go home.'

It was during that autumn of 1919 that there occurred the event that my father had so long awaited - the publication of the results of the observations that the British expeditions to Africa and South America had made to test Einstein's theory: to see whether light was bent by gravity, whether space was curved, and whether it was this that we understood as gravity. My father came back from the university one evening carrying a file of papers under his arm and went straight to his study, and although I hung about outside to see if he would talk to me he did not come out or call me in. My mother, as usual, had to summon him to supper. I remember him

in the dining-room at first not speaking; then turning to me and saying 'It's true, I've got the results. Light is affected by gravity.'

My mother said 'I thought you might have some interesting news to tell us.'

My father said 'Such as what?'

My mother said 'Such as whether President Ebert has made a deal with General von Liittwitz.'

My father said to me 'But there's still something not quite right. It's not in the measurements. It's in the language.'

I said 'What is in the language?'

My father said 'What is true, is usually in the form of a myth.'

It is difficult now to imagine the interest that was in fact aroused by the publication of the results that seemed to confirm Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. The earlier Special Theory had, as I have said, made little public impact; then for a time the General Theory had been no more than a conjecture. But there was something in the mood of the times, I suppose, that required a liberating vision - a longing in the aftermath of war for old patterns to be broken up - and it was felt that this had in some way been achieved by the confirmation of the General Theory. Also there was something romantic, I suppose, in the story of the conjectures of a comparatively obscure German physicist being confirmed at great trouble and expense by British expeditions to the tropics. Whatever the background, there were headlines in the papers the next day: 'Revolution in Science'; 'Ideas of Newton Overthrown'; 'New Theory of the Universe'. The evidence was, yes, that light from a distant star had been bent as it passed close to the sun; it was thus as if light had weight and mass; 'gravity' was a word for the curvature of the universe. The language used to describe all this might not exactly seem to make sense; the sense was in the mathematics. Language, it was suggested, was after all a second-rate way of trying to explain what in mathematics could be trusted.

All the reports seemed to agree that something liberating had occurred; old systems in which minds had been trapped had been broken; thoughts were freed to wing this way or that round the universe. I remember kneeling on the floor of my father's study and trying to understand the newspaper reports spread out on the floor. I said to my father 'But I thought you said that, if the theory were proved, it would mean something quite different.'

He said'Yes.'

I said 4 - That everyone would see that they could never see anything much beyond the backs of their own heads.'

My father said 'Something like that.'

I said Then what has happened?'

My father said 'I suppose it might be by seeing that they can't get out of their own vision, that people might get out.'

I said 'And that was what you were saying?'

He said 'Yes.' Then - 'You're brilliant!'

I thought - What's brilliant? I said 'So they haven't got out.'

He said 'Not if they don't see, they haven't.'

I said 'That's difficult.'

He said'Yes.'

I remember my mother being somewhat grimly humorous during these days. She would move in and out of the apartment with baskets of groceries both for her own family and for others; she would walk with her shoulders slightly hunched like Rosa Luxemburg. It was as if she were battling against a world gone slightly mad: she even made jokes, which she did not often do. She said 'So it is light that has weight: perhaps it is that which explains the heaviness of these groceries!' My father would say 'Yes, my dear, you are quite right to make jokes.'

She said 'Perhaps we can scoop up some of this light and with it make bullets to use against General von Luttwitz!'

My father would say 'Yes, my dear, one day we might even be able to do something like that.'

This was the time - the winter of 1919-20 - when there were barricades again going up in the streets: when there was apparently the threat of a revolt by right-wing extremists against the moderate socialist government.

I would say, as I so often said - 'But what is it really that is happening?'

My father said 'What was that thing you said the other day?'

I said 'That / said?'

He said 'That just by seeing that we can't get out from our own vision, we might be out.'

I said 'I said that?'

My father used to walk up and down in his study at this time as if he were very excited. I remember an evening when we, he and I, could hear my mother, as usual, banging plates and cutlery about in the dining-room: my father turned to me and said 'We might even go out to your mother and say that we are ready for supper!' He

did this, and my mother looked amazed. I thought - Well, that was brilliant!

During that winter my father struggled to put into words what might make sense at least to himself about what was happening in physics. I think he planned to write some short book or pamphlet on the General Theory, though there were no traces of such a manuscript in what later was found of his papers. There were however some notes in a notebook. What he was trying to do, it seemed, was to say that there were two problems - one was to try to understand Einstein's mathematics, and the other was to try to understand what mathematics in general was doing. These, he said, were problems on different levels. The second problem had, as it were, to look down on the first: what was required was a type of language that could talk both about mathematics, and about what mathematics is.