The Air We Breathe (17 page)

From a tree an owl called; was he in love? Was that the name for this sense that, like the trees, the cattails, the frogs peeping, the geese arrowing overhead, he was springing back to life? Or maybe he was simply in hope, which might be the same thing. Something had been growing in him all winter, just now poking a green tip through the surface; a sense that almost anything might after all be possible. He felt—this astonished him—
grateful.
Not since he was a boy had he had time to think and study and look at the world and himself; and although throughout his stay up here he'd been sick, sometimes terribly so, and had feared for his body, at the same time these past months had been astonishing. Food, shelter, books, the forest, our Wednesday gatherings. The world, unclouded. Eudora. He drew another deep breath and made a modest plan, one step at a time. Study, tell Irene he was ready to work. Work, and then meet Eudora at the movies. There, perhaps…

B
EFORE THE NEXT
movie night, though, we had two more Wednesday sessions scheduled, which we were particularly excited about because Irene had finally agreed to take her turn. The rest of us had been flattered that she continued to come to our sessions; she was older than most, better educated than anyone except for Dr. Petrie, and she knew so much about so many things that we couldn't predict what she'd discuss. Poland, Ian hypothesized before that last Wednesday of April. Madame Curie, Kathleen said; we knew she worshipped the Polish scientist. Eudora, wedged between Naomi and a mute and clumsy Leo—he'd hardly been able to speak to her since their session in the darkroom, and he still hadn't asked her advice about his own proposed talk—wondered out loud if Irene might describe some of her first experiments with X-rays. Dr. Petrie worried that she'd mention their work correlating her films with the autopsy reports. But instead she announced something we hadn't even known she was interested in: the work of a German physicist named Albert Einstein.

In our chairs we shifted uneasily; would this be like our first meetings, when Miles had spoken so abstractly, and at such tedious length, about a subject that meant nothing to us? Right away, though, Irene made it clear why we should be interested. This man, she said, had changed our conception of time and shown that what had once been thought to be absolute was really relative. What could be more important? Here at Tamarack State, time passed so slowly that it sometimes seemed to stop entirely, but outside, she said—outside, where men in trenches were dying daily—clocks were ticking relentlessly and time was speeding down a giant hole.

We could
feel
this, she said—that time did not flow at the same speed for all of us, nor did it flow consistently—but until Einstein formulated his theory of relativity no one had articulated what that meant. Around us the walls glowed with the afternoon sun. Kathleen moved her chair so the rays wouldn't shine on her face; Ian moved to make room for her; the movement passed through our circle of chairs like a puff of wind through wheat. Irene said that while many of us might know the theory already, because she herself still wrestled with the basic idea she thought perhaps some of us did as well. Her violet-gloved hand swooped with her words and one lock of hair detached itself from her loosely pinned braid. Both Celia and Pearl, wondering when she'd tuck it back in, kept losing track of her argument.

“Einstein,” Irene explained, “published a crucial paper a dozen years ago, in 1905, when he was twenty-six and working as a patent clerk in Berne.”

Deftly she wove the strand of hair back into place, describing how she'd paid no attention to that work until, during her first winter at Tamarack State, a Hungarian physicist curing in the village had been sent to her for a radiograph. While she was struggling to get the best view of his chest, he'd tried to explain his own work to her and mentioned how much he relied on Einstein's discoveries. After she'd confessed her ignorance, he sent over some papers for her to read—but these, she said, had only bewildered her further. Yet the central idea was so interesting, and these days so essential, that she wanted to try to explain it.

“Time,” she said, catching the eyes of first David and then Seth, Olga and Sophie and finally Pearl, “is not something out there, something beyond us that flows serenely like a river, without any reference to us or our doings; it is not a fixed reference against which our own lives move. It is not background, it is not—

“It is
not
. That's the strangest part of what Einstein said: time is not a thing but a
relationship
. Things moving in relation to each other. All of us grew up thinking that if everything around us disappeared, our world and even the stars in the sky, time and space would still continue on. Einstein says that time and space would disappear together with the things.”

Eudora, rapt until now, felt Naomi poking her elbow and looked down to see a note sliding from Naomi's pad of paper onto her lap. Irritated, she looked back at Irene without reading the note but then felt Naomi's hand again.
I'm bored,
Naomi had written.
Aren't you?

Eudora frowned, slid the note into her pocket, and turned away, only to find herself caught in Leo's gaze. Him on her right, Naomi on her left; where was a person to find any peace? Already she'd begun to fret about agreeing to meet Leo for movie night. Standing there in Irene's laboratory, his chest revealed on the film they'd made, he'd seemed truly transparent. Nowhere had she seen a speck of interest in Naomi, and when he'd dismissed Naomi's feelings for him so firmly, it was almost as if the feelings themselves had disappeared. But Eudora was surprised to find, in the space opened up by that, her own curiosity as to what might happen between the two of them. When she'd accepted his invitation, she'd been thinking of movie night as an experiment akin to trying out a new tube on the machine, which might yield interesting results, or nothing at all.

By the time she turned her attention back to Irene's talk, Pearl and Sophie had started taking notes. Sophie had a small brown volume on her lap, which Eudora hadn't seen before, while Pearl was writing on a single sheet of paper folded into quarters. Both were using the stubby pencils kept in our library, which we were forbidden to take. Before Einstein wrote that paper, Irene was saying, he'd worked on other problems, important but not revolutionary; no one could have expected what he'd do next. He'd written about Brownian motion, photons, a method for determining the size of molecules…

“I read that paper,” Leo interrupted. “In German, a few years ago.”

Our heads, as if they were attached to a single string, swiveled together. Miles, who'd been irritable all afternoon, sniffed and said, “German science is nothing to be proud of, these days.”

“But you wouldn't really call this
German
science,” Irene said, impatient with the interruption. “It's just—science.”

She turned back to Leo. Obviously he was ready to start the next part of his training, and the timing was right: there'd always been more work than hands to do it but now, with so many doctors and nurses heading overseas, her laboratory might well end up serving the whole village and she could use him right away. Still, she worried about the consequences of him working with Eudora. She'd seen the radiograph of his chest, and while at first she'd been amazed at the quality of the image and delighted to see the old machine so well restored, she'd also been startled to find Eudora experimenting without her. That the subject had been Leo concerned her even more. Twenty years ago, she and her brother-in-law, experimenting eagerly in the first months after the rays were discovered, had in the process of peering into each other's bodies felt a kind of electricity that had nothing to do with an induction coil.

“I was sure I wouldn't be the only person who knew of Einstein's work,” she said, seeing even as she smiled at Leo the small, unhealed spot on his left lung: another cause for concern. “In this paper, he's simply exploring the idea that time is not absolute but flows at different rates depending upon where you are and how fast you are moving.”

Someone groaned—Polly, perhaps?—and Ian dropped his head in his hands.

“I know it's confusing,” Irene said. “I don't really understand it either although I'm told it makes perfect sense mathematically. But the point is just to think about what it means in the most basic terms: that time doesn't move at the same speed for everyone everywhere. You know this is true; we all feel it.”

She paused while we murmured and shifted; unlike Miles, she paid attention to the way we responded to her words and she gave us time to try to absorb them. Sophie and Pearl both wrote down her last sentences exactly as she'd said them. Then she continued, “There's so little time, now, between discovering something and applying it. Barely twenty years from the first hints of the Roentgen rays through the early apparatus to the equipment I have downstairs and the portable units in France. Everything moves so quickly. My fingers”—here she held up her glove—“got lost along the way. The lives of my friends. Time was moving slowly for me as I lived it—I think it moves even more slowly for you—but very swiftly in the world of science. Who knows how it moves for a soldier caught in battle? That's not really what Einstein meant when he spoke of time being relative; he sees things mathematically and he was concerned with something different, the speed of light and the nature of energy. But in our everyday lives, we feel his ideas in a different way. Do you know what I mean?”

Leo nodded, as Sophie wrote
What
is
the speed of light?
and turned her book toward Pearl, who didn't know. Miles claimed that he'd heard of these ideas years ago and knew of several good books that could explain them far more clearly than Irene just had.

“Excellent,” Irene said. “If you have copies, perhaps you could lend them to those who want to read further?”

“They're at home,” Miles said. “In my library there. And anyway—”

But he didn't finish whatever he meant to say and Naomi, who had bent over her drawing pad, frowned at him. Earlier that week they'd had an unpleasant conversation about some committee he said he was joining because of the war. He needed a permanent driver, he said, someone he could count on every day; important work, for which he'd pay a weekly salary. When she'd told him he should check for someone at the garage, he'd made a face like a puzzled sheep. Her mother, scolding her after Miles had tattled, had said that the decision wasn't solely hers, and that they'd discuss it further when they had more time. Now, as his voice subsided, she said to him, “If you understand it so well, why don't you give the rest of us the benefit of your
wisdom
?”

WISDOM:
what is that? Like time, it's different for all of us; certainly Miles's wisdom wasn't Leo's or Naomi's, Zalmen's or Pietr's or Sadie's. Nor was it ours as a group. The dispiriting note on which Irene's first talk closed was a reminder of how easily things could go wrong even when we were all intrigued by a subject. Miles and Naomi squabbled and then Miles left, embarrassed that we'd overheard him. Naomi, after trying to say something to Leo only to have him back away, followed Miles, while Leo, as soon as Naomi was gone, moved toward Eudora. But Eudora was talking to Irene, and the sight of the two of them laughing gently made Leo feel so left out that the ideas Irene's talk had sparked in his head blinked out one by one.

And then a week later, Irene's second session, which might have been so interesting, went nowhere. Miles caused that as well, circling the room rapidly while the rest of us took our seats and then, before Irene could pass out the diagrams she'd retrieved from her files, brusquely waving her toward a chair.

“I have some announcements to make,” he said.

Naomi stood near the window, arms crossed over her chest, as rigid as the statue of Hygeia outside. Her dark hair, mussed by the wind, tangled with her collar.

“I have to miss these sessions for a while,” Miles said. “Some weeks, or maybe longer. New…duties have fallen on me, which I can't describe in detail. They have to stay secret. But I can't stand by while we are in such danger.” Flourishing a creased page of newsprint, he continued, “I want to read this to you. You might have seen it when it was printed, a couple of weeks ago, but I never know what you pay attention to, here.”

Bea came close to saying something sharp then; so did Arkady, but we caught ourselves.

“It's from President Wilson's war address to Congress. I want to point out this particularly important part, where he says ‘one of the things that has served to convince us that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot…Indeed it is now evident that its spies were here even before the war began.'

“That's been proven
exactly
true in the last few weeks.
‘From the very outset of the present war'
—the more I read and hear, the more I am convinced. There are a million German aliens living here, probably half of them spies. Since war was declared they've been streaming from our country into Mexico and they may be heading into Canada as well. If you've been paying any attention at all you will have read that the government has already alerted troops along the Mexican border to defend us against seditious acts. Troops have also been deployed in various states to guard power plants and railroad bridges and reservoirs. We have to be alert! Citizens have to play a role, and here, where we're so close to the border and where the forest provides the perfect hiding place for criminals of all sorts, our responsibilities are doubled—we must be vigilant.

“I can't say more. Others will fill you in, when and if that becomes appropriate. But for now I simply wanted to explain why I need to be absent for some time, and to encourage you despite that to continue with your gatherings even as you're watching out for anything or anyone unusual.”

As if, we thought, we'd stop because of him. As if we hadn't secretly wondered how much more pleasant our meetings would be without him.