Einstein (20 page)

Although he was willing to consult Mari
’s family, Einstein had no intention of letting his own family know that his mother’s worst fears about his relationship—a pregnancy and possible marriage—were materializing. His sister seemed to realize that he and Mari
were secretly planning to be married, and she told this to members of the Winteler family in Aarau. But none of them showed any sign of suspecting that a child was involved. Einstein’s mother learned about the purported engagement from Mrs. Winteler. “We are resolutely against Albert’s relationship with Fraulein Mari
, and we don’t ever wish to have anything to do with her,” Pauline Einstein lamented.
⁵⁸

Einstein’s mother even took the extraordinary step of writing a nasty letter, signed also by her husband, to Mari
’s parents. “This lady,” Mari
lamented to a friend about Einstein’s mother, “seems to have set as her life’s goal to embitter as much as possible not only my life but also that of her son. I could not have thought it possible that there could exist such heartless and outright wicked people! They felt no compunctions about writing a letter to my parents in which they reviled me in a manner that was a disgrace.”
⁵⁹

The official advertisement announcing the patent office opportunity finally appeared in December 1901. The director, Friedrich Haller, apparently tailored the specifications so that Einstein would get the job. Candidates did not need a doctorate, but they must have mechanical training and also know physics. “Haller put this in for my sake,” Einstein told Mari
.

Haller wrote Einstein a friendly letter making it clear that he was the prime candidate, and Grossmann called to congratulate him. “There’s no doubt anymore,” Einstein exulted to Mari
. “Soon you’ll be my happy little wife, just watch. Now our troubles are over. Only now that this terrible weight is off my shoulders do I realize how much I love you... Soon I’ll be able to take my Dollie in my arms and call her my own in front of the whole world.”
⁶⁰

He made her promise, however, that marriage would not turn them into a comfortable bourgeois couple: “We’ll diligently work on science
together so we don’t become old philistines, right?” Even his sister, he felt, was becoming “so crass” in her approach to creature comforts. “You’d better not get that way,” he told Mari
. “It would be terrible. You must always be my witch and street urchin. Everyone but you seems foreign to me, as if they were separated from me by an invisible wall.”

In anticipation of getting the patent-office job, Einstein abandoned the student he had been tutoring in Schaffhausen and moved to Bern in late January 1902. He would be forever grateful to Grossmann, whose aid would continue in different ways over the next few years. “Grossmann is doing his dissertation on a subject that is related to non-Euclidean geometry,” Einstein noted to Mari
. “I don’t know exactly what it is.”
⁶¹

A few days after Einstein arrived in Bern, Mileva Mari
, staying at her parents’ home in Novi Sad, gave birth to their baby, a girl whom they called Lieserl. Because the childbirth was so difficult, Mari
was unable to write to him. Her father sent Einstein the news.

“Is she healthy, and does she cry properly?” Einstein wrote Mari
. “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!” Yet his love for their new baby seemed to exist mainly in the abstract, for it was not quite enough to induce him to make the train trip to Novi Sad.
⁶²