Los Alamos (13 page)

“So many,” Eisler said, a low intoning.

“We knew, but we didn’t know.” They were still oblivious to Connolly, but looking at the photographs had drawn him into their circle. “Friedrich,” Weber said, “they killed everybody.”

Eisler put his hand on Weber’s shoulder, glancing up at Connolly. Connolly took him in for the first time—a tall, scrawny man with the pallor of laboratory duty about his face. His neck stretched unnaturally high, with a prominent, bobbing Adam’s apple and the slight discoloration of a birth defect to the right of his chin. Connolly noticed his long fingers, delicate and tapering, as if they had been formed, or trained, for precision work. His hair was uncombed, landing wherever it fell over his gentle face.

“They’ve won,” Weber said, almost to himself.

“No. What are you saying?”

“They killed everybody. It’s too late, don’t you see? All this work. We’re too late now.” He shrugged in resignation just as his wife came to the door to summon him.

“Liebchen
, come start, please. It’s getting late,” she said, barely sticking her head in, unaware that she had trivialized the moment.

Dutifully, Weber got up and shuffled out of the room, leaving Connolly and Eisler in uncomfortable silence. Still holding the magazine, Eisler sat heavily on the bed, cushioned by the heap of coats. Connolly stared down again at the pictures. Personalize the crime, an old journalist’s trick. Focus on one person—that man looking through the fence—to construct the story. But as he stared at the picture, everyone became disembodied. There were no people left, just those rows of blank eyes. Then Eisler let the magazine slide shut and he was staring at the bright color of a Chesterfield ad on the back.

“What did he mean, we’re too late?” Connolly said quietly.

For a moment he thought Eisler hadn’t heard, but when he finally spoke, his soft voice was precise, as if he had been carefully considering his answer. “We came here to defeat the Nazis. Soldiers, you see?” He smiled weakly. “This was our way of fighting. With our slide rules. Our tests.” His voice had only a trace of accent. “We were the little boys wearing glasses, not the big ones with the boots and the armbands. But we had the intelligence. We could fight with this.” He tapped the side of his head. “We would build a bomb to kill all the Nazis. A terrible thing, yes. But with the Nazis, anything was permissible. Even the bomb. They wanted to kill everybody. And now, you see, they have. What are we going to do now?”

“The war isn’t over yet.”

Eisler looked up at him, surprised at the sound of his voice, and Connolly realized he’d been thinking aloud, not talking to him at all.

“It is for them,” Eisler said, rising slowly and handing Connolly the magazine. “It will be over for the rest of us very soon. You think perhaps they have a secret weapon? A new rocket for London? Well, it’s an idea. Convenient, certainly.”

“Convenient?”

He took off his glasses and rubbed them slowly with a handkerchief. “If there are Nazis, we don’t have these inconvenient moral questions. But what shall we do with this bomb if there are no Nazis?”

“I don’t know,” Connolly said, at a loss.

“No,” he said, smiling. “None of us do. Sometimes I wonder what we have been thinking. Maybe the Nazis did that to us too. But you must excuse me. You came to hear the music, not to discuss—well, what do we call it?”

Outside, the music had begun, the precise lilting phrase of a Bach partita.

“German music,” Eisler said ironically. “Such beautiful music. You must admit, we are an extraordinary people. Or were.”

Connolly felt again that he was eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. Eisler might have been talking to Weber, not a stranger holding a magazine. His shy face seemed to be looking elsewhere, at some invisible sadness.

“Something always survives,” Connolly said, not even sure what he meant.

“Yes, we survive,” Eisler said gently, opening his hand to indicate the house. “Americans now. Oh, I can see you think I’m being sentimental. You’re right, of course. That’s very German too. But our culture is over. Perhaps it had to end this way—killing ourselves. Very German. The end of the world. But now it is really over. There won’t be any more music, you know. It’s finished. Only this bomb is left—our last gift. I wonder what you will do with it. Perhaps you’ll become Germans too. Everybody can become monsters now.”

Connolly felt claustrophobic, as if he had stepped into Eisler’s self-absorption and couldn’t find his way out. Los Alamos had struck him as some overgrown international campus, everybody’s project, but that seemed irrelevant now. To Eisler, the Americans, the Hungarians, the Italians, the whole polyglot community were simply spectators to some violent national drama.

“If someone has to have it, I’m glad it’s us,” he said finally.

The blunt pragmatism of the answer roused Eisler, and his faraway milky eyes gleamed with attention. “Why? Because we’re not monsters? I say
we
. I’m American now too. But perhaps I don’t trust us quite so much. Once, perhaps. Not now. We have all learned to be monsters in this war. I wonder, are those lessons we forget? I don’t think so.”

“Nobody ever won a war being nice.”

“Fire with fire. Shall I tell you something? I am from Hamburg originally. You read about the firebombing there. The number of houses. The docks. Even the casualties. But what was it like? Most people don’t want to read that. The fire so high that it sucked in all the oxygen. For miles. You can do the calculations with slide rules. So you step out of the house and your lungs collapse. No escape. You jump into a canal and you are boiled alive. They found people trying to cross the street. Their feet were stuck in the melting asphalt, so they just stood there—screaming, I imagine—until they burned to death. Thousands. What difference, the numbers? Everybody.”

Eisler glared at him as if he knew Connolly had rewritten those first dispatches, headlining the statistics of victory. A payback for London.

“We didn’t start the war,” Connolly said stupidly, a reflex.

“Mr. Connolly, neither did my friends in Hamburg.”

“That was an English raid, you know.”

“Now you are splitting hairs with a vengeance. Tokyo was all yours. That was even worse, if there is such a thing. What do we do now, argue over degrees of terror? You think there is a hierarchy of suffering?”

Connolly was quiet. “I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.”

Eisler sighed, his shoulders slumping in a kind of apology. “Forgive me, please. I’m not myself.” And he seemed then physically to return to his earlier manner, his face growing gentle and sensitive, a young boy too polite to offend. When he spoke, he was distracted, as if he were examining his own outburst. “My point. What was my point? I’m sorry, my point was not to disturb you. I suppose only this—be very careful when you fight monsters. Be careful what you become.”

Connolly held out the magazine. “We’ve never done this.”

“No.” Eisler’s voice sank in defeat. “Not that. So,” he said reflectively, “they make it possible for us to make the bomb. Now what else will they allow us to do?” He hung his head.

For the first time since he had come to Los Alamos, Connolly felt himself an intruder. He had expected the science to be over his head; what went on in those barrack laboratories was some new form of alchemy, too mysterious to be reduced to a set of formulas. Now everything that surrounded it seemed equally complicated and incomprehensible, a series of questions to which there were no answers. They folded back on themselves, contradictory, insistent, then got lost in vagueness, their scale as measureless as theology. Connolly liked a problem with a solution. He liked the crossword filled in, a murder explained. But what was happening here left him finally overwhelmed, and out of place. All of them—the gentle émigré scientists, the eager American kids—were living in a state of abstraction as high and remote as the plateau itself. He turned toward the door and the audible sounds of the music, something real.

People were listening politely, some of them with their eyes closed, nodding to the familiar notes. The group was amateur but competent. They approached the music with a hesitant respect, but at least they didn’t plow through it, and the music rewarded them, carrying them through difficult patches with the logical force of its own structure. The music leaped; the notes joined each other and rose with the lamplight to brighten the room. Connolly realized with some surprise that everyone already knew the piece—it was as familiar to them as a jukebox hit—and he felt again oddly out of place, the little boy with his face pressed against the glass. But the music itself was welcoming, racing along now, simple at its heart, and no one in the room was excluded.

At his cello Professor Weber, usually bubbly, was sight-reading with determination, so fixed on the page that he seemed unaware of anything around him. Next to him a young American in a busy V-neck sweater played with confidence, glancing up from his instrument to take the audience in when the notes began to answer each other. Daniel, Emma’s Daniel, looked only at his violin, his eyes sometimes closed in concentration, his movements sure and accomplished. Connolly imagined him as a boy in Poland—what was that like?—practicing on a rainy afternoon. A good boy, responsible. Or had he been chased home by bullies, his case flapping as he ran from the tram? Connolly’s imagination bounced with the staccato notes, but the fact was, he didn’t want to imagine Daniel at all. A decent man, a gifted scientist. Why go further? As he brought down his bow across the strings, there was a surgeon’s accuracy—the strength was in knowing where things went, not in being forceful. But what did that mean? That he was self-possessed, or merely that he’d been trained properly all those rainy afternoons? He had seemed diffident before, but now Connolly wondered if he had misread him. And then suddenly his eyes opened and Connolly had to look away, embarrassed by his reverie. He didn’t want to know him. It was safer to speculate about the others; there were no consequences to that. The fourth member of the quartet, for instance, with his bulky double-breasted suit, Slavic cheekbones, and pudgy fingers that grasped the bow like a lance. But he couldn’t imagine anything about him.

Aside from the occasional rattle of coffee cups, the room was quiet and attentive. Still standing against the wall, Connolly found himself lulled by the music. The sharp rising notes had played themselves out, followed now by the deep bass of a cello bridge. In the slow, moody interlude, Connolly’s mind went back to the magazine and then, like a succession of snapshots, to Eisler’s wistful face, the cocktail chat in the hall, Johanna Weber’s name-remembering trick, Emma walking away. He looked around the room, trying to match faces to the faceless columns of the savings accounts. They’d be offended if they knew; he wished he could tell them it hadn’t meant anything. He wondered how many had seen the magazine. The room didn’t seem to be in mourning, not even for the President who had brought them all here. It was instead a kind of time-out, an evening of friends and yeast cakes and music from before the war, an evening from that culture Eisler claimed had already disappeared. Had it? In this room on Bathtub Row it still glowed.

He was so used to the placid, almost dreamy faces in the room that he noticed instantly Johanna Weber’s look of quiet alarm. He followed her eyes to the musicians. Hans Weber was still staring at the sheet music but was now obviously not reading—perhaps he had never needed to. As he played, he was listening to his own music, a passage of such beautiful sadness that everything else in the room had stopped. Involuntary tears rolled down each of his cheeks, as if the music itself were squeezing him in pain. He never stopped playing. His face was impassive, not scrunched with emotion, so that the tears seemed to come from somewhere else, a sorrow so secret that he was not even aware of revealing it. Connolly couldn’t look away. A few others in the audience had now noticed and looked around in dismay. The music never stopped—it seemed to grow even lovelier—and the tears rolled quietly, unwilled. What did they imagine was wrong? Did Weber, bubbly sentimentalist, frequently get carried away by the music? But no one looked as if this were normal. Something had happened. What was the protocol? Offer assistance? Pretend nothing was the matter? No one moved, and no one, Connolly saw, realized this was a larger mourning, beyond all courtesies. They hadn’t seen the magazine. They didn’t know he was playing for the dead.

The room, cozy and warm, now seemed stifling, and Connolly fought the urge to bolt. He didn’t want to be in Europe, all knickknacks and solid furniture and mistakes past repairing. Soon they would all choke on tears and he would suffocate. Then Weber, sensing their discomfort, paused briefly, wiped his face, and joined in again on the next stanza, right on the beat. To those who had not noticed, he might have been wiping away perspiration. Connolly saw the others relax. Oppenheimer, across the room, stared at Weber in astonishment, frankly curious about something he didn’t understand. Eisler, his hands at his side, bowed his head. Only Johanna Weber, her eyes shining with held-back tears, understood that something remarkable had occurred. Out of either blind loyalty or a shared distress, her face reached out to Weber across the room, ignoring the others, and Connolly saw that he had got her wrong, so eager to notice her manners that he had missed the woman. He thought suddenly that he didn’t understand anyone here, their sorcerers’ jobs and their terrible stories. How many in those camps had the Webers known? And wouldn’t it be the same if they hadn’t known any? The room was too close, and he didn’t belong here. Quietly he slipped through the door, unnoticed, with the music following him out into the night.

He gulped in some raw fresh air, surprised at its chilly bite, and looked up at the sky. The stars were always wonderful in the high air of Los Alamos, but tonight they seemed spectacularly abundant, masses of them, laid out for the music.

She was standing near the end of the building, smoking a cigarette, huddled in a cardigan, her arms folded across her chest to keep in the warmth. The weak yellow light from the window kept her face in shadow. She glanced over quickly when she heard him, then turned back again, unsurprised. For once there seemed to be no movement on the mesa, no truck exhaust and grinding gears, so that the music poured out of the house as if it were being played in the open air. She shivered from the cold and inhaled, making the end of her cigarette burn a flicker of orange.