Jelena planted her elbows on the table. ‘The woman is a mathematical genius. Her father Miloš encouraged her to study mathematics for a good reason,’ she added, now looking down at her hands.
‘For what reason?’ I prompted.
‘For the obvious reason she would need a profession,’ the woman snapped. Her tone was spiteful.
‘If Mileva had stayed in Serbia she would have stayed a spinster for ever. In the Vojvodina culture we consider a woman like Mileva completely unmarriageable.’
She gave what sounded like a snort of contempt. ‘She is ugly. Mileva would never have found anyone to marry her. It is a fact,’ she added conclusively.
Her eyes darted up from her hands and fixed on Holmes.
‘Perhaps you can explain to me why this Einstein married her. After all, he is a German and Germans consider Slavs backward. He is a Jew and Jews marry into their own. She’s four years older than her husband. Marrying a woman several years older is a Serbian custom but it is not a German one. ’She added, ‘And she’s a cripple.’
Her cold stare shifted across to me. ‘Why do you think the Jew married her?’ she asked.
I indicated I had no idea.
‘I could tell you,’ she went on.
I took a sovereign from my pocket and pushed it discreetly to her.
‘The reason is simple,’ she retorted, ‘and unarguable.’
She placed the coin carefully in her purse. ‘Because she gave the young Jew presents!’
‘Presents?’ I echoed.
‘Gifts.’
‘What sort of gifts?’ Holmes asked.
‘Shirts.’
I was confounded by this trivial revelation. Was this some Balkan equivalent of a dowry?
‘Shirts?’ I repeated.
In a high-pitched voice she burst out with two lines of a song, and translated them - spitting the words at us: ‘”In Banok and Bjelopavlice - she called to everyone. To everyone she gave a shirt”.’
Heads swung round. Jelena’s grey eyes turned almost black. With an abrupt movement she stood up, the chair scraping away from the table.
She said in a harsh tone, ‘I have work to do. You must excuse me. I have told you everything I wish to. We have a saying zaklela se zemlja raju da se tajne sve saznaju - the Earth pledged to Paradise that all secrets will be revealed. May you have a pleasant stay in my country and a safe return journey to your homeland.’
The meeting had come to an abrupt and disturbing end.
Over dinner at the hotel I looked at Holmes despondently.
‘A shirt,’ I repeated. ‘We don’t seem to be getting anywhere, do we?’
‘There are certainly difficulties,’ Holmes agreed. ‘We are in the Balkans, dear fellow. We must conduct our affairs according to the precept of the Iron Duke- the whole art of war consists of guessing what’s at the other side of the hill. And now, my dear Watson, since the official records reveal nothing, we must look elsewhere.’
I reminded him that Dr. Herdlitzschke had suggested a check of hospital records. An exceptionally virulent Scarlet Fever epidemic had ravaged the region in the summer of 1903. Four hundred of Novi-Sad’s one thousand children died from that cause alone that year. The Doctor had patrolled hospital wards crammed with dead or dying children, their pulses racing, tongues bright strawberry red, throats a deep crimson.
Another day dawned. We left the hotel and hailed a cab. I showed the cabbie the address of the section for children’s contagious diseases at the Hospital St. László. As I sank back with relief in the familiar cool interior of a Hansom cab, I remarked,
‘What would we do without the Hansom! They say there are 7500 of them in London alone, and many more in Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and New York.’
Holmes grunted. At the St. László two bored-looking hospital receptionists barely raised their heads at our arrival. Thirty seconds passed in silence, forty, then fifty. One minute. Two. Holmes fingered a Maria Theresa thaler. The heavy coin had an electrifying effect. What was it we wished to know? An animated conversation between the women ensued. To no avail. Some of the records had gone up in flames a few days before. We could try elsewhere, for example the Rókus Kórház, the hospital for poor people. It included a children’s wing for contagious diseases. We discovered nothing there either.
Noting our frustration, the staff at the Rókus Kórház suggested our inability to find any information on this Lieserl might mean she was born ‘Stupid’. There was a special place for such luckless creatures, the State asylum Országos Pszichiátria és Neurológia Intézet. Another cab took us to the asylum. The walls of the dim corridors were crumbling, the floors dirty and cracked. Large damp patches threatened to bring down the ceiling. The stench of mildew was overpowering. The production of another thaler led us to the inner sanctum which turned out to be a dank cellar scattered with crates of old case records and a box of photographs.
A listless woman clerk with long black hair and kohl eyeliner pulled out a ledger listing female patients for the last seven years. The book contained thirteen names, date of arrival, condition (mostly ‘stupidity’, ‘severe stupidity’ or ‘mongoloid idiot’), date of departure or, more often, death. But - no mention of a Lieserl. The clerk closed the sad book. She advised us to pursue our quest among the records at the Wolf Valley Cemetery in District X11.
This time we waved down a Fijaker. The black leather top smelt of the cow it had been until recently. At the cemetery an elderly gravedigger told us that if graves were not paid for year by year the remains were exhumed and placed in a nearby charnel house or disposed of in a garbage heap. Yes, he had dug up and thrown a lot of children’s bones on the heap. Were there any headstones with the name Lieserl? He shrugged. Gravestones for children were not the custom in Serbia. Unchristened children were put in a box and buried at the edge of the cemetery. Sometimes there would be small wooden crosses but they disintegrated in one or two severe winters.
‘You might go to see Father Magyar,’ he advised. ‘He is a priest of the Orthodox Church. He has records of adoptions and children with disabilities.’ The grave-digger accepted a coin gratefully and resumed work on an infant’s half-dug grave, already fourth in line of a further two dozen or more marked out.
The visit to Father Magyar proved equally fruitless. We heard then that a long-standing girlfriend of Mileva called Desana Tapavica was now married to a Dr. Emil Bala, Novi-Sad’s mayor. The mayor received us and told us nothing. The wife refused to meet us. I paid for a search through Politika and other Serbian newspapers. More days passed. We were told Lieserl was the name of an infant who had been christened in the ancient Kovilj Monastery situated between Novi-Sad and Titel. To get to the monastery we bumped along dusty, pot-holed roads, among pale ochre houses with lace-curtained windows and brown wooden shutters. Despite spending hours with a monk searching through every record in the archives, we found nothing. In this strange Serbian world we were out of our depth. Holmes became more and more terse. At home in England, among the coiners and smashers and cheque sharps of London’s underworld, my comrade’s every word, his every glance suggested he knew something you didn’t, some secret which would give him the eternal upper hand - but here, in the Balkans...
We had arranged for our post to await collection at the principal Post Office. The sole letter was from the bank robber John Clay. He mockingly signed himself with the initials of his former alias, Vincent Spaulding.