The Sun Chemist (11 page)

All these were very melancholy reflections and I gladly
responded
to the summoning whistle of the kettle from the kitchen.

I took the coffee back to Chaimchik’s room; but still couldn’t settle. His towel waited on the towel-warmer off the bathroom. His suits waited in the wardrobe. I opened his dressing-table drawer. Two very large sets of teeth were in a bag; unusually long palate. Were these the ones that had given him all the trouble? Or were they now out in the garden with him, and these an earlier source of irritation? There was a collapsed rubber bladder. Something for taking his own blood pressure?

This wouldn’t do, of course. There was work to be done. But instead I sat on his bed and put down the coffee and picked up the shorthand notebooks, and felt over the pages, the pencil indentations. Taken down right here. He had been where I now was, his head a foot or two away: pointed beard, yellowish sick face, vehement, his teeth in, or out, telling her things. Trying to get her to understand. What?

None of it, as turned out from little Miss Margalit’s more exact transcript, was really coherent; sometimes there Was just a single phrase on a page, indicating that he had dozed off or dried up. The earlier Miss Knowall hadn’t, evidently, known what to make of it, though she’d strung it all together. My Miss Knowall had set the phrases down as they came.

After this, several paragraphs quite coherent and in no way different from what we had; and then the very trying last paragraph, also not much different, but apparently containing a few more home truths that had not found their way into the other transcript. The spacing different, too, of course.

Well, that was it, and I could see right away the answer to one of the problems and experienced a certain lightening of heart. But there was really no time to go into it now. The translation had to be ready by the morning, so I buckled to, and managed to finish a little before midnight. I took the things I’d used down to the kitchen and washed them up. There were a few carrots in the vegetable rack. I munched a couple to help with the night vision, as I went round switching everything off and relocking doors, and then took to the woods again.

The bike was where I’d left it. I pedaled back to the San Martin, let myself in, and took my room key. There was a note in the slot: Professor Tuomisalo had phoned me at half past nine. She hadn’t left a message.

Professor Horowitz had organized Dr Finster as well as the plant geneticists, and the conference took place in the plant genetics laboratory. Numerous plants were diligently growing in the greenhouses outside, and I could see that the windows had steamed up there. It had suddenly grown very chilly. The sky was gray and lowering.

Copies had been made of my translated document (all the diagrams and formulas separately copied and inserted), and the geneticists now had the parts of it that concerned them. Meyer had asked me to attend to explain anything that was not clear. I sat and watched them read slowly through.

It didn’t seem to be a very conclusive conference, but as soon as it was established that there was nothing for me to explain, I left. Just before I did this, one of the ‘geniuses’ had been telling Meyer that it might be possible to get something approaching the hypothetical potato in four or five growing seasons, but another had been saying that maybe it mightn’t. The reasons for this seemed to be that all the work done on improving the sweet potato, in those areas where they liked it, had been done to enhance flavor and appearance (qualities in which the
hypothetical
one would evidently be very short) and that it would therefore be necessary to start from scratch to find quite different
parentage
. To find this
parentage
might take four or five growing
seasons
. Meyer was looking rather anguished as I left.

Dr Patel was outside. He was peering into the misted-over greenhouses.

‘Do you know, I have never had a look at what they are doing here,’ he said. ‘Some day I must. My word, it has become quite chilly.’ So it had, and he was wearing a muffler. ‘What about a good cup of hot coffee?’

‘Well, I’d love one, but I’m actually in a terrific hurry. Work to do.’

‘Work to do. A terrific hurry. On the Sabbath Day?’ he said gaily. ‘Where are you working – at the Weizmann House?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’ve never had a look at that, either. We could take a brisk walk together. I promise not to get in the way of the work!’

‘I’m going by bike.’

‘Ah. Oh, well. Another time.’

I began to trot, to emphasize the hurry, and picked up the bike from outside the San Martin and pedaled away on it, with a jolly wave to him. There’d been no need to return the bike to Ham. I had told him I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the offered car, so he had gone off in it with Marie-Louise to Jerusalem. And I wasn’t actually in such a terrific hurry. I’d wanted to phone Marta first. She had been at breakfast when I’d called earlier. This now meant using the complicated after-hours telephone system at the House, which I didn’t understand. I wondered if I shouldn’t look in first to the Lunenfeld-Kunin, but a few spots of rain now began to fall, and the sky was distinctly menacing, so I pedaled on.

There was hardly anyone about. The grounds were open to the public on Saturday and were normally thronged with ambling Israeli family groups. These were not normal times. With the Army still called up, nobody was making pleasure trips, and the sky was unpropitious, anyway. The first thunderclaps began to roll as I arrived at the House.

They were rolling in profusion, accompanied by the most
fantastic
electrical displays and a cataract of rain, as I went briskly upstairs rubbing my hands. A dark chill had settled everywhere and there was a faint reek of kerosene from the stove I’d used to late the night before. The rain thrashed and pelleted against the windows as if the place were under machine-gun attack; wind howling; the sound level quite extraordinary. I’d been in Israel the previous year, in late October. On a heavy, humid day, still summer, there had come suddenly a single puff of wind from nowhere; a giant belch. The leaves fell all at once off the trees, the sky opened, the dry dusty streets began to run like rivers: 
autumn had come. Not hard to believe the Biblical accounts of creation in this abrupt part of the world.

I was humming ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ as I hurried into Chaimchik’s room and switched on the light. No light came. Hmm. Lights very often didn’t come on when lightning began to crackle in Israel. I lit the kerosene stove. That didn’t come on, either, and I looked at it rather superstitiously, until a moment’s reflection suggested that the kerosene must have run out. The thing had been stinking rather in the latter reaches of the night. Where the devil was the kerosene? And how to fill the thing, if found? No time for these technical complexities. My teeth were chattering. I might even have been gibbering as I sprang about in the unearthly din looking for another heater.

Nellie had a neat little electric heater. Jolly good, and I
gratefully
switched it on, and after a moment received the message, but swore all the same. I ran into Julian’s room. He had quite a nice setup of built-in heaters, all electrical. I scampered up the stairs to the turret room, the lair of Harold Blumberg, Julian’s deputy. It was not, now, unlike the lair of Frankenstein,
grimacing
and leering in blinking violet light. Through the window I saw the rain bouncing off the flat roof. Harold had a couple of stylish little two-bar electric heaters set in the wall.

I ran in mild panic about the detonating house. I found a kerosene heater in the kitchen and ran back upstairs with it, lit it, and then ran down again, picked up Old Taylor and a glass, and rejoined the heater.

I regained my spirits in about five minutes, at much the same time that the sun came serenely out on a balmy, glistening world, faintly steaming. Well, not bad for starters. It wasn’t quite eleven o’clock. The telephone began to ring somewhere. I chased it all over the House, picking up phones. For some reason, the voice came out of the receiver in Harold’s room. It was Connie’s.

‘Igor? They told me you weren’t at the San Martin. Are you still working at it?’

I brought her up to date on batatas, and said, ‘Connie, how do I make a call from this House?’

She gave me detailed instructions about switches and buttons. ‘Do you want help, Igor? Do you want me to do anything?’

‘Well. I’d like his diaries.’

‘They are in folders – the photostats are – on the bottom shelf on the left as you come in my room. Are you in my room?’

‘No, I’m in Harold’s room.’

‘What are you doing in Harold’s room?’

‘It’s the only room the phone answers in, Connie. It’s a very funny house, this.’

‘Which diaries?’

‘For 1933.’

‘Why 1933?’

The batatas. I don’t think he was only doing it with Vava. I was looking at the memorandum again. It isn’t what it seems, Connie. The paragraphs are run together, but they weren’t really. He is referring to two different pieces of work. He talks about something they did with a catalyst. There is no mention of a catalyst in the correspondence with Vava.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Certain. It doesn’t come up at all. He was doing it with somebody else.’

‘So why the diaries?’

‘There might be some mention. I mean, if it was all done at the same time, he could have been in correspondence with
somebody
in the same way as with Vava. They could both have been writing away on the same bit of paper, and there’d be no copy. I thought perhaps he might have made a note, some stray
mention
in his diary. It’s this funny German, you see, the one that made the cat laugh. It might be with him, mightn’t it?’

‘Well, it might. Certainly. Igor, shall I come down there?’

‘Of course not, darling. It’s just that I didn’t sleep well. It’s been on my mind.’

‘There’s also the correspondence for 1933 – something could have been overlooked there.’

‘That was on my mind, too.’

‘Except, in 1933 there were many Germans.’

‘I know. Okay, then, Connie.’

I’d put the phone down before I realized I hadn’t made a note about the buttons and switches. I pressed one or two
experimentally
, and then remembered she’d said something about Nellie’s
room, so I went and examined them there and pressed some more. All the phones started to ring again. I hared up to Harold’s room, wildly helloing. Dead. Connie’s, Nellie’s, Julian’s, everybody else’s – nothing. They stopped after a while, and I realized that not only couldn’t I receive a call but I couldn’t make one, either. Awkward. Marta would be rather miffed by this time. Still, I
had
called her, and left my name. She would realize something must have cropped up.

I was by now in Connie’s room, so I had a look at the bottom shelf on the left, and saw the folders, ‘
DIARIES
.’ I ran along them to the one I wanted, and slid it out. 

I buzzed rapidly through to late summer and early autumn. ‘Sept. 1st, Zermatt – Hotel Seiler.’ ‘Sept. 5th, Merano – Sanatorio Stefania.’ ‘Sept. 21st, Paris – Hotel Plaza-Athéneé.’ ‘Sept. 25th, London – home.’ Not many days later he was in Paris again; and then Brussels – Hotel Astoria. ‘Oct. 9th–dinner, King & Queen at Palace.’ High Life. Not very high in detail, though; not the faintest mention of catalysts, or batatas, or anything beyond appointments and visits. It would have to be the correspondence, then.

I lugged it out, boxes of it, and took it through to Chaimchik’s room. When had Vava entered his life, anyway? Weiss had said they’d worked together for only a few weeks, so it couldn’t have been much before that September. Hadn’t he mentioned something about it in the letter to Fritz Haber? I quickly located the letter. October 2nd: ‘As to the good Vava, he is of course incorrigible. He has been working with me lately –’ Lately. How recently was lately?

Well, his holiday that year had begun in August. Plenty of references to it here. They’d toured about first in a car that had kept breaking down. So he’d gone away in August, and had left
Vava work to do, which probably meant Vava had turned up in July, perhaps June. I played safe and started with May.

I’d read for about twenty minutes, barely covering the first week of May, before it occurred to me that I was going at it the wrong way. The other process, the one with the catalyst, must have followed Vava, and not preceded him. Vava, after all, had initiated the work with the batatas – clear enough from the stuff I’d translated yesterday.

After
Vava, then. This, of course, was very dreary, and brought us back to square 1. I’d already made a list of all the
correspondence
to be looked into after Vava. There was twenty years of it. Except … if Weizmann had bracketed the two things together in his mind, must they not have occurred in some sort of proximity?

The correspondence with Vava had finished when he’d left the Stefania. He’d got back to London September 25th. On to September 25th.

A positive deluge of letters on his return. Several dozen
relating
to German and refugee questions. Protein. Plans to visit Palestine, where the outer shell of the Daniel Sieff Institute was nearing completion. Personal letters arising out of the holiday. One to the Humber Company, complaining about the car.

I plodded on through the first week of October, on to the second. One to his wife from the Astoria in Brussels: ‘Last night I dined with the King and Queen, who expressed their regret that you were not there.’ One reigning monarch to another. Where had vanished his little Verochka, his Verunya, his Verusenka, darling and joy? Stately relations.

The sky had blackened again, and an air of doom settled on the
place. It was a fact that I hadn’t slept much. My eyes were jumping. I leaned my elbows on the table, covered my eyes, and felt them hot and throbbing. This certainly wasn’t a quick
Saturday-morning
job in which a bit of inspiration, a bit of luck might bring results. With this man’s lively and broad-ranging mind and his universe of connections, ‘proximity’ to the Vava problem could mean anything. He’d carried problems in his mind for years; as Beylis had said, had returned to them like a dog to a bone. The following year, 1934, was one of his heaviest years of correspondence. I could remember the figure from the rough notes I’d made for my introductory essay. He’d written 1,083 letters in that year, many of them four-or five-pagers.

I tried to visualize him at the time, but I couldn’t; couldn’t at all see the ‘I’ of I and My Party, Motoring on the Continent, Proceeding by Leisurely Stages, Accepting Royal Regrets. All I could see was a yellowish sick old man, pointed beard, cooped up in this room, vehemently trying to tell somebody something; within hours, really, of the most leisurely stage of all.

I opened my eyes and blinked. The grave was giving up its dead! A white-shrouded figure materialized vertically above it, as the Last Trump sounded. A second, and clarifying, blink revealed Marta, straightening up from reading the inscription. The long roll of thunder was still unrolling. She was in a long white mac, startling in the gun-metal light. She saw me peering, and waved, and I waved back and ran down to let her in. The sky had divided instantly at Heaven’s command and she had caught a little of it even before reaching the door. She was panting slightly.

‘Hello,’ she said brightly; relations evidently still somewhat metallic.

‘The telephones don’t work here,’ I said energetically. ‘I hope you got my earlier message.’