2000: Philadelphia, United States

Ethel Zane sat in a chair at the end of the exhibit, next to Lena. After she’d snatched the portrait of Einstein off the wall, she’d been asked to sit there, like a scolded American child told to think about her actions. Her mother, Miri, would have told her to be grateful, that in Russia she would not have been treated so gently. But she still resented the two museum guards standing on either side, making sure she didn’t move. Worse, she was stiff and her dress was still damp from all that rain. “My mother faced far scarier situations,” Ethel whispered, nodding toward the guards.

“I know.” Lena smiled.

“And I was right. That curator should have had Vanya front and center—not Einstein.”

“But look, he did his job. We were just impatient.” Lena pointed to a photograph of Vanya leaning against a towering larch. It was a focal point, five times the size of Einstein’s image. The photo had been taken in Birshtan, near the dacha where Mama and Uncle Vanya had been taught to fight. Vanya looked so young, so hopeful. The curator had found it somehow, just before the exhibit opened, hidden in a corner in the basement of the Hermitage, buried in boxes and boxes of Kir Romanovitch’s archives. How they got there, no one knew, but on Ethel’s advice the curator had been searching for those records, for anything from the czar’s preeminent physicist, for months. And he’d left this as his final surprise for her.

“Who imagined that boy would change the world?” Ethel asked. “Einstein published equations in 1914, you know?”

“Of course I know. They were wrong. He corrected them himself.”

“Several years later. Vanya corrected them first.”

“Yes, Bubbie, but Einstein deserves something, no?”

Ethel shrugged. Every wall around them was an homage to her uncle’s work and family. The stunning centerpiece hung across from the photo of the teenage Vanya. It was an enormous, colorized print of a photograph taken at the 1914 eclipse. Yellow streams of light flared around the edges of the moon, and off to one side were a series of distinct dots: the Zeus star cluster—Vanya’s proof that light bends.

When Ethel was little, she’d fall asleep listening to her mother spin the tale of Uncle Vanya racing to capture the eclipse that devoured Russia. He’d deserted his unit, braved the firing squad all in his quest to understand the universe. And he’d done it. Except the war had gotten in the way. If things had been different, Abramov would be the name people knew. Einstein would be a footnote. Ethel devoted her life to finding Vanya’s work, to showing the world that her mother and father were right about their family legend.

Papa. Sasha. He was the man in the military greatcoat, in the photograph with her mother at the beginning of the exhibit. Ethel saw that now. The picture of her parents was taken in Podil, published in a newspaper, back when they’d just met. They were so young, they looked nothing like she remembered.

Ethel closed her eyes and imagined her father. Just as she couldn’t remember a day in her life without relativity hanging over her, so too would she be hard-pressed to remember a day without him. “I was head over heels for your mother from the moment we met,” he used to say.

Ethel had been too young to remember the day he found them in Philadelphia, yet her mother had told the story so many times she could picture every detail. Papa materialized on their front stoop three years after he was separated from Mama in Russia. The officer who captured him did fire his gun, but the bullet only grazed Sasha’s temple. Head wounds bleed profusely, even minor ones, and Sasha was left for dead. Once he came around, he crawled to the Jewish hospital. Anya nursed him. She hid him.

Once Sasha recovered, he walked across Russia and up through the northern border, careful to stay deep in the forest where no one could recognize him. He knew how to hunt and trap. And ski. Ethel couldn’t imagine what he’d gone through and he never talked about it. Brutal, her mother used to say. One word that held it all.

He worked his way across the ocean as a deckhand. When he showed up at Mama’s door, he was as thin and pale as a corpse. No one would have known him, but Mama, she recognized him in an instant by his eyes—the same eyes that she saw every time she looked at their daughter.

Mama told Sasha and Ethel all about the letter she’d received from Dima Velikoff, and the family spent years tracking the sailor down. Miri and Sasha had both passed away by the time Ethel finally found Dima—but he, too, was gone. By then Ethel’s only living family member still excited about the chase was Lena. Lena was the one who pushed her grandmother to contact Dima’s great-grandson, the only other Velikoff still alive. And it was that great-grandson, Danny, who told them Dima’s story.

“Tell us everything,” Ethel said to him the first time they met. They sat around a rickety coffee table on the side of a Russian market in northeastern Philadelphia. Next to them, at the deli counter, dozens of colored herring dishes were on platters arranged like a rainbow. Women buzzed, gossiping and ordering in Russian. “Did Dima ever tell you about a painting from Russia? He mentioned it in his letter. The missing notebooks and photographs were supposed to be with it somehow. But no one at the museum received the painting.”

“A painting? No, he didn’t mention anything, although he loved the museum. He spent hours there drawing.” Danny shook his head, seemed to remember something. “I did find one in the attic when I cleaned out his house.”

“Where? Where is it now?”

Danny took them to his apartment. He hadn’t opened the wooden crate. It sat in the back of his closet, buried behind three suits and a row of starched shirts. “My great-grandfather must have forgotten about it. The dementia,” he explained as he pulled it out.

The nails on the crate were rusted through. The heads snapped when they tried to pry them off. When they finally succeeded in peeling back the lid, the three of them, Ethel, Lena, and Danny, looked at the canvas together. Danny was the one to hear the glass rattle inside. And Ethel was the one to cut into the burlap and find Vanya’s photos and journals. Most of the plates had shattered but one survived.

“Bubbie,” Lena said. Ethel blinked. The exhibit was crowded now. Ethel hadn’t noticed when it opened. She was too deep in her memories. “Bubbie, do you need some water?”

“No.” Ethel smiled. “Do you think they’d mind if we look at the photos one more time?”

“So long as you promise not to take anything else off the walls.” Lena threaded her fingers through Ethel’s and walked her grandmother back into the exhibit. They started at the beginning, at the photo of Miri and Sasha together in Russia.

It had taken scientists and art historians a full year to authenticate Vanya’s work and the photographs, to declare him the true winner of the race to prove relativity. And once Vanya was crowned, the museum begged for the chance to showcase the discovery. They offered a handsome price for the painting that held Vanya’s work, and that helped Ethel to say yes. Once Ethel agreed, the curator worked magic. He dug up photos of Miri, Sasha, Yuri, Dima, Anya, and even Russell Clay, the American who had gone missing after the expedition for the 1914 eclipse. All of them were enlarged and framed, arranged in chronological order. The equations themselves were gilded behind bulletproof glass.

“Gorgeous,” Ethel whispered as she stood, transfixed again by the photograph of the eclipse. The sun’s arms seemed to reach out around the moon. She could feel the gravity of the photograph. “It’s what I’ve always told you,” Ethel said to Lena. “Life and the universe are not written in stone. Gravity bends direction. Always keep your mind open.”

“Open to what?” Lena asked.

“Open to anything.”