In physical reality one cause does not produce a given effect, but a multitude of distinct causes contribute to produce it, without our having any means of discriminating the part of each of them.
—Henri Poincaré,
“The Measure of Time,” 1898
2000: Philadelphia, United States
Ethel Zane stood next to her granddaughter, Lena, in the museum’s rotunda and tried to catch her breath by pretending to examine the painting in front of them. The oversize canvas once served as the backdrop for a ballet, a Russian Romeo and Juliet, and Ethel had studied it so many times she didn’t need to look to see its brilliance. A sun and a moon hung together in a sky ignited by shades of orange.
“Are you ready, Bubbie?” Lena asked. Her curls were dripping, and the dress she’d spent so much time choosing was splotched with rain. “They’re waiting for us.”
“After all this time, another minute won’t hurt.” If only she could smoke inside.
Lena threaded her fingers through Ethel’s. “I’ve always loved the romance in this.”
“It’s not romance. This painting is about an eclipse.” Ethel pulled her granddaughter close. “See, the sun and the moon are converging. There’s the eclipse. And from that you’re sensing passion. You have it, Lenaleh. Passion like that eclipse, like the painting, the kind that makes a woman want to jump into the bath with a man after a sweaty day.”
Her granddaughter threw her head back and laughed. Another woman might have been embarrassed, but not her Lena. Ethel was proud of that. “I suppose with the right man, anyone would like that bath,” Lena said.
They took the stairs, slowly. At the top, a bar glittered with champagne. A florist leaned over a vase heavy with the lilacs Ethel could smell from across the room. On the landing stood the great-grandson of Uncle Vanya’s old friend, Dima. The young man was tall, taller even than Lena. He had deep-set eyes and a thick frame as if there was a sailor’s bearing in his bones, like his great-grandfather. He took Ethel’s other hand. “Thank you for coming to celebrate my uncle Vanya,” she said. “None of this would have been possible without Dima. He was a great man. I just wish I’d had a chance to meet him myself.”
“If only he’d told me more about what happened in Russia before he died, about their adventures during the war and the competition with Einstein.”
Ethel frowned. “That’s the problem. Life doesn’t travel in a straight line. Knowing the end doesn’t mean you can follow it back to the beginning.” She paused. “And I’m not sure they would have called their time together adventures. There was the need to survive, no?”
They turned the corner and Ethel saw the exhibit’s title: The Race to Prove Relativity. Then came the shock: a photograph of her mother, Miriam Abramov, hung on the wall. It was one Ethel hadn’t seen before, one the curator must have found at the last minute. The image was part of a constellation of other new prints, each in their own frame, capturing pieces of life in 1914: the Bern clock tower, a Russian port, the czar’s troops boarding a train, but none of them were important. For Ethel, her mother was all that mattered, and she hurried closer to get a better look. The picture had been taken before Ethel was born, back in Russia. Her mother looked so young as she stood in front of a slice of a shtetl and stared down the camera. Her doctor’s coat was smeared dark, and her face was lined with dirt. She must have been working herself to the bone, but still there was an energy to her. It was conviction. Ethel knew it as a quality she saw in herself and in her granddaughter, a quality passed through the blood. How did Mama stand so tall while the world around her was shattering into war? And who was the man next to her? He wore a military greatcoat and a cap with the visor pulled down so low Ethel couldn’t see his face. Instead of looking into the camera, the soldier looked at her mother. He was inclined toward her, drawn by gravity.
Lena squeezed Ethel’s hand and pointed to the opposite wall. Across from the image of Miriam hung a collection of more photographs, academics posed in front of telescopes. One had a scale model of the solar system suspended behind him. These were all physicists arrayed in orbit around Albert Einstein.
“Where’s my uncle Vanya’s photograph?” Ethel asked. He should have had pride of place above Einstein—Vanya was the whole reason they were there.
“I thought they’d found the journals, that this was about Uncle Vanya’s work. Don’t they know what he did?” Lena asked.
“They do now.” Ethel reached for Einstein’s photograph and plucked it off the wall. It was easier to do than she’d imagined. An alarm blared. The curator and his assistants came running. “History needs a narrator,” Ethel said. “Perhaps this museum chose the wrong one.”
Tammuz
The Hebrew calendar is based on three astronomical phenomena: the rotation of the earth on its axis, the revolution of the moon around the earth, and the movement of the earth around the sun.
The fourth month in the Jewish calendar is Tammuz, from the Aramaic, meaning heat, fire, or sun. It is said that during Tammuz, in the midst of battle, Joshua ordered the sun to stand still. God heard his pleas and the day stopped. Only the moon continued, sliding in front of the sun.
I
1914: Kovno, Russia
On the eighteenth of Tammuz, Miri Abramov sat at the window in her room watching the slip of a moon emerge behind the mottled rooftops of Kovno. Her shoulders were slumped forward, and curls escaped from the braid running down her back. She was exhausted from tending to dozens of patients and couldn’t stop thinking about one in particular—the fishmonger. She lit a cigarette, watched smoke finger the polished glass in front of her. He had been beaten so severely Miri didn’t recognize him, and his was a face she knew. He brought her family his catch every Monday. The word Jew had been scrawled on his chest with so much hate that the charcoal used to write it cut his skin. The letters oozed red. His ribs were cracked and Miri was sure his spleen was pierced. She needed to operate to save his life, but she wasn’t a surgeon. She was still training, couldn’t do anything without permission, and all the surgeons above her—men—disagreed with her diagnosis. They said he was only bruised. But she’d watched his condition deteriorate. She’d recorded his pulse rising, his blood pressure dropping, along with his increasing confusion—all signs he was bleeding internally. Would he make it through the night?
The grandfather clock downstairs struck the hour. It was time for supper. Miri stubbed her cigarette in a pile of ash on a cold saucer and made her way into the hall. Standing on thick, woven carpet, Miri took a deep breath and arranged her face. Making an appearance downstairs in the crowded sitting room where she’d find her grandmother always made Miri feel as if she were onstage. The house, the paintings, the silks and velvets were props in Babushka’s exquisite theater. Her grandmother was Kovno’s most illustrious matchmaker, and she was paid in gifts. Everything her family had was chosen for them. The house was given by the owner of the brick factory on the night of his wedding. Beds were delivered by a carpenter once he held his first child. Baba’s clients furnished one room and then another. All of her needs were provided for in this way. Babushka found wives for tailors who sent clothing, and fishmongers, like Miri’s patient, who delivered food. The only thing Baba refused was help. She didn’t want a cook or a maid. She was the keeper of secrets, she explained with a wink—one clients never questioned. And Miri knew they were lucky to live so well, especially when so many Jews scavenged for food and heat. She was grateful for it, but none of it felt like a home.