The Sun Chemist Read Online Free Page A

Weisgal.’
    ‘How are you, Mr Weisgal?’ I was having my hand shaken a good deal lately by very affable once-met folk. I racked my brains.
    ‘So what are you doing in New York, Igor? I saw you were at Harvard.’
    ‘I’m doing a couple of lectures.’
    ‘Well, it beats everything. Here I take a walk and turn over in my mind The Betrayed Decade , and who walks along? You know, you don’t have to make things happen.’ He was doing a kind of shuffle, salty eyes smiling up from under his brows. ‘They just happen. They happened so often in my life!’ (So they did. Interested readers may turn to his autobiography, So Far , published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.) ‘Quit worrying, we didn’t meet yet,’ he said.’ I am from the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘It’s a very good – even an excellent book.’
    ‘Thank you very much.’
    ‘I don’t know if I would have passed the title. It takes the teeth out if you have to say it: I’m a good editor.’ The salty eyes were still radiating away.
    ‘You are – an editor at the Weizmann Institute?’ I said in some confusion.
    ‘Well, no, I’m not. I’m really the Chancellor there – whatever the hell that happens to be. Say, Igor, why don’t you and I take a stroll?’ He turned and we strolled back the way he had come.
    ‘How’s your father?’ he said.
    ‘Fine, thanks.’
    ‘That’s Maxim Druyanov, right?’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘What’s he doing now?’
    ‘He’s lecturing at the School for Slavonic and East European Studies in London.’
    ‘Do they guard him yet?’
    ‘No, no. That was years ago.’
    ‘Your mother is Jewish, right?’
    ‘Perfectly right.’
    ‘Well, hell. Goddam it,’ he said. The accent was a rich mixture of Brooklyn, Russian, Yiddish. He told me why he thought we were so well met.
    A large letters project was under way – the collected and annotated letters of Chaim Weizmann. An editorial committee had been set up some years before consisting of Lewis Namier, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon, all very top-class; also R. H. S. Crossman, the British ex-statesman, who was doing the big biography of Weizmann.
    Most of the volumes had been allocated and were being worked on by political specialists, but a certain hole had appeared for the years 1931–35, Weizmann’s period out of office. For this correspondence , which apparently reflected well the Zeitgeist of that dismal era, it had not proved easy to think of the right editor. The appearance of The Betrayed Decade , with what was considered quite an intriguing name on it, might have solved one part of the problem.
    ‘The other part is up to you. How about it, Igor?’
    We were in his apartment by that time – a pied-à-terre just off Central Park South, which is where our stroll had led – and his wife, Shirley, was pouring coffee.
    ‘Well. It’s sudden, Meyer.’ We were both now on first-name terms.
    ‘It would be two volumes, of the greatest historical importance . It is kind of the prehistory of the State of Israel. He was in touch with almost everybody. Day after day, in a thousand ways, you see the moral collapse of Europe coming. You’d have running footnotes, a long introductory essay to each volume. It’s yours, I see it, I have a feeling.’
    His feeling was why I was now where I was, having mine.
    *
    It was the penthouse suite in the San Martin Clubhouse on the Weizmann Institute campus. Dignitaries usually got it. There weren’t any at the moment, which accounted for my occupancy. The plane had been hours late – a bomb scare in London – so I wearily sat and admired the glory and had a drink with Connie.
    More than ever, she reminded me of a small South American hummingbird – a confectioner’s model, perhaps. She had very neat little legs and feet. Her eyelashes flickered. Her name was Nehama, but the nuns in the convent school in Maracaibo (where she had been born) had had some trouble with this, and asked what it meant. She