Hopeful Monsters (47 page)

Then I heard, yes, a car arriving in the drive outside.

He said 'Quickly, once more. I can talk with your father?'

'Yes.'

'What shall I tell him from you?'

'Give him my love.'

'Is that all?'

'And my love to you.'

'And what will you tell your husband?'

'What we've said.'

'But we've said nothing.'

'And he'll say nothing.'

4 Yes.'

There were the sounds of the doors of a car slamming on the drive outside. It did seem suddenly, yes, that there might be people coming to arrest us: even perhaps that Franz might have summoned them. I thought - One never completely knows in this strange territory.

Franz made a noise like the black dog sneezing.

He said ' - A mountain path, a stone, a bird - ' Then - 'And my love to both of you.'

There was a banging on the front door. Franz went to open it. A man in army uniform came in. He was followed by two men in SS uniform. When the man in army uniform saw me he stopped. The two SS men remained by the door.

Franz held out his arms to the man in army uniform. He said 'Hans!'

The man called Hans took hold of Franz by the arms. He said 'My old friend!' Then looking at me but speaking to Franz - 'We have come to make sure you get to Berlin!'

Franz laughed and said 'Am I under arrest?'

The man called Hans laughed and said 'We have come to ensure your safety!'

I thought - But I can tell the style: they know they are actors.

Franz turned to me and said 'You remember Hans.' Then to Hans 'Eleanor. Frau Ackerman.'

Hans put his hand on his heart and said 'Frau Ackerman! For how many years was I in love with Frau Ackerman!'

Franz said 'Hans met us in the forest. You remember? He was with Max. All those years ago!'

I said 'Oh yes, of course I remember!'

Hans said 'How is Max?'

I said 'He's very well, thank you.'

Franz said 'Hans is one of my colleagues at the Institute.'

I thought - Yes, I see! Then -But there are the two SS men standing by the door.

Then - Oh dear God, now let us give beautiful performances!

Hans walked round the room. He had been holding a hat under his arm; he took it in one hand and he flapped it against the palm of the other. He said 'Max was an extraordinary little boy! He was more interested in biology than physics at that time. He did an experiment with salamanders.'

I said 'Oh yes, he told me about the experiment with salamanders.'

Franz said 'What was that?'

Franz had been tidying the room as if in preparation for leaving. I thought - Oh please God, let me go home!

Hans said 'As I remember it, he tried to encourage some mutation, or the emergence of what had been a potentiality, by a rearrangement of the environment.'

I said 'Of the aesthetic environment.'

Hans said 'Ah, the aesthetic environment!' He stopped by me. He said 'Is that correct?'

I said 'Or the moral environment.'

Hans said 'The moral environment. The mental environment.' He watched me. Then he turned to the two SS men by the door and said 'We will go in two or three minutes.'

Franz said 'I am ready. I have my luggage in the hall.'

Franz had tidied the room and put his gun away. He had the dog on a lead. Hans and I were by the window.

Hans said to me 'And where will you be going?'

I said 'To Switzerland.'

He said 'Max used to call them "hopeful monsters".'

I said 'I know.'

Hans turned to Franz. He said 'But in fact, if such things were to live, how would you know them? They would have to have very few distinguishing marks, or others would know to destroy them.'

Franz said 'One of their distinguishing marks might be that they would not want to destroy.'

Hans said 'Oh they would not want to destroy themselves.'

I said 'I'll go now.'

Hans said 'Give my love to Max.'

I said'I will.'

Hans said 'What was that phrase Max used to say "Meet you behind the gasworks, twenty minutes" - '

I said 'He said that then? I mean, to you?'

Hans laughed. He said 'Yes.' He went to the door. Then he said 'And what was that other thing he used to say: "Flowers are the flowers that grow at this time of year."'

I said 'I've never heard him say that.'

Hans said 'I suppose he meant - everything happens in the right order, if you let it.'

I said 'You have to have luck.'

Hans said 'Oh don't you think we're lucky?'

Franz said 'I don't know when we'll see each other again.'

I said 'We'll see what flowers grow.'

which he had been evacuated: then when America entered the war he crossed the Atlantic with other British physicists and joined in what became known as the Manhattan Project. He stayed in America till the first practice Bomb was exploded in the Nevada desert in July 1945; then he resigned from the project, saying that it seemed to him that the necessary work had been done. He stayed long enough to argue that a demonstration Bomb should be exploded in an uninhabited area and observers from as many countries as possible should be invited to attend; only after this should consideration be given to a Bomb being dropped on a still persistent enemy. By the time the two Bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945 Max was in New York trying to get a boat back to England. For a time he came under the suspicion of the American security services and was taken in for questioning. Under interrogation (Max himself used to tell this story) he said that personally and from a military point of view he felt relieved that the Bombs had been dropped on Japan since it was likely that this had shortened the war by months if not years, also it would serve as a ghastly warning for the future: it was as a scientist that he felt that it was his responsibility to make a protest. When his interrogators argued that there was no sense in his suggesting that there should be different moralities for different individuals or groups or indeed within the same person, Max replied that, on the contrary, he was convinced that for a proper working of society such an attitude of mind was essential; courses of action could only be said to be right if there had been a genuine interplay of what indeed might be conflicting moral inclinations. Moreover, it was some such complexity of mind within an individual that was necessary if there was to be the existence of the Bomb without the use of the Bomb - a situation which he, Max, saw as being likely to be necessary for the human race if it was to survive or evolve; human nature having evidently such a propensity for evil that with all the technological advances it was only the existence of something so shocking as the Bomb that would prevent the evil from going into runaway, out of control. While he was explaining these ideas to his interrogators, Max used to say, they seemed to understand him and even have some sympathy with him: but after he had gone they must have felt that he had tricked them, for they had him back for further questioning. This sort of thing became typical of what was apt to happen to Max: as he developed and formulated his ideas he intrigued but also alienated people by the unexpectedness of his

thinking; he seemed to be saying that experience could be best dealt with not so much by reason as by a style - a style of mind involving trust in a connection between it and an organising spirit in the outside world.

Regarding the Germans and their building or rather not building of the Bomb - much of the story is well known. The Germans had been months ahead in theoretical work in 1939; then after the outbreak of war not much in practice was done. The British and American authorities did not know this at the time, so that the driving force behind the enormous resources eventually provided in America for the production of the Bomb continued to be the fear, as it had been from the beginning, that the Nazis would get the Bomb first and would use it if not to conquer the world then to blow up everyone including themselves. Without the impetus of this fear, Allied scientists and governments might never have embarked on the doubtful and expensive enterprise of building the Bomb. And when they did, the skills they used were those of refugees from Nazi Germany who in other circumstances might have been working in their homeland - so this indeed was an example, Max used to say, of the Nazis scattering the seeds of their own destruction. When British and American observers entered Germany at the end of the war they were amazed to find that although much work had been done on the production of nuclear energy for peacetime purposes, almost nothing had been done about a Bomb. There were, of course, some straightforward explanations for this. At the beginning of the war it had indeed been thought that the military conquest of Europe could be achieved so quickly that there would be no sense in Germany diverting resources from the production of tanks and aeroplanes to such a long-term risky project - especially one about which, to Nazi fanatics, there had always been a whiff of 'Jewish physics'. Then towards the end of the war the Nazi hierarchy seemed anyway to have become less interested in winning the war than in the killing, before defeat, of the maximum number of Jews. This had begun to seem to some top Nazis even a justification for the war - and by this time it was too late to embark upon a project that might otherwise have seemed attractive to them: that of killing, before defeat, the maximum number of everyone. But with regard to the middle years of the war there were strange stories that began to come to light - of chances missed, of experiments wrongly reported, of false trails laid and followed. So it did seem sometimes, yes, that there might have

been a hidden conspiracy, conscious or half-conscious, to do with the Nazis not getting the Bomb.

How much Franz, and Eleanor's father Professor Anders, might have had to do with this, can, by the nature of the case, never be known. The nature of the case was, as Eleanor and Franz had recognised in their conversation on the first day of the war, that to be effective it had to remain secret; both at the time, for obvious reasons, but also later, because of the participants' sense of self-responsibility. (This was a good example, Eleanor used to say, of the way in which certain attitudes and effects cannot be talked about without the loss of their virtues.) Some shelvings of important information and false trails laid during these years could be explained by the interdepartmental rivalry that always existed in the gangster style of the Nazi regime (yet another example of the Nazis allowing to take root the seeds of their own destruction); some occurrences might indeed have been the result of psychological blockages in men responsible enough to fear the prospect of a Nazi Bomb yet too loyal in a traditional sense to take responsibility for deliberately preventing this. But there was evidence of delays and diversions that were uncanny if they were not intended. There was one experiment to do with testing the suitability of graphite as a moderator for irradiating neutrons that was wrongly recorded or interpreted so that the Germans abandoned the line of research which was in fact the one that led the Americans to success; there was a report on the feasibility of the use of plutonium as a fissionable material that was locked away in a safe. Nothing, of course, could be proved about what might have been deliberate: what would constitute proof? Max, looking back, used to say 'The hand of God, of chance, of responsible humans, of a universal unconscious - how could you tell the difference?' And nothing could be asked of Eleanor's father or of Franz after the war: Eleanor's father died, probably by his own hand, after being suspected of implication in the plot against Hitler which failed in July 1944; Franz, having been in a reserved occupation for much of the war, took up arms at the very end and was killed fighting against the Russians on the outskirts of Berlin. Hans survived; and after the war remained in friendly contact with Max. But he would talk little about the war years: he would say just 'What is odd, in human affairs, about things being uncanny?'

Regarding the Russians - there is evidence that they, possibly under the guidance of Kapitsa, were quite far ahead in research into

the Bomb by 1945: they were helped comparatively little by the spying that Max had been unwilling to be part of. Max's friend Kolya, from Odessa, did eventually find his way to Cambridge, in the 1940s: but he too did not like to become involved in fruitless speculation.

With regard to Eleanor - when she rejoined Max in England in the autumn of 1939 (she used to maintain that she could not remember what exactly in the end had happened in the matter of Rudi and Stefan and the diamonds, because the subject was too boring and was it not the job of memory to get rid of stuff that was boring? but to those who knew her it seemed obvious that she had given what was not her share of the diamonds back) - when Eleanor got back to England in 1939 she stayed with Max for a time in a village near the country house to the north-east of Cambridge where he was working. (It was Eleanor who used to tell the story of what happened to the girl with fair hair: she did marry the child's father, who was an undergraduate at Cambridge; he later joined the army and was sent abroad and the girl spent much of the war alone with her child, who was indeed a girl called Lilia.) Eleanor and Max took a room in the village and there Eleanor began to write her first book, which was some sort of history or meditation on the history of the Jews: it was never published in its original form. Eleanor had had the subject in mind, I suppose, ever since she had been in Spain: something of the substance of the first version of the book can be gleaned perhaps from what she wrote later of her time in Spain.

Eleanor had had the vision of the Jewish and Christian versions of history as being essentially not contradictory: Jews were a chosen people, to be sure - this was their own conviction, thus could be explained the destructive jealousies of the people around them. Their 'chosenness' could be understood in the sense of their being endowed, genetically even, with some special trait: this could be seen as a gift of God just as well as a result of chance. The special trait of the Jews, Eleanor argued, was to do with their ability originally to hold a view of humans both as entities subject to laws of cause and effect but also as agents, components, in the working-out of a larger pattern. Those who were not endowed with this trait - who had no vision of'God' or 'chance' in fact working out a pattern - of course felt a threat from those who had: this was a characteristic of evolution: those who possessed a special trait might supersede, if circumstances favoured them, those who did not. But, having thus been endowed with a special trait, it seemed that Jews had not been