Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

This time she knew just how to fit her hands into his armpits. “So what is it you do, exactly?” she asked. When he hesitated, she said, “I did a couple of years of graduate work in biochemistry, you know. It’s not like I can’t understand.”

“I know that,” he said. “But I’m more or less retired now.”

“What about before?”

His whole long life as a scientist stretched behind him, inexplicable to the young. He tried to skim over it quickly. “In Kraków,” he said, “where I went to university, I was trained as a physical chemist specializing in polymers. I went to England, just before the Second World War”—he looked at her open, earnest face, and skipped over all that painful history, all those desperate choices—”and after I’d been there a little while I was recruited to work on a secret project to develop artificial rubber. Then I studied alpha helices and similar structures in polymers, and then did some fiber-diffraction work on proteins. Once I gave up running a lab I started doing more theoretical work. Thought experiments. Do you know much thermodynamics?”

“Enough to get by,” she said. “But it’s not my strong point.”

“I like to think about the thermodynamics of surfaces, and the folding of globular proteins. The buried residues inside the assembly and all the rest. There are a set of equations—”

But Bianca shook her head. “Your bad luck,” she said. “I’m probably the only person here who can’t follow your math.”

“I can show you something,” he said. “Something that will make you understand at once.”

“Yes?” she said. She was, she realized, wonderfully, happily drunk. Her companion reached into his magic bag once more.

“More vodka?” she said. “I could do another shot.”

The paper cups were soft-edged and crumpled now, but he straightened them and filled them before delving again in his capacious bag. Sometimes, when he traveled to foreign countries, his audiences were so diverse that he had to bring the level of his standard lecture down a notch, use visual aids so the biologists could grasp what he was saying as well as the biochemists and biophysicists. Here at the institute, where the staff prided themselves on their mathematical sophistication, he hadn’t had to use the toys he always carried. But now his hand found the coil of copper wire and the little plastic bottle.

“Perhaps,” he said, “if there was a way we could get a bowl of water?”

Bianca pointed at the basin just below them. “Right here.”

Had he not had so much zubrowka he might have considered more closely the relationship between the limpid water in the basin and the tiny stream trickling from the hollow bamboo. But he looked at the small pool and the eager, beautiful girl beside him, and without further thought he opened the bottle and poured some solution into the basin. From the wire he quickly fashioned several simple polygons. “Watch,” he said.

The voices from the patio faded, the ferns waved gently, her vision narrowed until she saw only his hands, the basin, the rocks where they sat. He dipped a wire shape in the basin and blew a large bubble; then another, which he fastened to the first. More wire forms, more bubbles, more joinings — and before her, trembling gently in the air, rose a complicated structure supported by almost nothing.

“See where the faces join?” he said. “Those shapes the film makes as the faces join other faces?” He launched into an explanation of molecular interactions that seemed simplistic to him, incomprehensible to her. “You see,” he said, “what a clear visual demonstration this is of the nature of surface tension. I stumbled on this some years ago, blowing soap bubbles for a friend’s grandchildren.”

“That was soap?” she said. “What you put in the water?”

“Not exactly — the film it makes isn’t sturdy enough. There’s glycerine in here, some other things …” He added two more bubbles to his airy construction.

There was a theory behind all this, Bianca knew. An idea that this growing structure of soap film and wire exemplified; at this rarefied gathering, only she was incapable of grasping what he was trying to explain. Yet as she sat in the blue air, the bubble structure elongating while he expounded on his ideas, she felt almost purely happy. Soon she’d have to leave this place. Although she was closer to Rose than to anyone else in the world, so close they sometimes seemed to share a soul, they couldn’t seem to get along now. At night, lying in Rose’s tiny apartment, she could feel the fierceness of Rose’s desire that she go back to school and continue the work they’d shared since their father gave them their first chemistry set. Or, if she refused to do that, that she leave Rose alone. Coming here had been a bad mistake.

Soon her whole life would change. But at that moment, sitting on the rocks with Krzysztof, she felt as if he’d led her to a castle from which she’d been barred, opened the front door with a flourish and then gaily flung open other doors one by one. The rooms were filled with sunlight and treasure. And although they were rooms she’d given up, rooms that from now on would belong to Rose and not her, this moment of remembering that they existed comforted her like balm.

She said, “I had a grandfather who did wonderful tricks. Maybe not as good as this but still, you would have liked him. He was from your part of the world, I think. I mean the part where you came from originally.”

“He was Polish?” Krzysztof said eagerly. That she equated him with her grandfather was something he wouldn’t think about now. “You have Polish blood?”

“Sort of,” she said. “Not exactly. I’m not sure. Our grandfather’s name was Leo Marburg, and the story in our family goes that he had a German name but was born and raised in Poland, near some big forest somewhere. Or maybe it was Lithuania. But somehow he ended up in the Ukraine, trying to establish vineyards there just before the revolution. And then — this is all confused, my mother told me these stories when I was little — he came to New York, and he worked as a janitor until he got sick and had to go live in the mountains. When he got better he found a job with one of the big wineries on the Finger Lakes.”

“What are Finger Lakes?”

“Some long skinny lakes all next to each other, out in western New York, where I grew up. The glaciers made them. It’s a good place to grow grapes. When he’d saved enough money he bought some land of his own, and established the winery that my father still runs. I know a lot about making wine. Grandpa Leo was still alive when Rose and I were tiny, and he used to bring us down into the corner of the cellar where he had his lab and show us all sorts of apparatus. The smells — it was like an alchemist’s cave.”

It was astounding, Krzysztof thought. What she left out, what she didn’t seem to know. That Leo might have been hardly older than him, if he were still alive; what did it mean, that he’d made his way here, worked as a laborer but then reestablished himself and his real life?

“So was he German, really?” he asked. “Or Russian, or Polish …?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “He died when I was five or so, before I could ask him anything. Most of what I know about him my mother told me, and she died when Rose and I were still girls. I don’t know much history, I guess. My own or anyone else’s.”

How could she tell him about her mother, whom she still missed every day? And talked with, sometimes, although this was another point over which she and Rose quarreled bitterly. She felt a sudden sharp longing for her sister and craned her head toward the crowd behind her, but Rose, who was talking with Vivek, had her back to them. “It’s because of Grandpa Leo,” Bianca said, “that I studied biochemistry in the first place. Because of him and my father and the winery.”