VI

Vanya ran into the auditorium where he was scheduled to speak and found every seat was already taken. Still, he hoped he could slink down the aisles to the stage unnoticed, avoid the need to return false smiles and handshakes. Quickly, quickly he hurried with his head down and his hands in his pockets. It helped, he knew, that most of the audience expected this behavior from him. Since Vanya had applied to the university eight years earlier, he’d been the center of attention and held apart, much to his dismay. He wrote his entrance exam in twenty minutes, scoring perfectly, while others toiled for more than six hours and still didn’t derive every answer. Once he started classes, he didn’t have to attend lectures that explained proofs and methods because he came to solutions on his own. Instead he spent hours in the library digging into Minkowski, Einstein, and others. Students and professors alike watched him from afar. He heard them whisper, calling him “that odd Jew.” He learned to be grateful that he was left alone. It gave him time to work.

It was Kir Romanovitch, the chair of the new Theoretical Physics Department, who was the first to breach the barrier and come near Vanya. Kir approached him in the library one night when he was working late. Vanya was sitting under a smattering of light that rendered Kir a towering shadow. His dark suit and hair made him hard to see in that setting, but the smell of his cigars was as distinct as any line. Without smiling or extending his hand, Kir put a copy of a recent math journal in front of Vanya. “Mr. Abramov, you know this Henri Poincaré?” Kir said, pointing to an article. “You’ve studied his gravitational waves?” Vanya was so stunned that such a powerful man was paying him any attention that all he could manage was a nod. “Good. I don’t care that you’re a Jew. You’ll lecture on Poincaré next week.”

Vanya was thrilled. He practiced with Miri, writing and rewriting that lecture. Only a few professors attended, but word spread that the Jew’s work was astounding, and others began to approach him, asking for his advice or help. Vanya was happy to work with anyone he judged serious by their commitment to math. Those who wouldn’t sleep until they had a solution, or a hint of a solution, were those he gladly spent long hours with in the library, working through equations. He loved going over problems with them, much as he loved talking through his own ideas with Miri at home in Baba’s kitchen. Though Vanya didn’t bother with compliments when answers were correct, his colleagues were drawn to him, to his passion. Of course there were plenty who persisted in resenting him, but they didn’t concern him as long as they stayed out of his way.

After he was awarded his degree, he was elevated to professor, a position that made him formally “useful” and gave him the freedom that came with that status: higher pay, the chance for advancement, and the ability to travel anywhere in the empire. Useful Jews were part of the czar’s plans for Russification. To unify his empire, to assimilate its outliers, Nicholas needed modern, educated Jews, and the promotion meant the czar’s men gave not only him a wider berth, but Miri and Baba, too. It was how Vanya had helped Miri get her training to become a doctor and how they were able to remain in a house in the section of the city where they lived—where only useful Jews were now permitted. Every year, more students came to learn from him. And every time he gave a lecture, the auditorium was full. That day he walked in after Sukovich’s surgery was no exception. There wasn’t a free seat in the room. It was good he came, after all: his absence would have been noticed.

Vanya took hold of the chalk and put the folded piece of paper with his spare notes on the lectern. He decided since he wanted to work through the question of acceleration anyway, he might as well do so here. Perhaps if he could explain it to his colleagues, he’d figure out how to use it for himself.

The solution he needed for relativity held two sides, linked by an equal sign. On one side sat the distribution of matter and energy in space—the stars. On the other sat the geometry of space—the stage. The two were linked, not separate. He compared this relationship to apples bobbing in water. Every time the apples moved, the water also moved, putting the equation back into balance. One always affected the other—in different ways at different times. How could he express that? In his mind, Vanya ran through his notebook, ticking through pages and pages. He needed a framework, what mathematicians called a tensor, to represent all four dimensions. He focused on the Italian mathematician Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro because Ricci’s tensor accounted for acceleration. It was so new, Vanya figured no one in the audience had even heard of it.

He turned to the board and started working at a furious pace, sensing rather than calculating the curves and height of space as they changed under his chalky fingers. When he came up short, he knew it because he could feel it. Each time he erased his work and started again. A cloud of dust sent him into a coughing fit and he didn’t pause to recover. Nor did he take questions.

“Another way to understand this problem,” he said, rolling a clean board out from the corner. “Imagine you’ve put a blanket on a laundry line.” He thought about the tram stop earlier. “A child stands behind the blanket and sticks her hand into it so you see her fingers’ profile on the opposite side. That sheet is equivalent to space. That hand is equal to a star, or even a galaxy. The correct tensor, and equation, will define both and include time—marking when the hand and the blanket were in that position. And when she moves her hand, imagine it’s fused to the fabric. Just as a star can’t simply leave space, her hand can’t lose contact with the wool. It doesn’t matter how it changes, or accelerates, or when. The correct equations will still hold true.” That’s what he was after. That’s where Einstein had failed. “Watch,” he said when one person asked for clarification. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes past the hour that he noticed he’d run late. “Sorry,” he said, stopping abruptly, knowing he was no closer to a solution. He’d been so focused on the math that he was surprised when he turned to face the audience and found rows and rows of men working to keep pace, copying every notation he’d made—not seeming to care that he’d gotten nowhere.

Vanya took a bow, as was expected of him. Before he stood, he was swarmed. “Professor,” they all seemed to yell at once. “Why gravity? Why are you focused on gravity and acceleration?”

“To understand spacetime, we must understand gravity,” Vanya said. “It slows time.”

“Isn’t that what the German is saying?” one student asked.

“Professor Einstein?” Vanya asked. “He’s Swiss now.”

“He has German blood. How can we trust that?”

“He’s a worthless Jew,” another said. And the room went silent.

Vanya cleared his throat and tamped down his anger, steadied his voice even as his face turned red. “The country Einstein calls home doesn’t matter. Nor does his religion. Ideas matter. Science above politics,” Vanya said, knowing it was more of a wish than reality. The truth was that, like Einstein, everyone in that auditorium thought of Vanya as a Jew before they thought of him as a scientist. Even Vanya himself thought that way. That was likely what fueled his obsession with him, the fact that Vanya had more in common with Einstein than with any man in his field. Both were outcasts from the day they were born. This bond kept Vanya fascinated. Since he’d first read about the theory of relativity, he’d tried to dig as deeply as he could into Einstein’s life. All he found, all that was available in Russia, were tidbits he could learn from journals and newspapers. Back in those early days, most established professors around the world dismissed Einstein as a radical at best and a fool at worst.

Vanya taught himself to read German so he could master Einstein’s publications. He saw Einstein adopted a patent examiner’s approach to writing scientific papers—he didn’t cite foundational sources. And Vanya began to do the same. He was chastised for it but he refused to change. Why did it matter who inspired him or came before him? His work was replacing that entire foundation anyway.

Vanya once paid double the value of a journal just so he could own a photograph of Albert Einstein. He propped the picture up on his desk at home. In the photo, Albert stood in front of the Bern clock tower near his patent office. He had a thick mustache and curls. His eyes looked sleepy. His jacket was too large. His tie wasn’t straight, and his collar, was it crooked? Vanya was a fatherless eighteen-year-old when he found that photo, and afterward he tried growing his own mustache—unsuccessfully. He also stopped making sure his suits were well tailored and his own ties were straight. Baba hated it, said that, as a Jew, Vanya couldn’t afford to look the way he did, but he fought back, countered that what mattered was math not religion. He could be sloppy in appearance but not in work. Since he continued to progress, there was little she could do to stop him. But when he tried to convince Miri to do the same, to stop worrying about the tightness of her braids and the starch in her collars, Baba scolded him. His sister, Baba said fiercely, was a woman fighting for respect. She couldn’t afford to be sloppy anywhere.

Vanya answered every question the students and professors asked after his lecture. One by one, the crowd thinned until Vanya was left alone. He stayed at the blackboard and continued. He was close. He could feel it. But was Ricci the right tensor?

“Maybe I can help?” The voice came from a shadow in the back of the auditorium. Vanya startled. The chalk snapped.

“Kir?”

“I said I might be able to help,” Kir said, smiling. He was halfway down the stairs in the auditorium, coming straight for Vanya. He wore his signature black suit. Strong like a Russian bull is the phrase that came to Vanya when he looked at Kir, because of his build and his self-assured arrogance. It was that demeanor, his ability to intimidate, not his work, that had earned Kir his title as department chair. He was a proficient mathematician at best, Vanya had come to learn.

“I’m fine, sir,” Vanya said, forcing a smile of his own. “I don’t need help.”

“Yes, but it’s all so interesting,” Kir continued. They were the same words he’d used at Vanya’s very first lecture on Poincaré. Back then, Vanya was so flattered his face had flushed. Kir had patted his back. His palm spanned the entire width of Vanya’s left side. “You’re certain what you’ve presented is correct?” Kir had asked Vanya’s twenty-year-old self.

“Of course.”

“Good, good. Then you won’t mind if I check your notes?” Kir was already reaching for the stack of papers in Vanya’s hands. “See if I can make sure you haven’t missed anything?” Vanya couldn’t object. Nor did he want to, not then. Kir was the center of his academic universe, the chair of his department. There could be no higher compliment. Vanya had handed over everything he had, expecting to hear back soon. But he didn’t.

It took six months for Vanya to realize what had happened. Vanya’s lecture on gravitational waves was published and credited to Kir and Kir alone. When Vanya confronted him, Kir smiled. “You know this is my work. You merely made suggestions.”

“But…,” Vanya tried.

“Did you write a single word that appeared in that article?” No. Vanya hadn’t. His work was confined to numbers and equations. Kir’s grin grew. “Don’t forget, I was the one who gave you that article. Do you think you would have come up with anything if it hadn’t been for my guidance? You must learn there’s an order to things.”

“B-but,” Vanya stuttered, feeling the first shock of shame. “The others who attended the lecture, surely they know?”

Kir leaned closer and whispered, “Remember, you’re a Jew.” That was when Vanya understood that no one would defend him. No one would risk their career and family for him.

Vanya’s work brought Kir fame—and power. Scientists across Russia elevated him to the top of the academy, and that only made Kir bolder and more aggressive. “Tell me what you’re working on so I can help,” Kir would say when he tracked Vanya in the halls or waited for him in Vanya’s office under the guise of giving him another article to study. “You should be grateful I’m looking out for you. Protecting you.”

Vanya tried to cloister himself away while digging deeper into Albert Einstein. Still, Kir found his ways. He waited at the tram stop, lurked in the halls outside the classroom and in the stacks at the library. He even hovered over Vanya when he helped his peers. Eventually, Kir told Vanya that to retain his position, he’d need to present a lecture every month. Before the lecture, he had to submit his notes to Kir. Vanya had no choice but to agree. He couldn’t lose his professorship—he needed it for Baba and Miri as much as for himself. They’d be thrown from their house, even from Kovno, if he was demoted and declared no longer useful. What did it matter if Kir saw his notes, he said to himself the first time he handed them over. Then Kir returned them, the exact same equations, only rewritten in Kir’s hand. “I’ve added ideas,” Kir said with a smile. “And I’ve already circulated these to the department.” Which meant he’d told the other professors the work was his, not Vanya’s. Surely they knew the lie, but still no one said a thing. It was a wonder Vanya had published that single article in which he declared Einstein’s math mistaken. He’d only managed it because Kir thought the business of Jew arguing against Jew was below him.

“This lecture today, it was about your fight with Einstein, no?” Kir said now, standing in front of Vanya in the auditorium. The sound of voices and footsteps slid from under the door. For a second, Vanya thought about running, but didn’t. His hands went cold. Sweat slid down his back. Kir continued. “You forgot to give me your notes for today.”

“I—I wasn’t prepared ahead of time. I’m sorry.”

Kir frowned. “You know I can get you anything you need to solve this.”

“You couldn’t get me funding. For the eclipse.”

“No.” Kir dropped his chin, and something like disappointment flashed across his face. It was the first time Vanya had ever seen him flinch. “No. The czar is staring down war. Using his coffers for bullets, not photographs. Besides, pictures are nothing. It’s math that matters.” Kir cleared his throat. “Let me look at what you have.” When Vanya hesitated, Kir continued, “A family like yours needs help. These are tough times. With war on the horizon, I can keep you safe.” Kir held out his enormous hands, pointing toward Vanya’s notes, and Vanya handed over what he had—the piece of paper he’d stashed in his pocket before he’d left with Miri. Kir raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. As he looked over the paper, he murmured, “Tell me. Your sister. Did she save that Jewish wretch this morning?”

Shocked, Vanya spoke without thinking. “My sister has nothing to do with this.”

Kir didn’t take his eyes off the paper between them. He added, “Did you hear about my promotion? I run the university now. Appointed by the czar himself.”

“Congratulations. On your new position,” Vanya mumbled. Then he hurried to the side door. He tripped. Fell into the first row of seats and righted himself. He’d banged his shin, badly. He tried to walk without limping, felt his face burning red with pain and anger.

“Good day, Vanya Abramov,” Kir called after him. “My regards to your family.”