The Sun Chemist (14 page)

‘Okay, ten to three, Meyer.’

‘Keep reading, Igor.’

*

The young man newly returned from Africa was not
noticeably
a son of the soil. He was a slim shy young man with slipping spectacles and a number of sores on his head. They were painted bright violet: a casualty of the bush. I wondered what they’d made of him out there. He seemed to have liked them himself, and shyly said so. He peered up to make a comment from time to time while reading from his folio of handwritten pages. They were his field records. He had some other records that had been made by others of his team, nutritional and analytical ones.

Though shy, there was not much stopping him. He just nodded at interruptions and kept going: stubborn. In his stubborn way, he seemed to have got through a mountain of work. He said his soil tests had shown the local varieties of sweet potato to be not the most suitable. He had introduced others and he had also done some large-scale seeding. (This was Meyer’s fifty thousand: he had raised fifty thousand seedlings.) He had selected a few hundred with promising tubers and had sent them for analysis. From these he had reselected and cross-fertilized. He had spent years at it in the bush.

He was unhappy at having to leave, and looked forward to going back. He had brought cuttings of the most promising of his parent plants, to keep them in cultivation. Among them was one with an analysis that Vava had fantasized about while Chaimchik was having his trouble with the Humber. It wasn’t a very appetizing variety. The enormous knobbly thing apparently cracked as soon as it was dug up, and went bad: it was also very bitter and almost blood-red and strongly aperient. But it was a demon in poor soil, and this vitality promised wonders in genetic lines.

Meyer sat and smiled beatifically as the young man told of his work and of this particular beauty.

‘Very nice, Uri,’ he said at the end. ‘It’s a pleasure to listen to you.’

Uri had brought several of his cuttings and they were in shallow seed trays, labeled and waxed. They were just little slices of tuber. The particular one was like a piece of putrescent liver. A tiny waxy pimple, like a wart, glistened on it: the growing point. I looked at the wart. Given the laws of genetics, and also the facts of life, it did not seem strange that the fate of continents might be decided by what could come out of this wart.

Meyer was looking at it, too. His face was wreathed in the kind of smile associated with the season and its patron saint.

‘It makes you feel good just to look at that cute little thing,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it?’

*

Sunday, December 23rd, that was.

I was going to be up half the following night in Bethlehem, so I went to bed early. There were two phone calls first. One was from Meyer, still full of good cheer.’ Is that baby going to change a few things out here!’ he said gleefully.

I hadn’t told him of the carotene complications yet, and he didn’t seem to have got the message from his other sources. There was no point in alloying such pure and quite delightful pleasure.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Listen, I was just talking with New York.’

‘I thought it was to be kept confidential.’

‘Not about this, for God’s sake. God forbid!’ he said, shocked. Of course confidential. It was other matters. When are you going back?’

‘The twenty-ninth or thirtieth.’

‘The twenty-ninth is Saturday – very restricted flights. I don’t want to push you – I mean, don’t hurry your work here. But Kammermann will be in London the twenty-eighth.’

Kammermann. Weizmann’s confidant of the 1930s. ‘I didn’t know he was alive.’

‘He’s
just
alive. He’s been a recluse for years. They are sending
him to Switzerland. He will be in London a day and a night. A specialist is seeing him. He will be at Brown’s Hotel.’

‘You want me to see him?’

‘Well, he will see
you
, which is something. He doesn’t see people. He was interested in your book. I just spoke with his doctor, Brodie.’

‘All right. Can he remember anything?’

‘Who knows? But he undoubtedly has political papers. He didn’t answer our letters. It would be nice to have the papers.’

‘Okay, Meyer.’

The other call I made myself. I knew Caroline would be at her parents’ place tonight. She was going to Hampshire to Willie’s tomorrow; she was staying there the whole week and not coming back till the following Monday, the thirty-first, so I wouldn’t see her till then. I hadn’t liked the way we’d signed off on the phone. Also, of course, she didn’t know of the parcel from Olga.

‘Hello, Caroline,’ I said when I got through.

‘What’s the trouble?’ she said loweringly.

‘No trouble. Good news. Vava’s letters turned up.’

‘Yes, she told me she’d sent them.’

‘Oh, you spoke to her?’

‘I went to see her, with Hopcroft. She phoned him. She got them the day Hopcroft had his accident. Her friend went down and got them.’

‘I thought that. Well, that’s good, and anyway they’re here and all’s well. Are you packing up and so on?’

‘Yes, I’m packed. What are you doing?’

‘I’ m going to Midnight Mass tomorrow in Bethlehem.’

‘Well. All in the family, I suppose, isn’t it?’

‘Quite. Would you like to give my mother a ring and tell her that? She might be tickled.’

‘All right. Anything else to tell her, like when you’re coming back?’

‘Yes – Thursday, the twenty-seventh.’

‘Oh. I thought you said the twenty-ninth or thirtieth.’

‘Meyer wants me to see an old personage who is passing through London on Friday. So I’m coming Thursday.’

‘Oh, you want me to make arrangements.’

‘No. I only rang to say hello. It was nice of you to go and see Olga. What’s she like?’

Odd.’

There was really nothing much doing with her; monosyllabic, situation distinctly strained. This was a pity. She’d been a good assistant, Caroline.

‘Well, it was only hello,’ I said.

‘All right. Hello. Happy Christmas,’ she said rather
grudgingly
.

I repeated the salutation and hung up, brooding.

Not a good idea.

On Monday I dropped Vava and got back to volume 15. Connie had set matters in hand and there were answers to my large pile of queries. A lot of work had been done in the archives, but I still had to go there myself for some hours in the morning.

Everything with Weizmann’s own autograph was kept in plastic envelopes and had to be examined there. He’d had a habit of adding handwritten P.S.’s and comments in the margin that hadn’t got back to the carbon copies.

To his ladyloves, often the only source for his private views on factional disputes, he had confided stray comments of political importance. All to be explained in footnotes. Verochka had shown admirable detachment here. Obviously, she hadn’t liked what she had read. But her sharp eye had seen what might later be needed. Hard to tell, of course, what she
had
destroyed.

His attachments were well signaled, the customary overture ‘Dear Friend’ accelerating rapidly over a couple of weeks to steamier terms. A consistent pattern in the content, too: a paragraph of endearments abruptly followed by several much longer ones, stiff with political views. He had simply needed somebody: opposite gender, young. Not to be seen in the Birley portrait, but you could just spot it in the photos. There was a look, a certain mercurial flicker that had never apparently left him. Until the bleak end. Almost everything had left him in the end. The man who had written 1,083, letter in 1934, had written three in 1952, 
Of course he had written something else in 1952, but I put this severely out of mind and attended to the enthusiasms of a livelier decade.

I thought the best thing to do about sweet potatoes was to write a report for Meyer, and let him worry about it. I would outline the problem, of which he was at the moment unaware, and present my conclusions. The snag was that I didn’t have any. I wasn’t even certain that I knew the problem. The whole thing was very unpromising, and my silence led Ham to inquire what was eating me. We were making a slow pilgrimage to Bethlehem; numbers of others were doing the same. I was seated next to him, and Marta and Marie-Louise were in the rear.

‘It’s carotene,’ I said.

‘What about it?’

‘It can’t have anything to do with petrol.’

‘Perfectly correct.’

‘Weizmann thought it did.’

‘You can’t be right all the time,’ Ham said.

‘If he’d thought about it for twenty years, you’d think he might have half a chance, wouldn’t you?’

‘Tell Uncle.’

I told Uncle. He swore a bit from time to time – not at the problem, but at other pilgrims, many on donkeys. We were part of a straggling procession. Bethlehem is not much above ten minutes out of Jerusalem; it had taken us nearly an hour already. It was still quite early, just after ten, but we had to find our alloted parking place. A sticker on the window gave its number.

You couldn’t bring a car into town without a sticker, and you couldn’t get in at all without a ticket. We were stopped frequently at roadblocks by young soldiers with automatic weapons. They gave us quite jovial Christmas greetings, however, and the nearer we got the more evident the festive spirit became.

Little stars were twinkling, in the approved manner, like
diamonds
in the sky, and a glow was radiating from the little town on its holiest night. It came from the television lighting that ashenly illuminated the scene like a piece of flashlit police
evidence
.
The Church of the Nativity was on high ground, and our parking place on rather low ground, which meant a long trudge up.

I didn’t know how much Ham had caught of my problem amid the confusion. The trouble was that the problem had rarely
remained
the same for more than a couple of hours. It had kept subtly changing itself. Originally it had been the simple one of obtaining Vava’s papers, but then it had become the more complicated one of obtaining his bacterium and his sweet potato as well. All of these had been posers in their hour, but at least they had been understandable posers. The carotene and the Grignard were something else, and because I wasn’t a scientist I didn’t know how to explain them. I simply knew that they would
become
problems because Chaimchik had said so; at least, I thought he had said so, which was another problem.

It was true that experts on the various problems were to hand, but to get proper answers you had to feed experts proper questions. It suddenly struck me that I had presented no single expert with the whole problem. I had gone running to separate ones with separate bits of it. This was because the problem itself had been revealed in piecemeal form.

Weiss, when primed, had unscrambled Greenyard into a
reaction
and Le-Roy-Parma into a chemist; Dan had directed me to where he lived in Cromer-le-Poyth; and Beylis had explained that he could have had nothing to do with Grignard. Except – wait a minute – no, he hadn’t. He’d said carotene could have had nothing to do with the papers I’d shown him.

Could there be some other papers?

No, there couldn’t. Expert Weiss had directed me to the papers. He had known everything that Weizmann had done with the Grignard reaction from the mid-thirties onward. And Weizmann had published nothing for thirteen or fourteen years before then, which took us back to the twenties or earlier. Which wouldn’t work, because there’d been no Grignard until the
thirties
. Or had there?

This reflection was so novel that I stopped short, and Ham walked on a few paces, and the women, following behind,
bumped into me. We had trudged up the hill and were crossing Manger Square. It was thronged with pilgrims, all looking, in the blinding chalky light, like characters from an early flickering movie.

Jesus freaks abounded, the younger ones, from affluent lands sitting on the ground and begging. Numerous old Arabs were going about selling felafel and shashlik, and younger ones were having a marvelous time feeling the girls. There were thousands of girls to feel. A troupe of young Franciscan monks,
brown-habited
, cruised with their guitars, bizarrely singing ‘Jingle Bells.’ A grotesque scene, stranger by far than the remote one it was celebrating; a Bartholomew Fair. To add to the madness, peals of bells continuously clanged.

I was rooted to the spot and gazing about, bedazzled.

‘What’s up?’ Ham said.

‘When did Grignard react?’

‘What’s that?’ He was shouting and cupping his ear. We had begun to move again, pushed from the rear. I yelled my question again.

‘Grignard? His catalytic reaction? I don’t know. The turn of the century, I think. Why?’

‘Oh, my God!’ I said.

It was a proper thing to say. We were ducking into the entrance of His earliest standing church. Inside was a Roman temple. The normal entrance had been bricked up at some time in antiquity to prevent the entrance of horsemen and camels. Numerous legends had developed about the need to be as a little child before one could get into the place. It was built over a cave in the rocky hillside, the presumed site of the Birth. The Emperor Constantine, in a rash of enthusiasm, and at the behest of his newly converted mother, Helena, had built the first one, but Justinian had pulled it down and built this one. He had done it by the year 537, and this was it: a Roman temple, soberly designed for the exercise of a cult – in this case the cult of Christ, and therefore quirkily constructed in the form of a cross to
conform
to faddish new Christian modes.

It was a handsome building, designed by a sound temple man,
but constructed, for reasons of economy, out of local materials; four rows of tremendous Corinthian columns, ten in each row, of pink Bethlehem marble supported the roof. It was already nearly six hundred years old when the stupefied Crusaders, coming from places with hardly any buildings to speak of, had first cast awed eyes on it. Generations of acolytes had been swinging censers through it ever since, which accounted for the
exceedingly
strange smell – the earliest sort of Christian smell.