Travelling to Infinity (25 page)

The Poland we witnessed in 1973 was a sad country, ravaged by Germany and dominated by Russia. It was hardly surprising that the Poles regarded all foreigners, ourselves included, with
suspicion. We were all tarred with the same brush: if we were not German, we must be Russian. Protesting our Britishness was of no avail because we and the Americans came from the envied affluent
societies to which the Poles would like to belong but from which they were barred. Plate-glass shopfronts bore ample evidence of western aspirations, but inside the shops the shelves were either
bare or the goods they displayed were shoddy and prohibitively expensive.

Everywhere Poland showed signs of a country ill at ease with itself, caught on the horns of a dilemma between old and new, East and West. Torn apart throughout its history by both its
neighbours, Russia and Germany, it had painstakingly reconstructed much that it had lost in the Second World War – especially, in fine detail, the old town of Warsaw. In contrast,
Stalin’s unwelcome post-war gift to the Polish people was a megalithic municipal building of which it was said that the best views of Warsaw could be seen from it – meaning that only by
viewing Warsaw from the Stalin monument could one avoid seeing the monument itself. In that building the Copernicus conference took place. It was approached from without by means of a long flight
of steps. Another long flight of steps led down inside the building from the foyer to the conference area. Each morning, Stephen’s student Bernard Carr and I would carry Stephen to the top of
the steps, sit him down on a chair and then bring up the wheelchair. Inside, for want of a lift, we would then take the wheelchair down the corresponding inner flight of stairs before carrying
Stephen down to it. This process was repeated in reverse sequence at the end of the day, possibly also several times during the course of the day, subject to variations in the programme and the
venue. Those steps did not impress us with Stalin’s generosity to the Polish people: they impressed us only with his megalomania.

A repressive Communism, imposed by Russia, which condemned peasant farmers to appear as lean as the emaciated cows we saw them herding along the country roads or the teams of scrawny oxen they
drove across the fields, had produced a defiant reaction in the people. Poland was the most devoutly Catholic country in Europe: the Polish Church had become a symbol of national independence and
nobly fulfilled its role as the defender of liberty, producing martyrs from among its priesthood. Nonetheless, I was perplexed to find strong reminiscences in Polish churches of the Church in
Spain, so unlike the refreshing simplicity of English Catholicism which had resulted from the reforms of John XXIII’s inspired papacy. As in Spain, churches in Poland were ornate, darkly lit,
incense-filled, full of extravagant plaster saints and virgins, imbued with that distasteful air of superstition. Clusters of little old crones, draped in black, crowded round the porches and
genuflected at the altars just as they did in Francoist Spain. Polish independence as manifested through the Catholic church was a very conservative force, competing against a hostile political
system with its own traditional opiate, whereas in Spain the attitude of the Catholic church was equally conservative but was generally one of political compliance with the repressive regime.

Cracow, to which the conference adjourned for the second session, was more assured of its identity than Warsaw, since its monuments – Wawel Castle and the church of St Mary – had
survived the war intact, but the vicinity of Cracow was tainted with the chilling notoriety of Auschwitz. There was no official excursion to Auschwitz, but some Jewish participants organized their
own outing and came back communicating to the rest of us their devastation at what they had witnessed.

The only place in that unhappy country where I detected any sense of peace and integrity was at Chopin’s birthplace, a single-storeyed thatched house, set in a tangle of greenery at
Ż
elazowa Wola in the country outside Warsaw. Although Chopin’s family moved to Warsaw when he was a baby, he spent summer holidays at
Ż
elazowa Wola, the country seat of his
mother’s aristocratic relations, the Skarbeks, and it was there that he put the finishing touches to his E-minor piano concerto. He also spent holidays with school friends in the country. On
one such holiday, he and his friends went on an excursion to Torum and found the house where Copernicus was born. Shocked by the condition of the house, Chopin complained that the room where
Copernicus was born was occupied by “some German who stuffs himself with potatoes and then probably passes foul winds”.

The old house at
Ż
elazowa Wola, with its sparse furnishings, polished floors, family portraits and collection of instruments, modestly conjured up the atmosphere of life in a cultured
Polish family in the early nineteenth century. It was not just the aura of unworldliness that held me enthralled, but also the evocative silence. Mazurkas and waltzes hung on the air as though the
main living room were still echoing with the strains of a family party. Nocturnes wafted in on a scented breeze from the shady garden. The setting lent a visual, tangible dimension to that
powerfully emotive music. Above all, the house spoke of peace, the peace of a devoted family which had nurtured that most seductive of Romantic geniuses, the genius for whom, according to his good
friend Delacroix, “heaven was jealous of the earth”. Like Copernicus, Chopin lived abroad for much of his life. He left Poland in 1830 never to return to his beloved homeland. His
requited love for the young Polish girl Maria Wodzi´nska, whom he met in Dresden, was thwarted by her parents, who disapproved of the match on the grounds of Chopin’s ill health.
Marriage to Maria might have taken him back to Poland. Instead he settled in his father’s native country, France, where he formed a tempestuous liaison with the volatile female novelist of
licentious repute, George Sand, and died of consumption in 1849 at the age of thirty-nine.

The tragic experience seemed to be the hallmark of that stay in Poland, where so many resonances seemed to touch familiar chords and reveal points of similarity with our own lives. The tragic
experience pursued us to the very end, for it was in the scientific company of Claudio Teitelbaum, a young Chilean delegate to the conference, and his wife that strange fleeting poetic memories
from my own past resurfaced. Although they were living in Princeton, the Teitelbaums had close connections with the government of President Allende – the newly elected socialist government of
Chile – through Claudio’s father, who was one of Allende’s ambassadors. They were part of the circle of dedicated left-wing reformers which included Pablo Neruda, the inspired
poet at whose feet I had worshipped as an undergraduate. In 1964 Neruda had come to read his poetry at a gathering in King’s College, London, and I still carried in my mind the sensual
sonority – as rich and evocative as Chopin’s music – that he brought to his love poems, caressing and emphasizing their lush strain of natural imagery. Neruda, a communist, was so
deeply involved in Chilean politics that the presidency was within his grasp, but he relinquished his ambitions in favour of his friend, Salvador Allende. It was in Cracow, in the bare lounge of
the hotel on the last day of the Copernicus meeting, that news reached us of the right-wing military coup against the legitimate Chilean government, allegedly with CIA support. Allende had died in
the defence of the Presidential Palace. The Teitelbaums were stunned not only at the death of their much admired President but also at the death of their dreams of reforming the impoverished lives
of the oppressed peasants of Chile. They with thousands of others were destined to spend many years in exile. Their destiny was fortunate by comparison with those who did not manage to flee the
vicious reprisals exacted by the right-wing Pinochet regime. Two weeks later Pablo Neruda, a Spanish-speaking poet of genius like Lorca before him, died in the aftermath of right-wing
revolution.

If the impressions I carried from Poland were confusing, Moscow was perversely reassuring in that there was no room for doubt among its citizens about their own political
identity or about ours. We knew – and everyone else knew – that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian police state and that there was little to be gained by hankering after a liberal
democracy. The Muscovites politely recognized that we came from a privileged society without holding that against us. On the flight between Warsaw and Moscow, Kip warned us to behave as though our
hotel room were bugged, not just for our own safety, but for all the colleagues we would be meeting. Stephen had visited Moscow once before, as a student, with a group of Baptists – strange
company for one of such forceful atheistic opinions. Even stranger was the fact that he had helped them to smuggle Bibles into Russia in his shoes.

Such reminiscences were hardly appropriate on the present occasion, which had acquired the importance of a high-level official exchange, with all the concomitant VIP treatment. On arrival at the
Hotel Rossiya, a massive square block between Red Square and the Moskva River, we glanced round our suite, equipped with samovar and fridge, half-expecting to uncover a microphone strategically
placed to record our private thoughts. We did not however resort to the lengths of the diplomat in a joke then circulating: he was said to have pulled up the carpet and snipped at the wires he
found beneath it. A loud crash and a horrified shout came from the room below where the chandelier had fallen to the ground.

We had already noticed that the lift bypassed the first floor of the hotel; this was out of bounds and was said to be reserved on all four sides of the hotel, each a quarter of a mile long, for
“administration”, for which we read “listening devices”. Moreover, many of the Russians who had come to meet us at the airport, bearing welcoming bouquets of roses and
carnations, were reluctant to enter the hotel beyond the lobby. Significantly in the light of their reticence, Dr Ivanenko, an elderly scientist of modest reputation, was only too pleased to sit in
Kip’s room for hours at a time, precisely enunciating, as if to hidden ears, all that he had achieved for Soviet science. It was Ivanenko who always accompanied groups of younger Russian
astrophysicists to conferences in the West. We generally supposed that he was their minder, especially because they were forever inventing schemes for evading him. His own behaviour could be
mysteriously unpredictable. In 1970, while we were at the conference centre at Gwatt in Switzerland, he had disappeared during the course of a boat trip along the shores of Lake Thun, not to be
seen again until he turned up sometime later in Moscow.

The purpose of Stephen’s visit to Moscow was twofold. Primarily a theoretician, he had begun to dabble in the practical question of black-hole detection. In this he was following the
example of an American physicist, Joseph Weber, who had been conducting a solitary struggle to build a machine for catching the minuscule vibrations of the gravitational waves which were predicted
to come from stars as they collapsed into black holes. We had spent several afternoons scouring rubbish tips in Cambridge for disused vacuum chambers which might be fitted up, in somewhat
Heath-Robinson fashion, with detector bars immersed in liquid nitrogen, to complement Weber’s work in Europe. This aspect of black-hole research had also been taken up in Moscow, at the
university, by Vladimir Braginsky, an experimental physicist who showed us his laboratory and cheerfully gave me the remnants of a stick of synthetic ruby which he had used in his experiment. He
was blessed with an extrovert nature which concealed the extent of his scientific foresight and revealed itself in his penchant for risqué political jokes, even in a semi-public setting. It
was Braginsky who at dinner one night kept the company captivated with a torrent of jokes, interspersed with a succession of toasts in vodka and Georgian champagne. Not all his jokes were
hysterically funny. Most had a political edge, as for example the joke about transport: an American, an Englishman and a Russian were comparing methods of transport. The American said, “Well
of course, we need three cars, one for me, one for my wife and a motorhome for holidays.” The Englishman said modestly, “Well, we have a runabout for town-driving and a family car for
holidays.” The Russian said, “Well, the public transport is very good in Moscow so we don’t need a car in town and, when we go on holiday, we go in tanks…”

Stephen had also come to Moscow for conversations with those Russians, many of them Jewish, whose freedom to travel had been severely curtailed. Yakov Borisovich Zel’dovich, a fiery,
impetuous character, had been in the forefront of the development of the Soviet atom bomb in the Forties and Fifties. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, like his American counterpart, John
Wheeler, he turned his attention to astrophysics, where the conditions inside an imploding star mirrored those of the hydrogen bomb. In consequence Zel’dovich became a foremost authority in
black-hole research. However, because of the secrecy surrounding his earlier work, he never expected to be able to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain and come to the West to share fully the
international excitement aroused by black holes. The seminal research in imploding stars which his group generated was broadcast to the outside world on his behalf by a rather shy and rather tense
younger colleague, Igor Novikov, with whom Stephen developed a strong working relationship.

Like Zel’dovich, Evgeny Lifshitz, also a Jewish physicist in the group, suffered travel restrictions, as did the many gifted students who knew that they would have to wait years before
receiving the coveted first travel permit, itself a passport to the rubber-stamping of further permits. Some were voci-ferous and intense, others reserved and pensive. However extrovert some of
their personalities might appear to be, it was obvious that they lived under extreme tension in an undercurrent of fear. All were seriously concerned at the restrictions placed on their creativity
by incompetent officialdom, and all were afraid of the power of the KGB if they tried to improve their situation.