The SMS text from Ray Bliss asked Fritzi Jordan to meet him at the Café Nicolai on the Gendarmenmarkt. It was such a short walk away from the university, she wondered why had she never noticed the place before.
A friendly waiter in white shirt and black pants bowed to them, then led the way past a pianist playing understated Mozart, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with worn leather books, and an artsy crowd dressed in black evening wear.
“One of my favorite places,” Bliss said, as they reached a quiet corner table with a white tablecloth and single apricot-colored rose in a bud vase. He ordered cappuccinos, then waved his smartphone at the spiral staircase leading up to the second floor. An app read their GPS location and displayed historical sketches and prewar photos of the Café Nicolai. A second app opened a virtual storefront showing photos of the rare books the café’s owner was selling up in the second story loft.
“Can’t believe Schultzi has never dragged you in here,” Bliss said as he plucked a book from the shelf behind his chair, and moved the rose aside. “Look at this.”
Candlelight illuminated a dusty volume by Hermann Schreiber called, The Germans and the East. He leafed through the pages pointing out photos of forgotten cities from a time before world wars; Königsberg, Danzig, Breslau; cities that didn’t exist on modern maps.
She looked up at him. Why was he showing her this?
“This book could help you with your assignment for Schultzi,” he told her.
He asked for names of scientists from those old cities, and, as she spoke, turned the pages to the cities where they had been born, or had studied, or had taught. He did it quickly. So quickly that, she thought for an absurd moment, he must have rehearsed for their meeting.
Ridiculous, she told herself. Schutzi was right. She needed friends her own age. That would banish old NSA paranoias once and for all.
“So what will you write? What’s the connection between Napoléon and science?” Bliss asked.
She stared at his hands, unwilling to speak.
He waited.
Could he really be interested? “Something generic,” she said. “Maybe how scientific thought fractured along national boundaries after Na-poléon.”
She looked up into his eyes, blue, as a sunny summer sky. Could he actually be interested?
She continued, “The loss of Latin, which had been the common European language for sharing scientific ideas, led to needless duplication of work. I’m thinking of using the discovery of oxygen as an example. The Swedes say it was Scheele; the French, Lavoisier; the British and Americans, Priestley.”
His smile was startlingly perfect in its proportions. “And now we’re in an era where one language, English, dominates once again,” he said. “How helpful to scientific progress.”
Was that sarcasm? Did he actually care?
“Have you ever thought about what we lose by making English the world language and American the world culture?” he asked. “Or how our thoughts in America and Canada and the UK are limited by our laziness in learning foreign languages?”
She was amazed. Could this man with his perfect smile really share her interests? She let his words caress and sipped coffee.
“If we speak only English, we only ever see the world through the prejudices of our own culture,” he told her, then stopped talking. Had he sensed he was revealing to much, too soon?
He redirected the conversation, told her about finding the café, gossiped about its regular patrons, the elegant old ladies at the window table. Would the wind outside blow away their enormous hats? Where can you buy a hat like that anyway?
He pulled another book from the shelf; a Berlin travel guide containing an article he had written, and her last suspicions melted away. His reasons for being interested in those old cities and in the Café Nicolai were genuine. They had nothing to do with her or the NSA. He made his living telling people about interesting tourist sites.
He smiled his beautiful smile while she read and admired.
His smile was almost as beautiful as her Polish angel’s had been in those long ago days before the Fall.
He had been studying Sports Management and was running, always running, or working out with weights, or sparring. They met at a Washington cocktail party that she hadn’t wanted to attend, but her NSA boss had insisted on.
Brief flirtations on the Mall after work had followed; then wonderful Sunday afternoons antiquing in Virginia hamlets.
How she had loved hearing the soft sibilant sounds of his Polish when he talked to his friends on the phone.
He once hopped over a wall into a Virginia churchyard and picked a ridiculously large bouquet of lilacs, which he presented to her with a European flourish and bow just as the rectory door opened.
She had died a thousand deaths. But he calmly stuffed the bouquet under his sweatshirt and turned to wish the rector good morning. The rector never commented on his lumpy belly, and forever after she couldn’t smell lilacs without thinking of him. How beautiful his body had been, stretched out on a grassy riverbank, sprinkled with the four-petaled lilac florets left behind by the bouquet.
His body, his mathematics unique to him had overwhelmed her. Too much. Too soon. Her mind hadn’t been able to stop writing equations to describe the curves in his forearm, the slope of his nose, the angle where his earlobe touched his cheek. Beautiful Polish math. Mandelbrot fractal equations for the beautiful blonde Polish curls of his hair, as he lay dreaming and she lay watching.
Did he have any idea what their relationship had cost her? Sleeping with a Pole, a ‘foreign national’? For two days after having been ‘allowed to resign,’ she wondered what he would do when she told him. Then Michael Usher showed her the video of the Swedish boxer, and it was over.
She fled Washington and her Polish angel.
“You all right?” Bliss’ question startled her. “You were in La-la-land.”
“Sorry. Bad habit.”
He was holding her hand. She jerked it away.
“No, no… My fault,” he said, staring at his empty hand, as if he felt sorry for it. “I was boring you with my travelogue. Pitching the café, as if I were trying to sell you a magazine article.”
He looked up into her eyes, and his smile was back. “One of my New York editors has been bugging me for new material for a GPS app, a walking tour through Berlin. Augmented reality is all the rage when it comes to digital add-ons for travel guides. Could you do me a favor?”
“What?” she asked warily.
“I’ve sold him on a science tour. First Berlin, then all the world’s great science cities. Who was living where, when they worked on whatever it was that made them famous. My publisher thinks adding a virtual tour for smartphones could push my sales high enough that I could actually live on my writing income.
“Here in Berlin, I thought I’d do an Einstein tour. Show where he worked… where he played his violin. Maybe add a picture of his villa, if it’s still standing, or where he liked to eat lunch.
“You’re a mathematician as well as a historian, aren’t you, Fritzi?”
How did he know that? Had he eavesdropped on her conversations with Schultzi?
“I’d like to add a few mathematicians to the mix and was hoping you could give me some tips.” Blue eyes pleaded. Too much. Too soon.
Schultzi was wrong. She wasn’t ready for this. “You should ask Professor Schultz.” she said. “He has lived in Berlin all his life.”
Bliss wouldn’t be put off. “I heard Leonhard Euler lived here.”
“Only a year. He didn’t get along with old Fritz.”
“Not many people did. Frederick the Great would have hated this coffee shop. All these young Germans starting their day with coffee instead of good old-fashioned beer soup.”
His perfect smile resurfaced. “Euler’s mathematics were probably beyond the old guy, and it pissed him off.”
Fritzi couldn’t help laughing. How did Bliss make himself so easy to talk to? And why was he doing it, her o
ld NSA paranoia wondered.
“Don’t waste your time,” she told him, balling up her napkin in stuffing it into her empty coffee cup. “The old places of mathematics don’t exist anymore. What the British and Americans didn’t bomb to smithereens, the Russians blew up to make room for cinder block housing.”
Bliss shrugged. “The Russians did unveil a statue of Immanuel Kant in Kaliningrad a few years back. Who knows what else they’ve rebuilt?”
He signaled the waiter for two more coffees and talked about his work… about writing assignments for the American Embassy. Life as a writer meant scrambling after any job you could get, and if you had to travel to Turkey, to Kazakhstan, or to Iraq, well, the American government paid better than most. Then he spoke about his past; how he wound up in European Studies at American University because of his last name. He had wanted to learn how his family could be German when his grandparents were from Odessa.
That had confused her as a child too, she admitted. Her grandmother had only ever spoken about Deutsch-Krone and Breslau, and Fritzi wondered, why she couldn’t find them in her high school atlas. Her grandmother had lived on a farm near Wałcz until her husband moved the family to Wrocław, which back then had been called Breslau.
The conversation drifted back to the Schreiber book, to Torún, the former free city of Thorn, Copernicus’ birthplace, and then to Wałcz, where Weierstrass had served ten years in math purgatory as an elementary school teacher before he moved to Berlin.
“Ever been back there?”
“No time.”
“I’ve never been to Odessa either,” Bliss said.
7 Prague