Servants of the Map (9 page)

Effortlessly she hauled him to his feet. “You want to go over toward the tables?”

“Not just yet. I’ll sit here for a minute.” This time he chose a straight metal chair with a scallop-shell back. He sat gingerly, then more firmly. A fine chair, he’d be able to rise himself.

“I’ll get you some food.”

He sniffed the air, repelled by the odor of charred flesh. “Get something for yourself,” he said. “Maybe I’ll eat later. But I’m terribly thirsty—do you suppose you could bring me something cold? Some water?” He remembered, then, the bottle in his bag. “And if you could find two small empty glasses, as well,” he said. “I have a treat to share with you.”

When she returned he gulped gratefully at the cool water. “Do you like vodka?” he asked.

“Me? I’ll drink anything.”

He reached into his leather satchel and took out the bottle he’d meant to give Constance. In return, Bianca held out two paper cups, printed with blue and green daisies. “The best I could do.”

“Good enough.” He held up the heavy bottle, showing her the blade of grass floating blissfully inside.
“Zubrowka,”
he said. “Bison vodka, very special. It’s flavored with the grass upon which the bison feed in the Bialowieza Forest, where my family is from. A friend brings it to me from Poland when he visits, and I brought it here from Cambridge.”

“Cool,” she said. “Should I get some ice?”

“Never,” he said, shuddering. “We drink this neat, always.” He poured two shots and handed her one. “Drink it all in one gulp—
do dna.
To the bottom.”

“Bottoms up,” Bianca said. Together they tossed the shots down. Almost immediately he felt better. Bianca choked and shook her head, her pale hair flying in all directions. He forbade himself to look at her smooth neck or the legs emerging, like horses from the gate, from her white shorts. He focused on her nose and reminded himself that women her age saw men like him as trolls. Even ten years ago, the occasional women with whom he’d forgotten himself had let him know this, and cruelly. How was it he still felt these impulses, then? That the picture of himself he carried inside had not caught up to his crumpled body?

“Take a sip of water,” he said.

“It
burns!”

“Of course. But isn’t it delicious?” He refilled the ridiculous cups and they drank again. She had spirit, he thought. This time she hardly choked at all. He tried to imagine her as the granddaughter of one of his oldest friends, himself as an elderly uncle.

“Delicious,” she agreed. “It’s like drinking a meadow. Again?”

“Why not?”

Around the left lobe of the kidney came Rose, a platter of chicken in her hand. She seemed simultaneously to smile at him and glare at her sister, who was caught with the paper cup still at her lips. Was that a glare? He couldn’t figure out what was going on between them.

“Welcome,” he said. And then, reluctant to lose Biancas undivided attention, “Will you join us?”

“I can’t just now,” Rose said. “But Constance wants to know if you’d like to come over to the patio and have something to eat.” She thrust the platter toward his face. “The chicken’s great.”

“Maybe later.”

“Bianca?”

“No,” Bianca said firmly; she seemed to be rejecting more than just the food. The sisters glared at each other for a minute—
children,
Krzysztof thought; then remembered Biancas earlier word.
No, prodigies. All grown up
—before Rose made a clicking sound with her tongue and walked away.

Her mouth tasted of meadows and trees, Bianca thought. As if she’d been turned into a creature with hooves, suavely grazing in a dappled glade. The joint she’d smoked earlier was still with her but barely, palely; this warmth in her veins, this taste in her mouth, were from the splendid bison vodka. And this man, whom at first she’d felt saddled with and longed to escape, was some sort of magician. Now it seemed like good fortune that everyone else had abandoned him to her care. They rose from their chairs, on their way to join the crowd and examine the platters of food. But the voices on the patio seemed terribly loud and someone was shrieking with laughter, a sound like metal beating metal. Chased away, they drifted toward the Japanese fountain tucked in the shrubbery, where Krzysztof had earlier crouched until Constance captured him.

“Isn’t this pretty?” he asked, and she agreed. Ferns surrounded one side of the fountain, lacy and strongly scented.

She peered down into the basin and said, “We could just sit here for a bit.”

“We could,” he agreed. His smile distracted her from the odd way his lower lids sagged, exposing their pale inner membranes. “If you wouldn’t mind lowering me down on this rock.”

This time she knew just how to fit her hands into his armpits. “So what is it you do, exactly?” she asked. When he hesitated, she said, “I did a couple of years of graduate work in biochemistry, you know. It’s not like I can’t understand.”

“I know that,” he said. “But I’m more or less retired now.”

“What about before?”

His whole long life as a scientist stretched behind him, inexplicable to the young. He tried to skim over it quickly. “In Kraków,” he said, “where I went to university, I was trained as a physical chemist specializing in polymers. I went to England, just before the Second World War”—he looked at her open, earnest face, and skipped over all that painful history, all those desperate choices—”and after I’d been there a little while I was recruited to work on a secret project to develop artificial rubber. Then I studied alpha helices and similar structures in polymers, and then did some fiber-diffraction work on proteins. Once I gave up running a lab I started doing more theoretical work. Thought experiments. Do you know much thermodynamics?”

“Enough to get by,” she said. “But it’s not my strong point.”

“I like to think about the thermodynamics of surfaces, and the folding of globular proteins. The buried residues inside the assembly and all the rest. There are a set of equations—”

But Bianca shook her head. “Your bad luck,” she said. “I’m probably the only person here who can’t follow your math.”

“I can show you something,” he said. “Something that will make you understand at once.”

“Yes?” she said. She was, she realized, wonderfully, happily drunk. Her companion reached into his magic bag once more.

“More vodka?” she said. “I could do another shot.”

The paper cups were soft-edged and crumpled now, but he straightened them and filled them before delving again in his capacious bag. Sometimes, when he traveled to foreign countries, his audiences were so diverse that he had to bring the level of his standard lecture down a notch, use visual aids so the biologists could grasp what he was saying as well as the biochemists and biophysicists. Here at the institute, where the staff prided themselves on their mathematical sophistication, he hadn’t had to use the toys he always carried. But now his hand found the coil of copper wire and the little plastic bottle.

“Perhaps,” he said, “if there was a way we could get a bowl of water?”

Bianca pointed at the basin just below them. “Right here.”

Had he not had so much
zubrowka
he might have considered more closely the relationship between the limpid water in the basin and the tiny stream trickling from the hollow bamboo. But he looked at the small pool and the eager, beautiful girl beside him, and without further thought he opened the bottle and poured some solution into the basin. From the wire he quickly fashioned several simple polygons. “Watch,” he said.

The voices from the patio faded, the ferns waved gently, her vision narrowed until she saw only his hands, the basin, the rocks where they sat. He dipped a wire shape in the basin and blew a large bubble; then another, which he fastened to the first. More wire forms, more bubbles, more joinings—and before her, trembling gently in the air, rose a complicated structure supported by almost nothing.

“See where the faces join?” he said. “Those shapes the film makes as the faces join other faces?” He launched into an explanation of molecular interactions that seemed simplistic to him, incomprehensible to her. “You see,” he said, “what a clear visual demonstration this is of the nature of surface tension. I stumbled on this some years ago, blowing soap bubbles for a friend’s grandchildren.”

“That was soap?” she said. “What you put in the water?”

“Not exactly—the film it makes isn’t sturdy enough. There’s glycerine in here, some other things …” He added two more bubbles to his airy construction.

There was a theory behind all this, Bianca knew. An idea that this growing structure of soap film and wire exemplified; at this rarefied gathering, only she was incapable of grasping what he was trying to explain. Yet as she sat in the blue air, the bubble structure elongating while he expounded on his ideas, she felt almost purely happy. Soon she’d have to leave this place. Although she was closer to Rose than to anyone else in the world, so close they sometimes seemed to share a soul,
they couldn’t seem to get along now. At night, lying in Rose’s tiny apartment, she could feel the fierceness of Rose’s desire that she go back to school and continue the work they’d shared since their father gave them their first chemistry set. Or, if she refused to do that, that she leave Rose alone. Coming here had been a bad mistake.

Soon her whole life would change. But at that moment, sitting on the rocks with Krzysztof, she felt as if he’d led her to a castle from which she’d been barred, opened the front door with a flourish and then gaily flung open other doors one by one. The rooms were filled with sunlight and treasure. And although they were rooms she’d given up, rooms that from now on would belong to Rose and not her, this moment of remembering that they existed comforted her like balm.

She said, “I had a grandfather who did wonderful tricks. Maybe not as good as this but still, you would have liked him. He was from your part of the world, I think. I mean the part where you came from originally.”

“He was Polish?” Krzysztof said eagerly. That she equated him with her grandfather was something he wouldn’t think about now. “You have Polish blood?”

“Sort of,” she said. “Not exactly. I’m not sure. Our grandfather’s name was Leo Marburg, and the story in our family goes that he had a German name but was born and raised in Poland, near some big forest somewhere. Or maybe it was Lithuania. But somehow he ended up in the Ukraine, trying to establish vineyards there just before the revolution. And then—this is all confused, my mother told me these stories when I was little—he came to New York, and he worked as a janitor until he got sick and had to go live in the mountains. When he got better he found a job with one of the big wineries on the Finger Lakes.”

“What are Finger Lakes?”

“Some long skinny lakes all next to each other, out in western New York, where I grew up. The glaciers made them. It’s a good place to grow grapes. When he’d saved enough money he bought some land of his
own, and established the winery that my father still runs. I know a lot about making wine. Grandpa Leo was still alive when Rose and I were tiny, and he used to bring us down into the corner of the cellar where he had his lab and show us all sorts of apparatus. The smells—it was like an alchemist’s cave.”

It was astounding, Krzysztof thought. What she left out, what she didn’t seem to know. That Leo might have been hardly older than him, if he were still alive; what did it mean, that he’d made his way here, worked as a laborer but then reestablished himself and his real life?

“So was he German, really?” he asked. “Or Russian, or Polish …?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “He died when I was five or so, before I could ask him anything. Most of what I know about him my mother told me, and she died when Rose and I were still girls. I don’t know much history, I guess. My own or anyone else’s.”

How could she tell him about her mother, whom she still missed every day? And talked with, sometimes, although this was another point over which she and Rose quarreled bitterly. She felt a sudden sharp longing for her sister and craned her head toward the crowd behind her, but Rose, who was talking with Vivek, had her back to them. “It’s because of Grandpa Leo,” Bianca said, “that I studied biochemistry in the first place. Because of him and my father and the winery.”

“But you stopped,” Krzysztof said. “Why was that?”

She couldn’t explain this to Rose, or even to herself: how could she explain it to him? The argument she and Rose had had, when they were working together on one of the papers that grew out of Rose’s thesis—how bitter that had been. At its root was a small kinetics experiment that Rose interpreted one way, she herself another.

“It’s so …
pushy,
” she said. The easy excuse, and at least partially true. “Science, I mean. At least at this level. When I started I thought it was something people did communally. Everyone digging their own small corner of the field, so that in the end the field would flower—I didn’t
know it got so vicious. So competitive. I hate all this hustling for money and priority and equipment. Actually,” she said, “I hate these
people.
A lot of them. I really do.”

“We’re not very inspiring in groups,” Krzysztof said. He pulled his hands apart and dropped the wire forms, disrupting the bubbles so that suddenly he held nothing, only air. Science was a business now, and sometimes he could hardly bear it himself. Yet he could remember the excitement of his youth, that sense of clarity and vision; it was this, in part, that had pulled him from Kraków to Cambridge. But not only this.

“Your grandfather,” he said. “If what you remember about his youth was true, our families might have come from the same place. In northeastern Poland is this huge forest—the forest where the bison live, where this vodka comes from. That might have been the forest your mother meant in her stories.”

“Do you think?”

“It’s possible,” he said, and he repeated the name he’d told her earlier:
Bialowieza.
Bianca tried to say it herself. “It’s a beautiful place.”

“And there are bison there? Now?”

“There are,” he said. “It is partly because of my own mother that they still exist.” The whole story swirled before him, beautiful and shapely and sad, but just as it came together in his mind Bianca leapt up from her seat and held out her hands.