The Berlin Project, Page 3

  Fermi was pale as he said stonily, “I must add a footnote to my unpublished Nobel Prize acceptance speech to this effect.”

  Bohr took this moment to quickly digress, ending up the talk with some slides of the data from Berlin he had just gotten from Lise Meitner. The talk concluded with curiously muted applause.

  As the seminar broke up, Karl followed his instincts. He moved forward as the crowd dispersed, noting that three separate circles had formed around Bohr, Fermi, and Teller. Urey was in Teller’s group, so Karl headed there. They were discussing details of the Meitner and Frisch experiments and he listened, picking up some of the physics jargon. He was fairly new to this subject and it was important to get the feel of it by the way people talked.

  Then he moved to Bohr’s crowd, about a dozen, and heard him expound on his model of the nucleus. Karl waited while some graduate students bombarded Bohr with questions. He could follow most of it but knew nobody else in the group. At a break in the conversation he said, “How sure are you of your model?”

  Bohr blinked. Maybe Nobel laureates weren’t used to being questioned? But Bohr just smiled and said, “At an eighty percent confidence level, as you Americans say.”

  “So why should a nucleus be like a liquid? Or the nuclear force something like a surface tension?” Karl kept his voice mild, no incisive cutting edge.

  Bohr nodded. “Because there’s a competition. The protons want to fly apart, the neutrons stir around and try to stop that happening. I made up a sort of simple calculation of that. It seems to give the curve of binding energy fairly well.”

  This struck Karl as remarkably honest. Considering that he hadn’t actually gone through Bohr’s published papers, he just nodded and resolved to correct that. He smiled and introduced himself. “I wondered how you reacted to Hahn’s news, and Meitner’s experiments.”

  Bohr chuckled. “I said, ‘What fools we have been!’—because we were so blind. I never saw that the liquid drop could be shattered—like a water drop.”

  Karl was impressed with such modesty. He had seen plenty of lesser lights parade their arrogance around Columbia. To work among scientists entailed a burden. Everyone in the room had grown up through schools and universities where they learned they were quite often the smartest guy in that room. So when they reached upper levels of research, they carried the same unconscious angles of attack, a presumption of always having the right answer. Learning otherwise could shock them.

  He nodded, thanked Bohr, and saw that Urey and Fermi were talking softly, heads tilted near each other. An opportunity.

  Fermi said softly, “Why did you not tell me of these matters when you met us at the dock on January second?”

  Urey shrugged. “Bohr said that the Germans were not yet published, so he kept it secret. They are about to publish in Naturwissenschaften, I believe.”

  Fermi said, “I can check their result quickly.”

  Urey nodded. “Good idea.” Noticing Karl, he introduced them. Fermi murmured some pleasantries, but his eyes were distant.

  Karl decided to go straight to the point. “Do you think a bomb is the only application?”

  Fermi blinked. “Well, no, though Teller seems to jump at that. And Szilard. But any energy source can have many implications.”

  “To make electricity?” Karl guessed. “Use the excess heat to boil water, turn turbines?”

  “Yes, very good application.” Fermi saw this immediately, or more likely, had already figured it out. He turned to some others and said, “Let us get down to the lab.”

  In a moment the room was clear. Karl had a sense of anticipation, ideas swarming in his head. Urey took him by the arm. “Let me take you to lunch. We can talk this over.”

  This was a welcome gesture, including Karl the underling chemist. Urey seemed to know all the bars and restaurants near the Columbia University campus and led him to a narrow place packed with people. A white-capped short-order cook at a gas grill took barked orders from a cranky waitress who blew her hair out of her face after each sentence. Aromas of frying meat and grilled potatoes layered the air. Booths marked off tables with red-checked tablecloths. Ceiling fans turned languidly, stirring smoky air into a smooth blue-gray blur. There was no hurry in the place, a feeling of having been there all eternity, with only the faces changing in the pale winter light from the big windows. The waiters moved with quick, sure movements, delivering food that tasted exactly the same as when he was a boy in Brooklyn. His small, personal world was at least holding steady, while the larger world warped toward war.

  In the hubbub and throughout the scattershot exchange of ideas with Urey, he still felt that the muttered talk nearby and the traffic murmur outside had a ring of the past, of history. And more history got made, every day. Karl began to think he could make some, too.

  3.

  Friday, January 21, 1939

  Karl slogged through the film of crunchy slush over the sidewalks. Rain peppered him like cold spit. He had run out for extra supplies and a bottle of Bordeaux for what would be, de facto, the first Shabbat dinner he and Marthe put on—though nobody in the family really paid any attention to such Jewish rituals. The pocked heaps of dirty snow under a gray sky looked like refuse thrown out of passing cars. The world news was similarly depressing.

  Two days before, he and Marthe had stopped at the Newsreel Theater on 68th Street to watch two hours of footage featuring the politicos and tragedies of Europe and Asia. There were clips of the Wehrmacht marching into Czechoslovakia, fruit of the Munich Pact. A speech by Neville Chamberlain, saying that England and Germany were “the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against communism.” Right after, footage of Churchill saying in his ponderous way, “We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat. . . . We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude. . . . We have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road.” Then members of his own Conservative Party jeered him in Parliament.

  Karl was still something of a Marxist, but in his soul he felt Churchill was right. Then the March of Time newsreel came on, showing scenes of Jews led away in Prague and speculating that the Nazis might spread out from the Sudetenland into neighboring territories. They were barely within their interpretation of the Munich Pact. Clips from Pathé and Paramount traced the rolling tragedies far away yet running right there on the screen in sharp black and white, immediate and insisting on his attention.

  Karl shook himself. He had to lighten his mood for the party, a fest to welcome his family and friends into the bright new home of the newlyweds. In a flurry of work that day, he and Urey had finished the paper for the Journal of Chemical Physics. All to get ready for this party.

  He crunched on along the sidewalks. Apartments crouched above pawnshops, boozers, fly-specked lunchrooms cheek by jowl with poolroom bars and retail tabernacles. Some small diners had moved in, taking the place of other businesses whose memory persisted in ghost letters still doing service on abandoned signs.

  They lived on the fourth floor of a building on 123rd Street, a half block off Amsterdam Avenue. It sported a pale brick facade, festooned with the requisite metal fire escape balconies and ladders. The sprawling, solid structure sorely needed a central courtyard, as the apartments were dark and the rooms cramped. From their apartment they looked down across the street on a pharmacy, University Chemists, their hanging neon sign coaxing DRUGS, LUNCHEON. It stayed open late and so drew happy but loud drunks. Even during the day, bums reeking of booze were fairly common, though harmless. Karl was starting to think of the neighborhood ambiance as “middle-class tenement,” but it was what they could afford, and close to Columbia.

  The entrance hall smelled of wax on ancient parquet tiles, glowing under incandescent bulbs like amber jewels. A hat stand with polished brass hangers pointed at the high dim ceiling, as if urging people up the steep stairs. Inside most of the apartments here, he knew from brief peeks through the doors of some tenants, every flat
surface carried geegaws, doilies, vases, pincushions and shells, half-armed chairs that closed around you like a cloth hand. Styles from the Old Country still lived on in the furniture. He tramped up three creaky flights and keyed into a different world, a wonderland he thought of as Martheland, a tiny Paris in style.

  She greeted him with a rich kiss, wearing the wide-striped dress he first saw in Marseille a year ago. When he had first met Marthe in Paris, right away his heart warred with his head, which said, Too complicated to get involved with a French woman; you don’t know enough yet to do that. Or maybe it was his head versus a powerful voice lower in his body.

  “I’ve finished the hors d’oeuvres,” she said, gesturing to the dining room table, where an array of petite French sandwiches beckoned, each with the crusts carefully removed. “The turkey is in the oven, and I found chestnuts for the stuffing.”

  Karl sniffed, smiled, and said, “Other Jewish families would be looking for kugel, gefilte fish, chopped liver, sweet noodle casseroles, kishke. Instead, we’ll feast on dinde aux marrons, crudités, lemon layer cake, and chocolate truffles. My family is not quite sure what to expect. This will raise eyebrows!” He liked the thought of his mother bragging about the food her foreign daughter-in-law, the French goy, cooked for them.

  Marthe smiled. “What Americans think of as Jewish cooking is really Eastern European peasant food turned kosher. I think this will be a good start.”

  “I’ll open the wine,” Karl said as he started for the closet. “That’ll surprise them too.” He had just brought out the Bordeaux when their doorbell rang. “They’re on time.”

  In came his mother, Rae; his aunt Mary; his sister, Mattie; and her husband, Lewis. Rae was an inch shorter than five feet and a classic feisty bantam hen. His times in France had given him enough distance to see her that way. Behind her was Mary, pale and muted as usual. Mattie was chatty. Lewis stood stolidly beside her, somewhat solemn and probably a tad drunk already, judging from his breath. The family was still getting used to Karl’s marrying a formerly Catholic Frenchwoman, and not any of the perfectly good Jewish women his mother had pushed at him for years. He led them over to the makeshift bar on a small table in the densely furnished living room. He proposed an aperitif of Dubonnet with a festive small twist of lemon. The bottle was the last remnant of his fall trip to Europe.

  “As the chemist in the family, I’ll do the setups,” Karl joked. “How do you want yours,” he asked Rae, “on the rocks or room temperature?” He set about cutting the lemon peel. Older people liked Old Fashioneds, so he got out the oranges, sliced them, and set out cherries in a small bowl. Other cocktails would no doubt follow.

  “Ah, martinis,” he murmured, and trotted out the green olives to stick toothpicks in them. “Gibsons, no toothpicks,” he muttered as he worked. For Manhattans he left the toothpicks off if the cherries had stems. Salt went into a shallow broad dish so he could just plant the already wetted rim down in it, then a lemon slice gashed at the end, all for a cocktail Marthe had learned about in Lebanon. He cut thick lemon slices for other cocktails and dropped ice cubes on them to keep them fresh.

  His mother blinked. “Where did you learn to do this?”

  He gave Rae a thin smile. “A chemist can acquire a lot in France.” He had picked it up at International House, where he met Marthe, and alcohol was something like a competitive sport.

  Rae frowned at this, and he realized she had not quite let go of the future she had imagined for him. He could have dutifully married one of the nice safe Jewish girls right there in Brooklyn, an easy walk for Rae. He could then aspire to the outer reaches of Brooklyn, with wood-shingled houses, screened front porches, neat lawns and strict shrubbery, and a cinder drive leading back to a one-car garage; a reasonable illusion of the salt-of-the-earth hometown America they all saw in movies. Not in a midtown Manhattan one-bedroom apartment, where honking cars and wailing sirens sang them to sleep.

  Karl could almost hear Rae think about this, as he filled the aperitif glasses and remembered how he had let Sylvia down in a Paris café. It was partly Rae’s fault. In a last attempt to stop the marriage with Marthe, she had encouraged the girl to rush over to Paris, to try to get him back. He had explained to Marthe that he needed a few days to show Sylvia the city, and when the “few days” seemed to be dragging on, Marthe lost patience and told him to choose one of them and be done with it. An ugly morsel appeared, way down in the bottom of his soul. A rational part of him felt relief.

  He could strain for crocodile tears, but leaving Sylvia behind, back there in gauzy memory, was right. She was indeed a beautiful girl, but it had been an uneven battle anyway. His and Marthe’s relationship had blossomed on two long train trips to the Mont-Saint-Michel she’d organized for her hiking group in 1936, and they’d kept in touch for almost a year with frequent, sometimes passionate letters when he returned home to job hunt. It wasn’t just her looks that attracted him; she was a European intellectual—a sharp mind, well read, trained as a journalist, and with an unerring political instinct.

  Rae took him aside. “I have at last gotten through to Jack. He sees your problem. He will release the inheritance.”

  Karl blinked. “That’s sudden.”

  Rae gave a rueful chuckle. “I work slowly, Jack thinks even slower. Still, the sum is in a paying-out annuity. It will give you fifty-five dollars a month.”

  “Great! We can get by on that.”

  Rae gave him a motherly cheek kiss. He put all thoughts aside and was handing out the cocktails as three more people arrived, greeted by Marthe and Rae together.

  Mattie came over and asked, “How’s it going at Columbia?”

  “Pretty well. Just heard about an amazing new source of energy.”

  “From what?”

  “The nucleus of atoms.”

  Mattie looked blank. “If you say so, Karl. I hope it will be something big and you can profit from it.”

  “No idea.” Karl had decided to say nothing about the ferment of discussions about fission. There might be a lot at stake.

  He went to greet the new arrivals: his uncle Jack and his wife, Edith. A small child in tow, too, from a cousin. “Glad we got this inheritance thing settled now,” Jack said, clapping Karl on the back as he shook his hand. “Marthe is a member of our so-called faith.”

  They both chuckled. The Cohens were divided over the issue of God. Karl saw it as a nonissue; he had no metaphysical complaint against the existence of death, the source of the big why in life—the major cause of religion, in his view. People all around him clung to their faiths as shelter against that why, but Karl did not. Science had stripped away whatever tattered religious garb he managed to assume at the larger family’s occasional mitzvah celebrations.

  He had found some comfort in an easy atheism and felt it grounded him in this world, the one that would end for him one day, but that he might alter for the better. He had read the whole Bible as a boy, and his skepticism deepened considerably when he discovered that among sexual behavior, forbidden were adultery, incest, and sex with angels. He sometimes thought that the right answer to the big why was just why not.

  Unlike Uncle Jack, his father, Joseph, had been the only one of three brothers who, running a garment business, refused to change his name from Cohen to Colin. The rest of the family changed to Colin to get a sweet contract from the army for pants in World War I, out of fear that bureaucrats in distant offices would not give the nod to Jews. But Joseph refused to give up his birthright, the Hebrew name Kahana that an immigration officer changed to Cohen.

  But the family’s religious wing still had a real effect on Karl’s life. Grandfather Cohen stipulated in his will that none of his unmarried grandsons would get anything unless they married a Jew. So Marthe had converted, taking only a week to do so. That now brought Karl the extra fifty-five dollars a month now, much needed. For the first time in his life he felt flush.

  Rae came over in proud-mother mode and plucked at his arm. “Play for us,
son.” He nodded and sat at the piano in the corner. He chose a piano version of a Mozart string quintet for her, quick and breezy, easy to play and not too long for the occasion. He preferred Bach, or Chopin preludes. He had deliberately practiced this earlier in the week, expecting Rae would show off her son this way to without being too obvious. Fair enough; she had gone through hard years after his father died and deserved a son’s devotion, however much she seemed obtuse and demanding at times.

  Talk was rising now as people drank more and spoke over the music, so he shifted to a short, joyous Bach piece he knew well, one he had mastered when he was fourteen. The piece had some hard patches, where he had to leap from one part of the keyboard to another, then back, places he read through many times at the piano but had to go to his teacher to master. He knew even then he was laying a foundation with each learned piece for a lifetime of modest, private pleasures. The challenge was part of the pleasure too, a fact he learned from his hard-nosed teacher, Mrs. Feibelman, who when he asked, “How do I do this part?” answered, “Play it a thousand times and we’ll see.”

  That had translated well into science and calculations. Do harder problems over until you understand them, never take shortcuts because you know the answer anyway, and add more tools to your kit. Here he made an odd transition, into the sensual. That earnest method had worked with Marthe, too, the first time he had buried his face in her, realizing her body as a great work of art. An old lesson: you have to actually work the problem to know it.

  He stopped playing when Marthe signaled it was time to eat. They crowded around the only table, some on chairs borrowed from a friendly widow on their floor. As he offered the Bordeaux and Marthe brought in the turkey, talk drifted to the war.

  Rae waved a letter at Karl. “Some of my relatives, Paleys, were in the Sudetenland. Just heard! They got out when the Nazis marched in. They’re near Prague. Your uncle Max got this letter at his firm.”