The Sun Chemist (5 page)

The process depended on a bacterium that he had isolated and in countless experiments improved,
Clostridium acetobutylicum weizmann
. It worked on starch-containing products, and the method he had perfected demanded large quantities of maize. When U-boat warfare interrupted overseas supplies, he switched to horse chestnuts in Britain, and the process crossed the Atlantic to be employed on Canadian maize. A plant was taken over in Toronto, and soon turning out acetone; and when the United States entered the war, the process was also adopted there, at two big distilleries in Terre Haute, Indiana. His operations had spread to Asia before the war ended; but by that time he had transferred his energies.

While he had been keeping the Navy’s guns firing, the Army’s were blowing the Turks out of their old Ottoman Empire, which
included Palestine. The wartime coalition government was headed by Lloyd George, very keen on his Old Testament, and the Foreign Secretary was Mr A. J. Balfour, whose mind had been so enlarged on the Jewish question in 1906. Weizmann became most tremendously busy. He had never ceased to be active in Zionism, had attended all the big prewar European conferences. But now the war had cut off the European societies, and from being a well-fancied middleweight in the movement he had become its senior statesman. Much negotiation brought about the Balfour Declaration, which declared: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine’; and while his ancient sparring partners Lenin and Trotsky were raising hell making their
incredible
dream come true in Russia, Chaimchik sped off to Palestine to attend to his.

He found fighting still going on, but lost no time in getting down to his first scheme, a project planned more than half his life, the laying of a cornerstone for a Hebrew University in
Jerusalem
. He invited the victorious General Allenby to the ceremony, and, recalling the prophetic utterance that the Word should go forth from Jerusalem, Allenby was both happy and moved. Gunfire could still be heard rolling in the Jerusalem hills while the future center of learning was founded, and
everybody
was very moved.

But things were moving everywhere, and in a variety of directions. On the scientific front, acetone was phasing out, and was anyway being produced as a by-product of the rising petroleum industry. Keeping pace with the petroleum industry was the rising automobile industry. The automobiles needed painting, and mass-production methods required fast-drying varnishes. The best solvent was found to come from Chaimchik’s butyl alcohol, which Professor Perkin had advised him to pour down the sink – still obtainable and in large quantities, by his patent method.

He let his patent agents attend to that one, together with Commercial Solvents, and threw himself into politics.

He was the leader of world Zionism, the builder-up of the national home, the settler of the people in it, the raiser of the
money to do the job. The university was his pet project and he raised that. For the next thirteen years, almost every minute was accounted for. He traveled, exhorted, pleaded, presided; and in 1931, thoroughly exhausted, found himself kicked out of the job owing to factional differences.

I was sitting in his chair and staring out at his grave as I pondered this, his presence strong in the room, so that when the hand fell on my shoulder I silently rose and almost went through the ceiling.

‘Igor, we are going down to lunch now,’ Connie said. ‘And Meyer wants you to call him afterwards. He didn’t want you disturbed while you were reading.’

‘Mashed potato – wonderful!’ Dan said.

Mealtimes were rather Old World at the House; time had stood still since Verochka’s death. Luncheon was
served
(
although
served now in the morning room behind the kitchen), and it was served by Verochka’s old housekeeper, Batya, still part of the establishment.

It was served to the archival staff, Julian magisterially at the head of the table. He sat with so grave a mien I’d half expected him, when I’d first eaten here, to break into grace. He didn’t quite do that. He robustly dealt with what was before him.

‘It
is
nice,’ he said judicially.

‘It’s delicious,’ Dan said. ‘Well, you live in style here. Very high off the hog, if the allusion gives no offense to the lady in the kosher kitchen.’

His name was Dan Navon, and he’d published a best-selling book about Israel the year before. We’d overlapped for a few weeks on the American newspaper lists. He was now doing some work on the connections between Herzl – Weizmann – Ben-Gurion, counterpart of the Abraham – Moses – Joshua triumvirate of earlier history, and he was doing it in Connie’s room, which was why I was in Chaimchik’s.

‘Mashed potato is the stuff,’ he said decisively. ‘That’s right, Igor?’

‘Quite right,’ I said absently.

‘You will give us salvation through mashed potato.’

‘Will I?’

‘So Vava will.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Mashed potato. His stuff. He made the petrol from it.’

‘What’s the joke?’ Julian said.

‘Not mine. Michael Sassoon’s. I had dinner with him
yesterday
,’ Dan said. ‘He’d got it from Bergmann. The Vava papers revolve around mashed potato.’

He had a long bony face and an engaging smile; also, behind his glasses, a very intelligent pair of eyes that missed little. His corn-crake voice quite often came out with peculiar deadpan jokes, though.

‘They do, eh? Well for your information, old friend,’ Julian said, ‘there aren’t any Vava papers. There’s just a single letter
mentioning
Vava, in 1933.’

‘From the single letter mentioning Vava in 1933, Professor Bergmann has made a deduction. He is an investigator with the brain of one of the great detectives. From this one mention it was at once obvious to him that Vava had made a super petrol with an octane number of 150, and he made it from mashed potato.’

‘Why mashed?’ Julian said humorously.

‘Vava mashed it. I don’t know why,’ Dan said simply. ‘
Perhaps
you have to.’

The conversation moved on from mashed potato, but not very far, and when the meal was over and Dan announced he wouldn’t be coming back in the afternoon, I followed Connie ruminatively up to her room.

‘Was that serious about mashed potato?’ she said.

‘I don’t know what’s serious today, Connie,’ I said, and had a look at my watch. Two o’clock. Twelve in England. Worth a try. I picked up the phone and in about half a minute Caroline said breathlessly, ‘Hello.’

I suddenly understood how Connie had felt the other day. ‘Hello, Caroline.’

‘
Igor?
’

‘Yes, darling. Have you been ringing Olga?’

‘I gave her a buzz earlier. There was no answer. I came back to start again. What’s up?’

‘Well, when you get her,’ I said, ‘tell her to leave the letters there.’

‘You don’t want them copied?’

‘I don’t want her to do anything with them. She can leave them, for the time being.’

‘I see. I think,’ she said. ‘Igor, is everything all right?’

‘Well, it isn’t bad, really. It’s quite nice,’ I said.

There was a slightly breathy pause. ‘I just got in,’ she said. ‘I could hear the damned thing. What are you talking about – you don’t want the letters copied and you don’t want them sent?’

‘That’s right. How’s everything there?’

‘Well, how do you expect it is? It’s pissing. How’s
orange-blossom
land?’

‘It’s turned a bit gray and chilly now,’ I said, staring out at the marvelous day. ‘Well, then.’

‘Just a minute, for heaven’s sake. You do realize, don’t you, that she might easily have popped down this morning?’

‘I did realize that.’

‘Or that if she’s there this very minute she might not answer the phone, because she knows nobody will be ringing her at Wimbledon.’

‘That crossed my mind, too.’

‘Has anything cropped up?’

‘It isn’t really as urgent as it was.’

‘I see. That’s why you’re ringing me, is it?’

‘What would you like me to bring you?’

‘I’ve just been seeing Hopcroft,’ she said. ‘He’s yarning away, perfectly all right, only his eyes keep crossing. Would you like me to go to Wimbledon and tell her all this – I mean, on the off chance of her being there?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. Don’t do that, Caroline.’

‘Igor, are the Russian secret police after you or something?’

‘That’s it, darling. Connie says there are some stunning caftans around. Would you like one?’

‘Well, I’d love one … When are you coming back?’

‘The twenty-ninth or thirtieth. If you do manage to contact Olga, could you call me?’

‘Because it is so unurgent. I do see,’ she said.

‘Reverse the charge, of course. If not, Happy Christmas.’

‘Quite.’ She hung up right away.

I pondered this a moment, and jiggled the phone rest and got Meyer.

‘You didn’t bring it,’ was his gloomy greeting.

‘No, well –’

‘Okay, I heard. It’s serious. You’ll have dinner with me
tonight
. Today you will be busy. There are many things to find out.’

‘Chemical things?’ I said.

‘What else?’

‘But I’m no chemist. I haven’t the faintest –’

‘Persevere. They’ll tell you.
I’ll
tell you. Waste no time,’ he said, and clicked off.

‘Yes, well, our friend got it nearly right,’ Julian said with satisfaction, coming in at that moment. ‘I’ve just been speaking to Finster, who is handling the thing here. Mashed potato! It is a botanical species called
Ipomoea batatas
.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Finster says it is in fact a kind of sweet potato.’

‘Is he mashing it?’

‘To tell the truth, I’m not absolutely on top line what he is doing with it. You’re finding out, I understand.’

‘Am I?’

‘Meyer said so. Finster works for Beylis at the Daniel Sieff. Ze’ev will take you. Ze’ev!’ he yelled from the doorway.

A response came from below.

‘It is really a very simple problem of carbon chemistry,’ Dr Finster said. ‘There’s little of what you would call higher interest any more. It’s work, after all, from fifty years.’

He didn’t look very pleased with it himself; he was wearing a pullover instead of a lab coat, perhaps as a mark of displeasure. Some hint of the reason for it had been given me by Professor Beylis, on whom I’d looked in first. The Weizmann Institute is a very high-class institute, and like its peers, the Rockefeller, Princeton, M.I.T., and so forth, is interested in distant advance on the frontiers of knowledge. The hall of fame and the name of Nobel hang in the air. In this climate, teasing out some further application of an ancient process long chewed over by commercial chemists was like asking for improvements to soap powder: very small potatoes.

I was in Weizmann’s old lab; he’d worked here a bit soon after it was put up in the thirties. It was now Professor Sprinzak’s lab, and he’d ushered me over to the corner where Dr Finster was muttering at a small fermenter. There was that unsettling smell of a strong gas leak and of chemicals that had always instilled such dread on entering the school laboratory. The place had a cluttered, old-fashioned look: shelves crammed with jars, benches with retorts and Bunsen burners; numerous experiments seemed to be under way.

I sat on a high stool and looked at disaffected Dr Finster and his fermenter. It was a cylindrical affair of stainless steel,
electrically
heated. Tubes and retorts issued from it to a glass jar. In the cylinder was Dan’s mashed potato – ‘We first must make a mash of our raw starting material’ – and in the jar what seemed to be a lot of water.

‘That’s it, is it?’ I said.

‘Yes. This is the product of fermentation.’

He inclined the jar toward me and took the top off. Rather a pleasing and wholesome fragrance came out of the jar, not
immediately
placeable but strangely familiar, all the same. It didn’t smell at all of potatoes. I looked more closely at the absolutely anonymous liquid. Was this the secret stuff of life? He had been talking rather a lot about life forms.

‘Does fusel oil smell like this?’ I said.

Dr Finster placed his own nose over the jar. It was a powerful and useful-looking organ, and the end of it quivered delicately as he made his observation.

‘Yes. Very like. By no means unlike fusel oil. However, it is not fusel oil.’

‘No.’ I could imagine Winogradsky’s nostrils fluting excitedly over it seventy years ago, and Weizmann’s, more critically and subtly, a few years later. ‘What happens to it now?’ I said.

‘What happens to it is whatever one wants to happen. It is a very basic substance,’ Dr Finster said wearily. ‘I will explain again.’

I listened with more determination this time.

Organic chemistry was the chemistry of living or once-living forms. It was largely the chemistry of carbon. The carbon came in some way from the sun, and growing vegetable matter
synthesized
it into starch, sugar, and other substances. Animals ate the vegetables, and people ate animals, together with vegetables. But whether they were eating it or wearing it, making furniture out of it or burning it, they were utilizing the energy originally
supplied
by the sun, and thus participating in the carbon cycle.

Vegetable matter that had in some way got out of the cycle by escaping contemporary use had become fossilized. It was
recoverable
in the form of coal, shale, peat, oil, and so on, and the solar energy in it was also recoverable, by scientific means. The simplest scientific means, as in the case of coal, was to put a match to it; it would then release, in the form of heat and light, some part of the original far more lavish solar contribution. This was a crude means of conversion, and Dr Finster said so.

‘However, if we are to regard this as fuel,’ he said, giving the jar a little shake, ‘all we have done is to accelerate the natural
process. We have taken vegetable material and allowed certain bacteria to break it down into alcohols and other substances. This certainly is what nature has done to make oil. But in nature it has occurred over millions of years, while here we have done it in hours.’

‘And this is what Weizmann has done?’ I said, falling easily into his preferred perfect tense.

‘Yes. He has done it with maize. He isolated certain bacteria – in fact, certain
Clostridia
– that he observed with the maize. And he has set them to work, by making a fermentation, to digest the starch in the maize.’

‘I thought he got acetone out of it.’

‘Here also we have acetone, and other substances.’

‘And what has Vava done?’

‘He has worked with
Ipomoea batatas
,’

‘I see,’ I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Dr. Finster looked at me. He looked as if he would like to help, but didn’t know how.

‘As between Vava’s batatas and Weizmann’s maize,’ I said, ‘is there much difference, Doctor Finster?’

‘With the result? There are differences. I have not found the great differences that Vava has told him.’

‘How do we know what Vava told him?’

‘Ah!’ Dr Finster went to a box file, lying on its side. There was an open lab book inside, with a ball-point pen in it. He removed this and took out a paper lying underneath. It was a photostat, which I remembered as soon as I saw it, of the letter to Fritz Haber that I had sent Connie months ago. There was only page 2 of the letter. Haber had been having difficulty
settling
his affairs in Germany. The government had imposed a levy on all Jews leaving the country. He had earlier pointed out to Weizmann that scientists who had gone to Turkey had been released from payment of this levy on the intervention of the Turkish government, with whom Germany was on friendly terms. Weizmann had not got anywhere with Ramsay
MacDonald
on this question, but he had written to the great
Rutherford
at Cambridge (where Haber had been invited) to use his scientific influence. He was telling Haber this. Then he went
on to various gossipy items. The ringed paragraph was in the middle of the page.

‘You read German?’ Dr Finster asked.

‘Yes.’

*

As to the good Vava, he is of course incorrigible. He has been working with me lately on the protein question, but has been waylaid by more basic interests. He has discovered a variety of
Ipomoea batatas
together with a paying guest which will give it, as he has written to me by every post, an octane number of 150. This will hasten to its destined place the food in question, but the unfortunates who eat it will not come back for more!

*

‘This is all!’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘What is the “paying guest”?’

‘A bacterium, evidently. This is Bergmann’s understanding.’

‘And you are working with this bacterium?’

‘No. How can we know what Vava has worked with?’

‘Ah.’ Light began to dawn.’ Or the variety of –
batatas
?’

‘We are working here with the common
Ipomoea batatas
.’ Full daylight set in.

‘You are not getting an octane number of 150,’ I said.

‘Nothing like it.’

‘If you had Vava’s batatas and also his bacterium, you might get an octane number of 150?’

‘But this is what he is saying!’

‘Yes.’

It had taken some time to get there. As Meyer had said, with chemical things you had to persevere.

The Chancellor was exceptionally natty that night, the host to a select small gathering. He had got the Sassoons and the 
Wykes, and also, to balance numbers, Professor Marta Tuomisalo (Shirley remembering that we had got on well together during my last visit). Conversation with this professor of advanced mathematics had at first been difficult, with much confusing talk of parameters, until I had observed, with reciprocated approval, that she had got a very fine pair of her own. Our
intercourse
had extended after that, and had been consummated last June at the Galei Kinneret Hotel in Tiberias. We shook hands very cordially and I inquired after her husband and two fine boys. Marta returned my kindly greeting and said that all was well at Helsinki.

Felicia Sassoon watched this with an observant eye and gave me a kiss. She worked in the Institute’s administration. ‘Well, Igor, how are things in your village?’ Her husband, Michael, was smiling behind her, and we shook hands. His
short-back-and-sides
gave his head the rather endearingly English look of a promising Oxford undergraduate of a previous generation, which he had been. He was now a rather senior professor on the campus.

‘Igor!’ Marie-Louise Wyke enclosed me in a warm embrace. Her slightly sodden appearance was unearned because she didn’t drink a drop. Her husband, the prospective Nobel Prize winner, helped in this equation, and he threw a bearlike arm round me, the other holding his glass, while greeting me in Russian. He had spent a year in Moscow and liked to air his bits of the tongue.

All of this was very convivial and a happy party ensued.

After it, Meyer took me to one side. ‘What is this son of a bitch of yours gabbing all over London? Doesn’t he know what the oil interests are doing to us?’

‘What are the oil interests doing to us?’

‘My God, we have here a clear breakthrough. Oil can be available to any country that wants it! Cheaply. Cheaper than those bastards are blackmailing everybody into paying. We have something of inestimable advantage to the world. We will not take from them a cent! We will freely make available the
knowledge
. It is what the Chief would want!’ He always referred to Weizmann as ‘the Chief.’

‘Meyer, old friend,’ I said. He had drunk very abstemiously but I had not. ‘We have not got the knowledge. Nor had the Chief. He did not understand the knowledge. He thought Vava was making some new kind of laxative.’

‘He did not. He dictated many memos. Didn’t you speak to Bergmann yet?’

‘I didn’t yet.’

‘You’ll speak to him!’ he said grimly. ‘If your son of a bitch had only –’

‘But, Meyer, I’m no scientist –’

‘Scientists we have! It isn’t science. It’s’ a needle in a haystack they’re looking for. Igor, I tell you, it’s something tremendous. At the end-he foresaw what would come with the Arabs here. He foresaw the opening up of their oil fields, which they didn’t have at the time. Their asses were hanging out at the time. He wrote the most prophetic memo to Churchill. But this is old history.’

He’d been moving to the telephone, and suddenly stopped. ‘Goddam it. He left today for the States, Bergmann. This is why we needed – So it will have to be Weiss.’ He paused uncertainly. ‘He goes to bed early, Weiss. He is kind of an old seventy. Even yet not seventy. Give me Weiss,’ he said into the phone. He did his little shuffle while waiting, looking up at me from his
eyebrows
. ‘What did you arrange for tomorrow?’

‘I didn’t arrange anything for tomorrow.’

‘Weiss? Well, hello, for God’s sake. It’s Meyer. I have here Igor Druyanov, who wants to come and see you in Jerusalem tomorrow …
Druyanov
. The son. With regard to Vava
Kutcholsky
. Wake up there, Weiss, you’re getting old or something? Of course the ketones. Exactly. So when? I’ll ask him … Can you make it by eleven? ‘he said to me.

‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

‘Eleven is perfect. Very good. In the laboratory. So go to bed Weiss. You sound tired.’

‘You are seeing Weiss at eleven tomorrow,’ he said to me.

*

There was some confusion at the car, which Felicia tried to sort out, unsuccessfully. They were picking somebody up somewhere.

‘He can walk Marta back to the Lunenfeld-Kunin.’

‘Why should they walk back when we’re going that way?’ Michael said.

Marta had got in the back during this. ‘So perhaps we will meet again,’ she said to me brightly, winding down the window, ‘during your stay?’

‘That would be lovely. We must do it.’

Good nights rang out cheerily. I walked back to the San Martin.

Caroline hadn’t rung back.

Next day I got the lot.

One of the stranger aspects of the discussion with Weiss was that he later supplied me with a transcript of it. I hadn’t noticed a tape recorder in the room, and there’d been no one else there. He’d suffered a lot, of course, from misrepresentation, had Weiss, and I suppose old habits die hard.

I’d seen photos of him as a young man, Weizmann’s young man, confident, febrile, brilliant, with a certain impatient pazazz to him. The pale triangular face was wasted now; fires banked. It had taken time to find him. Unlike Rehovot, which as a research institute had only a few graduate students, Jerusalem’s was a great teaching university, and most of its undergraduates were still in the Army. The huge stony campus seemed empty, just a few people drifting in and out of the buildings. But I’d
followed
my nose, and smelled the unsettling smells, and found people drifting aimlessly about the chemistry department, too, and at length found his office.

Weiss had spent much of his life in Bergmann’s shadow, had been involved in the tremendous conflicts that had broken out in the late 1940s between the President and Bergmann, until then the heir apparent at Rehovot.

The subject of the conflicts was enshrined in a
correspondence
, not for publication, and under most severe restraint, anyway. I’d had a good look at it, of course, before coming to see him. I wondered if he knew of the existence of this
correspondence
,
and after one look decided that he did, and moreover that he very likely knew of the existence of
everything
.

He was a small, hunched, elegant composition in grays and blacks, and he looked at me most suspiciously as he shook my hand and seated me. But in a couple of minutes he’d crisply put into perspective all of Finster’s plodding science.