I could not tell her that I had long since mastered that language too, after both Russian and Arabic courses at West Point. Or that I had inherited my linguistic skills—as well as my German—from my mother.
So then I suggested Lise Meitner. During my advanced course in the theory of science, Ingrid Bergman had described her as the greatest female scientist ever. Einstein had apparently called her “our Madame Curie”. An Austrian Jewish physicist, she had fled to Sweden immediately before the war, and there she was the first to comprehend the principle of nuclear fission—before being hidden away behind an obscure research post at Stockholm’s Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan.
Meitner turned down all the increasingly persuasive requests to move to Los Alamos and to join in the Manhattan Project’s work, refusing to get involved in any sort of military research. Despite that, the over-excited reports in the newspapers after Hiroshima and Nagasaki referred to her as none other than the “Mother of the Atomic Bomb”. The world’s press lined up outside the boarding house in Dalarna province where she was on holiday at this historic moment. Hollywood wanted to produce a movie about her with the title “The Beginning of the End”. She was incredibly well known at the time—and now was almost forgotten.
It was even said that Meitner had before the war worked out how one could build an atom bomb. While she was still in Germany, she had smuggled out the secret and passed it to the Americans. In the movie script, she was supposed to have fled with the bomb itself in her handbag. That was what decided her to turn down the proposal.
When I mentioned the name, Ingrid Bergman was more or less lost for words. “That’s a fantastic idea,” she said at last, “absolutely brilliant.”
Quite soon the idea appeared to be better on paper than in reality. The problem was not the German, which both Ingrid Bergman and I were able to understand more than adequately. Nor the fact that I, because of my other life as a special agent, could never get clearance for private travel overseas—and most of what was interesting about Meitner’s story seemed to be in the Swedish archives. All I had to do was to tell Ingrid Bergman that I had a pathological fear of flying, which did not appear to surprise her at alclass="underline" sensitive and talented young man that I was.
That problem resolved itself easily enough because Ingrid Bergman traveled to Sweden regularly to research in the Swedish archives—sometimes she was away for the whole summer—and she copied for me Meitner’s letters to friends and scientific colleagues the world over. It was then that she told me she came from a small town in the far north of Sweden, but that she had when young mostly worked as a boss’ secretary in Stockholm. Before she happened to fall head over heels in love and follow the object of her affections to the U.S., where eventually she began her studies.
The real problem was that there was so little information about Meitner that one could get one’s hands on. Almost nothing about what she had been doing in Sweden during the war, at a time when the academic world was buzzing with rumors about extensive research within nuclear physics, and both sides thought that the other already had a finished bomb. Or what she had been involved in for all those years after the war. Who she really was. Meitner seemed to have wrapped herself in secrecy.
Even the correspondence with her nearest and dearest turned out to be ambiguous and hard to fathom. At the same time as members of her Swedish circle were giving accounts of magnificent parties at her home, she herself was sending out stifled cries for help in German or English to her friends overseas.
So hardly a week went by without my trying to abandon my project. And hardly a week went by without Ingrid Bergman, equally frenziedly, dragging me along, pushing, urging, enticing. At times it almost seemed as if she were ghost-writing my dissertation. During our supervision sessions, which I recall like dreams, she must have persuaded me to keep going more or less against my will. The while calling me “my treasure”, as if we were in a relationship.
When I had completed all the theoretical courses for my doctorate, Ingrid Bergman gave me a present, a portrait to put on my desk in the office which I was then assured. It was a photograph of Lise Meitner in the laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. She is looking straight into the camera, wearing strangely formal clothing for somebody who is carrying out experiments.
But the striking thing about it was her face. Meitner’s mouth appeared a little crooked, as if she had had a stroke, which was hardly likely. She could not have been more than forty in the picture—and she was twice that age before her first stroke occurred. Yet there was something additional, a hidden membrane, which disturbed the picture. The answer to the riddle came if you covered up one side or the other. The right half was sad, undecided, almost sickly. The left one determined and open, with an audacious little smile.
That photograph provided both the title—“The Two Faces of Lise Meitner”—and the direction of my dissertation. That it should deal with the idea of having more than one side to oneself. And be-neath the surface it would be as much about myself, my double life.
But Ingrid Bergman refused to accept the idea. What she wanted—and it was impossible to resist her: after our sessions I felt drained—was for the title instead to be “Lise Meitner’s Secret”.
I could at no time bring myself to tell her that I never really understood what Meitner’s secret was, or whether there was one. Yet in the end I managed to describe it in a general enough way, to satisfy Ingrid Bergman. So the development of nuclear physics and mankind’s inability to withstand its own scientific and military potential, how the whole impossibility became the only thing that was possible, the sweeping theoretical basis for my dissertation.
Against all the odds—and even though the style was closer to that of a literary essay than it was soberly scientific, since I was always finding myself carried away by the momentum of the thing—the dissertation survived its examination by an introspective and humorless exiled Bulgarian.
Immediately after that came the attacks of September 11, 2001. And then the summons to join the newly created team which was to save the world.
They also arranged my new double life in a very elegant way. At the same time as I took my place in Edelweiss’ team, they stowed the other me away in a research post with minimal teaching responsibilities at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. A gloomy early-nineteenth-century castle with pinnacles and towers, no more than a couple of thousand students and some surprisingly interesting manuscripts in a dark archive called Sister Helen’s Library.
Those who thought they knew me well—a few fellow researchers from university, the odd friend I dared have and had managed to hang on to—were told that I was more or less burned out after my work on the dissertation and needed to get away on a long journey, alone. I was given a new name, a new identity and a new appearance. Two operations in little more than a month, followed by a long and painful convalescence, in the gap between my dissertation and the new job.
During the year that followed, before I met my future wife at a party and the same evening went back to her place with her, I had also tried on a few occasions to contact Ingrid Bergman. Anonymously, obviously, from telephone boxes outside abandoned training grounds or somewhere in the desert. I had not caught so much as a glimpse of her since I had defended my dissertation. Nor re-read my thesis, hardly given it a thought. But I could not forget her, however hard I tried. The faculty and the university switchboard had both given the same answer. “Ingrid” had handed in her notice and moved on. No, unfortunately, no forwarding details.