The Sun Chemist (7 page)

I went through to Julian’s room, and after a moment or two was handed the phone.

‘Igor? Weiss tells me he explained to you.’

‘Well, yes, he did. He explained a bit, Meyer.’ My head was throbbing evilly. ‘I am just going through some papers he gave me.’

‘He has a further point. He asks where Vava got these potatoes in the first place, how he even came to deal with such things. That’s very interesting, eh?’

‘Well, it is,’ I said, ‘I suppose, in a way.’

‘It raises the question of locating Vava’s other correspondence – not just with Weizmann. Weiss says he had many friends in London. What I am thinking, this Joe of yours there, he could initiate some work in that direction.’

‘He’s in hospital just now.’

‘So give him a call.’

‘Yes, all right, Meyer.’ Lying in bed, with his eyes crossing, would not, it suddenly occurred to me, greatly interfere with Meyer’s own telephone activity.

‘What is it? You have some problem?’

‘Weizmann’s last memo. It’s very fragmentary and complicated.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, that’s the problem. I’m thinking about it.’

‘Can I help?’

‘It’s the last week of his life. He is saying strange, disjointed things. I don’t understand them.’

He was silent a moment. ‘So maybe I can. Come over here. That guy will bring you.’

I put the papers together, and Ze’ev ran me there.

It was really a very beautiful house. The contrast between its impatient occupant and the building’s own unhurried harmony, the natural wood and stone and the several dozen fine pictures,
was very striking; not more so, of course, than the many striking contrasts in the character of the occupant, whose taste it faithfully reflected. He had a splendid study in it, but his preferred place of work was a collapsible card table on the landing. There was a phone on this table, and another on a chair alongside. I took the phone off the chair and sat down. He was in a dressing gown of subdued blue stripes; natty as ever.

‘
Nu?
’

I showed him the long last memo, and he put his glasses on and carefully read it.

‘What prescience, eh?’ he said admiringly at last. ‘
Twenty-odd
years ago, he saw this coming. Who else did? “Where the economies of even the developed countries may be dependent in a large degree on Arab oil.” I tell you!’

‘Yes. I don’t understand about the people in Bradford.’ I read it over his shoulder.

‘Well, you recognize the last sentence,’ he said.

‘I don’t.’

‘
Goy
. It’s from the Yom Kippur service. It’s the last thing he read.
Unetanah tokef kedushat hayom
, et cetera. He had his prayer book there. Probably he looked at it just then. Yom Kippur. When this last war broke out. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?’ His battered face was creased in a most solemn expression.

‘Yes. The German who made the cat laugh couldn’t be Vava, could it?’

‘How could it? Vava was not a German. He wouldn’t think of him as a German.’

‘Haber or Willstätter, perhaps?’

‘Certainly not. He had the greatest respect for them.’

‘Hmm.’

‘It’s a problem. Bradford people. Was he ever in Bradford?’

‘Well, Meyer, I am sort of asking you.’

He took his glasses off, and put them on again, and read the whole thing through once more.

‘Bradford is a place in Yorkshire, England, right?’

‘Right.’

‘A textile place. I don’t recall anything from Bradford. Who the hell do we know in Bradford?’

He was looking at me, so I shook my head. I didn’t know a soul in Bradford.

He put his glasses on and off a couple of times and looked in frustration at the transcript. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Who the hell took it down?’

‘Well, I thought I’d ask you that, too.’

‘Some goddam stenographer took it down, it’s obvious.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Give me Julian Meltzer.’

He had a somewhat inconclusive chat with Julian. Julian didn’t know who’d taken it down either. It was established that the dictation books ought to be around somewhere, though. A
whirlwind
round of phone calls revealed that several of them were in the basement of the Wix Library; and about five minutes later, so was I.

The Wix Library was another magnificent building; I picked my way down to the basement and found Dan in it.

He said, ‘Cassius hath a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much … Mashed potato, Igor?’

‘Mashed potato.’

‘That’s the stuff.’

These were the main Weizmann archives, embracing some scores of bays of shelving. In the House there were only typed copies of the outgoing letters, translated from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, or German where necessary. Here were the originals, incoming and outgoing, plus everything else relating to the great man: photographs, certificates, drafts, invitations, telegrams, minutes, cuttings – every memento of his life, stacked in box files, shelf upon shelf. I’d done some work here, but it was an oppressive place to work in; the ceiling was low and the air heavy in the strongroom.

Alizia, the librarian, expected me, but the notice had been short and she was somewhat flustered.

‘These are from 1952, Mr Druyanov. Would you like to check that everything is here?’

‘I wouldn’t know what to check. I will take your word for it, Alizia.’ This statement was the more heartfelt because a quick glance at the books showed they were all in shorthand.

‘If you would just sign here.’

I signed, and on the off chance paused at Dan’s desk.

‘Dan, can you do shorthand?’

‘A little … Hmm. Pitman. I will tell you something disheartening, Igor.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They do Gregg in Israel.’

This turned out to be correct. But by the afternoon, Connie had organized a Pitman person.

*

There was a small gathering at my place in the evening, including Professor Tuomisalo. I was rather ashamed of my question to Connie.

‘We haven’t really met much, Marta.’

‘Well. You will be spending some time here.’ Discreet as ever. I found myself overstimulated again by the very cool mixture of brain and propriety and sexuality.

‘You are marvelously tanned, Marta.’

‘I take fruit back to my apartment at lunchtime and sun on the balcony. The winter sun is very special.’

‘Is the work working out?’

‘Of course. I told you. There’s a tiny group of us, and two happen to be at Rehovot. It’s really a most blissful situation.’

I had seen the two, who gave no problems. Her English was excellent. So was her Russian. Everything about her was by no means ordinary. She was nine years older than I, which I had felt once or twice was in a way a pity, apart from other considerations, which were that she was well contented with her lot. She was charmingly ignorant of various areas of knowledge in which I was informed; which worked both ways, except that she was incapable of explaining hers. In other areas, of course, we suited,
and she smiled calmly at me. ‘Is your life going very nicely in London?’

‘The life of a bachelor is always strange.’

‘Are you thinking soon of normalizing it?’

‘Well, I’m getting old.’

‘It’s everybody’s problem. Don’t worry, Igor.’

‘I’ m not worrying. How do you like my penthouse?’ I said. ‘My very private penthouse.’

She had a look around it. ‘It is very nice. Mr Deutsch at the desk below, who is always at the desk below, is a good friend of mine.’

‘I see. And all your good friends will still be at the
Lunenfeld-Kunin
, will they?’

‘Oh, yes, we’re all good friends there.’

I recalled her room at the Lunenfeld-Kunin. She was very family-minded. Her bullet-headed father kept an eye on
proceedings
; also her mother, and her husband and two sturdy lads: photos all about. All the people who had been there with me had inspected these domestic treasures: I had never been in a position to inspect them alone. Discretion, circumspection, propriety.

‘Well, we must try and see a little more of Israel while I’m here.’

‘That would be very nice. Where would you recommend, Michael?’ she said to Michael Sassoon, who had at that moment amiably joined us. ‘Igor would like to see something of Israel while he is here.’

‘December, hmm. The Dead Sea, I should think. Somewhere down low, you see. Tiberias is low, but chancy. You can get a lot of rain at this season.’

‘I’ve been to Tiberias. That was June.’

‘June, ah. It can heat up considerably in Tiberias in June.’

It had heated up considerably in Tiberias in June, as the
faintest
glance from Marta acknowledged.

‘How are the sweet potatoes doing?’ he said.

‘Not much at the moment.’

‘Is your research man all right?’

‘Well, he’s hard-headed,’ I said. I couldn’t remember telling him about Hopcroft. News circulated at Rehovot.

While I pondered this, he began talking about some work in his department. ‘Mechanochemistry. it comes out of
polyelectrolytes
and irreversible thermodynamics,’ he said.

Ah, does it?’

‘Oh, yes. Polymer research, basically – membranes, that kind of thing. Quite fascinating.’

‘What does it do?’

‘What does it
do
?’ He frowned. This was always the sticking point here, of course. Surprisingly, it did something useful. It promised, in some distant future, to provide an alternative to the heat engine by duplicating the action of muscle. Muscle apparently expanded or retracted in response to the effect of certain body acids.

‘Happens when you lift your hand or scratch your nose, or whatever. Quite fast, you see – no intermediate processes.’

Muscle cord was being made out of various polymers, and the acids from something else, and the membranes that would admit one kind or the other from some other material.

‘You mean it works?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. It’s primitive. The models just turn little wheels and lift weights, and so on. The interest is with the polymers, you see.’

Others had joined the group, and in a way that I did not quite mark it became a discussion of biological membrane and the brain. Marta had become quite animated during this, in
connection
with some apparent rate of energy conversion that did not accord with her advanced standards, and an interested small party was arranged to go and view the experiments right away; except, as a phone call established, the man in whose demesne it lay was out, so it was decided to do it tomorrow. Vava’s batatas and the economic plight of the world were happily lost sight of. The only thing settled, really, in a little tête-à-tête, was a weekend twosome to the Dead Sea.

One of the problems with research is to know what to look for. Too little material leads to groping and stress; too much to drifting – Hopcroft’s complaint. Here there was far too
much. It was necessary to write myself a short list and then check with experts that it was the right list, and then put
somebody
on to keeping to it. Sitting in Chaimchik’s chair, and gazing out the window to the position he occupied in the grass below, I tapped pencil against teeth and reviewed the situation.

It was twenty-one years ago that he had been placed in position below, and the situation I was reviewing was almost exactly twenty-one years before that. What we had was a fine
upstanding
figure, in his prime, distinguished, full of life and vigor – indeed as remote from the moldering remains in the ground as I now was.

The House that now sat like a museum all around me was still in the future; as was the stripy material for Verochka’s eye so delightedly to light on – where? At Harrod’s? No Institute. No Israel. The 2,500 young participants in the tragedy referred to by Connie not yet born; few of their parents born. Chaimchik was beavering away in London and elsewhere to make the national home that they would be born in.

Of the period of his life between 1931 and 1935, I now knew more than anyone – more than Bergmann, who had lived and worked with him; more than Weisgal, who had laughed so often with him. Day by day, month by month, from the records of this prodigious witness, I knew the onset of every chill and bowel irregularity, every sleepless night, every little affair (though not as much as I wished: Verochka had spent a year ahead of me at the files, at about the time that I was seven). I knew what he said in public and wrote in private. I knew what he had thought, and bought, and had seen and done; could visualize the excellent, intelligent man, trim beard, knowledgeable sardonic eyes, delightful smile.

Of course with all this, it goes without saying, I knew
practically
nothing – little more in any sensible way than he could know, presented with my catalogued particulars, of the person who would one day have to dress him in footnotes and exhibit him. Still, I knew something. I knew that at the time he had underestimated – rather patronized – mysterious Vava. Between us, we might yet do more for him than ungrateful Israel.

In 1931, thoroughly exhausted after thirteen years of political
struggle, he had found himself kicked out of the leadership of world Zionism, owing to factional differences. He was fifty-seven, and he didn’t know what to do. An early thought, naturally, was to return to science, but science had rolled on. Was he still up to it?

At this time, Professor Richard Willstätter, Nobel Laureate, first director of the massive Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany, and perhaps the greatest chemist in the world, came to London to address the Royal Society and to receive its Gold Medal. Weizmann asked his advice. The Laureate sternly catechized him, told him he would still do, and graciously undertook to collaborate with him by mail on a small piece of research to do with protein, Willstätter’s own subject.