Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

We wavered between laughter and anxiety. Bruria, fearing for the general safety, took the lamp from his hands.

“Calm down, Professor! Don’t go looking for trouble!”

He patted his pockets searching for his faithful companion. Helen picked up the beads that had fallen on the rug. As she walked out of the room, she put a placating hand on her employer’s shoulder. Collapsed once more in his chair, he was tugging at the ends of his yellowing, tobacco-flecked mustache. Though his sagging features spoke of his great age, his eyes had lost nothing of their youth: two black stars.

“Unless there is a price to pay, courage has no value. Since I publicly supported Robert, I have had fifty more trench coats dogging my steps! And have you seen what the newspaper boys are writing about me? Thank goodness my Maja is no longer here to read such garbage!”

“You’ve been so brave, Herr Einstein.”

“What can they do to me, Lili? Take away my American nationality? 41Throw me in prison? It is the one good thing about this goddamn fame! It keeps them from doing anything they want!”

He lit his pipe and drew several puffs on it, which seemed to calm him.

“Poor Kitty. She defends Robert tooth and nail although they’ve dug up an affair he once had with a Communist girlfriend! What depths will they not sink to?”

“It doesn’t concern us, Adele! I hate this fishwives’ gossip.”

I swallowed the insult. I wasn’t fooled: Oppie hardly came out of this business pure as the driven snow. I was ready to acknowledge that he had helped us a great deal, but he had also played with fire. This parody of a trial had brought to a close, to his advantage finally, what the press called the “Chevalier affair.” In this time of anticommunist hysteria, anyone who was against using the bomb was considered unpatriotic. Einstein had publicly warned against the H-bomb during a televised interview. The fusion bomb would be a thousand times more destructive than the fission bomb. 42This statement had brought down on Albert the fury of every anticommunist and of their puppet master, J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful and long-standing head of the FBI. After working zealously with the military as the director at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had tried to put the brakes on nuclear proliferation. I had heard him discuss it with his colleagues around a barbecue grill. He claimed that the U.S. arsenal was already big enough to bomb Siberia into the Pacific — big enough to give our Red “opponents” a good scare. When the news emerged in 1949 that the Russians had detonated their first atomic bomb, a wave of espionage fever swept over America, culminating in the arrest and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were supposed to have sold nuclear secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviets. And just the summer before, with the witch hunt in full swing and U.S. forces mired in Korea, we learned that the Russians had set off their first H-bomb, less than a year after “Ivy Mike,” the American one. The speed with which the Soviets had developed a thermonuclear bomb gave further grist to Senator McCarthy’s mill. Those commie bastards had the gall to piss as far as we did! Who had sold them their new toy? Suspicion again fell on the Manhattan Project regulars. By posting a moderate stance, Oppenheimer drew fire. Edward Teller had never forgiven him for choosing Hans Bethe to head the theoretical physics department at Los Alamos. Teller had rolled up his white-coated sleeves and set to work digging Oppie’s grave. Robert was no plaster saint. He’d already named names, a common practice at the time, when ancient forms of inquisition were being revived. To cover his rear, he’d had to confess in later hearings, muddling his story, to having been invited, although he never accepted, to give secret information to certain “persons.” He eventually denounced his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor at Berkeley. The new commission charged with investigating Robert’s “loyalty” had quickly picked out the inconsistencies in his earlier testimony. It also probed his past leftist sympathies, exhumed a militant girlfriend and his wife Kitty’s ex-husband, a soldier in the antifascist forces in Spain. The Oppenheimers were predictably enough caught in a web of allegations. With his arrogance and his undeniable intellectual superiority, Oppie offered a perfect target for petty spirits. An excellent chess player, he had taken the calculated risk of positioning himself as a victim: now History would remember him as a martyr, not a craven informer. His darker aspects didn’t negate my affection for him, just the opposite. The all-powerful boss had his flaws too.

On that afternoon, it was still too early for nuances. Indignation was the order of the day. Anger kept our minds from being numbed by fear, but only momentarily, because whose name would be blacklisted next? Kurt had done nothing to be ashamed of. He lacked the soul of a traitor and had no valuable information to offer. Why would the Russians take an interest in his work? Yet given the demented logic of the times, no one was safe, not even Kurt. A simple summons to testify would have been fatal to my husband.

We sipped our cold tea, hoping for better days. I looked at the clock: it was time to go. I was afraid that Kurt would use the momentary silence to initiate a conversation of the kind he particularly specialized in: obscure and supremely irrelevant. He leapt at the opportunity.

“Oppenheimer’s trial is not the first of its kind. The great scientists have always been subjected to cabals by the powers-that-be. Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Leibniz …”

Albert hesitated a few seconds. He knew where this would lead if he picked up the cue. In the end, he couldn’t resist the chance to needle his friend a bit. Morgenstern made an effort to mask his impatience by draining his already empty cup. Lili crossed and uncrossed her legs in anticipation of the ordeal.

“I wondered how long you would hold out before bringing good old Gottfried into the picture, Gödel. What is he doing in this list of brave martyrs? Leibniz was never persecuted, so far as I know!”

“Newton had powerful political allies. He brazenly robbed Leibniz of the credit for inventing the differential calculus.”

“That has nothing to do with a plot! Newton was a horrible man. But I settled his hash, don’t worry!”

“And what do you say to this ? Certain works of Leibniz have disappeared from the Princeton library! Oskar is my witness.”

Morgenstern, embarrassed, nodded his assent. The university had acquired an extensive collection of the German scientist’s papers, but some of the documents were missing. According to Kurt, Leibniz had kept all his writings, his drafts and notes, for posterity. He couldn’t have destroyed the documents himself. Oskar believed the gaps reflected an oversight on the part of the catalogers, not a plot of any sort. My husband, eager to support his pet mania, would hear nothing of it.

“Certain texts have been secretly destroyed by those who want to prevent mankind from progressing in intelligence.”

“Who in God’s name would do that? McCarthy? He barely knows how to spell his own name!”

“Leibniz anticipated modern scientific research. He pointed to the paradoxes of set theory two hundred years before the fact. He even stole a march on my friends Morgenstern and von Neumann by developing game theory!” 43

Oskar had been the stoic target of many previous attacks; he took no offense at this one.

“Don’t try to sell me a conspiracy by the Rosicrucians or some other secret order. We have enough thugs in our own day and age. Politicians persecute in broad daylight now. And let’s be frank. The modern world doesn’t give a damn about your Leibniz!”

“The general indifference is further evidence of machinations! What I do is to encrypt my notes in Gabelsberger. You should too, Herr Einstein.”