Einstein (16 page)

It didn’t work. Einstein again got turned down. “Riecke’s rejection hasn’t surprised me,” he wrote Mari
. “I’m completely convinced that Weber is to blame.” He became so discouraged that, at least for the moment, he felt it futile to continue his search. “Under these circumstances it no longer makes sense to write further to professors, since, should things get far enough along, it is certain they would all enquire with Weber, and he would again give a poor reference.” To Grossmann he lamented, “I could have found a job long ago had it not been for Weber’s underhandedness.”
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To what extent did anti-Semitism play a role? Einstein came to believe that it was a factor, which led him to seek work in Italy, where he felt it was not so pronounced. “One of the main obstacles in getting a position is absent here, namely anti-Semitism, which in German-speaking countries is as unpleasant as it is a hindrance,” he wrote Mari
. She, in turn, lamented to her friend about her lover’s difficulties. “You know my sweetheart has a sharp tongue and moreover he is a Jew.”
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In his effort to find work in Italy, Einstein enlisted one of the friends he had made while studying in Zurich, an engineer named Michele Angelo Besso. Like Einstein, Besso was from a middle-class Jewish family that had wandered around Europe and eventually settled in Italy. He was six years older than Einstein, and by the time they met he had already graduated from the Polytechnic and was working for an engineering firm. He and Einstein forged a close friendship that would last for the rest of their lives (they died within weeks of each other in 1955).

Over the years, Besso and Einstein would share both the most intimate personal confidences and the loftiest scientific notions. As Einstein wrote in one of the 229 extant letters they exchanged, “Nobody else is so close to me, nobody knows me so well, nobody is so kindly disposed to me as you are.”
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Besso had a delightful intellect, but he lacked focus, drive, and diligence.
Like Einstein, he had once been asked to leave high school because of his insubordinate attitude (he sent a petition complaining about a math teacher). Einstein called Besso “an awful weakling . . . who cannot rouse himself to any action in life or scientific creation, but who has an extraordinarily fine mind whose working, though disorderly, I watch with great delight.”

Einstein had introduced Besso to Anna Winteler of Aarau, Marie’s sister, whom he ended up marrying. By 1901 he had moved to Trieste with her. When Einstein caught up with him, he found Besso as smart, as funny, and as maddeningly unfocused as ever. He had recently been asked by his boss to inspect a power station, and he decided to leave the night before to make sure that he arrived on time. But he missed his train, then failed to get there the next day, and finally arrived on the third day—“but to his horror realizes that he has forgotten what he’s supposed to do.” So he sent a postcard back to the office asking them to resend his instructions. It was the boss’s assessment that Besso was “completely useless and almost unbalanced.”

Einstein’s assessment of Besso was more loving. “Michele is an awful schlemiel,” he reported to Mari
, using the Yiddish word for a hapless bumbler. One evening, Besso and Einstein spent almost four hours talking about science, including the properties of the mysterious ether and “the definition of absolute rest.”These ideas would burst into bloom four years later, in the relativity theory that he would devise with Besso as his sounding board. “He’s interested in our research,” Einstein wrote Mari
, “though he often misses the big picture by worrying about petty considerations.”

Besso had some connections that could, Einstein hoped, be useful. His uncle was a mathematics professor at the polytechnic in Milan, and Einstein’s plan was to have Besso provide an introduction: “I’ll grab him by the collar and drag him to his uncle, where I’ll do the talking myself.” Besso was able to persuade his uncle to write letters on Einstein’s behalf, but nothing came of the effort. Instead, Einstein spent most of 1901 juggling temporary teaching assignments and some tutoring.
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It was Einstein’s other close friend from Zurich, his classmate and math note-taker Marcel Grossmann, who ended up finally getting
Einstein a job, though not one that would have been expected. Just when Einstein was beginning to despair, Grossmann wrote that there was likely to be an opening for an examiner at the Swiss Patent Office, located in Bern. Grossmann’s father knew the director and was willing to recommend Einstein.

“I was deeply moved by your devotion and compassion, which did not let you forget your luckless friend,” Einstein replied. “I would be delighted to get such a nice job and that I would spare no effort to live up to your recommendation.” To Mari
he exulted: “Just think what a wonderful job this would be for me! I’ll be mad with joy if something should come of that.”

It would take months, he knew, before the patent-office job would materialize, assuming that it ever did. So he accepted a temporary post at a technical school in Winterthur for two months, filling in for a teacher on military leave. The hours would be long and, worse yet, he would have to teach descriptive geometry, neither then nor later his strongest field. “But the valiant Swabian is not afraid,” he proclaimed, repeating one of his favorite poetic phrases.
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In the meantime, he and Mari
would have the chance to take a romantic vacation together, one that would have fateful consequences.

“You absolutely must come see me in Como, you little witch,” Einstein wrote Mari
at the end of April 1901. “You’ll see for yourself how bright and cheerful I’ve become and how all my brow-knitting is gone.”

The family disputes and frustrating job search had caused him to be snappish, but he promised that was now over. “It was only out of nervousness that I was mean to you,” he apologized. To make it up to her, he proposed that they should have a romantic and sensuous tryst in one of the world’s most romantic and sensuous places: Lake Como, the grandest of the jewel-like Alpine finger lakes high on the border of Italy and Switzerland, where in early May the lush foliage bursts forth under majestic snow-capped peaks.

“Bring my blue dressing-gown so we can wrap ourselves up in it,” he said. “I promise you an outing the likes of which you’ve never seen.”
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Mari
quickly accepted, but then changed her mind; she had received a letter from her family in Novi Sad “that robs me of all desire, not only for having fun, but for life itself.” He should make the trip on his own, she sulked.“It seems I can have nothing without being punished.” But the next day she changed her mind again. “I wrote you a little card yesterday while in the worst of moods because of a letter I received. But when I read your letter today I became a bit more cheerful, since I see how much you love me, so I think we’ll take that trip after all.”
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