A young woman with a slight limp wended her way through the crowded tables towards us. She wore an orthopaedic shoe on her left foot. A sleeping infant was tied to her, peasant style, by a shawl. Besso stood up with a welcoming gesture.
‘Mileva!’ he called to her, ‘Wir sind hier!’ He formally introduced the newcomer to us as Albert Einstein’s wife Mileva Marić-Einstein.
‘And who is this?’ I asked, pointing to the child.
‘This is Hans Albert,’ Mileva replied, laughing at my polite interest. ‘He’s our first son.’
‘We all call him Steinli,’ Besso remarked. ‘It means ‘Little Stone’.’
The new arrival broke into a pleasing smile at the mention of her child’s nickname. I studied Mileva as closely as I dared without being impolite. She wore a soft white cotton shirtwaist with a high lace collar. The nose was small and turned up, her hair pinned up loosely in a chignon. The large black eyes portrayed an intense intelligence. With her came the sweet and pungent odour of Tamjan, produced by the sap of the Bosuellia plant. It was a scent I remembered from our visit to the Balkans five years earlier.
She glanced around eagerly to see if her husband was on the point of arriving. Failing to see him she remained standing, looking down at Besso, a hand on his shoulder. He remarked,
‘Mileva, you’re looking very satisfied with yourself.’
‘I am, Michele,’ came the reply.
‘Because?’ Besso prodded.
‘You’ll see. Soon Albert will publish a paper that will make him world famous.’
‘How soon?’ Besso asked.
‘Soon enough,’ came the reply. With one more glance around the café she prepared to leave.
‘Meine Herren, I can’t stay. Michele, can you give Albert a message? Tell him he’ll be happy to know Rózsika returns to Novi-Sad tonight.’
She indicated a young untidy-looking woman staring in our direction. Mileva’s voice dropped. ‘My sister Rózsika comes to stay with us once in a while. Albert doesn’t find her very -gemütlich.’
Mileva went on, ‘My sister’s not very sociable. She refuses to join in.’
The sibling rested on a leg which also ended in an orthopaedic shoe. I knew from our visit to Serbia’s neighbour Bulgaria that such deformation of the hip ran widely in the Balkans. Unkindly, it had affected both sisters.
Mileva bade us goodbye.
‘The younger sister, ’Besso said, with sympathy in his voice. ‘Albert will be cheered by the news of her departure. They say the fairies brought Rózsika an illegitimate daughter, but soon they took it away. Albert says she makes his skin crawl just by her presence but he can’t stop her visits. Mileva likes to catch up on all the news from home.’
‘Tell us about Mileva,’ I urged.
‘She adores Albert beyond measure,’ Besso responded. ‘Last week I observed her catching sight of his back in the distance. Her face lit up. Never has a single look demonstrated such a womanly love as I saw then. She puts Albert’s career success infinitely ahead of her own. It’s an irony that at one time she might have had a better chance than Albert in gaining employment at the University. Her grades in physics and mathematics at the Royal Classical High School in Zagreb were the highest ever awarded. Her teachers wrote the word ‘brilliant’ on her report.’
His brow wrinkled. ‘Which makes what happened later the odder.’
‘Odder?’ I queried, my sympathy and curiosity alerted in equal measures.
‘Seven years ago she was admitted to the Physics Department of the Zurich Polytechnikum. She was only the fifth woman admitted to the Department and without doubt the first Serb. She studied not only theoretical physics, applied physics, and experimental physics but differential and integral calculus, descriptive and projective geometry. Plus mechanics and astronomy.’
He glanced around to be sure Mileva was out of ear-shot.
‘She was working on her dissertation on the topic of thermo-conduction when suddenly, around October 1900, she drops out. Without offering even friends like me an explanation, she returns to her family in Novi-Sad. She remains there out of sight, doing nothing, for many many months until she comes back to Berne to marry Albert.’
Besso described how, when Mileva was away in Serbia, Einstein worked day after day on the metric field describing space and time for a rotating observer. ‘He encountered mathematical difficulties quite beyond his ability to conquer. Time and again he shouted at me he was going crazy. He is certain that gravity and acceleration are one and the same thing. One day he came rushing over to see me. He was sure he had solved the problem.’
Besso shrugged expressively. ‘You can’t come up with such an idea without good mathematical reasoning, but Albert is Albert. He was so convinced he had the answer he put his theory in an envelope to send to the Annalen der Physik. Luckily Mileva came back just in time. She found he’d made a trivial mistake. Both the energy of the point mass and the energy of the metric field must be taken into account.’
He smiled. ‘Without Mileva, Albert would have become a laughing stock. Anything he turned out afterwards would have been scorned. For the moment he has given up on these field equations but I know he and Mileva have been working on something else of the greatest importance.’
Holmes was silent, but little darting glances showed me the interest he took in our companion.
Besso leaned forward.
‘People say her mathematics is why Albert married Mileva. Why else? they say. They point to the club foot and the grating Novi-Sad accent. But she is a wonder on the tamburitzsa and when she plays Brahms on the piano, ah! It’s like an angel from Heaven has taken control of the keys.’
Besso paused. ‘Mileva has such a happy personality she inspires her friends with happiness too. At least that was so until about eighteen months ago.’
‘At which point?’ I prompted.
‘Her mood changed. Something must have happened at that time. In 1903. Yes. Around September. They’d been married about eight months. I can’t explain it any other way than that she stopped smiling. In some way she seems to be holding Albert responsible for whatever happened. One day she was so alive -the next, visibly distraught. For a while she even stopped coming to the Olympia Academy.’
He gave us an unhappy look.
‘She has stayed that way to this day. The only time she has warmth in her smile is when she speaks of Steinli, her little Hans. I am not the only person to notice it,’ he added. ‘We all have.’
He caught my quizzical look, and went on, ‘We tried. I asked Mileva more than once. She would say only it was “intensely personal”. Whatever it was, she has gone on brooding ever since.’
He squinted up at a clock-tower. ‘Albert won’t be coming now. I must return to my lectern. Albert calls it “our cobbler’s trade”:3,500 Swiss francs a month is not the highest salary in the world but it gets me by!’
Besso stood up and thanked us for the bicycles. He led them away as a man would lead two purebred Arab stallions into the enclosure.
‘Albert and I will make excellent use of these wonderful creatures,’ he called back.
Wes at for a while after Besso’s departure. With no sign of Albert Einstein we left the café and hailed a motorised taxicab to take us via a circuitous route to the Hotel Sternen Muri. In the cab Holmes pulled the note with the word Titel from his pocket and examined it, brow furrowed.