Hopeful Monsters (6 page)

Perhaps I have not always been fair about my mother: I have so many fewer memories of her than of my father. Or I feel guilty about my mother. There were many times when she was good to me, after all: she had sat up with me when I was ill; she had taught me to play the piano; she made for me the dresses in which I went out to the tea-parties of friends. And now here we were hand in hand as a family at the top of Wilhelmstrasse. Most of the crowd had stayed to jeer at the soldiers as they marched out. But I suppose the revolution or counter-revolution could never be a laughing matter for my mother.

The soldiers were like strange animals caught in a desert without water. They moved off round the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and into Under den Linden. There were glimpses of machine-guns in the wagons. From the crowd there were whistles and catcalls and booing. The columns turned left towards Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. When the last of the columns had gone round the corner the crowds broke and drifted after them. My mother and father and I at first stayed with our backs against our wall; then my father moved off in the wake of the crowd. He held me by the hand; my mother pulled me back by my other hand; she would not let me go. I was thinking - She wants to protect me; but I have been on so many journeys with my father! Then my father let me go; he went off in the wake of the crowd. I was angry both with my father and my mother - how could I be left behind! I broke away and went after my father. I thought I would just go round the corner into Pariser Platz and then I could say that I had been with my father and then perhaps I could go back to the safety of my mother: or I could be on my own. Then suddenly there were shots. I had got round the corner, I could see the Brandenburg Gate, I did

not at first recognise the sound of shots; it was like fireworks going off. These were the only shots fired during those three or four days. But then there were people running back from the direction of the Brandenburg Gate. Some were screaming. I stayed where I was because I wanted to find my father. There was a girl just next to me who was not much older than myself; she had been knocked backwards as if something like a tram had hit her; she had sat on the ground. Then she rolled over, holding her middle. The crowd trampled over her. Then my father came up and grabbed me. What had happened I learned later (there were photographs of this in the illustrated magazines) was that as the end of the last column of soldiers was going through the Brandenburg Gate the crowd, coming up behind, had given it a valedictory jeer; and the soldiers sitting on the backs of baggage-wagons had opened fire for a moment with machine-guns. And now there was the crowd running back to the safety of Wilhelmstrasse. I think both my father and my mother grabbed me at the same time - the one running back and the other running forwards - and then we were all going back round the corner to our wall. But my mother was once more shouting and yelling at my father. Then my father and I stood in an alcove while my mother went back into Pariser Platz; this was now almost emptied of the crowd; there were just bodies here and there and my mother picking her way amongst them like a bird. She knelt down by the young girl who was lying on her side holding her middle. My father and I watched her. I thought - She is like an angel, or a vulture. Then - But what my mother shouted at my father was: 'You murderer!'

The other incident that has stayed in my memory of this time (a bump from a corner of the maze; a nugget left behind in the sieve) was to do with the rocketing to fame of Professor Einstein.

The publicity given to the corroboration of the General Theory of Relativity, combined with the apparent need of the public for at least the illusion of a liberating vision, had resulted in adulation for Einstein but also a growing hostility. In particular there was animosity towards him on the part of some scientists in the Berlin Academy, who either did not understand what he was proposing, or did not like it if they did. They complained not only that his physics was incorrect, but that his theories were undermining objective principles about right and wrong. In particular there was a physicist called Lenard, a Nobel prizewinner, who led the attack

against Einstein. After a time this took the form of a crusade against what came to be called 'Jewish' physics. It had been a characteristic of German anti-Semitism, I suppose, that Jews were held to be subversive to objective standards of right and wrong.

These so-called 'true German' scientists embarked on a series of public lectures to try to warn what they saw as the gullible public about the machinations of the wicked Professor Einstein. My father got tickets for one of these lectures; he wanted to attend it so that, of course, he might be better armed to defend Professor Einstein. He got two tickets, intending to go with my mother, but my mother was becoming more and more distant from both my father and me at this time; she would spend two or three nights at a time away at her soup-kitchen; she was becoming increasingly involved again in Communist politics. When she came back to the apartment now she would sleep in the dining-room which had been rearranged to take a bed; my father and I ate and sat in the drawing-room. At the time of the shooting in Pariser Platz I had felt some kinship with my mother; it was as if some light had entered my mind about the prevalence of death. But my mother did not seem to want to take any notice of this; it was as if she wanted quite openly now to hand me over to my father.

So when my father asked her to go with him to the anti-Einstein lecture, saying that there might be a chance here of their joining hands in their work, she just said 'Take Eleanor.'

My father said 'Eleanor's too young.'

'She's not too young for most of the things you get up to.'

So my father said to me 'Would you like to come to this lecture?'

I said 'Can I?'

He said 'There's no reason why not.'

I thought - I still do not know if she wants to damage me, or encourage me, my mother.

I remember that I tried to dress up to appear as old as I could for this lecture: I put on one of my mother's hats; it looked ridiculous; I took it off. In the end I wore just one of my mother's shawls. The lecture was in the old Philharmonic Hall; there were boxes in tiers; there did not seem to be any empty seats in the hall. I suppose it was brave of my father to take me; many of his colleagues were there; they looked at me curiously. I think my father had told them that I was some sort of mathematical prodigy - which I was not. We sat in the stalls. The audience did not seem to be so different from that at a concert of Wagner's music that my father had taken

me to not long before in the same hall; the music had made my mind go blank; I had thought - If I were a snake, yes, I would be being drawn up out of a basket. Now I thought - Will this lecture be about Jewishness and non-Jewishness? I must pay attention: I have to study, after all, what is it to be half Jewish and half not.

The first speaker was a large man in evening dress who had a purple sash across his chest. He spoke about the Theory of Relativity being contrary to the German Spirit; this Spirit was to do with the Fatherland and blood and God, while Relativity was to do with atheism and decadence and chaos. According to him Relativity was also, in some contradictory way, to do with a highly organised conspiracy for world domination. The Absolute German Spirit, he said, if it did not take heed, would be overwhelmed by an alliance of rampant subjectivity and alien invasion. The man made strange gestures with his arms as if he were throwing stones. I thought -How long will it take the stones to go right round the universe and hit him on the back of the head?

The next speaker was a small neat man with a beard. He explained how the so-called 'corroboration' of the General Theory was anyway not scientific because it was probable that any peculiarities in the experimenters' measurements were caused by the deflection of light by the murky atmosphere round the sun. And anyway, he added - was it not significant that the theory of Professor Einstein had been confirmed, if that could be the word, by the British! This last remark brought forth a growl of approval from the hall. My father was sitting with his hair seeming to stand on end. I thought - But he will not shoot up and make some public protest, will he? Is it not best, in this strange territory, if we remain somewhat secret; then according to the theory will not these people find their criticisms coming down upon themselves?

Then at a certain stage of the evening there was a slight disturbance in the hall; heads were turning as if a wind were blowing them; there were people entering late and settling down in one of the boxes in the first tier. One of them, sitting at the front, even looked like Professor Einstein. People around us began to whisper; my father was looking up at the box as if he were indeed now transfixed by light; then he murmured to me that the man in the box was, to be sure, Professor Einstein. There was the dark halo of hair; the humorous look that seemed to be going far outwards and inwards all at once. This was the only time that I saw Einstein in the flesh. From the front of the box he bowed slightly to the audience; he

seemed to be acknowledging their whisperings. The speaker on the platform had paused; Einstein waved at him as if he were encouraging him to continue. The whispering in the hall subsided. (This was on 27 August 1920; I have checked the date; do you think it makes it more telling if I can say 'I have checked the date'?) Einstein sat back in his box. The speaker went on. He was suggesting what a dangerous and terrible thing it was to have no objectivity. Einstein was nodding and smiling; he leaned back and spoke to one of the people behind him; this person laughed. The man on the stage paused again; he seemed both at a loss and furious. I thought suddenly - But what of that crowd, those waiters, the people who jeered at the soldiers! Einstein leaned forward and clapped, sardonically, at the speaker; it was as if the performance might be over. Then my father whispered 'Oh don't overdo it!' I remember this whisper quite clearly: I thought I understood it. I put my head in my hands. Several images had come into my mind all at once: there was my mother walking like a bird amongst the dead or dying bodies as if on a battlefield; there was the girl curled up with her hands to her middle (I read later that she had died); then there was a photograph I had come across recently when I had been looking through some of my mother's papers, which was of the body of Rosa Luxemburg when she had been dragged from the canal some months after she had been killed. Her face was like that of a wooden doll, half eaten by worms. So I felt I understood when my father whispered 'Oh don't overdo it!' When the small furious man on the platform began speaking again his beard pointed and waggled up and down like a machine-gun. Professor Einstein seemed only to have his halo of hair to protect him.

human intercourse and the enjoyment of exquisite objects. He had begun one lecture with the words 'We should spread scepticism until at last everybody knows that we can know absolutely nothing'; and then apparently had been overcome with laughter.

My father also came from a Cambridge family but one of a more austere intellectual tradition. He was a scientist: his father and grandfather had been scientists - one a biologist and the other a physicist. My father was a biologist specialising in the field of genetic inheritance. There was a good deal of controversy in this area as he grew up; orthodox Darwinists were under attack; it was difficult for them to explain how evolution could have occurred simply through chance mutations and natural selection. There seemed to be too many coincidences required for the emergence, by these means, of complex organic forms.

I was an only child. I do not know why my father and my mother did not have more children. Perhaps too many coincidences have to be taken into account for the answering of such questions.

I had a bedroom on the top floor of our house, from which I could look down on what went on in the world below. There were the red-tiled roofs of the village; the tops of creeper-covered walls along which squirrels ran. My mother might be talking to Mr Simmons the gardener by one of the herbaceous borders; my father might emerge on to the lawn from the greenhouse where he had once kept the famous collection of sweet peas with which he had been able to confirm some of the ideas about genetic inheritance put forward by Mendel. These had made it easier to understand the evolution of complex organic forms.

I had been allowed the use of an attic room of our house in which I could set up my toys. At an earlier time in my childhood I had created a model village complete with houses and shops and a church; there were roads and a railway system that ran right round the room; at the door there was a drawbridge to allow giant humans to go in and out. It had seemed important to me to try to make a model of the real world in my attic; not exactly so that I could control it, but rather perhaps so that there should be somewhere orderly and exact in which I might feel at home. At the time about which I am writing my model village was still intact: but now I spent more time with my electricity and chemistry sets, which I suppose were like factories springing up and polluting the once pristine countryside.

Beyond a green baize door on the top floor of the house there

were the rooms of Mrs Elgin the cook and Watson the parlourmaid (what complex evolution of forms must have been required for a cook but not a parlourmaid to have acquired the prefix 'Mrs'!). On the floor below there were my mother's bedroom and my father's separate bedroom and their bathrooms and two spare rooms. There was a primitive bathroom next to my bedroom, which had pipes that shuddered and bubbled like pieces of my chemistry set.

The times when I felt most at home outside the fastness of my attic were when my father was away; he used to go on lecture tours to the Continent and to America. Then I could ride my bicycle in and out of the croquet hoops of the lawn; in the evenings I could stay in the drawing-room and be read to by my mother. My mother and I would sit side by side on the curved seat on the inside of a bow window; our backs would be to the setting sun; there would be the cool touch of flames at our necks. When I was younger my mother had read to me fairy stories; I think we went on being interested in fantasies and myths somewhat after a time when they might have been thought suitable for a boy. My mother had a professional interest in fairy stories since she was studying psychoanalysis and saw that useful insights might be gained by an analysis of such matters: I suppose I liked whatever was of interest to my mother. In particular I enjoyed stories in which a person went on a journey for the sake of some precious object that had to be found or some person to be rescued; on the way there were meetings with birds, magicians, rings, wells, animals; there had to be an understanding of portents and tricks, an answering of riddles.