Читать книгу Solo - Rana Dasgupta - Страница 12

SOME DECADES BEFORE Ulrich arrived in Berlin, German scientists made a philosophical leap that would change history. They rejected the idea that life is a unique and mystical essence, with different qualities from everything else in the universe. They reasoned instead that living things were only chemical machines, and they speculated that with enough research, chemical laboratories could emulate life itself.

They began to experiment with making medicines, not merely from trees or plants, but from man-made chemicals. A triumph came in 1897, in the laboratories of the chemical company Bayer, when chemists observed several positive effects of the first synthetic drug: aspirin. Not long afterwards, the chemist Paul Ehrlich, who was seeking a cure for the sleeping sickness that devastated his compatriots in the German Congo, injected infected mice with hundreds of different chemicals until he found that an industrial dye cured the disease – and so discovered the first antibiotic. Ehrlich coined the term ‘chemotherapy’ to describe the great new work he had started off.

German scientists also wanted to see whether chemical laboratories could make materials that were usually found only in nature. The world was running out of natural nitrogen deposits, for instance, and agriculturalists were concerned about how they would continue to fertilise crops. Populations were exploding. Doomsayers began to warn of imminent famine, and people dying off in swathes. The Berlin chemist Fritz Haber began to seek a chemical solution to this problem. Working with BASF, he discovered a way of fixing the enormous supplies of nitrogen in the air, and turning them into ammonia for fertilisers. He won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and a large fortune, and the newspapers called him the saviour of the human race.

When its empire was taken away after the First World War, Germany was deprived of access to essential raw materials. It was set far behind Britain, which could take all the Malayan rubber it wanted, and Middle Eastern oil. Germany’s chemical firms – BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst, Casella, and the rest – were consolidated into a vast chemical cartel, I. G. Farben, whose objective was to produce chemical versions of these lacking natural resources.

Farben’s synthetic rubber and oil technologies soon became the envy of the world. Within a few years, it was the largest corporation in Europe, with stakes in oil companies, steelworks, armaments manufacturers, banks and newspapers – in Germany and across the globe. It had its own mines for coal, magnesite, gypsum and salt, and cartel arrangements with leading American companies DuPont, Alcoa and Dow Chemical.

It was in Farben’s laboratories that a chemist named Hermann Staudinger, while attempting to synthesise natural rubber, first hypothesised that there might exist molecules much more extensive than any hitherto imagined. These giant molecules, he suggested, would be arranged in mobile, chain-like structures, which explained the unusual flexibility of rubber. Staudinger’s work on polymers won him a Nobel Prize, and set the course for a new direction in chemistry: the development of plastics.

This new area of innovation transformed the human environment. Until that era, every human being had lived among the same surfaces: wood, stone, iron, paper, glass. Suddenly, there emerged a host of extraterrestrial substances that produced bodily sensations that no one had ever experienced before.

This was the production that Ulrich wished to be a part of.

When Ulrich arrived in Berlin he realised immediately he had walked in upon the wonder of his age. Berlin was the capital of world science, which lifted him upon its tremendous current, and made him certain of his own great future. But Berlin was also the studio of mighty artists and musicians. Bertolt Brecht was there, Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang. It was a carnival of boxing, jazz and cabaret.

Later on, after Ulrich left it, this miraculous metropolis ceased to exist. With the next war, old Berlin was gutted, tossed away and forgotten, and it sank into forgetful waters, until only a few bent tips were visible above the surface, twitching with the bad dreams below.

This has had a curious effect on Ulrich’s memories of the time he spent in that city. They do not hang together, or fall into sequence, because they were later scattered like refugees, and were forced to take shelter in other times and places. Some of them were lost entirely in the great dispersal.

Ulrich tries to assemble the remnants into one place.

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How lovely was the Jewish girl, Clara Blum, who took notes in the chemistry lecture with her left hand.

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As a boy Ulrich had wandered so many times among the parasols and dogs of Unter den Linden, but now there were staring, mutilated soldiers and penniless refugees. The men in Berlin had lost more limbs than the men at home.

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He saw Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst. Their thought was so clear it was terrifying, and Ulrich felt reborn with every lecture he attended. He often struggled to follow their theories. But he loved them because they were also practical men who reminded him of the old-fashioned inventors he had read about as a child. In his spare time, Walther Nernst applied himself to such tasks as the invention of light bulbs and the development of an electric piano. Fritz Haber, whose chemical weapons had failed to achieve a German victory in the war, was looking for a method to pay off his country’s war debts by distilling gold from the sea.

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Clara Blum had a habit of reading books as she walked in the street.

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Ulrich was afraid of spending money, for his father’s wealth was already exhausted by his university fees. But there was an irresistible world of jazz in Berlin, and Ulrich fell in love with the new sounds as deeply as he had once fallen in love with Gypsy music. He could not keep himself out of debt.

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In one of Max Planck’s lectures, he thought that his father, with his admiration of far sight, would have approved of all those eyes set on the remote country of atoms.

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He took Clara Blum to his room. He had set up a long glass tube with holes drilled along the top. He had removed the horn from a gramophone player and led a pipe from there into one end of the glass tube, while in the other end was a supply of methane. ‘Watch,’ he said, lighting the holes so there was an even line of flames. Then he set the record going and a Beethoven symphony was fed into the glass tube. The sound waves in the tube bunched the gas and the flames dancing on top were arranged as a graph of the symphony. And Clara Blum laughed gaily with his gimmick, and begged to see a hundred other pieces of music in fire.

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How curious it was for Ulrich to find his German name suddenly commonplace.

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The rapturous crowd in the Admiralspalast shouted Bis! Bis! to the American Negroes playing jazz. The musicians exchanged frowns among themselves, hearing English words – Beasts! Beasts! – and in a few minutes they had packed themselves into cars and left Berlin. In their language they say not ‘Bis’ but ‘Encore’.

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Clara Blum had a fascination for the new towers in New York. When we go to New York, they used to say, for all our fantasies. Ulrich once gave her a postcard of the Woolworth Building. Tallest Man-made Structure in the World!

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A man and a woman, refugees, frozen to death on the street, with an infant boy between them who was quite alive, and crying for food.

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Ulrich read that Fletcher Henderson had begun to play jazz only when America’s oppression of the Negro made his further pursuit of chemistry impossible. He had a degree in chemistry and mathematics, but he was a Negro, so he became a bandleader.

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Almost every week, a shattering new scientific idea arrived from Rutherford in Cambridge, Bohr in Copenhagen or Curie in Paris. Someone would read the paper aloud, and young students would march madly around the laboratory, their bodies unable to absorb such news sitting down.

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The first time Ulrich laid eyes on Albert Einstein, he was in the circus, screaming with laughter at the antics of midgets.

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After the struggle, you could tell from the way the police slung the revolutionary into the ambulance that they knew he was already dead.

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Clara Blum loved the dark things that happened in Berlin. She kept Ulrich awake at night reading aloud newspaper articles about all the suicides and murders. For a long time afterwards his love for her would well up again whenever he read a crime report.

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His mother wrote solicitous letters every day, full of enquiries, advice and warnings about the consequences of romantic entanglements. My dearest baby Ulrich, they began each time. This phrase returned to him like a maddening chaperone during his caresses with Clara Blum.

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Walking on the street in the early evening, he saw a famous film actress get out of a limousine in front of the Savoy Hotel.

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Clara Blum helped Ulrich prepare for his examinations, for she was more accomplished in theory than he. ‘I want to make stuff,’ he protested when his throat went hard with academic frustration. ‘I didn’t come to study mathematics. I want to make plastic!’

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Watching the men pushing barges, Ulrich and Clara Blum walked by the river and discussed chemistry, and he suddenly had the feeling that he would be a great man.

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There were many Bulgarians arriving in Berlin, and they used to get drunk together, and speak Bulgarian, and play silly pranks. They spent nights laughing in the steam baths, where men poured in from the brothels and refugees from Galicia got clean from the streets. When German women saw them together in the street they would run away. They called them dark Balkan thugs, and other such things.

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When Ulrich picked up the papers that Albert Einstein had dropped behind him in the corridor, the scientist looked him in the eye and said, ‘I am nothing without you.’ Ulrich managed to say, ‘Nor I you, sir,’ as Einstein turned his back and ambled on. Ulrich has thought back so many times to this moment that the figure in the corridor has transmuted into something more than a man. Now Einstein looks down on him with eyes that scan like X-rays, and his speech comes not from his mouth but from somewhere invisible and oracular.

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The animated electric mannequin in the window of the optician’s shop had spectacles as thick as paperweights, but still reminded him of Misha the fool.

When Ulrich made his abrupt departure from Berlin, the mighty German chemical industry was at its height. He believed afterwards that, if he had completed his degree and remained in Germany, his life might have been very different.

But while the big German companies triumphed through the hyperinflation, which wiped out all their debts, many ordinary investors were ruined. One of them was Ulrich’s father, who, Germanophile to the end, had put the funds remaining from the sale of the old house into German investments. His mother held out for as long as she could, but at last the money dried up for Ulrich’s fees, and for everything else too – and she wrote a desperate letter begging him to come home. Ulrich dropped everything and rushed to Sofia.