Caught (Missing) (27 page)

“But
which
people are you supposed to help?” JB asked, sounding as if he really wanted to know. “I’ll go back to the Einstein analogy you used before, about the bowling ball on the trampoline, changing the paths of the little marbles around it. Time travelers always thought Einstein was the huge bowling ball and Mileva was just one of the inconsequential marbles orbiting around him. But it turns out she was a bowling ball in her own right.”

“I hope you don’t ever use that as a pickup line, trying to meet girls,” Jonah said. He slipped into an imitation of some stupid, sleazy guy in a bar. Or maybe in a middle-school cafeteria. “Hey, babe, you’re not just some inconsequential marble.” He pretended to stick his thumbs in imaginary suspenders, then flipped both hands forward like guns. “You, babe, are a real bowling ball!”

JB laughed. He ran his hand through his hair so it stood up almost as dramatically as Albert Einstein’s.

“What if it turns out that everyone’s important?” JB asked. “Everybody that’s ever lived, in all of history?”

“What if it does?” Jonah said. He gulped. “And, speaking of history . . . ,” His voice sounded weird again, but maybe that was just because his ears were ringing. He
forced himself to keep talking. “Who am I? I mean, who was I originally?”

JB froze. Then, very deliberately, he slipped his hands from above the table to beneath it. He seemed to be forcing himself to act casual.

It didn’t work much better than Jonah trying to force himself to act normal.

“You want to know your other identity now?” JB asked quietly. “After weeks of avoiding every hint of it?”

Jonah nodded. “It’s because of Albert Einstein,” he admitted. “Your . . . dad . . . was a great man in so many ways, but he was kind of a coward, too, don’t you think? When Mileva tried to tell him things he didn’t know how to deal with, he just kind of tuned them out, you know? Avoided the truth? I just—” He looked down, then forced himself to look back up. “I don’t want to be like that.”

JB lifted his hand to his chin and rested it there.

“Interesting timing,” he muttered. “Very interesting.”

“So, will you tell me?” Jonah asked impatiently.

“No,” JB said, shaking his head. “Not yet.”

Jonah sagged against the pantry door.

“Do you know how hard it was for me to get up the courage to ask?” he said.

JB looked at him steadily.

“Yeah, I kind of do,” he admitted. “And I’m proud of
you for that. But there’s too much up in the air right now, too much in flux. I did take an oath to protect time, to the best of my abilities. And that’s what I’m still trying to do.”

JB stood up.

“Wait, where are you going?” Jonah asked. “I’ve still got, like, ten million questions!”

“I know,” JB said. “But I don’t have ten million answers.”

“Am I going back in time again anytime soon?” Jonah asked. “What am I supposed to do? Will Katherine or Chip go with me? Are Emily and Angela and Hadley okay? And—”

Jonah saw that JB had picked up one of the Einstein books from the table and begun leafing through it.

“Here, this is the best I can do for you right now,” JB said. “Read what Einstein had to say.”

He handed the book to Jonah, and pointed to a sentence near the top of the page that quoted Einstein:

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even
the most intelligent human being toward God.

“I wasn’t asking anything about God,” Jonah complained.

“Yeah, you kind of were,” JB said. “If there is fate, who else would control it?”

Now JB was confusing him even more. It looked as if JB was about to leave, so Jonah rushed over and put his hand on JB’s arm.

“Can’t you tell me anything else?” Jonah begged.

JB looked at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Have the Apple Jacks.”

“What?” Jonah asked.

“When I arrived, you were trying to decide which cereal to have, weren’t you?” JB asked. “Well, that’s my advice. You like Apple Jacks the best. And, believe me, that sugary stuff doesn’t taste nearly as good once you’re an adult.”

Dimly, Jonah realized that this was JB’s way of telling him the same thing he’d said after Jonah returned from the 1600s: Have fun . . . while you still can. Maybe it wasn’t such an ominous message. Maybe it was just the only way anyone could enjoy any part of life, knowing there could always be plenty of heartache and difficulty ahead.

“You’ll be back soon, won’t you?” Jonah asked.

“Yes,” JB said. “I’m afraid so.”

JB shook Jonah’s hand off his arm. A second later the time traveler vanished.

Jonah felt foolish just standing there watching an empty space. Eventually he walked over to the pantry and pulled out the box of Apple Jacks. He poured the cereal in a bowl, added milk, grabbed a spoon, and sat down at the table with his snack and the Einstein book.

There was still so much he still didn’t understand—so much he might never understand.

But he knew at least one thing that JB had told him was true.

The Apple Jacks really were delicious.

Lieserl Einstein was both a missing child of history and—for decades after her 1902 birth—a very, very well-kept secret.

As described in this book, she was the first child of Albert Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric Einstein. Albert and Mileva met and fell in love when they were both students at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. They seem to have shared a fascination with physics and a faith in Albert Einstein’s genius at a time when many others looked at him and saw only a bumbler.

Albert’s later accomplishments are well known, and the facts of his life have become something of a modern myth. The man whose name would become synonymous with brilliance was very slow to learn to talk as a child, but careful biographers have found no evidence that he ever flunked math, as is often alleged. He did follow an unorthodox path to scientific fame: He left high school in Germany at fifteen because he had such a problem with the strict, autocratic system. He tried but failed to qualify to skip directly to university, so he attended a more relaxed high school in Switzerland to prepare. He barely managed to graduate fourth out of five in his class at the Zurich Polytechnic, and then he constantly ran into
obstacles for the next few years as he tried to get a job, earn a doctorate, and win the scientific establishment’s attention. By the summer of 1903, the time of most of the action of this book, he was twenty-three, and his job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office probably seemed like proof to most people that he would never be a scientific all-star.

Mileva’s early life isn’t as well documented, but the details that are known mark her as extraordinary in her own right. As the daughter of a woman from a well-off family and a Serbian peasant who had done quite well for himself, Mileva seems to have been a particularly beloved child. She was born with a dislocated hip, which gave her a lifelong limp and may have made her think that marriage and children were less likely to lie in her future. With her father’s strong encouragement, she focused on academics much, much more than most females of her time and place. And, at least in the beginning, she excelled at them.

After blazing a trail through various schools as the family moved around what was then the Hungarian section of Austria-Hungary, Mileva got special permission to enroll at the all-male Royal Classical High School in Zagreb, in what is now Croatia. (Her family’s hometown of Novi Sad is now part of Serbia but was part of Austria-Hungary between the late 1800s and the end of World War I. However, because the Marics and their friends
would have regarded themselves as Serbs, not Hungarians, that is how I refer to them in this book.) Although Mileva also had to get special permission to study physics, she ended up having the highest exam scores in her class in that subject, and in math as well.

Unlike Albert, who seemed certain that he wanted to focus on physics, Mileva wavered somewhat between academic interests. She first moved to Zurich to study medicine, then quickly switched to physics and math at the Polytechnic. She was only the fifth woman to be admitted in the school’s history, and the only one in her class. However, she stayed there only a year before leaving to study at Heidelberg University in Germany instead—even though Heidelberg only let women audit classes, not actually earn degrees. Some biographers speculate that she left Zurich because she was falling in love with Albert and recognized that that was most likely a path to heartache. It’s impossible to know if that’s true or not, but Albert begged her to return. And, after a semester, that’s exactly what she did.

Still, her stellar academic accomplishments seemed to come to an end as she grew more involved with Albert. In 1900, the year that both of them were scheduled to graduate from the Polytechnic, Mileva’s dismal exam grades left her last in the class—the only student that
year who didn’t do better than Albert. Her grades were actually not that much worse than his, but the difference led to vastly different outcomes. With the help of a little rounding up, he passed, and earned his diploma.

Mileva failed.

Part of her problem might have been that she was still scrambling to catch up after spending time away from Zurich, following a different course of study in Heidelberg.

Some Einstein scholars speculate that Albert was also a bad influence on her—he could skip class and borrow a friend’s notes and still eke out a passing grade; maybe she was trying that approach too, with less success. Or maybe the contempt he showed for some of their professors rubbed off on her, and it reflected even more in her grades than his.

Personally, I wonder if discrimination against her as a female scientist played a role as well. At a time when so few European universities even admitted females, and so many scientists were on record as claiming that females’ brains just weren’t capable of comprehending physics (a view that Einstein himself came awfully close to espousing later in life), it seems likely that a female would have had to work twice as hard and come across as absolutely flawless to get any credit at all.

Mileva was clearly not flawless.

She took the news of her failure hard, but vowed to study more and take the exams again the following year.

By then she was pregnant with Lieserl.

From the letters that Albert and Mileva exchanged, it appears that both of them fervently wanted to get married even before the pregnancy. But financial problems and Albert’s family were working against them.

According to Albert’s letters, his mother was absolutely scathing in opposing the match. Even before the two women met, when Albert told his mother in July 1900 that he wanted to marry Mileva, Albert says:

Mama threw herself onto the bed, buried her head in the pillow, and wept like a child. After regaining her composure she immediately shifted to a desperate attack: “You are ruining your future and destroying your opportunities.” “No decent family will have her.” [And, presciently] “If she gets pregnant you’ll really be in a mess.”

Later in the same letter he describes his mother’s active campaign to get him to break up with Mileva, and his stalwart resistance to it:

The only thing that is embarrassing for her is that we want to remain together always. Her attempts at changing my mind came in expressions such as: “Like you, she is a book—but you ought to have a wife.” “By the time you’re 30 she’ll be an old witch,” etc. But now that she’s seen that for the time being her efforts only make me angry, she’s refrained from giving me the “treatment” for a while.

The more Albert’s family opposed the relationship, the more Albert wrote gushing declarations of his love for Mileva, such as:

How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life—in short, without you, my life is no life.

And:

You are and will remain a shrine for me . . . ; I also know that of all people, you love me the
most, and understand me the best . . . When I see other people, I can really appreciate how special you are!

And perhaps most interestingly:

I am so lucky to have found you, a creature who is my equal, and who is as strong and independent as I am! I feel alone with everyone except you!

For all his declarations of love, Einstein believed there was no way he could marry until he had a decent job. His parents’ own finances were in crisis, so they couldn’t have helped him even if they’d wanted to. The other students he’d graduated with in 1900 moved quickly into reputable academic positions, but he spent the next two years chasing slim hopes and struggling at marginal, low-paying jobs. He complained that a professor who should have been giving him recommendations was actually sabotaging all his chances—and this may well have been true, as Albert had made no secret of his contempt for the man’s scientific views.

Faced with worries over the pregnancy and Albert’s situation, Mileva retook her exams in July 1901. She failed
a second time. Eventually she returned to her family’s home in Novi Sad, and gave birth to Lieserl in January 1902. Although Albert had hoped that the child would be a boy, he responded giddily to the news of the child’s arrival, writing to Mileva:

Is she healthy, and does she cry properly? What are her eyes like? Which one of us does she more resemble? Who is giving her milk? Is she hungry? She must be completely bald. I love her so much and don’t even know her yet! Couldn’t you have a photograph made of her when you’ve regained your health? Is she looking at things yet? . . . When you feel a little better you’ll have to draw a picture of her!

But when Mileva returned to Switzerland to be near Albert, she left the baby behind.

Albert finally found his job at the Swiss patent office in Bern with a friend’s help. It wasn’t the highly respected academic position that he’d longed for, but it would prove to be a better fit for his talents and interests at that point in his life. And, while still a low-level position, it paid enough that Albert believed he could finally support a wife. Then,
right before his death in late 1902, Albert’s father gave Albert permission to marry Mileva. Neither family came to the wedding on January 6, 1903, but a few close friends celebrated with them.