And then, suddenly, Vanya heard the man next to him hiss, “Too much blood!” He leaned even further forward. The comment was followed by other murmurs around them.
“She’s enlarged the tear.”
And: “She’s killing him.”
Quickly, Yuri took the instrument from Miri and she stepped back. A nurse began using sponge after sponge in the fishmonger’s chest. Had Miri made a mistake? Or, as she’d predicted, had they operated so late that his body had given way?
“Hold this,” Vanya heard Yuri say in a voice louder than it needed to be. “I’ll tie it off.” More blood and sponges. Miri eased down to Sukovich’s side and stroked his palm just as Vanya used to stroke hers when they were children and she was scared. Finally, Yuri made a show of handing Miri a curved needle, asking her to close the incision. At that, Miri let go of Sukovich. She leaned in and narrowed her eyes. The look, the posture, Vanya knew. She was doing all she could to hold back the darkness, and tears. She was angry and ashamed. Couldn’t Yuri see that crack in her? Why didn’t he say anything to defend her, to tell the room it was Miri who’d made the correct diagnosis, that she’d started perfectly?
“What we expected,” the man next to Vanya said. Was he smiling?
After the last stitch was tied, the men around Vanya surged toward the exits, but Vanya stayed. Baba had raised them to respect pain, to fight through it, but that didn’t mean Miri needed to feel it on her own. Vanya wanted to comfort her, but she’d never forgive him if he did that in front of her peers. And so he waited in case the room cleared and she looked for him. But she didn’t. She disappeared through the side door without even glancing up at the gallery. “Damn Yuri,” Vanya muttered. He could have helped more.
Vanya checked his watch and realized he still had time to run to the university for his lecture. As much as he didn’t want to go, he knew he should. Baba was right; Kir didn’t need more ammunition. It was lucky he hadn’t canceled after all. Vanya hurried through the hushed hospital, past people waiting in line to be seen, and through the heavy front doors. Outside the street was loud—a main thoroughfare—packed with the frenzy of Kovno’s workers. Vanya bobbed past carts piled with vegetables, fish, and coal, past wagons loaded with soldiers and cannons. On the corner closest to the edge of the square, he waited for the tram. A woman across from him was selling blankets. They hung from lines on display like laundry. A small girl played in them, pressing her hands into their wool while her sister batted at her profile. The tram choked to a stop. Vanya elbowed his way on.
As the noisy tram slinked through the city, Vanya reached into his pocket and ran his fingers over Eliot’s letter. An expedition. Coming to Russia. Even now. Incredible. He burned to read the rest, but he couldn’t manage it on that crowded tram. If only he could solve the math before the eclipse. He tried to push past what had happened to Miri and concentrate on his equations for relativity. At least that was something he could fix.
He asked, again, the question he’d been asking himself every day for five years. How to account for acceleration? And gravity? How he wished he could ask his Papa. Baba had been mother and father to them both, more than any child could hope for, but Vanya longed for those afternoons he’d spent in his father’s workshop as a child. “Look around,” Papa used to say. His father had sold watches and clocks. When he could, he’d taken in repairs and taught Vanya about the gears and mechanisms. “No clock can ever be perfect.” The first time Papa had said that, Vanya was nine years old. He was bent over a workbench, clutching a screwdriver and a loupe. The smell of grease was thick between them along with the remnants of smoke from Papa’s pipe.
“I don’t understand,” Vanya said.
“You see all these clocks on the walls? Not one tells the same time as another. Even if their hands point to the same hour and minute, their second hands aren’t in sync.”
“We could fix that.”
“Perhaps we could make it look precise to the human eye, but to make it truly exact is impossible. It is beyond any human ability. No clock can precisely match another.” Papa smiled through his thick beard. “You’re fighting nature. Think about it, my boy. If time existed naturally, every clock in this room would read the same.”
Vanya had never considered it before but nodded as the idea worked through him. “You’re right. The moon doesn’t tell time.”
“Of course not! Our watches can’t mark the rising or setting of the sun or the moon—those change every night. What’s it matter to the moon or to the stars what any clock says? Still, time is important to us. For trains. For anything with a schedule.” The idea was radical. Vanya knew it even then and he loved his father for it. Later, after he’d lost his parents, when he discovered that the great scientists of the day were focused on the problem of synchronizing clocks, he couldn’t turn back. Especially not when he discovered Einstein’s work at the patent office was dedicated to reviewing inventions for aligning clocks, inventions such as pneumatic tubes and blasts of air. His father was right: time was a human invention. Like Einstein, Vanya came to believe time was relative. And defining a second or an hour was arbitrary—but sequence was absolute. A tree falls. It cannot rise up and become whole again, just as an egg breaks and its shell cannot be reassembled, regardless of how anyone defines the time it takes for these events to happen. How did that fit into field equations?
He closed his eyes to picture the problem, but then the tram stopped hard and sent Vanya into the window. Looking out, he realized he’d missed his stop. Not by much. He hurried for the door and ran down the cobbled streets toward the university.
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.”