The Sun Chemist (12 page)

‘Oh, yes. I thought you might try again. I called you at the San Martin and they said you’d gone out.’

Yes, well, you see –’

‘Still busily at work?’

‘It’s other work. I was working till midnight on the
translation
. And then I couldn’t sleep. This is related to it, but it’s not really –’

‘Is Connie helping you?’

‘No, no. I’m alone. I could stop now. It isn’t going anywhere. If I could have used this damned phone –’

‘Is it too late for the Dead Sea now?’

‘Ham took the car, you see.’

‘Ah. Of course that is the only transport in the Land of Israel.’

‘Well, it might be today. It’s Shabbat, no buses. And it would be very difficult to get anything else, because of the war. Well, you know that, Marta. Anyway, we couldn’t get back easily.’

‘I wouldn’t for the world want to disturb you.’

This was all very ridiculous, and the door was still open, so I closed it and kissed her.

She was far, temperamentally, from those who kept things going; but she was now somewhat wound up and feeling herself absurd, so her face was hard and her coat of mail very severe. It was a wet-look garment, quite genuinely so at the moment, as was her brainy head. She took the coat off after a minute, put it on a chair, and recovered herself.

‘Well,’ she said returning, and began to get some value out of her parameters. As was soon obvious, she got more than I did, my mind still on 1933. Still,
toujours la politesse
. Still enclinched, I unbuttoned her blouse, and attended to her skirt, which she stepped out of. I took the blouse off myself, also her brassière, which left her rather incongruously in a pair of tights. We must have made a rather regal pair ascending the marble staircase; I carried her discarded clothing.

‘I think you could skip various things just for now. Only just for now,’ she said not long after. ‘Oh, my God! Oh, darling. Oh!’

‘Well,’ I said presently.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t been cutting such a dignified figure recently.’

‘Not in the most recent moments.’

‘I mean, it was unfair. I’m quite controlled normally, as you know … I have had a celibate six months.’

‘I didn’t know they were giving medals for that kind of thing at the College of the Sacred Heart these days.’

‘I was never a collegiate there. But you know I don’t go
in for things on the campus. You know that about me, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I didn’t sleep terribly well either … This pillow’s a bit low.’

I went and had a look in the cupboards and found more.

‘It’s a tiny bed.’ She had closed up to the wall to make room;

‘For one.’

‘Do you suppose I am the first woman in it?’

‘I’m certain of it.’

‘Would he mind us using it?’

‘What’s that?’

‘That’s Hardy.’

‘Who’s Hardy?’

‘An English poet, ignorant Finn.’

She was looking calmly at me, flecked gray eyes, slightly turned-up nose, broad cheeks. There was no appearance here of one of the brains of the world, but it was there. I ran a finger over the somewhat Eskimo cheeks: a very ethnic and Northern person.

‘You won’t have been so celibate, I take it?’ she said as I did this.

‘Should I have been?’

‘I don’t know. Anybody much.’

‘Not much.’

‘Who is Caroline?’

‘A young historian. She works with me.’

‘How young?’

‘Twenty-three. She is going to be married. To an
Honourable
,’ I said.

‘What an Honourable?’

‘In this case he’s the younger son of an Earl.’

‘You’ve picked up a great deal of English lore and learning. Is she a Lady?’

‘Small “L.” Why these questions?’

‘Connie said she was in love with you.’

‘Connie said that?’ I tried to remember the occasions when they’d met. Connie had been in England the previous year.
Caroline
had been going with Willie then.

‘M’hmm. What is she like?’

‘Caroline? Well,’ I said, thinking over this piece of
information
. ‘She’s tallish and thin. Fair.’

‘Nice-looking?’

‘Not ill-looking. English-looking.’ I tried to think what she looked like. I could barely recall her.

‘Nothing like me?’

I was abstractedly making a ring round her breast as I made this effort at recall, and now looked at it. It was a large, firm breast, moving up and down in a warm and attractive manner.

‘Nothing at all,’ I said.

‘That’s all right.
I
love you, anyway,’ she said.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes. I’d like you for weekends. And my husband and family. Now that would be an impossible thing, wouldn’t it? Have you finished that cigarette?’

‘Yes.’ I put it out.

‘How do you feel?’

‘How do you feel?’ I said.

‘I feel six months is half a year, which is a lot in terrestrial terms. You can tell me more of that poem later. Just now you can think of other things.’

The joint lack of sleep took a somewhat unromantic toll and after a while we both had some. The kerosene stove was out when I woke up, and some time later she said, ‘You’ve got a cold bottom.’

‘It’s numb.’ I’d wondered when she’d notice.

‘Well, let’s get under.’

‘Are we going to stay here into the evening?’

‘What else do you want to do?’

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

‘Oh, you Russian.’

‘Well, the carbon cycle has to be kept going. You know all about that, don’t you?’

‘I thought you were eating here.’

‘I think I must have eaten it all. I don’t know what I’m going to tell them.’

‘We’ll go and find something.’

We found the rest of the cold smoked turkey and bread, and some cheese, and coffee, and took it all back to bed.

‘Meat and milk products. Not a kosher mix,’ she said.

‘You’ve heard that, have you?’

‘You learn such things here. Do you
feel
Jewish?’

‘I don’t feel anything – not Russian, not English, not anything. My mother apparently now does. She’s got a rabbi.’

‘In an English village?’ she asked.

‘He comes. He’s terrified of my father.’…

‘Do you remember all that, when he defected?’

‘Of course.’

‘I was at Stockholm at the time, postgraduate,’ she said. ‘It was a most tremendous story, naturally. How old were you?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘Mmm. I suppose I seem old to you, don’t I?’ For some reason we were now talking in Russian.

‘As the hills.’

‘I expect that’s true … What happened?’

‘There was a Christmas party, for the diplomatic children, in the British Ambassador’s place. There’d been something that year. Macmillan and a man called Selwyn Lloyd had gone to Moscow, and there was an Anglo-Soviet trade pact, so
we
were allowed to go, too, which of course normally we wouldn’t have been. I remember we were snowballing in the garden, and we were called in to get our presents from the Christmas tree. I’d seen my father just a bit earlier. He’d come along with his driver. But I never got my present, though the tree was there. I was just rushed through into another room. My mother had gone in to have tea some time before. And my father had gone to look at some pictures. The whole thing was fixed. Anyway, that was it. He’d sweated on it, to get us all together, you see, which was very difficult to do. And we all flew off the same evening.’

‘Were you glad?’

‘Glad? I was infuriated. I wouldn’t talk to him for weeks.’

‘Why?’

‘I wouldn’t talk to my mother, either. I knew she was in it with him. They were both traitors.’

‘Did you feel that?’

‘I was absolutely inflamed. They couldn’t do anything with me. I was a young builder of Socialism, you know.’

‘In the Komsomol?’

‘To my lasting regret, I wasn’t. I was a Young Octobrist. We were actually just going to start a group of Young Pioneers, but we hadn’t yet. I was to be the brigade leader. The Komsomol was the All-Union Leninist Communist League of Youth, and you couldn’t be that kind of youth till you were fourteen. I’d been writing away to Moscow to establish this cadre of Pioneers, and I’d got a most encouraging response. There were quite a lot of us there in Stockholm. It was important for some sort of intelligence reason. That’s why it wasn’t so awful my father having the job.’

‘Was it such an awful job?’

‘Well, damn it, he’d been a Deputy Prime Minister, with Molotov. He was a Molotov man. Then Molotov was disgraced and sent off on his rotten job to Mongolia, to get him out of the way. We’d had quite a tricky time in Moscow ourselves, though of course I didn’t know it. But my father had worked with Khrushchev, you see, quite an old hatchet man of his in the south, and he sort of weathered the storm, and they gave him this job in Stockholm. Of course, he was sold out then – but it never occurred to them he would run. Nobody had, in his position. I mean, they were quite a dedicated gang.’

‘Is he not?’

‘Well, he is, but rather old-style.’

‘Did he do the terrible things they say?’

‘I’m afraid he did. I think so.’

‘The collectivizations and so on.’

‘He’s writing a book – whether of explanation or expiation, I’m not sure.’

‘And were you very distressed?’

‘You see, in Moscow I’d actually been a Pioneer. You stopped being a Young Octobrist when you were about ten. That’s about what they were in Stockholm. Maybe they didn’t let them take the older children with them as a general rule, I don’t know. Anyway, all these terrible little Comrades were Young
Octobrists
, and there weren’t any Pioneers. Oh, yes, my ultimate dream was the Komsomol. I wanted to devote my whole life and go there.’

‘Go where?’

‘To Komsomolsk.’

‘It’s a place?’

‘Oh, my word, I can tell you everything about it. I can
recite
it. It stands on the left bank of the River Amur, well over a hundred miles from Khabarovsk. There was a tiny village called Permskoye, and the Komsomol took it over in 1932 and built a town there. I used to receive the most regular and up-to-date information, all pamphlets, all booklets, and I cut everything out of the children’s newspaper. Do you know, by the time my dream was shattered, it was the third largest town in the Soviet Far East. There were almost two hundred thousand Komsomolniks there, all connected to everywhere else by Trans-Siberian Railway, a section of which they’d laid themselves. What do you think of that?
And
fifty schools and a couple of polytechnics, and factories galore, heavy engineering, et cetera. All built by the young
builders
, you see.’

‘Well, this is a surprise, Igor.’

‘You don’t see me as a young builder.’

‘I don’t. I didn’t know any of this. So when did you learn it was not paradise?’

‘Oh, well. Gradually. A series of shocks. It was a question of what to believe. It sets you looking into things, you see. History and such.’

‘Ah.’

‘We could have a most enormous chat about mathematics now, if you like, and what they are. What are they?’

‘Oh, Igor, this is too hard. You wouldn’t understand.’

‘All right.’

‘Don’t be offended. It’s just – look.’ She suddenly made an
energetic reach over me and, still bending over, used my writing materials on the desk. ‘What’s this?’ she said.

‘Einstein’s equation, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, well, thank goodness. Well, that’s a relief.’ She gave me a kiss.

‘What about it?’

‘It’s – music, that’s all. It’s like asking someone to explain music to a deaf person. It isn’t as explainable as your things, Igor. It’s appallingly difficult, it really is, but – well. You know what music and mathematics have in common?’

‘The initial?’ I said attentively.

‘They resolve things. They make order. They do it with economy and elegance. In this equation – look at the beautiful thing – he makes an equivalence of energy and mass.’

‘A mass of what?’

‘Mass as space-time.’

‘Oh.’

‘You see. I did very little teaching; I’m terrible at it.
Please
don’t ask me to explain. But look at the sheer stark loveliness, and the grace and fun. Libraries, universes of thought in that delicious equation.’ She was looking very fondly at it herself. ‘You know what composer this reminds me of?’

There was here a need to walk with extreme caution. As one who was totally tone deaf, I knew the indignation aroused by a careless attribution. It was almost an imputation against the other’s taste and personality. The fond look could easily portend thoughts of home.

‘Sibelius,’ I said.

‘Oh, my God.’ She threw the paper down and also herself, quite coldly, away from me.

‘I was teasing. Idiot,’ I said, and leaned over her.

Who, for God’s sake? Not evidently the moody and melodious Finn. Beethoven? A bit noisy and obvious. Bach? Plenty of mathematics there, except I couldn’t actually recall anyone saying he was all that funny. There was only one name that seemed to give no offense.

‘Mozart,’ I said softly into her ear.

‘Darling.’

Thank God for Mozart, whom we celebrated for a while, after which, with something apparently ticked off in her mind about me, she was disposed to enlarge in a less inhibited way about her own mysteries: Mozart, music, and mathematics.

‘The great equations have this air of profundity with wit, just like him. It’s a pity you can’t play them.’

‘Well, it is.’

‘It’s grace; there’s no other word. You know when I heard that gorgeous bit of sublime nonsense for the first time, I shivered.’

‘Mozart?’

‘Einstein.’

‘Why nonsense?’

‘Well not nonsense. The brevity says nonsense. Of course it isn’t. It makes everything else nonsense. Your father starving off those millions of peasants. All those insane little men running about in your book, fixing everything. Just to fix something true! To get down in a few symbols so much truth, with wit and urbanity, as he did.’