The Sun Chemist Read Online Free Page B

had told them it was consolation in Hebrew, so they had renamed her Consuelo, shortened in class to Suelo. When the family had moved to New York, the teachers there had asked what Suelo meant, and she’d told them it could either be Nehama or Consuelo, and everyone had settled for Connie.
    I said, ‘So what is the panic with Vava?’
    ‘Oh, you are too tired for these complications.’
    ‘What is the complication?’
    ‘Let me put it this way. I don’t understand it, and I’m an expert. He was a cousin of Vera’s, you know.’
    ‘Vera Verochka. Vava was?’
    ‘Your genius Hopcroft didn’t find this out from Olga?’
    ‘He didn’t tell me. Perhaps it was his bang on the head.’
    ‘Bergmann knew him in London in the thirties. He’d forgotten about it. Vava came from Vera’s hometown, Rostov. He didn’t leave Russia till after the Revolution. Then he went to Germany, until the Hitler thing started, and Weizmann got him out. He was one of his refugees. He stayed with the Weizmannsfor a short time and Chaim started him off with some work at the Featherstone Laboratory.’
    ‘The Featherstone Laboratory.’ Through the echoing longueurs of the day and of the jet, I remembered somebody telling me something about this laboratory. What?
    ‘The Featherstone Laboratory in London. Weizmann’s laboratory . The one he started when they threw him out of the presidency of the organization in 1931. When he returned to science.’
    ‘Ye-es?’
    ‘Well, that’s it. So Vava stayed with them a short while, and then he got himself the job with the oil company, and found someplace to live, and they lived happy ever after, he and his wife and the little girl.’
    ‘Olga.’
    ‘Olga,’ Connie said.
    None of this seemed to answer the question, and I was too weary to grapple with it anyway, so I ate one of the oranges she’d picked for me, and listened while she told me what was going on at the Institute and who was still around. Most of the old faculty people were still around, the Sassoons, the Beylises; also a good egg from Harvard called Hammond L. Wyke.
    I said, ‘Anything further about his Nobel Prize?’
    ‘Well, fingers are crossed. There is an upstart in Japan who has his backers. That Nobel committee – I would seek to influence them in subtle ways, like financial. The unworldly scientist says you can’t. Then, Professor Tuomisalo of Finland is still with us.’
    ‘The professor of higher mathematics.’
    ‘That one. Well.’ She yawned. ‘Bat Yam is some kilometers away, with my bed in it. In the morning, you’ll ring when you want to come to the House. Ze’ev will drive round and fetch you.’
    I saw her down to her car and returned, dog-tired. It was very quiet; just the soft thud of the heavy-water plant from near the nuclear science complex a few hundred yards away. I stood at the open window and took in the scent of oranges from the dark. My eyes were jumping. I thought I saw something in rapid, jerky motion. It wasn’t an animal, or a vehicle. It seemed to be a running man.
    I watched the figure for some time, and went to bed, and tossed and turned there for hours, vaguely uneasy, sleepless.
2
    Next morning, in the dead of winter, birds sang, sun glittered, trees shone with fruit, and God was back in business – all welcome after the London that Caroline had so pithily described. From the window I looked at the undulating grounds, magnificently undulating away in all directions. Along the paths people were ambling on bikes between the temples of science discreetly embowered here and there – all very seemly and inspiriting.
    I showered and shaved and topped off with a bit of the heavenly talc and descended for breakfast. There was only one other person in the restaurant, an Indian carefully feeding himself olives and cream cheese as he read the Jerusalem Post . I filled up a tray, and bought a paper for myself and took it near the window.
    Armies still locked together on the west bank of the Suez