Einstein's Dreams (3 page)

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffeehouses, in the government buildings, in boats on Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined.

On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no
one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past?

In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction?

A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly,
her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic?

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in
time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

It is evening. Two couples, Swiss and English, sit at their usual table in the dining room of the Hotel San Murezzan in St. Moritz. They meet here yearly, for the month of June, to socialize and take the waters. The men are handsome in their black ties and their cummerbunds, the women beautiful in their evening gowns. The waiter walks across the fine wood floor, takes their orders.

“I gather the weather will be fair tomorrow,” says the woman with the brocade in her hair. “That will be a relief.” The others
nod. “The baths do seem so much more pleasant when it’s sunny. Although I suppose it shouldn’t matter.”

“Running Lightly is four-to-one in Dublin,” says the admiral. “I’d back him if I had the money.” He winks at his wife.

“I’ll give you five-to-one if you’re game,” says the other man.

The women break their dinner rolls, butter them, carefully place their knives on the side of the butter plates. The men keep their eyes on the entrance.

“I love the lace of the serviettes,” says the woman with the brocade in her hair. She takes her napkin and unfolds it, then folds it again.

“You say that every year, Josephine,” the other woman says and smiles.

Dinner comes. Tonight, they dine on lobster Bordelaise, asparagus, steak, white wine.

“How is yours done?” says the woman with the brocade, looking at her husband.

“Splendidly. And yours?”

“A bit spicy. Like last week’s.”

“And, Admiral, how’s the steak?”

“Never turned down a side of beef,” says the admiral happily.

“Wouldn’t notice you’ve been at the larder much,” says the other man. “You’ve not put on one kilo since last year, or even for the last ten.”

“Perhaps you can’t notice, but she can,” says the admiral, and winks at his wife.

“I may be mistaken, but it seems the rooms are a bit draftier this year,” says the admiral’s wife. The others nod, continue eating the lobster and the steak. “I always sleep best in cool rooms, but if it’s drafty I wake up with a cough.”

“Put the sheet over your head,” says the other woman.

The admiral’s wife says yes but looks puzzled.

“Tuck your head under the sheet and the draft won’t bother you,” repeats the other woman. “It happens to me all the time in Grindelwald. I have a window by my bed. I can leave it open if I put the sheet over my nose. Keeps the cold air out.”

The woman with the brocade shifts in her chair, uncrosses her legs beneath the table.

Coffee comes. The men retire to the smoking room, the women to the wicker swing on the great deck outside.

“And how’s the business since last year?” asks the admiral.

“Can’t complain,” says the other man, sipping his brandy.

“The children?”

“Grown a year.”

On the porch, the women swing and look into the night.

And it is just the same in every hotel, in every house, in every town. For in this world, time does pass, but little happens. Just as little happens from year to year, little happens from month to month, day to day. If time and the passage of events are the same, then time moves barely at all. If time and events are not the same, then it is only people who barely move. If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

Einstein and Besso walk slowly down Speichergasse in the late afternoon. It is a quiet time of day. Shopkeepers are dropping their awnings and getting out their bicycles. From a second-floor window, a mother calls to her daughter to come home and prepare dinner.

Einstein has been explaining to his friend Besso why he wants to know time. But he says nothing of his dreams. Soon they will be at Besso’s house. Sometimes Einstein stays there through dinner, and Mileva has to come get him, toting their
infant. That usually happens when Einstein is possessed with a new project, as he is now, and all through dinner he twitches his leg under the table. Einstein isn’t good dinner company.

Einstein leans over to Besso, who is also short, and says, “I want to understand time because I want to get close to The Old One.”

Besso nods in accord. But there are problems, which Besso points out. For one, perhaps The Old One is not interested in getting close to his creations, intelligent or not. For another, it is not obvious that knowledge is closeness. For yet another, this time project could be too big for a twenty-six-year-old.

On the other hand, Besso thinks that his friend might be capable of anything. Already this year, Einstein has completed his Ph.D. thesis, finished one paper on photons and another on Brownian motion. The current project actually began as an investigation of electricity and magnetism, which, Einstein suddenly announced one day, would require a reconception of time. Besso is dazzled by Einstein’s ambition.

For a while, Besso leaves Einstein alone with his thoughts. He wonders what Anna has cooked for dinner and looks down a side street where a silver boat on the Aare glints in the low sun. As the two men walk, their footsteps softly click on the cobblestones.
They have known each other since their student days in Zürich.

“Got a letter from my brother in Rome,” says Besso. “He’s coming to visit for a month. Anna likes him because he always compliments her figure.” Einstein smiles absently. “I won’t be able to see you after work while my brother is here. Will you be all right?”

“What?” asks Einstein.

“I won’t be able to see you much while my brother is here,” repeats Besso. “Will you be all right by yourself?”

“Sure,” says Einstein. “Don’t worry about me.”

Ever since Besso has known him, Einstein has been self-sufficient. His family moved around when he was growing up. Like Besso, he is married, but he hardly goes anywhere with his wife. Even at home, he sneaks away from Mileva in the middle of the night and goes to the kitchen to calculate long pages of equations, which he shows Besso the next day at the office.

Besso eyes his friend curiously. For such a recluse and an introvert, this passion for closeness seems odd.

The world will end on 26 September 1907. Everyone knows it.

In Berne, it is just as in all cities and towns. One year before the end, schools close their doors. Why learn for the future, with so brief a future? Delighted to have lessons finished forever, children play hide-and-seek in the arcades of Kramgasse, run down Aarstrasse and skip stones on the river, squander their coins on peppermint and licorice. Their parents let them do what they wish.

One month before the end, businesses close. The Bundeshaus
halts its proceedings. The federal telegraph building on Speichergasse falls silent. Likewise the watch factory on Laupenstrasse, the mill past the Nydegg Bridge. What need is there for commerce and industry with so little time left?

At the outdoor cafés on Amthausgasse, people sit and sip coffee and talk easily of their lives. A liberation fills the air. Just now, for example, a woman with brown eyes is speaking to her mother about how little time they spent together in her childhood, when the mother worked as a seamstress. The mother and daughter are now planning a trip to Lucerne. They will fit two lives into the little time remaining. At another table, a man tells a friend about a hated supervisor who often made love to the man’s wife in the office coatroom after hours and threatened to fire him if he or his wife caused any trouble. But what is there to fear now? The man has settled with the supervisor and reconciled with his wife. Relieved at last, he stretches his legs and lets his eyes roam over the Alps.

At the bakery on Marktgasse, the thick-fingered baker puts dough in the oven and sings. These days people are polite when they order their bread. They smile and pay promptly, for money is losing its value. They chat about picnics in Fribourg, cherished time listening to their children’s stories, long walks
in mid-afternoon. They do not seem to mind that the world will soon end, because everyone shares the same fate. A world with one month is a world of equality.

One day before the end, the streets swirl in laughter. Neighbors who have never spoken greet each other as friends, strip off their clothing and bathe in the fountains. Others dive in the Aare. After swimming until exhausted, they lie in the thick grass along the river and read poetry. A barrister and a postal clerk who have never before met walk arm in arm through the Botanischer Garten, smile at the cyclamens and asters, discuss art and color. What do their past stations matter? In a world of one day they are equal.

In the shadows of a side street off Aarbergergasse, a man and a woman lean against a wall, drink beer, and eat smoked beef. Afterwards, she will take him to her apartment. She is married to someone else, but for years she has wanted this man, and she will satisfy her wants on this last day of the world.

A few souls gallop through the streets doing good deeds, attempting to correct their misdeeds of the past. Theirs are the only unnatural smiles.

One minute before the end of the world, everyone gathers on the grounds of the Kunstmuseum. Men, women, and children
form a giant circle and hold hands. No one moves. No one speaks. It is so absolutely quiet that each person can hear the heartbeat of the person to his right or his left. This is the last minute of the world. In the absolute silence a purple gentian in the garden catches the light on the underside of its blossom, glows for a moment, then dissolves among the other flowers. Behind the museum, the needled leaves of a larch gently shudder as a breeze moves through the tree. Farther back, through the forest, the Aare reflects sunlight, bends the light with each ripple on its skin. To the east, the tower of St. Vincent’s rises into sky, red and fragile, its stonework as delicate as veins of a leaf. And higher up, the Alps, snow-tipped, blending white and purple, large and silent. A cloud floats in the sky. A sparrow flutters. No one speaks.